Kris Safarova  01:09

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and this episode is sponsored by StrategyTraining.com. We have few gifts for you today. Access to Episode One of How to Build a Consulting Practice. You can get it at firmsconsulting.com/build. You can also get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. And you can download it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And lastly, you can get a copy of a McKinsey and BCG Resume example, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms, and regardless of how senior you are, it’s always very good to have a good resume. So take a look and see what you can borrow for your resume, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And today, we have with us MichaelAaron who is the founder and CEO of Xenopsi Ventures, a brand incubator firm that owns, operates and invests in over a dozen companies. And Michael’s companies have been recognized for three consecutive years on the Inc 5000 list of America’s fastest growing private businesses. And all of that was done without debt and investors. So such an incredible organization. Can’t wait to start diving in. Michael, welcome.

MichaelAaron Flicker  02:29

Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here with you.

Kris Safarova  02:33

So let’s start with what internal practices do you think explain three consecutive years of Inc 5000 recognition?

MichaelAaron Flicker  02:41

You know, as an entrepreneur, when we first started, we believe that hard work and diligence were the keys to all success. The harder we work, the better we do. But at some point, we realized that hard work by itself wasn’t the key. It had to be successful. It had to we had to start to professionalize ourselves, bring in people who had done it before, have a team with a lot of psychological safety, with a lot of willingness to try new things and make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. And xenosai started in 1997 we didn’t first break into the Inc 5000 list until 2021 so it was a long journey before we started the scaling and growth that we’ve done here. So I would say it’s one part, having the right team of people who are who are in an environment where they feel safe to learn and test and fail. And part two is trying to find the right business model that we felt our customers and our clients needed.

Kris Safarova  03:53

And tell us more about what you guys actually do on a day-to-day basis.

MichaelAaron Flicker  03:57

So in 1997 we started with an idea that we would do computer programming on the internet. Back then, that was a very revolutionary idea. Computer Programming belonged on mainframe computers. So long before y 2k we were starting by trying to take solve business problems by using technology on the internet, and we did that throughout high school. We did that throughout college, and when we graduated college, we learned something very important. People saw us as builders. We would make things, computer programs, on the internet for folks, but we weren’t architects. We didn’t solve problems for people, and so we started building what we called, back then, disciplines. We opened a business consulting discipline that would help solve business problems with technology. We opened a political consulting discipline. We opened an advertising and marketing discipline, so from 2005 All the way to 2021 those were all parts of one, xenosai in 2022 we evolved xenosai into multiple operating companies, each one with a single core focus, method one and function growth are our ad agencies. They work with clients to help solve their marketing, branding growth problems, using marketing and advertising, our political consulting business Z axis strategies works with political movements to change belief and behavior. And then, of course, we started making our own brand. So we make wellow premium bamboo compression socks. We make we make healthier for you, soda, we make a number of different things, all of it connected through this idea of behavioral science, that there is a academic basis for why people choose what brands they choose for, why they choose what political parties they vote For, and if you can understand those underlying psychological beliefs and behaviors, those biases, you can help brands grow. You can help good political movements change, and that’s what we do.

Kris Safarova  06:11

Very, very interesting. Tell us about the most important psychological beliefs and behaviors people need to be aware of.

MichaelAaron Flicker  06:19

I think it starts with what you learn in high school, in college and grad school and classical economics would say we are all rational actors in a rational world, and we can model and anticipate logical actions based on rational actors. And the truth is, the world’s a lot more messy than that, and people very often will do things not in their self interest. We often don’t know why we choose the brands we choose. And behavioral economics, behavioral psychology is a growing field of understanding what it is that we do and why we do it. And so we create and so our interest in behavioral science really started with, how can we understand the underlying motivations, the underlying beliefs that drive people’s actions? Lot of great work done in the 90s and early 2000s Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Peace Prize for this really very interesting work, understanding the unconscious biases that drive our action so at the very broadest level, our interest and our insight is that there are underlying beliefs and behaviors, underlying psychological principles that guide what it is that we do, and if we can uncover those through academic studies, through peer reviewed research, we can have a better chance at making our brands stronger, our marketing work harder, and our businesses more successful.

