Daniel Burrus, Technology Futurist, Disruptive Innovation Expert

Over the past three decades, futurist keynote speaker Daniel Burrus has established a worldwide reputation for accurately predicting the future of technological change and its impact on the world of business.

Voted one of the Top 10 Global Influencers

With over 1,000,000 followers, Daniel was hand picked by LinkedIn as one of the worlds most influential innovative thinkers.

He is a strategic advisor to executives from Fortune 500 companies, helping them to accelerate innovation and results by developing game-changing strategies based on his proven methodologies for capitalizing on technology innovations and their future impact. His client list includes companies such as Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, Verizon, Merck, American Express, FedX, Deloitte, Procter & Gamble, VISA, KPMG, Honda, and the Department of Defense.

He is the author of seven books, including The New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller Flash Foresight, and his latest book The Anticipatory Organization.

He is a featured writer with millions of monthly readers on the topics of innovation, change and the future and has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Wired, CNBC, and Huffington Post to name a few.

He has been the featured subject of several PBS television specials and has appeared on programs such as CNN, Fox Business, and Bloomberg, and is quoted in a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fortune, and Forbes.

He has founded six businesses, four of which were national leaders in the United States in the first year. He is the CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients profit from technological, social and business forces that are converging to create enormous, untapped opportunities.

In 1983 he became the first and only futurist to accurately identify the twenty technologies that would become the driving force of business and economic change for decades to come. He also linked exponential computing advances to economic value creation.

Specialties: Hard Trend Methodology, Anticipatory Business Model, Technology-Driven Trends, Disruptive Innovation, Strategic Advising and Planning, Business Keynote Presentations 

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Transcript

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daniel fantastic to have you on this episode of leadership bites absolute pleasure to have you here all right it's really a pleasure to be with you so i have done a little introduction on the audio podcast but on the video cast i don't do an introduction so for those people that don't know it'd be just great to hear the well listen if you don't know who i am this is who i am and this is what i do yeah well thank you actually uh very quickly i started out teaching biology and physics so obviously i didn't have any money and uh but i was a research guy and that that passion kind of is a thread that weaves through my life and i ended up teaching for a number of years then i started six different companies that did very well in the us five were profitable in the first year for example four were national leaders in the first year but i knew i was put on the planet i see i think the two most important moments in a person's life is the day you're born in the day you find out why you're born and i'm very lucky i found out why i was born and that is i was born to teach so instead of on this podcast just telling you i can't help myself i'd like to teach people uh and and to give them some principles so 37 years ago i did a research on the latest innovations in technology came up with a methodology of how to separate the things that will happen from the things that might happen i've written seven books that have been bestsellers thousands of articles actually given over three thousand speeches about it and here i am helping people to look at how you can be an anticipatory leader versus a reactionary leader okay and that's that i think leads us um into i i was actually practicing saying anticipatory uh when you i know it is one of those words because in my brain i knew how to sorry i couldn't come up with a better one but it seemed to fit i really tried though i tell you because i was going i'm going to lose all credibility if i can't say this right i had a little practice but um the book the anticipatory uh organization um is that that's your newest uh sort of um offering into the world and i and i guess it leads me to some questions and that focus of um organizations that are trying to get ahead um and i suppose why would an individual read the book what do they what do you who do you want to read it and what you want them to walk away with when they've taken it on board well a couple of things number one is that think of strategy whether it's personal or business as a two-sided coin and i think we're really good at one side of the coin and that is being agile and agility if you think about it is reacting as fast as you can to a problem after it occurs reacting as fast as you can to disruption after it disrupts but as uh the world has learned with the pandemic you can't react fast enough things just keep coming at you and there's black swans that you think come out of nowhere actually they don't but they seem to and you and the feeling is why plan for the future no one can predict the future and i do want people to lead with agility the better you are the more agile you are the better but that's assuming you can't predict anything the other side of the coin is how to be anticipatory how to anticipate problems before you have them so you can pre-sell them let's face it how