Michael Hyatt
speaker
169 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Feb 2025
Michael Hyatt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I'll tell you a story in a minute, if you want, about my coach talking about leadership and ownership and how it's always about your leadership.
Well, I'll tell you the story. This was, I think, in the summer of 2009. So we were beginning to get on the other side of the recession, but there were still a lot of problems. My executive coach came in. She would work with me for a full day every month. So she came in and this was in August of 2009. She said, well, how was July? And I said, ugh, we missed our budget, top line and bottom line.
How much? I said, well, about 20%. She said, you're kidding me. She said, you were so confident when I was here before that you were going to make the budget. And I said, I know, I know. But I said, look, foot traffic's down at retail still. The economy's a mess. Consumer confidence is still low. All of our competitors are flailing away in the marketplace and we're really struggling.
And it was always about this out there. And she said to me, okay, I hear you. It's a tough market. And by the way, she said to me later, she said, it's kind of always a tough market. You know, there's always factors that are against you. And so she said, but I want to ask you a hard question. And I said, okay, shoot. She said, what was it about your leadership that led to this result last month?
That ticked me off. And I said to her, I said, look, I just told you. This has nothing to do with my leadership. It has everything to do with the environment. And she said, okay. She said, but what was it about your leadership that created this result? And I said, I just told you. And it's getting a little heated. And she said, well, let me ask the question another way.
If you could go back 30 days and lead differently, what would you have done differently? And I said, well, that's easy. I said, I would have met with the sales staff for a daily standup meeting just to get a sense of what was happening in the marketplace. She said, what else?
And I said, well, I would have gone on that sales call to Walmart last month because I'm convinced that if I had, my presence could have made a difference. They would have bought more stuff. What else? I listed off three or four things. So she kind of smiled and she said, so what you're telling me is that it was about your leadership. And she said, I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is it's your fault. You don't have to beat yourself up about it. But it was your fault. But the good news is this is now in your control. As long as it's out there. It's not under your control. You can't fix it. You can't fix the economy. You can't suddenly flip a switch and change consumer confidence, but you can change the things you have control over and those will be enough.
That was like the best leadership lesson I ever got.
The inciting event was that in 2011, we sold the company to HarperCollins. And by that time, I'd already picked my successor and I had moved from being the CEO to now I was the chairman of the board. And I stayed on for a year after that. But I thought, this is my opportunity. Rupert Murdoch wasn't going anywhere, so they didn't need a chairman. So I was basically on my way out. And that was good.
I was ready for a change. But it all started really back in 2004 when I started blogging. I did start blogging and I started writing just for myself. And in fact, I usually don't know what I think about something until I've written. You know, it's all kind of a jumble in my head and I'm confused and not clear, but then I start writing.
And somebody once told me that thoughts disentangle themselves passing over the lips and through pencil tips. And that's really true. You know, if I can talk it out or write it out, I get clarity. So I was just basically sharing at that time productivity hacks, things I was learning about leadership. Again, just writing for myself. and a lot of people signed up for the newsletter.
And so I had, by the time I left Thomas Nelson, I had a little over 100,000 subscribers to my newsletter. By the way, I should say, my board was not a big fan of me blogging, and I was very active in social media. So I was an early adopter on Twitter, now X, on Facebook, those two platforms, And a couple of the board members met with me in the middle of the Great Recession.
And they said to me, we would like you to stop blogging because we think it's a distraction.
And I said, okay, where do you think the future of publishing is going? I said, I think digital is a huge part of where it's going. In fact, if I wasn't blogging and involved in social media and I was sitting in your shoes, I'd insist that the CEO get active in this. Right. Because my like number one job as a CEO is to find the future.
And so I learned so much about social media marketing, learned so much about digital content and all that. I was able to lead the company into that. But I told him, I said, here's the deal. I'm not going to stop. I said, you can fire me if you want. And if I have to make a choice, I'll leave.
But I said, I think this is not just critical because I'm trying to be stubborn, but I really think this is the way that it's all going to go. And if we don't figure this out, we're going to be behind. And right now, because of my involvement, we're ahead of our competitors. So I never heard about it again. That was the end of it. But I'd build up this audience.
So when I left Thomas Nelson, I thought, okay, I'm going to do this full time. So out of that, I wrote my book Platform, which became a New York Times bestseller. And I was trying to share with people basically how to do what I did because it wasn't that extraordinary. You just create content that solves people's problems and the rest kind of happens. And it was the early days, to be honest.
It was the weirdest thing because I kind of fell into it. And it was mostly just experience and observations. And I noticed, for example, my Twitter account, you know, I had about 200,000 followers and the Thomas Nelson account had about 30,000. And I said, you know, people don't want to follow institutions. In fact, people are generally wary of institutions. They connect with people personally.
And I had thousands of people tell me, you put a face on Thomas Nelson. You gave us a personal contact and I would get customer service things. You know, I remember somebody reached out to me on Twitter at one point and they said, hey, we just got one of your, we were the largest Bible publisher in the world. We just got one of your Bibles. I think it was in South Africa.
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