Kris Safarova  07:56

Many of our listeners are in consulting. So if we take a look at someone who is a partner at a big consulting firm, and of course, they have a lot of pressure to sell, some firms talk about it, and some people just expect you to do it, but they don’t talk about it as much. But if you’re not doing it, you’re out. So maybe we can take a look at it as an example and think about what are specific psychological beliefs and behaviors a consulting partner needs to become more familiar.

MichaelAaron Flicker  08:26

Yeah, my so I host a podcast on this called behavioral science for brands, and my co author and I, Richard schotten, have a book coming out called hacking the human mind, and it’s all about the beliefs and behaviors that have powered some of the country’s best brands. So we’re looking at how do consumer brands leverage these psychological principles for their benefit? And I think the same can be applied to anybody working in a consulting firm. At the end of the day you are selling your consulting practices to another human meaning they are susceptible to the same behavioral biases that affect consumers at the grocery store shelf as they do for somebody making a B to B business decision. So I could start with the very simple one, and then maybe, if we go, we can go see what, what else is of interest. I’ll start with a business story. It’s 1986 and Jerry Morrell is walking down the boardwalk in Maryland beachfront. It’s him and his four sons. And you’ll I’ll tell you who Jerry Morrell is in one minute, he’s waiting there, and he’s looking at all the food stalls all over the Maryland boardwalk, and he noticed that only one of the food stalls has a huge line of people, and it was Thrashers fries. And he thinks, Why only one? Of all the food stalls has this line, and he guesses maybe it’s because all they do is sell fries. He and his four sons start five guys the famous American burger restaurant now worth $1.6 billion in revenue last year on the simple concept, what if we don’t do chicken salad, ice cream. What if all we do is burgers and fries and we are excellent at that? Now this taps into a underlying behavioral bias called the gold dilution effect, and it was originally studied by two psychologists in 2007 I yell at fish back in Yin Zhang at the University of Chicago, and here’s the study that they ran. They gave people a information describing how eating tomatoes could help you achieve either one goal, preventing cancer or two goals, preventing cancer and helping reduce I degeneration. When they then they asked the participants to rate how effective eating tomatoes were at preventing cancer. And strangely, people rated eating tomatoes 12% more effective at preventing cancer when it was given as the only benefit compared to when it had both preventing cancer and idea degeneration. It’s not logical, but it is. More people were more confident when just one advantage was presented. How we can use that in brand marketing is, instead of having a TV commercial with five benefits of your product, you should focus on one at a time and only talk about one when you’re pitching as a consultant to a buyer. Are you excellent at risk mitigation and making business plans? Are you only good at one and focusing on one is more believable than stacking the reasons to choose you. It’s proven by the behavioral science, and it kind of just makes sense. How could one firm be good at everything? You must be best at one thing, and so if you use that principle, it can help people be more effective when they’re selling their consulting arrangements to clients.

Kris Safarova  12:18

When you said the study, my immediate thought was that it could also be because people are more familiar with the benefits of tomato as it relates to cancer versus eye cough.

MichaelAaron Flicker  12:31

It’s an interesting question. There’s other studies that show the same result, that if you only focus on one benefit more than multiple, you’re going it’s more believable that you’re effective at one benefit more than many, but I think you’re right. There is a familiarity. If you have heard of a big four account, a big four firm, you just generally believe they’re going to be better at accounting, rather than all the other complementary services. So I think having some recency bias, or having some previous knowledge absolutely might weigh into how you feel about it.

Kris Safarova  13:05

Michael, and when did you became so fascinated with how humans think and make decisions?

MichaelAaron Flicker  13:11

I was working as a consultant for AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals back in the early 2010s and we were facing a very interesting problem. Someone would have a cardiac arrest, they would have a heart attack, and they would walk in, they would be rushed into the ER room. The doctor would fix their heart, they would restart the heart, and they would come out the next morning, and the doctor would say, we have an amazing drug. Take this pill every day for 365 days, and your heart will be healed. You have to change your eating habits. You need to exercise. But if you take the pill once a day for 365 days, it will, it will, it will heal your heart. And they definitely took it the first day. They even took it the second day and the third day. But we would see drop off after seven days, after 14 days, after 30 days, and it was a challenging problem. You just had this life altering event that you know you need to heal from, and you we could not even convince people to take their pill once a day. And that got me thinking, what are all the other things that we do that we don’t know why we do them? There was a big intention to take their heart medication every day, but there was a big gap that we call in behavioral science the intention to action gap. And so studying why people don’t do the things they intend to do was the start of my journey. And now thinking about all the things that do create our belief to create our underlying assumptions that drive behavior. Has become a commercial practice for me. It’s something that I think about all day. It’s where I go and talk with other people about because if we can get people to change their belief and behaviors, we can do a lot of good in the world.

