Mistakes Leaders Make, with Skip Prichard – Episode 230 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Speaker, author, and President & CEO of OCLC, Skip Prichard, shares his unusual childhood background, the research on near death experiences, why to fail faster, how people are often like nickels, and the philosophy of working harder on yourself than you do on your job.

About Skip:

Skip Prichard is an accomplished CEO and growth-oriented business leader, best-selling author, and global keynote speaker.

Skip is an Inc. Top 100 Leadership Speaker and author of the WSJ bestselling book, The Book of Mistakes: 9 Secrets to Creating a Successful Future. He is known for his track record of successfully repositioning companies, dramatically improving results and corporate culture. He is a keynote speaker on topics ranging from leadership, personal development, growth strategies, culture, corporate turnarounds, and the future of publishing.

His views have been featured in print and broadcast media including the BBC, The New York Times, CNN, NPR, The Daily Beast, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Writer’s Digest, Information Today, Inc., The Bookseller, Publishers Weekly, Christian Retailing, Forbes, and the Library Journal.

He is the President & CEO of OCLC. Based in Dublin, Ohio, OCLC is a global nonprofit computer library service and research organization.  Its goals include furthering access to the world’s information and reducing library costs.  Before OCLC, he spent about five years as President & CEO of Ingram Content Group, Inc, one of the largest behind the scenes companies in the book business, repositioning the company to improve results and grow key parts of business significantly, expanding operations as far away as Australia while also pushing further into digital business lines.  Prior to Ingram, Skip was President & CEO of ProQuest Information & Learning where he led the company through a dramatic financial turnaround.

Learn more at SkipPrichard.com or TheBookofMistakes.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Host
Skip Prichard has one of the biggest blogs on the internet, one of the best leadership blogs on the internet. He is the former CEO of Ingram. His book is called The Book of Mistakes. So Skip, welcome to The Action Catalyst podcast, my friend.

Skip Prichard
Thanks so much.

Host
Give us a little bit about your background, and can you tell us a little bit about that and how that sort of shaped your path?

Skip Prichard
It was very unusual and not a normal childhood, though. You don’t know that at the time, right? My parents were both going to be missionaries overseas. They thought that’s what their calling was. They couldn’t have children. They were told they ended up having six. And my mom said, you know, we just want to help people. Let’s make our home, let’s open it up. And so I grew up in a place where we took in people from all over and they were abused, addicted and abandoned, is the way I like to think of it. And all races, all walks of life, all ages, but all of them had trouble. It’s a fascinating way to grow up. It’s unusual, but I remember, even as a kid, I would be fascinated with why somebody would kind of leave the house, get a job, do well, maybe start a business, or whatever they did, and somebody else would leave the house and get back on drugs, not be able to move past what had happened to them, whatever, whatever those issues were. And I was fascinated with that. Why is this person doing well and this person not doing well? It started my earliest thinking and studying over success principles.

Host
The book is called The Book of Mistakes. So you talk about these nine mistakes that people make, just give me like one of the nine that you say this is, this is one people need to really, really know about.

Skip Prichard
Sure. Well, we’ll start at the beginning. I think the first mistake that people make is becoming part of someone else’s dream. Why did you major in engineering? Well, Mom said to her, why are you a marketing manager? Well, my first boss pushed me that way. Wait a minute. What is your purpose? What is your dream? What are you trying to accomplish? If you’re an entrepreneur, are you really doing what you want to do? Or if you’re in a jobs, kind of somewhere, is that? Is that your passion? Is that your purpose? And so often, people are locked in someone else’s dream, and then they wonder, well, why am I not successful? It doesn’t mean everyone has to start their own business and their own thing, though it may, but you have to think about my personal purpose. What gives me energy, what drives me? Why am I put here? And if you’re in your purpose, your sweet spot, enormous success is possible. If you are not, then it can cause all kinds of problems. Are you in your sweet spot? Are you in your zone. You know it’s interesting. When you study research on near death experiences, on the dying, if you look at the regrets, what do you regret in life? The answer almost always comes back, I regret not being true to me, right? And it doesn’t matter if you do it 10 years ago, if you do the study again, if you look at different countries that bubbles up to the top of the list. Why is that? Well, I regret not being me. I regret not following my dream I was pushed into someone else’s so it’s something that really stays there. But it’s not necessarily your own business. It may be, but you can find your purpose in a job. Some people hear this, I do a talk on this, and they may find their purpose in a charitable thing that they’re doing on the side, and their job is kind of a way to that. But their purpose is not defined just by their occupation. So you really have to give some time to thinking about your purpose and and what is that? And so all of these mistakes are universal truths, and I have found them to be based in research, academic research. I’ve interviewed over 1000 people and studied successful people, and my own life as a CEO of several companies. And I’ll just jump to one other one all the way at the end. That’s the first mistake, the very last mistake, the ninth one, is believing you have all the time in the world the most successful people have a sense of urgency, and they tackle it. You have to prioritize your time. And is that time then and where you’re spending that time multiplied, as you would say, Are you a multiplier? Is that going to enhance your goals, your purpose? And then it kind of reinforces all of the nine that. Helps assure your success. So all of the principles relate to each other, and they’re all designed to get you on that track that you want toward your own goals. They all interrelate, and it’s that sense of urgency for my personal purpose and all of these mistakes. If you have that sense of urgency and that drive, you’re going to fuel your own success. In fact, you’re going to fail faster, right? Failures, great. We all know that failing, if you’re not failing, you’re not trying enough things, you’re not expanding your comfort zones, but people who have that sense of urgency are just failing faster, right? You’re not going to fail and then wallow in it for years, because you know that success means time, and time is more valuable than money. You’re going to be incented. You’re going to be this deep drive within to say, Well, what’s next, right? What’s the next sale, what’s the next opportunity, what’s the next call I can make, what’s the next book I can read that’s going to change my mindset motivate me just 1% more in this next month, which then, of course, changes the trajectory of my year.

