Welcome to Hal Leaders Lead, where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today's guest is Jim Levine, who is the founder and principal at his literary agency, LGR. He represents authors like Tom Brady, Ray Dalio, Patrick Lencioni, and even some guy named David Novak. As a literary agent, Jim's mentality is all about helping others win. He wants to land good deals for his authors, help publishers find the right books, and coach everyone on his team to succeed. Let me tell you, there's a level of satisfaction you just can't get until you learn to help others win. It's a mentality every leader needs to develop, and Jim is the perfect person to show you how it's done. Plus, if you've ever thought about writing a book, you're about to get a rare inside look into the world of publishing. So let's get into it. Here's my conversation with my good friend, and soon to be yours, Jim Levine. And a lot of people are unfamiliar with how literary agencies really work. Give us an overview of the business you're in and how the business model itself works. Publishing and being a literary agent is like playing in a casino. There is no logic to it. The longer I am in this business, the more I realize there is no rhyme or reason. We'll send out projects to publishers, say we send out the same proposal, we can have an auction, and bids come in 25,000, 50,000, 75,000, 350,000. How could people in a business who are supposed to know what they're doing be valuing the same property at such a broad range? And this is my life every day. It's not even that. Sometimes it's, you'll get no bidder except one who's willing to pay a million dollars. My job is to find the best match between my client's goals and the publisher who helped them meet that goal. Sometimes it's not just money. There's lots of other factors that go into it. What book in your career, Jim, surprised you the most in how well it did? Probably Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louvre. That's a book about the importance of nature for all of us. Great writer, really terrific book. We couldn't get anybody to buy that. We got one publisher who made a pretty decent offer. That book has gone over a million copies, has become a classic in its field, and it just keeps selling and selling. I'll put it on the list. Now, when that happened, and when you have these surprises, how did it change the way you process ideas from then on? It's changed me as a leader in helping my young colleagues understand that we 're in it for the long game. When I'm training, when I've got young people, I say, "feel the skin on my right arm." Feel that. It's as tough as a rhinoceroside. How do I got that? It's from all the rejections. I know you want to sell books. You're going to sell books, but the main thing you've got to do is learn to deal with rejection. Try to just deal with it, develop a tough skin. Don't take it personally. If you believe in this project, then stick with it, and we'll help you do everything we can to sell it. If in the end it doesn't sell, okay. But if it's something you believe in, you think it's important, you're passionate about it, you think you've got a great author, stick with it. Well Jim, you've had 30 New York Times bestsellers in the last two years alone, which is incredible. As a leader in your industry and your categories, there any one thing that you could say is the "it factor" for the books that really make it. I specialize in big idea books by business leaders, change agents, thought leaders like yourself. There are three elements. One is a contrarian idea, big idea that's fresh. Two is stories. You've got to have stories. That's what engages readers. And the third is takeaways. People got to know, "What do I do Monday morning? How is this book going to change my outlook on the world the way I think about the world or the way I act in the world?" So I'm always looking for those three elements. You know, all leaders have people who bring them a germ of an idea. Share a story of when that happened to you with the book and how you helped develop it into a winner. It wasn't all the way there yet, but you added that special cherry on top that made it go. So a guy comes to me 25, 30 years ago. He's a psychologist referred by another psychologist. He's got an idea for a book about relationships. Really smart guy, but none of his ideas about psychology work. So what I try to do is find out, "Tell me about other stuff you're interested in. What do you do for hobbies?" And he says, "I'm really into craft beers. I have this list I keep. Yeah, I kind of got a rating system for craft beers." I say, "Really? You got a rating system? Because I love craft beer myself." He said, "Yeah, I got it right in my pocket." He takes a little slip of paper out of his wallet, his current resting of craft beers. I looked at him, I say, "That's a book." He says, "What do you mean that's a book?" I say, "That's a book." We do the beer lover's Bible. I know just the publisher to take it to took it to Peter Workman at Workman Publishing. He got it immediately. That book has been selling steadily for 25 years. This guy comes into my office to tell me one story, and I'm trying to be open- minded enough to look