Blake Hall
speaker
270 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Blake Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It's what I loved about the military and what I'm really passionate about enforcing here at IDME as well.
Yeah, so his other rule was if you have a choice of unit to go to the one with the worst reputation so that when you leave, you can see the difference that good leadership makes. And then he had one that was quite specific to his experience, but he said, never let your name be associated with S4, which is supply and logistics.
He had fought his way up through Anzio into the Alps, and it was wintertime. And everyone in the Alps on the front lines, they all had frostbite or frostnip of some form. And he got pulled on a detail to go all the way back to headquarters for something that they needed to do. And so he's in the back of this truck.
And as they got further and further back, he started to see jackets and gloves and fur-lined parkas until they're back at headquarters. everyone's got the latest, greatest cold weather gear, and there's heaters and stuff. And meanwhile, he and his brothers who are in the Alps on the front lines have none of that.
So I think there's more general lesson there to be extrapolated, which is leaders eat last, always serve those who you're responsible for, who are at the tip of the spear before you take care of yourself. And that's more, again, back to caring and selflessness. But those were the three rules that he gave to my dad after his experiences, 66 months in combat.
Our brains hear the same words, but it interprets it into different meanings. So maybe the easiest example would be like, if you asked Thomas Jefferson or your average high school student about what's the purpose of education, you would get two very different answers.
Jefferson's going to be talking to you about how an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. The high schooler is probably talking to you about whether they should go to vocational school or whether they should get a bachelor's degree or join the military. It's very tactical.
And so at root, what you're screening for is you're screening for linear versus conceptual thinkers. And what's amazing is that so for our overall selection, we have the triangle, which is skills capability is sort of your habits and expressed values in terms of behavior. Maybe your childhood. We can fix a lot of things. I can't fix your childhood. So we want to screen for that.
Then for executives, you have, it's really like the cognitive equivalent of speed. And so people talk a lot about systems level thinkers. Well, what do they mean? So the first thing you want to do is you want to separate linear from conceptual thinkers. And so this theory of strata, and we have these two trained psychologists that administer interview tests.
You could ask a Rorschach block question like, what do you think about a bachelor's degree? Should we legalize cannabis? Do you think that it's okay to paint your house pink or that you have to buckle up when you drive? And what's amazing is that thematically, you will get similar answers from the same person at a certain level of thinking.
So for example, if you ask somebody about buckling up when you drive or painting your house pink, they might say like, yeah, it's annoying, but it keeps you safe. And I think it makes sense and people should buckle up more often. You're in a conversation about buckling up when you drive and we should probably be more responsible about that.
The systems level thinker will have a totally different answer. They'll be like, that's bullshit because it's the same question. So they reject the frame first. They go, what we're really talking about are what are the limits of individual freedoms when it comes to some broader impact on the surrounding community or public? And so maybe let's just talk about that.
You could talk about cigarettes in public too, right? So let's talk about that. And now you're into a completely different conversation. So what's true thematically is true systems level thinkers, they think over different time horizons. So think about Elon Musk. He's thinking over millennia.
He wants to make humans multi-planetary, and all of his actions day to day are guided by this overriding mission to get folks to Mars as a broader bridge to being a multi-planetary resilient species.
thinks over, and when you think about your CEOs of oil and gas companies and everything else, and they're riding these broad macroeconomic trends responsible for geopolitical dynamics across different cultures, they have to be good at so many different things. And so what's remarkable is stratum four is the shift from linear thinking to conceptual thinking.
But the thing about stratum four is they'll be able to start to feel concepts, but they wouldn't be able to go to a whiteboard and explain to you how they influence each other. So for us, like stratum four is where we want our VPs to be who are on the road. But keep in mind, it takes maybe five to 10 years to move from one stratum to the next.
Stratum five is when you can not only see concepts, but if you went up to the whiteboard, you could organize them and you could make it really simple. That's where you go, hey guys, it's really this. This influences all this other stuff. And so what you'll typically find with like stratum four thinkers is just a lot of detail.
But what you'll continually have to go back to is, hey, listen, I love the math. I love the work. What's the headline synthesis? If you find yourself talking for like, you're like looking at this Excel spreadsheet and they haven't taken the time to just give you the headline number, you're probably talking to a stratum three or a stratum four worker. And it's just how their brain works.
Stratum five is where it's simple. And then stratum six and seven is where you start to deal with like how concepts influence other concepts. You're thinking over very long time horizons. So to be on our executive team, you have to be at least stratum five because you have to take a very complicated thing and make it clear.
And I just noticed that as we were scaling, I would have different conversations with different executives. The higher stratum ones would come to me and they'd be like, Blake, I got 99 problems, like everything's burning, but these are the three that matter. Here's how I see if we execute on this, it hits that. Is that aligned? And I'm like, yeah, that's aligned.
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