Greg McKeown

the equivalent product at Apple, and eventually they just fail at it, right?

So that's just one of many illustrations.

So what does he do?

Very first meeting, I interviewed the president of Microsoft as he told me the story, is that he came in and he gave everyone a copy of nonviolent communication.

And that's not normal for that culture.

That was a hugely symbolic thing.

but also wasn't just symbolic, it was symbolic about the very, what he believed was either the central issue or a central issue.

And you can map from there a little like the butterfly effect.

That symbolic action and how it reverberated outwards, I don't mean that alone, but how that helped to create a tonal change and actual skill development.

And he was modeling it constantly.

So it wasn't, it was genuinely how he was going to lead.

And he considers it the most important thing he did over the next six months, next year was a serious kind of change of communication with people.

And in doing that, so he would call people up brand new employees of the company and just ask them questions and listen to them and really try and gather insight from them.

And so the logic of this is not the benefits of being understanding.

It is the benefits of actually understanding.

That is not the same thing at all because what people say is not of equal value.

there's something that people know that is disproportionately valuable.

Anyone he's speaking to as the CEO, they have something that's really a signal in the noise.

They have insight.

But the problem about meaningful things is that they feel disproportionately vulnerable to share them.