at, "Well, this guy's an interesting person. He's got to have other stories." That's really, I think, what it takes to be successful in this business is not to take what's on the surface, but to try to pay attention to what other people aren't paying attention to. A lot of people struggle to have their ideas challenged and criticized, especially creative people. You're dealing with really creative idea leaders and a lot of powerful people who have a lot of people telling them how great they are all the time. Give us an example of how you offer feedback after you know that people have put their heart and soul into a project. My whole approach to being an agent and to life, I guess, is to catch them doing something right. Somebody sends me something that's a 40-page proposal. They put their heart and soul into it. I'm thinking, "This is terrible. There's not a lot of good stuff." In fact, there is a good paragraph on page 13, and there's another one on page 17. Let's go in and look at that and figure out how we can do more of that. I'm trying to capture people doing something right and then coaching them. I'm a coach to my authors. I'm a coach to the people on my team. Whatever their strength is, I want to capture that and then help them to develop it to be even stronger than it was when they came to me. Sometimes we learn things the hard way, Jim, and I'm sure you would recognize that. Can you share a time when maybe you offered feedback poorly and what you learned from it? I got a great example of that, actually. Guy comes to me, he's been self-publishing a book. He's making a ton of money selling books out of the back of his car. It's a book called The Question Behind the Question. He's selling books in numbers. He's selling a million copies a year at this book. He's making a really good living. He's speaking. He's got sales that any publisher would kill for. He comes to me and he wants to be published by a regular publisher. I've always thought of myself, my goal, I want to serve the client. I'm going to get you the best deal possible. I say to him, "Look, I think you should just keep doing what you're doing because any publisher, you're just not going to make as much money. Man, you've got a successful business. Just keep doing it." I didn't listen carefully enough. For him, it really wasn't about the money. He wanted the prestige. He wanted to be published by Simon and Schuster, a random house to somebody like that. I took that at the heart because another agent took it, found a big publisher. The book's been a big success for like 20 years. All I had to do was really listen to, "What does this guy really want? I'm thinking, 'Oh, I can give him what he should want, which is to keep doing what he's doing. I was missing what he really wanted." Jim, after you vet these ideas that come into your office every day, you then have to go out and sell it to the publisher if you think it's a good one. What's your template for how you do this to get the most value for your clients ? I'm a matchmaker. I need to understand my clients, what their goals are, what their needs are, what their work is. But I also need to understand who would be the right person on the publishing side, who's going to really love something that go crazy. Part of that is getting to know editors individually, what their tastes are. Here's a great example. The guy comes up to my wife at a party. He's a professional golfer. He says, "Oh, I got a book. I want to write a book." She says, "Oh, that's great. My husband's a golfer. He's an agent. I meet this guy. His name's Roberto Burgatti." I say, "Look, this is great. Roberto, what's your method? Have you written anything on paper?" He says, "I don't really know what my method is." I said, "Look, I got an idea. Take me out for a teaching lesson. Take me out on the course and I'll see if you got a method." Maybe we can put it into words. The guy takes me out, he's an amazing teacher. After nine holes, I'm just playing the best golf I've ever played in my life. I come up with this notion that, "You know what you made me do? You made me trust my swing." I think we can call your method a swing you can trust. How am I going to sell this? Nobody's heard of this guy. This isn't Tiger Woods. I said to him, "Look, the only way we're going to sell this book is I got to find an editor or a publisher who is as much of a golf fanatic as I am. I got to get the mat on the golf course with you and me." Because I know the editors and publishers who are into golf the way I am, that 's how I make the match. I called Judith Kerr, who was the president of Atria, "Judith, look, I got a great author for you. I got a great book for you. But the only way you're going to believe it is you come out on the golf course with me and him." The worst that can happen is you got a great golf lesson. The best that can happen for you and me is you're going to buy the book. I take her out with Roberto. We play 18 holes. She gets off the course and says, "I want to buy the book." I sent her a one-page pitch for the book. We didn't even have a full description of the book. She got it. There was magic there. She knew that she and I can work together to figure out the book. Love it. A lot of your