Ikigai Leadership Podcast: Dhru and Steven Kirch Talk About How to Build a World-Class Company

Dhru 00:00

Hey everybody, this is Dr. Dhru Bee. And I’m here to welcome you to my podcast Ikigai Leadership. We’re gonna be talking to leaders in all different industries from all different backgrounds and demographics from all over the world. And we’ll be discussing topics like leadership development, culture, DEI, content creation and marketing, and all things business and entrepreneurship.

Dhru 00:24

Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition of Ikigai Leadership. I’m Dr. Dhru Beeharilal and I’m here with Dr. Steven Kirch. Steve, great to meet you, thanks for coming out today, I really appreciate the time. 

Steven 00:35

Dr. Dhru, hey, great to be here. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today. 

Dhru 00:40

Yeah. So, profit minds, it’s obviously it’s business coaching, for those who don’t know, and particularly different lens, as Steven knows, you know, everyone, every coach has their own little lens through which they see the world through which they help the clients see the world. And so what’s your lens? What does it look like for you? 

Steven 00:55

It’s interesting, because, yeah, my lens is quite different. I’m a scientist and I like to understand things in some level of detail before I prescribe some kind of a solution. And life is an experiment. So, we try something and if it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else. And, you know, I’ve learned a lot over my years. That’s, you know, how I got the gray hair. 

Dhru 01:26

You earned the gray hair writing and getting–

Steven 01:28

I earned it, I earned every one of them. That’s right. 

Dhru 01:30

Yeah. So, tell us more about I know you’re a PhD in physics, right? How do you go from being a PhD in physics to being a business coach? 

Steven 01:39

Yeah. So, it is kind of an interesting story that, you know the first job I had out of graduate school, my wife and I both got jobs working for IBM, in New York, and moved there. And, you know, I had no desire whatsoever to be a manager in the IBM System, because a manager couldn’t do anything technical. And I loved technology, and I loved being on the cutting edge of developing new technologies. That was the reason that I became a physicist in the first place was to discover new things and the IBM System required that managers be managers pure and simple manage. We had a minimum of 30 people reporting to you. And that meant all you could do is manage. I’ve been at IBM for eight, nine years, something like that. And they did their first layoffs. And it was at that point, I realized I needed to take responsibility for my own career. When I joined IBM, I figured I’d be there for the rest of my life, you were called an “IBMer”, that was the expectation. But when they made that change, I said, well, I better do something about this. So, I started passing out my resume. And a guy from Intel called me and recruited me to come to California, which is where I am now. And also convinced me that I could be a manager because, at Intel, you could manage a team of three or four people and do technical work at the same time. And so for the rest of my career at at Intel, even though I was a manager, almost all of that 22 years, I was also able to contribute technically, so it was a good balance. But a few years into my time at Intel, I was introduced to, I was offered the opportunity to take the class, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. They were rolling it out to the entire organization and 1500 people are going to take this, they were taking three to five days off-site for every member of the organization. That’s a huge investment. And I found the course transformational. In fact, they were looking for instructors, because again, they’re rolling it out to everybody and I put my hand up, because I know the best way to learn something is to teach it. So, I became a certified facilitator and I’ve been able to do that now for over 25 years. And one of the other cool things about Intel is that each senior leader, I was director level at that point, is required to teach at least three classes, a year, every year. That’s the way they perpetuate the culture. And I loved the teaching, I loved watching the students’ eyes light up as they got some new concept. And over time, I got introduced to and certified in a number of other courses of that ilk, you know, personal productivity, organizational effectiveness, you know, those kinds of things and I found that I really loved it. And the other pivotal thing that happened to me while I was at Intel, this is 2008, so almost 15 years ago now or 15 years ago, I was a member of the senior staff for the factory that was here in Santa Clara. And we announced or we were told we had to announce that we were shutting down the factory. 800 people were going to be displaced by that single act. And what we did as a leadership team, I was Chief of Staff to the gentleman who were running the factory at the time, the entire leadership team said, we made the commitment to every employee, we said, we will find every employee a successful new beginning. We didn’t define what that was like, what that was going to be for them. We also put together courses to help them figure out what it would be. But the fascinating piece of that was that those employees, we had a turnover in the factory. And in here in Silicon Valley turnover is pretty high, we were probably averaging somewhere between 15% and 20%, annual turnover within the factory, right, you know, for the 18 months. And by the way, we announced the shutdown, and it was 18 months later that the factory was actually closing. So, we needed to keep those people to do the things that needed to be done and our turnover dropped from over 15% to around 5%. And the reason was because we made a commitment to the people in that organization. And they understood that we delivered for them. I would be willing to bet that of the 800 people that were displaced, there were less than 10 that didn’t have a successful new beginning. My real discovery of the enjoyment of teaching, I taught in graduate school, of course, but wasn’t the same, right? But my enjoyment of the teaching of some of these fundamental business principles and combining that with the value of understanding how important it is to tend to your employees. Those two things combined. So, as I started to contemplate this thing they call retirement, which I did now, more than seven years ago. I said, boy, it would be fun to continue that as a business coach. And so I hung out a shingle.