many times have people said i knew that was going to happen and i'd say so why did you let it and then anticipate disruptions before they disrupt and for those that have read or listened to any of my work before you'd know that every disruption that's happened was there to see and fully predictable um it's just you need a way to do it so i've come up with a science uh to find certainty in an uncertain world you see see the world seems to be so uncertain and strategy whether it's personal or business based on uncertainty has high risk and if you're a leader and you're trying to get people to make bold moves and you're giving them your opinion what are they going to want another opinion but if you learn how to speak in future facts in future truths that are perceived and known to be true the minute you hear them you have the confidence to make bold moves so being an anticipatory leader is vital in this new world of amazing disruptive uncertainty define certainty so i'm saying you need both and i think one side of the coin i think you got down i'm here to give you the other side of the coin[Music] so what i what i think i hear in in there is an individual can take this on board a team can take this on board but there has to be an overarching call it permission or safety to offer that idea because i can i might see that trend and i might be that truth-bringer but if it's not going to be heard then you know it's it i may not or may lose the bravery and i may others may see so what what's what's your how much of this work is around you having the mindset is one thing but the organization's willingness to to hear it is another yeah absolutely and that and you've nailed one of the biggest problems so let me talk about trends and two key elements i would like to teach today uh first thing is that a trend by itself is boring it's academic now look i've been doing this for 37 years and i'm telling you that what what is the difference well if a trend has an actionable strategy attached to it it bursts into life so if anyone from this moment on is talking about a trend and you don't say and by the way here's the opportunity you are just talking something academic so that's number one we'll park that over here because that big one that i want to give you and it's part of the science that i've developed and i've been teaching and that is all trends fit into one of two categories they're either a hard trend based on a future fact that will happen and no matter who you are how much money you've got you cannot stop it the good news is you can see it coming i'll give you some ideas and examples in a minute you can see it coming before it happens when you can see a disruption before it disrupts you now have a choice to be either the disrupter or the disrupted by the way there's no in between some people are coasting but let's face it you can only coast downhill and there is a bottom so uh so you've said that you said that before haven't you there yeah yeah i did there is hard trains all right so all trends are either hard trends based on future facts that will happen and therefore let you see problems before you have them so you can pre-solve them let you see disruptions before they disrupt so you have a choice to be the disrupter or the disrupted and it gives you certainty because it's going to happen and by the way when it comes to strategy if you don't do it someone else will because it's going to happen anyway the other kind of trend is a soft trend and a soft trend is based on an assumption about the future that may or may not happen now it's important it doesn't mean that it won't happen but it's not a future fact which changes risk now i'm getting to your your question guy and that is how do you have the confidence as a leader to even bring this up how can you get people to embrace it and the answer is you have to reduce their risk because if the risk of embracing it is high because the uncertainty is high i'm not going to embrace it when you take away the risk and help me to see the big risk is not embracing it because if we don't do what our competitors will it's going to happen then all of a sudden you flip things around and get people to move forward let me give you a couple of quick examples uh let's take soft friends for a sec for just a minute uh in the united states uh there has been a trend that's been going on for a couple of decades that is health care costs have been going up up up up up they haven't been going down they've been going up dramatically and that is a trend all right now is that a hard trend or soft trend the answer is oh it's a soft trend but most people see it as a hard trend which means if it's unstoppable it's really a future fact then all we can do is do healthcare reform around how are we going to pay for the mess as the baby boomers get older and need more care but if you realize oh that's a soft trend and the beauty of a soft trend guy is if you don't like it you can change it see that's the strategy of a soft trend if you don't like it you can change it so for example we could use in this country we could use blockchain and blockchain creates transparency it creates trust it's highly secure and right now in a healthcare system that has no transparency if you knew the aspirin in the hospital cost 25 you would have your spouse bring it but you didn't know that if you knew that artificial knee buried in price by 200 made by the same manufacturer in the same size they're putting in your leg you would say wait a minute what's going on so and i'm just giving you a quick example of blockchain i could give you countless examples of how we could change that so that's just one but soft friends let's say right