deals are much more complicated. There's a lot more negotiation that goes along with it than that. Although that's a really unique way to skin the cat. Talk about how you get to yes when you negotiate with your publishers. You got to understand there's an auction process in publishing. We'll send out a proposal and we got to sort of find out is there a market for this book. That golf story was a rare case. That's one publisher. I'll send out a proposal. Let's say it's in and out to 20 publishers. It turns out three are interested. We'll set up what's called a "best bids auction." There is submit there bids. Lots of people think that the best way to get the best deal for your client is to have an auction which people think of as like in a painting, a sothepiece. You raise your hand. Five dollars, ten dollars. That doesn't work for my clients unless I know that I got a big spread because let's say I've got three potential bidders. If I hold a round robin and the highest anybody's going to bid is 50,000, I'm not going to get to 100,000 by having a round robin auction. What I do is I have what's called a one-time best bids auction. Publishers hate to do that because they don't know where everybody else stands. They got to put their cards down on the table. That sort of forces them to put the most money down that they're willing to pay . That lets me optimize for the amount of money, but I want maximum control and flexibility for my clients. I want to give them the ability to choose a partner based not just on the total amount of money offered, but on all elements of the deal. The publisher's plan, who the editor is, marketing, etc. As you mentioned earlier, not every book gets sold. Sometimes it's an author or your people or you yourself, you face rejection. How do you coach yourself and others on how to accept rejection and failure? In our team meetings that we have every two weeks, one of the things we do is focus on what we call situations, which are problems or challenges. We've got everybody coming to the table, including me saying, "I just can't sell this book." I don't know why, but I've been doing this for a long time. Younger people are hearing all the time. They're saying that they're not alone in meeting with disappointment. I think that's the most important thing. We built a culture where people feel comfortable sharing their vulnerability, their disappointment, and understand that they're not alone. I think if you can show people that this is just part of the job and it's part of life, and you've got a support team behind you, that's what keeps people going. It's not when they've got a team with them. It's like basketball or any sport. One day you win, the next day you lose, the next day you win, but if you know your team's there fighting hard for you, that makes it possible to... We've got people working for us a long, long time. I think it's part of the team culture that keeps them there. Jim, has there ever been a book that you absolutely knew was great, but you couldn't sell it the first go around? You're a busy guy. You've got all these books hitting your desk every day that people want you to sell. Do you just give up on that book then and try to get a higher return on another book that crossed your desk? Oh, if it's something I believe in, I think it's a good book that's got to get published. I'm absolutely dogged. I'm like a dog with a bone and not let go that I'm just determined to sell it. I'll tell you two stories. One is a book by my client, Jeff Hawkins, the guy that developed the Palm Pilot . He's actually a brilliant neuroscientist. We did a book on intelligence and couldn't sell it. I just went back to one of the publishers who I thought would be the best and I said, "You're just missing this. I want to sit down with you and figure out because I want to help you see what I'm seeing." We were able to convince the publisher that he was missing things and we were saying things the right way. Here's another story, a recent story. This is one of the most fun projects I've ever worked on. Two clients come to me. They've had another agent. They're trying to sell a book about Costco. These are two Costco fanatics. They spent years visiting Costco's all around the world. They're on this kind of ... Like a hobby. Do they visit Costco's? They had an agent who was trying to sell a book on how Costco does business. Nobody would take it. They came in to met with my colleague, Courtney Paganelli, a young agent and me . We both happen to be big Costco fans. We're talking about them with them. He says, "Well, that's the wrong idea. You need to create a book that gives people the experience of being at Costco. You never know what you're going to find. You need to create a treasure hunt of a book." We create this book with them called The Joy of Costco, a treasure hunt from A to Z. I can't get any publisher to publish it because everybody's saying, "This is just for the Costco fan base. Unless Costco agrees to carry this book, how are we going to do this?" We finally get one publisher who agrees to on a profit sharing base going to do it. The author says, "You know what? We've decided we put so much skin in the game. We're going to become publishers. We're