Host
Were any of the nine surprises to you?

Skip Prichard
You know, it’s more for me, which one I identify with at that particular time. And I wrote the book in a fable, story form. It’s written as fiction. It’s written to grab people’s attention. I wrote it as a fable because stories are engaging. You know Jennifer, Jennifer Aker of Stanford University, you remember stories 22 times more than you do facts. And I want it. You know Jerry Seinfeld’s wife, she writes these great books, cookbooks, on getting kids to eat vegetables. How do you get these kids to eat vegetables? And so how do you sneak zucchini like into chocolate chip cookies and things like that? And it’s this very clever book. Well, this book is written in that same way. How do I take success principles and work them in, in a way, into a story that’s enjoyable that I’m reading, and I don’t realize by the end, I’ve kind of learned, I’ve gotten my success vegetables. The idea was looking at young people in particular. How do you get them to read something and engage? And so I’ve had people who just read the story, and they’re just fascinated with the story, and they love that. And I think that’s great. And so I think I did that for all of those reasons. Also, stories are enduring. I mean, they last for a long time. So people were referred. And it’s kind of that gift kind of thing, where you can say, hey, I read this story. I think it would benefit you, if you think about a discipline, if you think about these mistakes, the one that identify, that I’m identifying with today is accepting false labels. The big mistake is to accept labels that people put on us. Think about I, you know, the example I use in the book is a nickel in the in the US. It cost us over 10 cents to manufacture a nickel. That’s our government, right? Why is it worth a nickel? Because we label it five cents. That’s what we attribute that value to even though it costs 10 cents to make, and how often in life, we accept labels that other people put on us. We allow the mistake is allowing someone else to define our value. And this has broad implications, right? It has implications. If someone says when you’re a kid, you’re not athletic, or you’re not a good speaker, and we accept these labels, and years later, we’re still struggling with what mom said, or dad said, that label that was put on us, but don’t allow your competition to define you. Don’t allow your competition to label you. You know so often you go into a situation, an RFP, a competitive sales process, you’ve won or lost already based on other labels that people have put on you, and the best successful people have already labeled the competition and put them in a box where you need to be able to define your value, and that’s personal. What is my personal value? And I’m not going to accept false labels that are put on me. And it’s also corporately important that you don’t accept false labels on your product, on your service, on who you are, that you’re going to define what label it wears, and you’re going to define that future success. Big difference.

Host
So great. And last little question, you know, if there was one quick piece of advice, if there’s one thing you could go tell young CEO Skip Prichard, what would it be?

Skip Prichard
Well, I’m fortunate. I actually heard that advice, and I heard it directly from Jim Rohn at one of his seminars, and I talked to him afterwards, and I attended many, many of them, and business philosopher Jim Rohn, and he shared something, and I share it with all of my companies, and I share it with with people that either work with me or for me, is to work harder on yourself than you do on your job. If you work hard on your job, you’ll make some money. If you work hard on yourself, you’ll make a fortune. And if we are constantly working on ourselves all the time, everything is possible. Your skill set keeps expanding. Saying I’m working hard on me. I’m working hard on me. I need to improve. I need to get better. As Stephen Covey would say, I need to sharpen the saw. And all of that information have worked harder on me. Will make me better. It will make my own saw sharper in future years. So that’s to me extraordinarily, and it’s contrary to what most people would think, because you’d think new CEOs coming in, he’s going to tell us to work on these things. And I say, No, we need to work harder on ourselves, because if each one of us and this company works incredibly hard on ourselves, our entire collective future is going to be completely different. All of us will be contributing at a much higher level in two years with the same people, even if we don’t change anyone than we are today. And so that, to me, is the advice that I’d rehear, but I was fortunate to have heard it very young. It made a big difference and a huge impact on me.

Host
Well, I love it. Thanks for being here, my friend. We wish you all the best.

Skip Prichard
Thank you.