now you're a restaurant and sales are terrible because of the coronavirus and it looks like you're going to go out of business is that a hard turn or a soft trend by the way soft trend that's that's your problem you aren't doing something about it if instead let's say you're a high-end place that can't get people coming in and uh the weather's starting to turn in your area if you live in this hemisphere the northern hemisphere uh what are you gonna do and that is i would want to have a home delivery system that matches the brand of the high-end experience that you come in because some have done that but they've delivered in paper bags in other words here's this wonderful meal but they haven't carried their brand promise through to the end i would have the brand promise going through the end and when the when the pandemic lifts you guess what i've got two business models instead of one i don't have to rely on just people coming in actually i'll be better off now by the way i've given that advice to a number of high-end restaurants that were closed down they opened doing that they're doing fantastic they're actually setting some records they've expanded their market and they haven't even opened their physical place yet my point is soft trends don't like them good i like that you can change them that's the strategy to a soft drink hard trends that gives you opportunity to see it coming and i got to give you some examples and then i'll let you ask me some questions all right because we got to nail the concept so hard trends it's not that hard there's only three questions there are three uh categories of hard trends that's it one of them is demographics for example uh and again in the united states we uh the number that's popped around is there's 78 million baby boomers actually there's 68 million 10 million have already passed away they're on the back end out of the front end of being young right now and they are not going to get younger they're going to get older that can also get young again so what does that mean well we can predict a lot of problems and either pre-solve them or not we can we can see all sorts of opportunities and mine them or not all right so for example as somebody gets older what's one of the biggest problems by the way i'm going to give you something that doesn't exist right now as an example of how to innovate how to be a leader how to innovate with low risk right now this is not a product nobody's talked about this scoop for this show and that is let's say uh people falling when they get old they break their hips and hips and pneumonia and now the coronavirus are the three biggest cause of death so people get older but you can actually the latest 4k camera can be the size of a fly's eye why can't i put some cameras on a little thing that goes around your shoe and it is looking at what's ahead by the way that's a step that's a bump and that's going to your little bluetooth thing that says because people can't see good as they're getting older that's why they trip that's why they fall they they don't see that stuff now i'm giving you a quick example of how you could make a smart shoe ex you don't even need the shoe just the part on the outside that could help people know what's ahead before it happens now again that's just a quick opportunity by the way is something like that going to happen the answer is yeah you know why if it can be done it will be done there's an amazing opportunity out there so i said there were three categories number one demographics and by the way when we look at gen z and gen y and the young people we have to realize guess what they're aging they're going through different phases of life they don't stay that age forever and those stages have predictable needs that change so as they go through those stages we could actually have if i'm a bank or a financial institution little triggers that let me know hey they're in another phase now there's some new opportunities for me instead of thinking they're always young with that same mindset all right i said there were three number two this will shock everybody government regulation yeah i did say that government regulations huge uh elon musk he has every business he's started he funded it with government regulation um and a matter of fact i think i've added it up he's received i think 1.4 billion dollars to start businesses so far from the government why because he's using regulation to his advantage so what we do is when we hear a new regulation and they aren't just in the u.s every country has regulations when there is a new regulation everybody looks at what they don't like about it and the list is endless but one of the principles i teach in my anticipatory leader learning system is opposites work better so instead of starting with what you don't like take a look at what you do like and you'll find amazing opportunities by the way can you predict all government regulations no but you can predict more than enough see you can't predict everything but lists of things i'm uncertain about don't empower me lists of things i am certain about do so instead of looking at the big list of things i don't know i like to create a list of things i do know let me give you an example with regulation well we have more regulation regardless of what country you're in on cyber security yeah why there's some hard trends at play that government can't ignore but there are some other things we could debate and may or may not happen again i like to know what i and can be certain about and develop opportunities around those third category last category then i'll let you get in a couple of words here and that is technology and technology has redefined