going to self-publish this." At that point, I put a lot of work in this thing. Do I drop out? Does Courtney drop out? We said, "Guess what? We'll continue being partners with you. We'll take a piece of the back end. We became sort of producers. We helped them find a designer. We helped them find a PR firm. And Costco just took an initial order of 50,000 copies. We just believe, "This was great. We're going to stick with you. It's unconventional, but we're going to do everything to make this work." It was great fun. Have you ever wondered what David is thinking as he interviews our guests each week? Or have you been interested in hearing David's take on some of the questions that he asks his guests? Well, I do, and I know a lot of you do too. My name is Koolah Callahan, and together with David, I host the Three More Questions podcast that airs every Monday. These episodes are just about 15 minutes, and in them, I asked David three questions that dive deeper into the themes of his episode with his guests. David shares incredible insights and stories from his career-leading young brands, and all of his answers are super practical and inspiring. Like this great insight, David shared in one of our most recent Three More Questions episodes. If you take over for a founder, or you take over for a director, or you take over for another vice president, you know, really understand what made the prior person successful. What made other people want to work with them? How did they get their results? You know, a lot of times what I see is people take over jobs, and they can't wait to just eliminate the person that they took over for. They can't wait to wipe out the thought of anybody thinking about that prior person, or the founder, because their ego is so big that they want to be seen as the new person. And so they don't really tap into the knowledge and the know-how that the people that they're taking over for obviously have. Get the Three More Questions podcast in your feed each Monday and dive even deeper into the episodes you know and love. Just subscribe to How Leaders Lead wherever you get your podcasts. You know, Jim, you've worked with such famous people and leaders, and I know you've got some stories on this. What was it like to work with Eric Smith of Google? What was the one thing you learned from him? Eric is really brilliant, and he's really tough and demanding as many of the world leaders I work with are. I think that you just got to have really high standards. You know, just don't settle for anything but the best. How about the famous investor Ray Dalio? Same thing. Ray is on the marketing side. We're selling his book all over the world, and we're getting offers from our co agents from different publishers in China and Brazil and wherever. And Ray just wanted to know with great detail about each of these publishers because if he was going to partner with somebody, it wasn't just about the amount of money they offered. He wanted to know, were they going to be really good partners? He's got a name that's a brand, and he has to protect that. And he forced us to do much greater due diligence in depth in knowing about our foreign publishing partners. How about the legendary quarterback Tom Brady? That guy. Tom had a team of people around him, you know, to help us put the book together . So that that was the case of a book where, I mean, just having a book by Tom Brady, we knew we were going to sell it. It was just, you know, he's just one of the most lovely, generous, thoughtful, kind guys you could ever meet. 100%. And how about Gillian Flynn, who sold over 20 million copies of her book, Gone Girl? Well Gillian's represented by my partner, Stephanie Roston. You know, that's again one of these cases. Gillian's first book was a really hard sell. Gone Girl wasn't her first book, but her previous books, they were really dark and publishers didn't know if they'd be an audience for it. And you know, that was the case where Stephanie just believed in Gillian's talent, has stuck with her, worked with her, Gillian is absolutely brilliant. One of the things that's so interesting about this business is some of the most successful people like Gillian are the most humble. They don't take success for granted, doesn't go to their head. They've got a really strong work ethic. They just keep at it. They don't rest on their laurels. They just keep doing it. You know, I know you're really proud of the fact you've kept the talent on your team for a long time. And continuity in any business is a huge value. But how do you keep getting fresh ideas with a tenured team? We have meetings we've set up for our fiction team. I don't do a lot of fiction. They're looking for ideas that come from the news media wherever. And we just have to keep reading widely, lots of different media coming up with , you know, ideas from out of the blue. I'll tell you one way to keep fresh ideas. Sometimes we've had interns. One of the interns was my grandson, Elijah. Elijah is 15 years old. He calls me out of the blue. He says, "Baba, I've got a guy for you to go after." I said, "Who is it?" He says his name is Rokana. Who's Rokana? He's the congressman from Silicon Valley, but he is also