Dhru 07:16

That’s awesome. There’s a couple of things I wanted to cover on there, like you said a lot. And I wanted to touch on a couple of things. But the first thing actually I’m most curious about, honestly, is actually kind of a tangential thing that you mentioned just in passing, but being part of Intel, during the 90s, right? And IBM and Intel, both during the 90s when the with the advent of the Pentium chip, right? What was that like? And for some folks who are here who are not as much as a nerd as I am, if you wouldn’t mind sharing what that is, you know, but.

Steven 07:45

Yeah, so the Pentium was the big breakthrough for Intel, in terms of the microprocessor and really set Intel apart, as you know, the leader of the microprocessor movement. Now, I arrived, as the Pentium, the first Pentium was being certified. And I took over the organization that was actually responsible for the failure analysis of those devices as they came through. So, I was really there sort of, in the heart of it, at the very beginning. And some of the people that I worked with, and for, were solving those problems. That, you know, in the reliability space, I was part of the quality and reliability organization at the time. And it was a magical place. Let me tell you, you know, IBM was a great company, is a great company. But the thing about Intel, that was really and it impacts the way I coach, by the way, as you might imagine. Andy Grove was chairman at the time. He’s one of the founders, and he’s got a couple of management books. And I think the thing that stuck with me the most and was most in practice, at Intel, was this idea of management by objective, or key performance indicators. KPIs is what we call them today. OKRs is another objectives and key results. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of different ways of saying this, but it’s what gets measured gets managed. And that’s so critical to the way I work with my clients. We develop KPIs, leading indicators. Every salesperson that’s worth anything that does anything that’s worthwhile for a company knows that you don’t keep track of what you do keep track of how many sales you make, but the primary thing you count is how many calls you make because it’s a leading indicator of your success. It’s both predictive, and it’s influenceable. Those are the two characteristics that make a successful leading indicator. It’s predictive that is to say, the more calls you make, the more deals you’ll get. Right? And it’s influenceable, you can decide how many calls you’re going to make today.

Dhru 10:12

And a lot of people don’t get that, right? I mean, I think a lot of people look at the results, and they’re like, Oh, we’re not getting results I want well, okay, well, what are you doing to get those results, right? 

Steven 10:20

What are the behaviours–

Dhru 10:21

What are the behaviours? Like, oh, well, I just made my calls, right? The network or I talk to people or whatever. Okay, how do people and you break it down, like you said, what gets measured? Right? Is what you need to measure, what the key from saying, Oh, you have to measure that what you’re doing. So, you know, what the outcomes look like? And so eventually, you know, what their what your cost of acquisition is, you know, what the active actions are to get to the point where you get customers, and a lot of business owners, you know, in this situation, I use that term loosely, because it’s some people get in the business, and then they’re not meant to be business owners, right?

Steven 10:50

Yeah. That’s a different problem. We could talk about that too.

Dhru 10:55

Yeah, but you get into the situation, and you’re like, Okay, well, I’m not getting results I want okay, well, what actions are you taking? Right? And they’ll be like, Oh, well, I’m doing this like, Okay, how many calls you making? How many emails are you sending? How many meetings are you attending? And if they can’t give you that answer, then that’s the you know, they have to start looking at those kinds of things, right? Which is, yeah, it’s amazing. 