reality over and over again matter of fact today we're doing things that were impossible two years ago we're going to be doing things that are impossible two years from now that are impossible today and it's amazingly predictable for example are we going to be putting more in the cloud or is the cloud getting full now we're going to be putting more in the cloud after 5g is that it no that's going to be 6g followed by 7g guaranteed there's amazing predictability and when you know when something's going to happen and there's even a way to see time frames oh you've got some great advantages and one little comment i'll make the pandemic let's talk about that when we were around the world forced to change and that's the key here why humans don't like to change and businesses are run by humans that don't like to change we don't change it till we have to we were all forced to change we were all forced to go digital and that created a unprecedented beyond exponential acceleration of technology trends i've been following for decades for example easy one e-commerce accelerated 10 years in just a matter of months makes sense we were all locked down what are we going to do we're going to buy online telehealth tele-education working remotely we could all work remotely before but we didn't have to the office was a place to house people and employees now it's not a place to house we found we can be quite effective not at the office by the way does that mean we're not going back to the office and everybody that's invested in office buildings are going to be in trouble no another principle i teach is the both end principle instead of the either this or even that which means instead of going all back to the office to house people again like we did in the past we're going to read design our offices to maximize innovation collaboration communication and all the things that we need to be in an office for otherwise why are we in the office it's going to be both but we're going to think it through more strategically so boiling it all down i've got over 16 trends that have been accelerated between 5 and 10 years all of them and when you have massive technology acceleration massive you have massive new opportunities and my worry is as leaders you know what you're all doing you're costing you know what you're doing you're crisis managing you're not looking at the future because it's so unpredictable when will this virus end you're asking the wrong question what are the amazing new opportunities and the ability for me to transform not just change transform my business model so that instead of getting back to the way it was which frankly wasn't that great anyway hey it wasn't that great anyway i can transform into what is it far better than what i had in the past now is the time to be strategic now is the time to be anticipatory sorry i gave you such a long answer but it was you asked i'm sorry i did mental note to self that's not careful about what you asked for you're very lucky that i don't live local because i just come and camp outside your house and ask you questions so that's the first thing so thank you for that i think what i um and you know course correct me you know one of the things that i talk about is trust accountability bravery and connection when i'm dealing with senior teams and when it comes to right say that again those are so important well i know and everybody that's on this podcast has started many times but you know what i'm i haven't heard it before from you and i'm telling you those are really important slow down sampling again so in i talk about and i know i know but i i want to get it's trust so it's trust i have to trust you you have to trust me we have to be trustworthy there is a narrative that goes around trust that says i may interact with you transactionally because i've got to but if i trust you then i will contribute outside of my own need to support you so i talk about trust absolutely and just uh back in 1988 one of the quotes of me in 88 was trust is the glue that holds the knowledge economy together in other words when you don't have trust all of a sudden this knowledge economy falls apart so right on target okay what's the other one well accountability to a greater or lesser degree is what you'd expect it to be that above or below the line behavior but understanding that accountability doesn't always mean success it means that succeed or fail i inherently trust your willingness to operate from a place of accountability which means as a product or a service or as an individual my the story around me can remain intact even when i fail think about customer service for example it may go wrong but if you take accountability and i feel you're trying then if you're fundamentally incompetent over a period of time our relationship may come to an end but in the short term i can actually remain an advocate even in failure if i feel you're being accountable so i find that very powerful well and failure you know one of the things to tie into that just a second and it's another principle that i teach is in starting my businesses again i started out as a teacher right i had to learn do what i'd learned how to fail fast so what i did is i developed fail fast metrics because most of us don't know we're failing in for years and i would like to know a lot sooner but here's the key of failure what do you learn from the failure and are you sharing what you learned with others because others are about to do the same failure you've already done unless we share it so i know you get into all of this stuff i am just kind of reinforcing that all of that that's why i wanted to repeat them they're all big well i i've been a lifelong martial artist and one of the things that you learn very very quickly is that learning to fail fast having very very quick feedback mechanisms and having a group of people around you where failure isn't vulnerability because actually the best martial artists are the ones that go in with the intent of learning from their failure to get better but then but when you're in the ring of course the feedback mechanism is it is incredibly quick i just got punched in the face three times that's not working you learn very very quickly but that methodology is a mindset that is inherent in that space so i'm going to guess this for you and that is in martial arts there is two sides to the coin and you've got to be very agile but you also need to anticipate that punch so there's an end right so i like this there are certain things that actually you can influence and there are certain things that you cannot exactly are you going to one of the things i talk from that soft trend description is and i'm oversimplifying it for guys world because i only heard it three minutes ago right is in the soft trend you shift right and in the ring you may say well actually the way that this is going and i've got the shift i've got to adapt but there are certain hard trends which is he's not going to get any smaller or he's not going to suddenly become less competent or and if i find that i've walked into a space where ah i thought it would be more of an equal mix but holy moly this individual must have been working on his kicking because he's just he's just put three in my head that isn't going to change in the short term so i've got to do i've got to check i've got to change well so what you just pointed out are the two big differences between hard and soft using the other terms i attached to them one is is it a future fact or is it an assumption so if you make assumptions about your opponent based on their past still isn't the future fact is it absolutely might have changed yeah they may have done a lot of work in the assumptions are a huge science that again i think is important to understand what are the other ones you add a couple more i think one or two more well the the two more then is bravery and connection but when i was latching on to when i was hearing you talk was i have this sense that when i talk about bravery which is to say that constantly there are elements of nervousness anxiety doubts fears that individuals and teams can suffer from but actually the way of i believe reacting isn't with this idea of just constantly being brave by moving forward but actually the bravery is in the willingness to become competent because when i look at things like emergency services and fire departments for example well they're running into the building everybody else is running out of they are per se inherently fearful as human beings but their bravery isn't necessarily in running into the building their bravery is in their willingness to constantly learn to take feedback even if it means that they're wrong to and and i think what i heard in what you were saying was organizations need to knock yeah sometimes you've got to do what i call put your big pants on and and go forward but it's about that competence with this these these unknowns it's about that going we can become very competent in a space which is constantly shifting if we're taking on board this thinking and we don't we we can sometimes we'll just have to put our big pants on and do something brave but let's reduce that and increase our competence in this space that's probably the bravery changing the way we think now re-adapting again on a constant basis and and i think that's what i heard if i if i'm wrong and so again using uh your example going into that burning building uh if i have no competency i'm new and i haven't been trained it's a hell hole and i don't know if i want to go in there if i'm merely agile what i'm going to do is i'm going to go in and with the idea that i'm going to respond to flare-ups which by the way i want you to do but on the second hand also i'm anticipatory and i've learned about how fires spread and how they move and what can happen i can anticipate what's going to happen so i want to be both i need both sides of the coin and you as so i i like where you're going on this and what was that last one and the last one is connection and i don't just mean eye contact and the willingness to put your mobile phone down i talk about that which is relevant but it's that contribution outside of your own need which is if we all just play our own game then i'm not going to feed into your your blind spots i'm not going to get mine fed into we're not going to offer outside of our own space so call it enterprise leadership that's a bit superficial i think but i think it's a cultural imperative that you're not just here to serve your own resource and your own span of control you're here and you will be judged by your willingness to contribute now if that means i have a blind spot and i'm more senior to you and i'm not willing to accept it then actually how brave would you be how accountable would you be can i trust that you will hold space on an unpopular idea do you have the competence in your vocabulary and the learning from daniel that i can offer that into the room because i've read the damn books and i've been on the courses or whatever they are but it's that willingness to contribute outside of your own need not just in a kabutz like way let's all help each other but in the sticky moments and face into that and i i think that that feels as if i'm hearing that in what you're saying yeah absolutely and again uh that's where i think those hard trends future facts are