co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign. I think there's no one's written a book by a progressive capitalist. I think he's a progressive capitalist. So I say, "If that's really interesting, you know, I never heard of him, but I think one of my clients used to date him." I called her up. She used to date him. She made the introduction. That was a case where Elijah, my 15-year-old grandson, did the heavy lifting. He basically wrote the guts of the proposal with me, but the fresh idea came from him. That's a great one. You have a relatively small team around 20 people or so. How does someone new get hired? What's your process? I think there's the most important thing in any hiring is to figure out what you're looking for. What are your values? We've identified three qualities we're looking for, which I picked up from my client, Patrick Lanchione, our humble, hungry, and smart. A lot of bright people out there, a lot of talented people. That's necessary, but not sufficient for us. We want people who haven't let their smarts go to their head. That's the only way they're going to fit in with our culture, that they're open to learning to being criticized, to getting open feedback. We had a situation a few years ago. We had two finalists. One was a brilliant young woman, gone to Harvard. She was Chinese. She spoke Mandarin. She had interned at the Wall Street Journal while she was at Harvard. The other guy had gone to a small college I'd never heard of in Pennsylvania. He just had hustle. This is a guy who was hungry, hungrier than this woman from China. The woman from China was just so convinced of how smart she was. We came to the other guy because he was humble, he was hungry, and he was smart enough for us. I debriefed the woman when I told her, "You know, I said, 'Look, you're terrific. You're going to be a star at some other place. Let me explain to you why you didn't fit in here. You are really smart, but you're a little bit too much about yourself." I would keep that in mind as you go to interview at other places in case they might be looking for have values more like ours. That was the best interview experience you could ever get. Has there ever been a time when one of your people went to one of your direct competitors? If so, how did you handle it? We've been fortunate that we haven't had that experience. One of the things I'm proudest of is our culture that we built. We don't have people wanting to leave. We got people wanting to join us. We have what I call a growth culture. My client, Mary Murphy, has a book coming out called Cultures of Growth, which I think we fit into. We just want to find the best talent and do everything we can to keep them. We tell everybody, "We want you to be so good that everybody wants to steal you away. We want to be so good that you don't want to leave." We try to live up to that, and it's been pretty successful for over 34 years. I want to shift gears for a minute, Jim, and I want to take you way back. What's a story from your childhood that shaped you into the leader that you are today? When I was in seventh grade, I didn't make it onto the junior high basketball team, but we had a recreation league. I was determined that I was going to compete and play in a league. To do that, you had to come up with a sponsor for your team. I just said, "I'm going to have a team," and I got a bunch of my buddies who hadn't made the team. I said, "I'm going to just find a sponsor." I just took the initiative to walk around our small town and went to every retailer I could find until I found somebody who was sporting goods who was going to sponsor us. I think that came out of anger now that I think about it. I was just pissed off that I didn't get selected for the team, and I was going to have my own team. I just went out and did it. I think back now that I think about starting my own business 34 years, and what I did, again, I was vice president of a college. New guy came in, wanted his own people. My wife said to me, "Look, you could go be president or vice president of some other college. You're not going to be ever happy. You need to start your own business." I went out and did the same thing. I guess I was just pissed off, and I went out and built my own team over the last 34 years, and I got a great team. You had such an interesting background before you became a literary agent, and just here's the cliff notes for everybody. After college, you worked at preschool. You were a daycare director at a large public housing project. You worked for a foundation. You wrote a book called "Who Will Raise the Children, New Options for Fathers and in Parens and Mothers." You were vice president of college, as you just mentioned. So I'm curious, Jim, where did this passion come to you for early childhood education and fatherhood? I've always loved working with kids when I was in college, I tutored kids. I think some of it must come from my own family background. I was adopted, and I knew that my mother had died. I didn't realize that the man who raised me was also not my biological father. I met him when I was 30 years old. My wife, who's a clinical psychologist, psychoanalytically trained, pointed out to me, "Duh, maybe you're interested in fatherhood