Kris Safarova  15:12

And what is interesting, people are more willing to take the pill if they understand they need to be alive for their family versus to be alive for themselves.

MichaelAaron Flicker  15:21

It’s an it’s an really interesting point, which is that the logical benefit, which is your heart has micro tears in it, and you must heal the micro tears is somehow less convincing than you want to be there for your child’s piano recital this July. And what we know is, if we don’t make you know in the power of building habit and the power of setting goals, if you not just make an intention a goal, but if you give it a time and a place and a trigger, you’re much more likely to stay adherent to that, to that habituation. So you’re right. If we say you want to be there next month to see your daughter get married, you’re much more likely to build the habit of taking that pill every day than if you say we have to shave, point 1% of your heart’s tissue every day, even if one’s more logical, even if one is more scientifically proven, that doesn’t seem to change people’s behavior as well.

Kris Safarova  16:28

If we dig a little deeper, why do you think that is?

MichaelAaron Flicker  16:31

You know, I think it’s a it’s an interesting thing about human evolution. You know, if you think about the ways that we develop our modern life is so radically different than our evolutionary biology. If you think about our evolutionary biology, we still live with fight or flight. We still have very automatic responses to things, but only in the last 150 years do we live in cities. Do we live in relative safety? And so what causes us to act is usually much more primal. It’s usually much more innate than it is logical. And I think it’s because of those evolutionary developments are behind where our current circumstances are that cause us to, you know, to be more subconscious in what drives our decision making, or to be more to be more automatic than logical and rational.

Kris Safarova  17:44

It could also be connected to another common behavior we observe. I have seen it with myself. If I have a meeting with someone else, I’m going to be there. I’m going to be there early. I will make sure I’m not late. I will feel so bad if it is one minute before and I’m not logged in yet, because something can go wrong. I have to be there early, but if it is a meeting with yourself is something important, maybe healthy late, that you need to go exercise. You think, no, I would rather work this time, because then I will be further in terms of progress.

MichaelAaron Flicker  18:14

There’s a behavioral bias about reciprocity that’s very connected to what you’re talking about. And there’s some amazing studies that show that if you give someone something, even very small, the the evolutionary desire to give it, to reciprocate, is incredibly strong and to the point you’re making. If I’ve only made a commitment to myself, well, maybe I’ll be willing to allow myself to slide or let something else get more be more important. But if I’ve made a commitment to you to be at a certain place at a certain time, the subconscious need to meet that and not be late is much stronger than than would logically be assumed.

Kris Safarova  19:01

And another driver that may be playing a role there, for many people, is so many of us grew up being told that we are not worthy, whether it was done directly, and you’re told you’re never going to amount to anything, or you just were shown that you’re not important. And so we have this subconscious mind the entire time. And it could also be playing a robot eating.

MichaelAaron Flicker  19:26

I think that your nurture is very influential in the way you behave in society. I think your culture is very influential. And I think there are some things that cut across nurture and across your your culture, that we all do as human beings. So I think you’re right. I think there are absolutely cultural norms or the way that you were raised that change the way that you act. And I think what’s very interesting you. If you’re a strategist, a consultant, or if you’re a marketer or advertiser, is to try to understand what are those broadest, most universally applicable things that you can pull and use to help meet your ends. And while we’re all different and we all have different cultural norms and we all have different upbringings, there’s so much that connects us. So I would, I would venture to say that so much more is the same than different about us, even while we’re all very different.

Kris Safarova  20:35

Very true for our listeners, what do they need to understand about the behavior in terms of how it may be keeping them stuck in certain ways in their career and life?

MichaelAaron Flicker  20:47

You know, so much of what we what keeps us at a certain level, of the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we construct around our selves, and so much of changing that or breaking through a certain level, is questioning, is that a story that I’ve been telling myself that the world hasn’t said to me, or is that a story that I can verify with what I see out externally, in the world around me? And so I think one of the strongest and most powerful things we’ve seen help change personal behavior is to question whether those stories are helping you meet your ends and your needs or not. So if you think that you’re an analytical person and you are not creative, well that’s a story you’re telling yourself more than the facts may be. Or if you say to yourself, you’re an executive and these jobs are too beneath you, that’s a story you’re telling yourself, rather than necessarily the reality of the situation. So I would say really interrogating the stories that we tell ourselves is one of the strongest ways to change the behaviors and the and the limits that we have.