Steven 11:15

And you have to know what’s working in each step of the process, right? How many calls do you make? How many follow-ups do you get? How many emails do you send? How many of those get opened? How many of those get clicked on? And all of those things, you know that there are and you can look them up? Right? There are standards for what is a good open rate, what is a good click rate. And if your open rate isn’t good enough, well, then you probably need to look at your subject line. If your click rate isn’t good enough, you probably need to look at the content. And if your close rate isn’t enough, well, maybe you need to talk about or get some help with your closing script, or whatever that is, right? But measure each one, you need to know the top of funnel to the bottom of the funnel, the rate at for for each of those things. I like to say, look, it’s not rocket science. 

Dhru 12:08

No, it’s not. But it’s–

Steven 12:09

I can do rocket science and trust me, this is not rocket science. 

Dhru 12:11

Exactly and it’s simple. But it’s not always easy. Right? And I think that’s–

Steven 12:16

That’s absolutely true.

Dhru 12:18

And a lot of folks don’t take the time that they do to break it down like that, though. They’re like, Oh, I’m doing I’m having sales calls? Well, what do they sound like, what are your sales calls consist of? Right? Well, it consists of means find out what other people do and tell them what I do. That’s a networking call that’s not a sales call, right? You’re not gonna get any business that way. So, you got to break it down. And someone like yourself, having experienced that much experience in that world in the world of technology, and then and then coaching as well. And teaching, right? What are some of the most common challenges? I mean, obviously, that would be one of them, right? Sales and Marketing and that kind of thing. But what are the most common challenges you come across with clients?

Steven 12:53

I think you said it very well, right? People that get into business, they get into business, because they’re good at what they do. They’re not good at business. That’s not where their passion is. So they need another set of eyes, a coach, perhaps, somebody to help them. Sometimes it just takes a mentor, sometimes an accountability partners enough. But very often, a coach will really help you understand, you know, what it is that you’re doing and what you could do better, but just an independent set of eyeballs. By the way, I call myself a coach consultant. This whole thing about being a business coach, and you’re not allowed to tell them what to do? Well, sometimes you got to tell them what to do–

Dhru 13:45

You have to, absolutely. You understand the business coaching world, right? Because if you’re meeting them where they are, there’s an element of teaching and consulting that has to go into that. Coaching, I don’t think people understand the distinction between coaching and consulting, right? And there is a distinction. And I’ll tell you, honestly, most of my clients that I work with, whether they’re business owners, or whether they’re executives or leaders in organizations, in the beginning, there’s always some element of consulting that has to happen, right? It’s just a matter of switching that from 60-40 consulting to coaching, to 10 or 15% consulting to coaching, to like 85-90% coaching, right? That’s just reality.

Steven 14:22

Yes, it is. And oh, by the way, you know, out here in the Bay Area, we have a basketball team, the Golden State Warriors. 

Dhru 14:29

Do you really? That sounds familiar. 

Steven 14:31

Some people may have heard of that– 

Dhru 14:32

That sounds a little familiar, not sure, yeah. Who’s on that team again?

Steven 14:34

And, yeah, I know Steph Curry, I think is one of the guys that plays on that team. 

Dhru 14:39

Oh yeah, Stefan, Stefan. 

Steven 14:41

Arguably the best shooter ever. 

Dhru 14:43

Yeah, that guy’s insane, man, amazing. 

Steven 14:45

He has a whole bunch of coaches. 

Dhru 14:50

I absolutely believe it. 

Steven 14:51

And I’d be willing to bet that Steve Kerr, the head coach of the Warriors, spends a lot of time helping Steph Curry to connect with the basketball and make sure he really has his feelings in order around the basketball, right? No, he says, go there, pass here, cut there, get the ball back, shoot, right? I mean, he designs these plays, and he’s great at it but he tells the players what to do. And sometimes a coach needs to do that. Sure, they have to help with motivation too. But does that make Steve Kerr, not a coach? I don’t think so. 

Dhru 15:29

No, I like in sports teams. I think sports teams are a great analogy, right? I like in sports teams to organizations in the sense that you have a team coach, right? The person who’s coaching the whole team, as you go, individually might coach one-on-one here and there, you know, but then on top of that you have your star players or the players that are key players in the team will have their own coaches as well, right? To work on different things, whatever that might be, right, you have a coach, you can have a coach to work on basketball-wise, you can have a shooting coach, you can have a dribbling coach, you can have, you know, a mindset coach. And again, those things, those coaches can be the same person, if their skill set aligns, or they can be 3 different people, right? 