and early childhood because of your own experience." So I think that's where it all stems from. Based on all the research that you've done and the experience you've had exploring fatherhood in the family, what's the lesson for us men? I think the most important thing you can do in taking care of your children is take care of your relationship with your partner. That is the single thing I've found to be the most important. I remember we were, I think our son, Josh, must have been eight years old. She's in graduate school. I'm working vice president of this college. We're setting out a plan for the week. Who's going to go pick Josh up here and Jessica there and cook what meal, et c etera? Josh walks up to and says, "What are you guys doing?" He said, "We're planning our week." He said, "Boy, you guys don't look like you ever have any fun together." Wow, that was a wake up moment. And that moment on, we just built in time to take care of one another. We sked at that time and we didn't have much time. We just scheduled date night once a week to watch a TV show, Hill Street Blues. That's how long it was. We just carved out that time to just pay attention to even if we weren't looking at one another just to look at the TV together, just to hold hands. I think it's like on, you get on the airplane, they say in case of emergency, if you've got a job, put your mask on first. I think as couples, you just got to put the oxygen mask on your relationship first and that will help you take care of your children. Now a lot of our listeners are parents. Talk more about the idea of looking for what you call moments of engagement. I think you've got to find just small opportunities to engage with your kids, just pay attention to what they're interested in doing and take their lead and follow them. For parents of adolescents, everybody says, "Oh, it's really, my kid won't talk to me. Drifting apart." One of the best moments of engagement you can have with a teenager is if you're driving them to practice or driving them to school or whatever. It's really strange, but teenagers often open up the most and will talk when they're not looking directly at you. You got them as a captive audience in the car. You don't think of it, but you're together, you're like in this little bubble. You don't have a lot of time to talk to a kid, taken into school or practice, whatever, but just in a few moments, you can actually have a meaningful conversation where they can say something about what excites them or bothers them and you get to give some feedback and then you can pick up on it later in the day. Becoming this fatherhood expert that you were and you still are, I understand you've been the guest on the Today Show, Good Morning America and Oprah. How do you get prepared to go on the Oprah show? I was pretty nervous, frankly. When they invited me, I said, "I'll come as long as you let me bring my..." I think Josh was then 12 years old. They agreed, they flew us out to Chicago. Big white stretch limo shows up. Josh looks up to me and says, "Dad, do you always travel like this?" I'm saying, "No, I don't." "How do you prepare? I don't know. I was just really nervous. I think if you're not nervous, you're in trouble. You've got to have enough nervous excitement without it being paralyzing. I don't know. I've just learned to do this so many times. I've gotten used to doing it." We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Jim Levine in just a moment . As you've heard us talk about, Jim represents the one and only Tom Brady. I think it's safe to say that Tom knows a thing or two about helping others succeed. That starts with great communication with his teammates. When he joined me on the podcast, Tom shared his three C's of communication with me, which helped him build strong bonds with his teammates and coaches. CCC, clear current communication. Really being clear, man, I'm going to say something and see if they can figure it out. I'm going to try to dance around a topic. Then current, what's happening in the moment? Hey, this thing happened two months ago and it's really bothering me. It's no, "Hey, this is the situation we're currently dealing with." You've got to communicate. Many people don't want to communicate. I think CCC is really important on a personal level, but it's certainly really important in a professional environment as well. Go back and listen to my entire conversation with Tom Brady, episode 53, here on How Leaders Lead. One of the things leaders have to do is break through the clutter. What have you learned about communication and keeping people's attention that all leaders could benefit from? In written communication with email these days, I try to get to the point really clearly, three bullet points. Here's what we've got to do, here's why we've got to do it, here's when we've got to do it, and not write long, long memos. I just try to keep things really succinct. While we're on the subject of emails, you're the only person in the world that sends me an email that says, "Please confirm receipt." What's behind that? What's behind that is that, in one case, I can't tell you all the details, but I lost a big client because they thought I wasn't interested in them. I