Kris Safarova  22:02

In what ways do you think consumer behavior in United States shifted significantly in the last few years?

MichaelAaron Flicker  22:10

You know, it’s been an interesting two decades for consumers here in America. If you think about, you know, the turn of 2000 and the early 2000s we were pre 2008 recession. The world was a place well, let’s say it started with the.com bubble burst in 2002 1001 and the world has been a place of general disruption. September 11 really changed much of America’s psyche. The 2008 recession was a was an economic hardship for so many and and I would say, if you had to add a third covid in 2020. Really was a disruptive force. And so you ask, how does that change consumer behavior? If we focus on consumer buying behavior, you know, each time there’s a major disruption, you see a pullback in spending and a growth in savings. People’s savings accounts grow, their spending drops. And then after the world event recedes, people start spending and growth and their savings accounts start to shrink. Certainly we saw that with the pandemic and the government and the government payments and then this massive spending that happened coming out of covid and the pandemic. So I would say consumer behavior on a micro level, meaning year over year, is affected by what we see in the markets, what we see in the news, but more universally, we see that what drives consumer behavior really has not changed in 100 years. Academic studies we look at from the 1920s and the 1930s can be replicated again today, and the same findings are found almost, you know, almost with within degrees of each other. So while we see individual behavior based on the news cycles, would certainly change what drives motivation and what drives people’s behavior, really hasn’t changed very much at all in the last 100 years of studies that we have.

Kris Safarova  24:34

And what do you think AI have done so far to how we think we behave?

MichaelAaron Flicker  24:39

I am not an expert in the changes of consumer behavior because of AI, but I will tell you that I, as a daily user of AI, I think a lot about how my my cognitive processes have changed because you have this unbelievable information source. Kris if you’ve ever sat in a Tesla on auto drive, you are holding the wheel and your feet are on the pedal, but you’re not actually driving. The car is driving itself, and after about five minutes of the car driving itself, you realize that you’re supervising rather than driving. You’re there to intervene, but you but you know that that the car is driving itself. When you use large language models to think for you, and you ask it a question, do research for you, summarize for you, it feels very similar. I’m watching the thinking occur, but I’m not doing it myself, and in that way, you feel a little disassociated from the interrogation of the work. You feel a little disassociated from the from the generative, generative act of making it and I think that’s where it’s a balancing act. There’s an incredible amount of knowledge that we now have access to, but less discernment, because it is hard to analyze everything that’s happening when it’s working. So it’s, it’s a little bit, for me, it feels a little bit like, like controlling a self driving car. You’re connected to it, but you’re not doing the same job that you used to do when you drove a normal car.

Kris Safarova  26:20

And keeping up with that analogy. Are you doing anything to make sure that you can continue be able to drive at the same level of skill?

MichaelAaron Flicker  26:27

Yeah, without doubt, I was when I was recently in a room where the head of Waymo, which is Google’s self driving car unit was speaking, and he shared a fascinating his story. He said, anytime somebody comes to Silicon Valley and they want to go in a Waymo, I always take the chance to take them. And he said, and the same experience happens every time we’re in the car. The doors close and people are taking pictures. They’re taking video. They’re excited as the car first pulls out the lot, and he says, in about five minutes, the cameras go away, and normal conversation resumes. That quickly, people give up the the fascination to AI and and automatic driving. And it’s fascinating how adaptable people are that quickly we’re willing to give up, you know, the fascination of it and maybe the safety concerns that come along with it. You’re no longer controlling the vehicle. So I think to your point, how do you stay engaged and where? What are the right ways to engage when you have a whole new generation of technology that you’re working with.

Kris Safarova  27:45

You recently wrote a book. Congratulations! Among the 17 brands that you guys featured, which campaign best illustrates hacking consumer decision pathways in real world settings?