so helpful because what they do is again it gives them confidence but more importantly you can use it to give others confidence yes and when you and when you elevate someone's confidence you have they then they are willing to make bold moves delta works with sales i mean first first of all there's nothing better than a few uh confused customer so high levels of uncertainty on their part that's good but when you're finished and you're ready to ask for the sale if they're uncertain it's going to be hard they're going to you know it's hard to get the sale if they have a high level of certainty they're going to write a big check so certainty is amazingly powerful closing tool uncertainty is a good way to open the door to the sale so i'm going to just budget into a little bit of new territory because the the topics are vast and uh et cetera uh they were they were too good to ignore and uh in our pre-podcast talk i discovered your brilliance and i wanted to bring that into this as well i think that's incredibly gracious but uh so one of the things i'm fascinated by is ai and this idea of you know we we have driverless cars on the horizon we have ai google ai booking hair appointments and you know there is an element of people and myself to a greater or lesser degree that will go listen the moment that ai can answer the phone to the point where you don't know it and that machine can flip that burger to the point where they don't need you then there's a difference between maybe the safety of intellect where it can always shift and adjust but for a population i don't mean in the terms of lack of intellect but in the terms of their demographic and where they are then what is that reality of ai if we fast forward to a position that might be around the ethics you know if i've got a bottom line it makes us more profitable i do it but i often talk about forget corporate social responsibility social responsibility there's a potential dystopian future on the horizon for a lot of people and i just would like to get your kind of thoughts on don't worry or yeah we might need to be aware of that and uh yeah exactly well one of the reasons i'm an advisor to the uh department of defense and to uh lockheed martin and raytheon and other defense contractors on ai and cyber is uh you know i want to be able to predict future problems and pre-solve them i don't want a terminator future and neither do you well some of those lockheed videos of some of the machines that they've got does make you go that may be a dog but stick a couple of guns on it and that thing's a bit worrying oh absolutely absolutely so to answer your question yeah uh one of the uh trends that i have highlighted in my matter of fact if you went to burris.com you could find them you have to buy them um is caught is uh looking at what i call again think the both end concept and uh so let's take oncology i'll teach it to you with a with a story right now ibm's watson which is a ai system knows more about oncology than any living oncologist because it's learned from all of this stuff so it knows more than any any human so let's say that you know someone that has cancer heaven forbid and they need an oncologist i'm going to give you three choices number one you got watson number two choice is you've got one of the best oncologists on the planet number three is you have one of the best oncologists that has access to watson so what i'm calling is that is the future and that is uh we're going to have uh i'll get back to autonomous vehicles but in this case it's like a symbiotic relationship in biology symbiosis is where two different creatures need each other to coexist so in reality we're going to be getting all the benefit of what no human can keep in their head given to us but still we there's something called the cognitive domain and ai is at the low end right now and it's working its way up but if you look at the higher ends where humans are at their best that ai is trouble for example ai has trouble with empathy i really care about what you're saying right now well um it can say that in my voice but does it care uh it's not as good at communicating collaborating innovating it can do levels of that so there's a told saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks the good news is we're not dogs we can learn some new tricks so here's an insight there's an art and science to every profession there's art and science every profession if it was just a science let's take a medical doctor they all went to college they all got good grades hopefully they all got their degree if it's all a matter of science doesn't matter who your doctor is they all did well but it does matter why it's the art part it's the other part that part that humans do best so in college and this relates to an earlier question in college what happens is you learn the science and you learn the art when you're out and there are better artists than others in this case we're going to get a flip taken place because ai's going to get much better at the science and give it to you in your ear and in your glasses and what is how are are humans going to beat ai and that is with the art part and as a matter of fact i'm just about to publish a uh blog which is i'm going to be on my website about those competencies and what is that art part we need we get better at that and by the way i think we're going to do more of that in the universities to prepare us so that we can more quickly profit from all these changes and by the way ai isn't as good as doing your plumbing and it isn't good at installing in 7g robots will help but you know what us humans still have a neat and a place to be at the moment but what i have heard