had sent several emails that they had never gotten. This was a huge client when I finally spoke, and they said, "Well, you were so unresponsive." I said, "What are you talking about?" I sent you guys email after email. I never heard back from you. That was a pain point that led me to make sure things were getting through. I knew there had to be a good story behind that. When was the moment? You had this incredible career, basically doing good in the world, social work almost, carrying about families. When was the moment that you decided that you wanted to become a capitalistic literary agent? Well, it was when I left me in Vice President of the Bank Street College of Education. My wife said to me, "You really should start your own business. You've always wanted to do it." It turns out, "I love business." It's not like the stuff I was doing was in business, but I love being able to ... I've created employment for 21 people now. That's a pretty good feeling to be able to start something from nothing. Growing into something you love doing, share the love and the excitement with other people and support them, help them support their families, and that's a pretty great feeling. How has the firsthand experience that you've had being an author? You've written seven books. How's that helped you in the literary world? Well, it's helped in two ways. One is that every book gets written three times. First you write it for yourself to figure out what the heck you've got to say. Then you write it for your editor based on your editor's feedback, and then you write it for the public. So that's the writing process. The marketing process, I've realized that writing the book is at best half the process. To be successful, the other half is marketing. Any author who thinks that they've finished the task when they've written the book is just naive about the way the marketplace works. Jim, this has been so much fun, and I knew it would be. I want to have some more fun with my lightning round of questions. Are you ready for this? Okay. Okay. What's one word others would use to best describe you? And what would you say is the one word that best describes you? Grateful. If you could be one person for a day beside yourself, who would it be? I would like to be my grandson Elijah and to see what the world is like through his eyes, what it's like to be an 18-year-old in today's world. Because our worlds are so different, it'd just be fascinating to spend a day inhabiting his world to see what it's like. What's your biggest pet peeve? The one thing that really gets under my skin if somebody is dishonest. What are three books that every leader should read? Aside from your own book, David, about teams, which they should definitely read , the three books that have most influenced me, I think, in being a leader are. One is Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I think a second would be my client Bill Urey is getting to yes. And third for me, this really has helped me is search inside yourself, which is a book about meditation. I found that I started practicing meditation regularly about 15 years ago. I think that's been very helpful to me. Now I know you love jazz. It's one of your go-to jazz albums. Anything by Bill Evans. Aside from books, is there anything you collect? I'm a very avid photographer. My children might say he collects too many pictures of us, which means he takes too many pictures of us. Why doesn't he stop clicking his iPhone? If I turned on the radio in your car, what would I hear? You would probably hear a podcast. That's something about you that few people would know. That I was on the high school wrestling team. So you are a grinder, no question about the toughest sport that I know of. You mentioned Stephen Covey's, that's the end of the lightning round. So good job. So Stephen Covey's, you mentioned Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And a big idea in that book for him is to begin with the end in mind. As you've navigated your career, I'm curious what you see as your end that you 're heading towards. My end is to keep doing what I try to do daily, which is to protect my family and those I love to develop the talents of people around me and to nurture myself so I can accomplish the first two. And that means exercise, which I mentioned, and meditation. I don't ever see myself stopping doing this job. What I'm doing now is work. If I were retired, I would be doing the same thing. I'd be trying to talk to smart, interesting people, helping them develop their ideas. I just have kind of lucked into a role that I never would have imagined ever doing that just fits me, my personality perfectly. And luckily my wife is the same. She's a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist. She loves what she's doing. She's not going to stop. We love to travel together. We love to spend time together. And we both exercise daily as long as we can stay healthy and keep our wits about us. I'll probably just drop dead at the copying machine. You mentioned your wife and I understand that if anyone asks your wife, she's been married. She says three times, same guy, but he's changed. How would you say, looking back, you've changed in the last, let's say, 15 