MichaelAaron Flicker  27:59

You know, we love all of our chapters, and there’s the funny thing about doing this project and writing this book is we asked ourselves a question, do we think that the people that took advantage of these psychological biases knew that they were using the pratfall effect, that they Were using the concreteness bias and our our insight after interviewing many of them was they didn’t know the academic studies that proved it, but they had a hunch. They had a belief that if they could, if they use this approach, it would be more effective. And so and so, what we’ve done in the book is we’ve said, here’s the brand, here’s the thing they did, here’s the academic studies that reveal why it worked, and then here’s how you can use it in your business. Here’s how you can use in your brand. So your question was, is there an example that really shows how they got ahead of of competitors, how they hacked the human mind so well, let’s use Apple, and Steve Jobs is in the moment. He’s going to reveal the first iPod, and he stands up on the stage. He holds this device that looked like lots of other mp three players at the time, and he says, this is 1000 songs in your pocket. Now up to that moment, every other mp three player said, five gigabytes of storage, 128k sound. And what Steve Jobs and the apple team were taking advantage of was that font that 1000 songs in your pocket you could see in your mind, and that visualization that being able to visualize a concrete idea was much more. Sticky than talking about tech specs. And if that sounds interesting, it’s proven by academic science. I’ll give you the quick study, because it’s super interesting. It’s 1972 University of Western Ontario, and Professor Ian Begg takes 25 students into a room and he reads them a list of 22 word phrases, like impossible amount, Rusty engine, white horse, subtle fault. And then he asked the T the the students write down as many of the phrases that I just said, that you could remember. On average, they could recall 23% of the terms. That’s interesting. But what’s much more interesting is that only 9% of the abstract phrases could be remembered, versus 36% of the concrete terms, things like white horse, things like rusty engine were four times more memorable than impossible amount or subtle fault, and that has proven to be over and over again, successful in brand marketing. Red Bull gives you wings M and M’s melts in your mouth, not in your hand. Skittles Taste the rainbow. Maxwell House good to the last drop. You can see what the brand saying when they make that statement. And that is really effective when you’re trying to get people to remember your brand after they see your ad, or after they hear your your consultants pitch. You know, consultant decks could be hundreds of pages. How do you get them to remember the most important things? If you can use concrete visual ideas much more likely to be remembered.

Kris Safarova  31:51

And of course, you never actually want to manipulate your customers. You want them to do what is best for them. So in your view, what ethical boundaries are required when applying behavioral science to influence how our customers behave?

MichaelAaron Flicker  32:07

Absolutely so we would say, first of all, these are not tricks to change people. These are pre existing biases we all have writing books about them helps everybody learn about them, and if you are interested in them, you can be aware of the biases that exist in ourselves that may be being used in brand advertising or in or in other ways. Ethically, we want to teach brands and and and businesses that they should be using these ideas to make their work more effective, not to convince somebody to do one thing or another, but if the work can be more effective, if the work can be more memorable, it helps the brand stand out. And we’d like for all businesses to use all of these tactics to be more effective in the world, and of course, we want to make sure it’s always done ethically. There’s laws in many countries to protect against this, and we want to make sure people are using ethical best practices. But these exist in us, and talking about them and bringing them to the forefront helps everybody become more aware of them.

Kris Safarova  33:20

And for someone listening to us right now who wants to use it ethically, what would be two, three principles, actionable principles from your book that you would recommend them deploying something especially that does not require a huge budget, because either it’s hard for you to get approval for that budget, or if you run your own company, maybe you don’t have it.

MichaelAaron Flicker  33:41

So one that may be counterintuitive is the concept called the peak end rule. And the peak end rule was first uncovered a documented by Daniel Kahneman in 2002 he’s the Nobel Prize winner in economics, and he comes up with this idea that we do not remember experiences universally, the same. In fact, we remember certain elements of an experience much better than anything else. So here’s in 1993 Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Donald Radel Meyer, run a trial amongst colonoscopy patients. And they give the colonoscopy patients a handheld device to record their pain level every 60 seconds throughout the procedure. And then after the procedure is over, they give two retrospective ratings, one immediately after the colonoscopy is done and one a month later, and what Kahneman discovers is that neither of those retrospective ratings correspond it with the total pain levels. Instead, they correlate it much better with two moments, the peak of the intensity and the final moment of the procedure. He. Calls this the peak end rule, and it has effects for everyone, everyone’s business. Rather than worrying, if you’re in the hospitality sector, about giving equally great service the entire time, think about a peak moment that can be memorable for people, or the end moment that can be memorable for people. Is a great example. In Los Angeles, for many years, it was in the top 5% of all la hotels. The Magic Castle and the Magic Castle had more five star reviews and impressive ratings than the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. But what’s surprising about the Magic Castle is it’s a 1950s motel. It’s got dated decor, old rooms, a small swimming pool. But they do one thing, shockingly, at any point in your stay, you can walk to the pool and pick up a red telephone, and you pick up the telephone and you can ask for pops the popsicle hotline, and anytime, day or night, they will bring you unlimited popsicles to eat at the poolside. It’s not expensive. It certainly doesn’t change that the rooms are dated or that it’s a motel building, but people love the popsicle hotline, and they remember the popsicle hotline long after they leave. Another example, Virgin hotels in in in the Caribbean, they had an insight that their customers would check out at 11am when the hotel is done, but many of the flights were not until eight, nine o’clock at night. So they created the Virgin beach experience, where they gave their customers a dedicated part of the beach to check their bags, go to the beach for the day and have showers and changing rooms before the end of the night. Comparative to all the other hotels on the in the island, they were about the same, but way higher ratings and reviews because they got the end moment right. So these are, this is an example of how whether you’re in B to B as a consultant or or if you’re in B to C, selling consumer something, you don’t have to make all of the experience great. You have to think about what’s going to be remembered after they leave. And the peak end rule is one way to do things that aren’t more expensive, but could be really meaningful and impactful.

Kris Safarova  37:35

And of course, you still have to make sure it’s not an awful experience, because in that case, no matter how great the peak is, and you can have the dread phone, and you can have something great at the end, people will remember.

MichaelAaron Flicker  37:47

I think it’s a great point. It doesn’t mean that it’s going to be remembered positively. It just means it’s going to be remembered. And so our jobs as marketers or as business leaders is to make sure that experience is extremely positive in those moments that people are more likely to remember.

Kris Safarova  38:05

For someone who will go through the book, what are the key things you want them to take away?

MichaelAaron Flicker  38:10

We really wrote the book focusing on some of the world’s best brands, because we believe we can learn from them and apply it to all businesses and to all brands. So we look at those that have become big, and we don’t attribute all of their success to the behavioral principles they accessed and they took advantage of, but what we can do is use them as a case study. Say this is what they did, and this is how we can understand why it worked. Therefore, this is how you could use it in your businesses and your brands. So the first thing we’d like everybody to take away from the book is that we can learn from others and use it as a shortcut to improve our businesses and our brands. I think the second thing that we want to let everybody to feel is that even though it’s academically backed, it doesn’t have to be complicated, even though there’s real deep professional research that proves it, it doesn’t have to be hard to access. So we worked Richard schotten and I, my co author, and I worked very hard to make the stories simple, easy to remember, but make sure we got the whole point across. So I think we’d like for people to believe that they can learn from others and that they can implement them on their brands and businesses.

Kris Safarova  39:31

Stepping away a little bit from the discussion with the few minutes we have left, do you have so to say, success habits that you really rely on to be able to run multiple companies and do very well?

MichaelAaron Flicker  39:43

Something I learned a long time ago was to be able to compartmentalize between each and every business that I’m working on, and then each and every situation I’m dealing with. And I think what you see as at a certain. Level of executives development, they start to be able to do this where, you know, they don’t walk into the room carrying the weight of the last meeting with them. They don’t show up in the morning with whatever happened in their personal life, getting the kids to school, maybe a fight with a spouse, affecting how they start the day. And to really be effective, to really have successful companies, every person, every teammate, every executive, deserves a clean, fresh slate to go and deal with that company’s problems at that moment. So I think the number one thing at success habit that I’ve had is compartmentalizing and giving each team and each business the time it needs to solve that problem, that probably be number one. I think number two is truly convincing people that psychological safety is real healthy and not a buzzword. It was. It was such an important idea, and I think it got politicized over a period of time. And what I would say as an executive, what what psychological safety means to me is that your most important thought leaders, the most critical people in the company, feel that they can share when they are not sure of what to do, and that goes not just for your most senior people, but your most junior people, the people that are first year out of college. They’re in your shop if they feel that, they can say, ask questions, stay there, not sure, and not be judged. Because of that, it creates an environment that’s always improving and always learning. And I think unfortunately, that got politicized to mean other things but strong, healthy companies have a culture of curiosity. Have a culture of collaboratively solving problems and asking big questions to get to big answers. And you can’t do that if you’re pretending you always have the right answer. I think that’s probably a second success principle that I use all day every day. I’m the first one to say I’m not really sure how we should handle this, but let’s talk about it and solve it together.

Kris Safarova  42:12

Michael and then, from self leadership side of things, do you have anything that you rely on to stay productive, disciplined, focus, given how much you’re doing?

MichaelAaron Flicker  42:23

Well, a few things. First, I’m a very strong believer in respecting everyone else’s time by starting on time and ending on time. And real strong guardrails that the meetings start when we say they’re going to start, and we start wrapping up 10 minutes before the end. Time is really helpful. In fact, at all xenosai companies, we have 25 minute meetings and 50 minute meetings, not 30 and 60, because we always give a break between meetings, because many of us go from one meeting to the next without much of a break. So we we only allow 25 and 50 minute meetings and 80 minute meetings if it’s a long meeting, but we always give ourselves a break. So number one, I think it’s, it’s about starting and stopping on time to give everybody the respect that they need to be focused. And number two, I think it’s, it’s a team. I have two full time executive assistants. We have executive leadership teams in each company that I run. No one person can accomplish the goals of an entire company. So knowing that it’s not your success alone, but it’s your success to support others and help them grow, is, is probably been the biggest part of my success. And the more authority and autonomy you give, the more that you can expect of someone, and the more that you can expect to someone, the faster you can grow. And so I think that’s been, those are, those are probably two of the big things for me.

Kris Safarova  44:00

And the last question for today. Over the last few years, what were some aha moments, realizations? Maybe you could share two or three quick ones with us that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at business.

MichaelAaron Flicker  44:13

I’d say the first one was a story that I told myself as a young consultant, as a young professional services person, that I had to be the smartest person in a room. And to me, the smartest person in the room meant that I thought fast and spoke fast, so if I was the fastest one to respond with the most comprehensive, maybe complicated thing to say that would add the most value. And I think one aha moment was that people really all operate differently. You have people that are external processors, like me and internal processors. You have people that are fast to get to English words, and you have people who don’t have English as a first language. Kris that might be a little slower to get to the same English words, and that’s not at all related to how smart they are or how effective they’re going to be in their role. So number one, just because you’re a fast talking, quick minded New Yorker doesn’t mean you’re always the smartest person in the room. I think that was one aha moment for me. A second one was that I thought that after 20 years of growing xenosai, that was the thing I would do for the rest of my life, because I had 20 years of experience on it, and it was 20 years of good development and growth. And that was a story I was telling myself, you can go and do anything that you want, and we wanted to create our own brands in the world. We wanted to take it from xenosai, an advertising agency, to Xenopsi Ventures, a house of brands where we provide intellectual financial capital, and we did that. And all that was holding us back from doing that was making sure we told ourselves the right story. So rather than we work for others, we work for ourselves. Rather than we solve other people’s big problems, we can solve our own. And that was and that was really helpful, and probably my last quick aha moment was that I didn’t believe it could be fun to me. Fun with what you did with your family and your friends on the weekends and work with serious business. And that’s true, and it can also be fun. It can be life fulfilling and truly enjoyable to make relationships with your clients, to solve real big problems together as a team, and it can be a lot of fun to grow along the way. So I think my third aha moment was, this can be a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

Kris Safarova  46:48

Michael, thank you so much. Where can our listeners learn more about you? Buy your book? Anything you want to share?

MichaelAaron Flicker  46:53

Thank you. theconsumerbehaviorlab.com is where all of my thought leadership on behavioral science, marketing and brand building is that’s where you can learn about hacking the human mind. Our new book and our podcast Behavioral Science for Brands. And to learn more about Xenopsi Ventures, you can go to xenopsi.com.

Kris Safarova  47:15

Our guest today was MichaelAaron Flicker, co-author of Hacking the Human Mind. And this episode is sponsored by StrategyTraining.com. You can get some gifts from us. Number one is the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. You can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. Take a look at it. See what you can improve on your resume. Regardless of how senior you are, it’s always good to have a good one. And the last gift is access to the first episode of How to Build a Consulting Practice Level One, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/build. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.