that think of it guy as augmented thinking but we will adapt i need augmentation to my thinking and ai is going to give me the augmented thinking yeah and what i've heard there is we will adapt we will do new things and as ai rises to do more things that might be well how would i earn a living well that's okay because you'll be doing something else and we don't know what that is because that's the future is yet unknown but if that if that there's that's not a future fact that's an assumption that's a soft trend yeah we'll all be doing something else to earn a living now you may not but that's soft how can you affect that because i want to have a positive future not a negative one i have to be willing to learn something new so if we're not willing to learn something new you'll ride that uh that assumption of uh you'll you'll earn a living somehow you may not yes but if you're willing to learn something new you can change that soft trend that looks really dystopian yeah into something good and actually positive for you and your family so my point is we can either sit back and let the future be shaped by somebody and something else and you may not like that future what i'm really all about and in my life is getting people to not just be anticipatory but to actively shape a positive future rather than passively receive it because you may not like what you're receiving yeah i i totally buy into that i could i could talk about the submissive nature of relationships i think but we'll step away from that for now but so the last thing i want to bring to the table just to respect your time because uh otherwise you know it'll be uh three o'clock three days from now and you'll say guy i've really got to go now and i'll break a possibly great relationship is we spoke just pre me pressing the record button on this idea of followers and influencers and i was you know you know you were sort of talking about how many followers you have on certain platforms and we were just talking about that difference and a great answer that you you'd uh you come up with as a reflex to being asked what's the difference between influence and followers and i think in this whole social media age that's a that's a great question and i'm interested to see what that might mean in the in the leadership context so uh yeah yeah what's the difference between influencers and followers daniel yeah well again that question was posed to me really just recently and that's what i mentioned to you and because again just on linkedin you know i've got 1.25 million followers so they said and and i've got other big followings too and a couple million blog readers so they said all right so what's the difference because you're thought of as an influencer you have followers are they the same thing and i said no they're not think of it this way and this comes to leadership um i was giving a commencement speech and uh in that commencement speech i started out by freaking out all the parents because there were thousands of people getting various degrees and i said i don't want you to focus on living a life of success and i'm sure they are going oh god but but what i said was success is all about you success is about how many degrees you end up with how big your house is how cool your car is how much money you make success is all about you instead i would like you to live a life of significance because significance is about what you do for others and when you elevate your significance personally when you elevate your significance professionally when you elevate your company from being a successful company to being a significant company you'll find success will follow so instead of success being the goal i want you to make significance your goal so what is the difference between the followers and influencers well influencers tend to be focusing on helping others followers are looking at how many followers do i have in other words it's my success is measured by my number of followers i would say that doesn't cut it at all in my world what are you doing for those followers how are you helping those followers in their lives in their world and what they try to do that is going to be the true measure and by the way this whole thing is about leadership i just gave you a giant leadership principle right there and i think that ties into my connection and that willingness to contribute outside absolutely that uh see that's what i was thinking when you mention that exactly yes okay well listen uh i want to go on and on and on but i'm not going to because i again i think these these things have a natural cycle for people to listen to um for me um i just want to say thank you so much for taking the time on a schedule which um you know when i hear other people's schedules and the work that they generate out i suddenly have a recognition that i need to stop watching as much television as i do and do something more valuable to the world but but listen i think it's been it's great to hear i think it's personally when i do this i don't have pre-conversations with people that come on the episodes because i want to listen and hear it for the first time and what this has done it doesn't always do so it's triggered me to want to take interest not so much in you but in in that work and the way that you think and so and i think that's important and i think that's indicative as feedback to you about the impact that you're having which is it's triggered a desire in me to find out more so i think that's uh hopefully that's a recognition of that from me to you and i think that'll be the same for other people as well so from me to you thank you very much yeah it's my pleasure thank you for having me on you