Steve Herz
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Steve Herz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And I said, Kate, I don't know what I charge because I don't have any clients, which is probably not the thing you want to say to somebody. But I just said, I was honest with her and I told her a price. And she said, that seems fair. And I got hired and it really kind of morphed into a nice little business where I was working for that bank. And then I got hired by a pretty big law firm.
And then I got hired by a medical company. And then one day, about a year later, this woman got up at an event I had been doing for Bank of Leumi and said, I love your ideas. I really want to buy two copies of your book for my children. They should read it. They're 18 and 20. Where can I buy those copies? I said, you can't. And I think she thought I was joking.
because I guess anybody who speaks now pretty much has a book. And I said, I don't have a book. And she said, well, that's really too bad because you should write a book. And that night, it was March 8th, 2017, I went home, told my wife, and she said, well, go write a book. And that's how it all happened. It's kind of crazy.
I think the best skill that I have is I do think I'm a pretty good communicator and I'm able to connect with people. And so that gives me a lot of opportunity to speak to people and influence them. And maybe they feel like, well, one thing I have also noticed now that I've been
in this kind of having almost dual things I've been doing for the past few years is this, I think there's never going to be a shortage for companies to improve their culture. And ultimately, one of the hopeful side products of my book and my message will be to improve culture in organizations. And so that's a real desire here. And I think it's a need.
Ultimately, like you said earlier, skills and abilities are great. but what need are you filling in another company or another person's life? And if you're not fulfilling a need, then there's no value to it.
The book is basically two broad thoughts in the book. First is kind of what I call the foundation for change, right? And the foundation for change is this idea of don't take yes for an answer. And my thesis is that there's been, I would say, a pretty significant change in American society in the past 30 years. And I don't,
say this politically at all, and I don't intend it that, and I don't think it's a millennial thing. I think it's just what's happened. Some of it is just people meant well, whatever, but there's always another unintended consequence of things. So those three things are, one, you've had great inflation. Two, you've had this what I would call participation trophy culture morphing into MVP culture.
And then the third is HR departments in many, if not most American companies, really acting as a adjunct to the legal department and not wanting to get sued and not in talent development as it might be thought of. And so they don't fire people. They don't really want to tell you what you're doing wrong. They just want to get you out. And go quietly.
And so what I say in the book in terms of setting up the foundation is that if you get the artificial A that should be a B that was 30 years ago, you get the participation trophy culture and you seem like you think you're an MVP. And you've had the job and you never even got fired.
You were lucky you got fired because now you would have gotten downsized or reordered and they would have told you, it's not you, it's me. You were great, blah, blah, blah. So what ends up happening is that you, the individual-
who's on the wrong end of this equation, and you mean well, you work hard, but no one's ever told you what you could do better, you get caught up in the vortex of mediocrity. And how do you get out of that? You can't get out of it if you're not reading the signals of somebody saying to you, Heather, you can do better. Heather, you're fired. Heather, do something else. Or Steve, get out of the law.
You stink at it. Okay, fine. You can do something with that. It's actionable. But that doesn't exist for a lot of people anymore. So there's not a mindset to think about change.
So assuming you can get past the first third of the book that sets up the idea, then you'll be able to understand what the signals are that you need to read for change and not get caught up in this echo chamber of yes and then the vortex of mediocrity. And this isn't just for people on the lower end of the scale in terms of their career.
It can be someone on the higher end who could be a superstar and is only a star because they're being told how great they are all the time. So I think it applies to everybody. So that's the first part.
And then the second half of the book, which I think is probably the more important actionable message for the audience here, is that it's really fascinating research shows that there's a very unexpectedly small correlation and causal relationship between how good you are at your job, the technical parts of it, and your success.
And that there's only a 15% contributing factor, what we would call the hard skills, the technical skills. And there's 85% of what we would call the non-technical skills. So I'll just call them the soft skills for the purposes of this conversation. And my thought here is that
We get drilled our entire lives from first grade on to graduate school and continuing ed, whatever, on the technical skills, how to become a better lawyer, better doctor, better surgeon, better technical, better writer, et cetera, et cetera. But no resources are dedicated towards these, quote unquote, soft skills.
And yet, so many people that we end up competing with in our lives, including us a lot of the times, we get good enough at the technical skills. We're all kind of commoditized, so to speak, in the technical parts of the job because we're all good enough at it. But that's not the defining factor and the distinguishing factor from those who just get a seat at the table.
and end up ascending to the place where they do have the influence and have the authority and have the leadership role and all the clients and customers. And that comes from this 85%. The important thing about the 85% is what do you do with it? What can you do if I told you, Heather, you know what? You've got a weakness in your soft skill. What the hell does that mean?
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