Brad Jacobs

Because when you're in your own school, maybe you're the top student in that class or the top one or two students in the class.

You think you're really smart.

When you go to school for the gifted, you realize suddenly you're in the lower quartile, not in the top one or two students in your class.

And I found that very enriching.

In fact, they were called enrichment camps.

And I remember the excitement of being in a group of really bright people, maybe 20, 30 people in a class.

and a very talented teacher up in front, and that teacher bringing out a lively conversation.

For me, that was a learning of an electric experience, how to run an electric meeting, which fast forward to today is the title of one of the chapters of my book is How to Run an Electric Meeting.

And one of the keys to that is to make sure that people in the room have the right people in the room.

So our meetings in all three of those companies are different, very different.

than the typical boring meeting that most companies have.

Most companies have a meeting where someone's up there and they've got a PowerPoint or they've got a speech they've prepared and people are sort of semi-listening to the speech.

Torture, going back to what I was saying before, when you get my age, you only have 5,000 to 7,000 days left.

You want to have every minute of that something exciting, something valuable, something rewarding and

That's not the kind of way I want to spend my days going forward.

The way we get those meetings very exciting and very valuable and productive is to first have the right people in the meeting, people who are very honest, who are very intelligent, who are very hardworking, who are very collaborative, and people who understand respectfulness.

People understand how to listen and how to be open and receptive to other people's ideas.

to what other people's perspectives are and people who can think dialectically, meaning thinking from different perspectives on the same problem, not rigid thinkers, not black and white dichotomous thinkers, not people who think I've got it all figured out and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong and I'm never going to change my mind because you don't get anywhere with that.

So you want to have an atmosphere where people are encouraged to disagree, but disagree respectfully.

And if you can create a safe zone for people to lean in and disagree with each other in a nice way, where the person who's being disagreed with doesn't feel bad, because you're not attacking that person, you're debating that idea.