Steven 16:06

But everybody that’s at the top of their game has at least one if not multiple coaches. I have coaches. 

Dhru 16:16

I have coaches, I also coach other coaches. We coach each other a lot of times, right? Coaches end up trading services for that reason, right? And you know, the ICF, whatever opinions people have about the ICF, good or bad or ugly, you know, it’s they do have a mentor coaching option as well, where you can get credit for those kinds of things. And they have that for that reason because there’s an element of necessity in mentor coaching. To take your coaching to the next level. Because once you get to the certifications, right, there’s professional development, obviously, right? But there’s no one sitting in with you saying, hey, you know if you ask the question this way, or what happens if you ask this question instead of that question or because we all get into our own heads. We get tunnel vision, right? In our own lenses, right, going back to the whole lens conversation. We have our own lens, and we get really focused on that lens, and we start missing things. We start having our own coaching blind spots and so a coach helps you uncover those, right? So, who’ve been the folks who have who’ve influenced your coaching in terms of like, your coaching partners over the years that kind of got you started on the on the path? 

Steven 17:16

There are a couple of people that I want to call out. The first was my mom, she’s been gone now for almost 30 years. There isn’t a day that goes by I don’t miss her. But my mom was the world’s best listener. And you know if I have any capability of listening, it comes from her. I have to tell a funny story. My mom, I am sure if Guinness kept track of this would hold the world’s record for the longest wrong number phone conversation.

Dhru 17:58

How long was the conversation? 

Steven 17:59

So, somebody called, she picked up the phone. 45 minutes later, she hung up. Dad said who was it? Mom said, I don’t know, it was a wrong number but he needed to talk. That was my mom. 

Dhru 18:16

That speaks volumes about who she was as a person. I mean–

Steven 18:20

Doesn’t it? 

Dhru 18:21

You know, like it’s funny on one side, but on the other side, it’s actually that person on the other end of that line lucked out, right?

Steven 18:29

Yeah. And, you know, I’ve had a whole bunch of different coaches along the way. But I have to say, I think the most inspirational person that I’m connected with right now, is my partner in Profit Minds, Randy Haykin, who was employee number six at Yahoo, was a venture capitalist for a number of years, and has now started an organization called The Gratitude Network. We’ve been around for about 10 years now and I’ve been on the board for the last seven. It’s a leadership development organization for social entrepreneurs and we work with scaling companies and leadership development for organizations, not-for-profit organizations that work with children and youth around the world. And Randy is in that phase of life where he is just giving back. And he’s such an incredible person, and so thoughtful about how can I help? So, I would, you know, I would say, Randy, is that person for me that’s been most influential in terms of how I do what I do. 

Dhru 19:49

Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, you got two great examples. Honestly. Your mom sounds like she was, honestly sounds like she was your first coach experience, right? And then Randy sounds like he’s doing some amazing work, man. That’s great. And The Gratitude Network sounds like a phenomenal organization. Are there opportunities for folks to get involved? You know, as a layperson who’s listened to this, maybe you might want to get involved in that? Is that something that people can get involved in at any level? Or is it something where you have to be a certain level or certain? 

Steven 20:17

No, no, absolutely. I mean, to be a coach, of course, you need to be a certified executive coach. And we have, you know, people at the highest calibre, donating their time, to these amazing organizations. We estimate, over the past seven years, the roughly 200 organizations that we’ve been helping the leaders expand, that they’ve impacted more than 45 million children. But go to gratitude/network.org and check us out, obviously, you can donate and become involved. We do have some opportunities there to even sponsor an organization that’s going through the program. And obviously, if people are coaches, and want to get engaged, we’re always looking for great people to help. 

Dhru 21:06

Fantastic. And I want to go back to your time, IBM versus Intel, in terms of the dynamic you felt with being asked to be a manager, right? And so many people run into that, right? When you’re a subject matter expert, you’re great at what you do, and you have a passion for what you do. And you want to be creative in that field, right? And then someone comes up to you and says, Hey, Steve, you’re doing amazing work. And we love what you’re doing. Now, we want you to stop doing it, and do something totally different, which is management, right? What did that feel like? Because I’m sure so many people listening to this right now are going through something similar, right? Or have gone through something similar? What’s your advice, your consulting side of things? What’s your advice for folks going through that right now? 

Steven 21:49

It goes back to what my mom taught me is listen and care about the people. By the way, I never really took off my technical hat at Intel, one of the things that I’m most proud of is that almost because I did a wide variety of things, I was never in any one job for more than four years, I think, in my 22 years at Intel. But I have patents more than 10 patents in almost every sub-area that I was, you know, have a patent in design, I was never a circuit designer. We were working in liquid crystal on silicon, held cost technology and I have patents in that field, right? It’s not something that I studied at any point in time. I have patents in failure analysis and X-ray inspection and all kinds of things. So, I never took off the technical hat but I always cared about the people. I was just give you a real quick example. My last position at Intel, I was brought in as a leader of an organization that was falling apart. I gotten a reputation as somebody who could hold organizations together. And again, because I cared about the people. And one of the things that I said to folks in my team, I had about 40 people working for me at the time, I said, I want you to come to work every day excited about what you do. And if you’re not excited, come talk to me. And I’ll find you a project that excites you. And if I can’t find you a project that excites you, I’ll help you find another job. In the last couple of years, I was working at Intel that happened only once that somebody came to me and I couldn’t find her a job that she was really excited about. So, I helped her find a different job and her career took off. Because excited, engaged employees are the best and they won’t ever leave you, doesn’t matter how much somebody else offers them. It’s not about the money. 

Dhru 23:54

And that’s my whole thing. Right? I say that all the time and it’s not about salary. They don’t leave bad salaries. They leave bad leaders, right? If the leader doesn’t care about the person it doesn’t matter. I mean. I’m going back to your–

Steven 24:06

They leave a bad manager that’s absolutely right. 

Dhru 24:09

Exactly, going back to your 2008 story about Intel about the starting on the factory, right? The fact that you guys saw such a drastic change in turnover when they knew the factories gonna close. They could easily just be like, alright I’m screwed, I’m out, you know, I mean, I’m done. They’re closing anyway, what’s the point? They stuck around, right? Because you guys cared, you showed you cared, right? And you promised them and you made the commitment to them. And you showed them put your money where the mouth was, right and showed them hey, we’re going to help you, we’re not just going to like throw you off to the wolves and I think a lot of companies can learn something from that nowadays. There is this or has been this disrespect and disregard for employees and people thinking I’ll just throw more money at the problem, right? If you throw them one more salary, we’ll still cut their medical benefits, we’ll cut their vision, we’ll cut everything, you know cut their vacation days and whatever or give them unlimited vacation day, which is not a real thing either. Though the reality is like you can have as many vacation days as you want as long as you’re working. That’s not a big deal–

Steven 25:05

As long as you get your job done. And by the way, there’s, you know, 80 hours of work to do every week. 

Dhru 25:11

Right, it’s like, that’s not a vacation at that point, right? And that’s just disregard for the employees, right? And I think more companies need to hear that story and get back to that. Where they care about the employees and put them first because they’re people. They’re not just numbers on paper, you know? That’s awesome. Well, Steve, thanks so much, man for sharing, I time actually flew by, didn’t even realize that we are done already. That’s, it’s been great. I really appreciate the stories, you got some really amazing experience. And again, like I said, I’m a little bit jealous, because you were around, right at the cutting edge of the Golden Age, as I call it of computing, right? Because that’s when everything started changing so rapidly. And nowadays, there’s so many cool things, right that, but back then, that’s when things were changing so rapidly, right? It’s like the technology had just started. 

Steven 25:55

It was lots of fun. It was exciting. It was a wonderful place to be. I feel so fortunate that I was able to be a part of that. 

Dhru 26:02

Well, I feel fortunate that I had the chance to talk to you and have you on my show. I really appreciate it. Thanks for your time and everyone else, if you want to reach out to Steve, his information will be in the description below. And please feel free to reach out to him and say thanks. Thanks a lot, Steve. I appreciate it. Take care everybody. Stay safe. Hope you enjoyed this episode. And we’ll catch up with you soon.

Dhru 26:22

Thank you all so much for listening to the Ikigai Leadership podcast today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a five-star review with comments to let me know what you thought. It really helps me keep on delivering valuable and relevant content to you all. And if you want to connect with me directly, please feel free to do so on my socials. That’s @dhrubee, on Twitter, @dhruvabee, on Instagram and LinkedIn, it’s linkedin.com/in/dhrubee. Thank you all so much. Take care. Stay safe. Talk to you soon.