years as a leader? Look, I've just learned that my job is to help everybody else succeed. That's my job. Jim, that sounds like a really nice thing, but when did you realize it was time to flip the script and be focused on other people instead of yourself? Was there a time? I think it might have been when I started my own business and I'm thinking that the guy was the president of the college where I was vice president. There were a lot of good things I learned from him, but I think I realized he was too focused on himself and I don't want to be a leader, but not a leader like that. I don't want to be a leader who's taking glory in himself. I want to help other people find the glory in themselves. The best businesses have a noble cause. If you had to step back and think about your business and what you do in your business every single day, what would be the noble cause? We have a set of guiding principles and we say our mission, our goal is to ignite talent. That's what it's all about for us. That's not just for our clients. It's really for everybody who shows up at work. One of the things I just love about our team and our culture, it's like every day everybody shows up with a sense that each person is going to become better at it, just by being together. I am so much better in doing what I do when I have a team of people that I'm working with. That's one of the biggest things I've discovered really in the last 15, 20 years is how important to me is having a team. A lot of the stuff I did as an academic, I was the star in a sense. As an academic you write books, you give talks. I had teams of research assistants, but the glory went to me. I am just so much better at everything by having a team of colleagues who I really rely on who we challenge one another day to day. That's been a big learning for me. Last question. What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone who wants to be a better leader? Listen, but listen not just to what people are saying. Try to listen to the feelings and maybe the thoughts behind what they're saying . Don't take any people at their word. It's not that they're lying. It's that there may be stuff they're really not coming out and hope to make them comfortable enough to let you know what's really going on with them. You've got to kind of respond to the full person, to really support people on your team. You really got to know them. It's not just what they're saying. It's what they're feeling. It's knowing what matters to them as a person. If you can tap into that, it makes the biggest difference to the world for people to know that you care about them. You can only do that by really listening. You don't, Jim, I want to thank you for taking the time to be on this podcast and have this conversation with me. I've had the privilege of working with you firsthand on three books. I always watched you and how you did your business. Now I have a much better understanding of you as a person and you are a guy who walks the talk on everything that you've said. I think you're kind. You're honest. You're talented. You're absolutely dogged in terms of your determination. And the one thing that I'm very impressed by is that the philosophy that you espouse, you actually live. And I want to thank you for helping me make my books so successful. I see it time and time again in the best leaders. It's not about how great you are. It's about how you can help others do great things. This is the philosophy driving everything Jim does in his work, both with this clients and his team. And it's a mentality we all need if we want to find true satisfaction and fulfillment in our careers. So help other people develop their ideas, recognize their gifts, listen when they talk, both to what they're saying and what they might not be saying. Those are just a few ways you can ignite the talent of those around you. Now if you're a regular listener of this podcast, you know this is the point in the show where I pause and offer a simple way you can apply this concept in your own world and become a better leader. And this week, my advice is real simple. Just think about someone in your life who helped ignite your talent, someone who offered you a listening ear or a bit of coaching or just an opportunity that helped you get where you are today. You have that person in mind? Now take a moment to express your gratitude to that person. Thanksgiving. The timing is perfect and it'll mean the world of that person. You can shoot him a quick email, but if you ask me, there's nothing better than a handwritten note to thank someone or a call out of the blue. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders ignite the talent of those around them. Coming up next on how leaders lead is Mark King, the CEO of Taco Bell. I believe that if you have this big aspiration and your thinking is here, meaning you don't know how to get there, you fill that gap with creative ideas. And so for me, it's unlocking the potential of people to find new creative solutions to be disruptive by driving with a big aspiration and filling that gap with creative ideas. So be sure to come back again next week to hear our entire conversation. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO]