Brave Together, with Chris Deaver – Episode 448 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Chris Deaver, author and co-founder of BraveCore, recalls stalking Stephen Covey in his own house, and talks about the key lesson he learned from Steve Jobs, bucking the “expert model”, writing a letter to Roy Disney then turning down the reply, the simplicity and power of co-creation, turning Dell around, making others the mission, and working next to a secret lab.

About Chris:

Chris Deaver is cofounder of BraveCore, and co-author of Brave Together. He’s influenced Fortune 500s from the inside, including Apple and Disney, creating breakthrough culture shifts with Tim Cook from “Thinking Different” to “Working Different Together”, and inspiring teams shaping iProducts and Star Wars experiences. Cohost of the popular podcast Lead with a Question, he’s cofounded startups and a mentoring network with Stephen Covey.

Learn more at ChrisDeaver.com and BraveCore.co.

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):

Adam Outland
Hello, Action Catalyst listeners. This is Adam Outland. Today’s guest is Chris Deaver, co founder of BraveCore, helping leaders be more creative and creatives be better leaders, with time spent at Apple, Disney Dell and working alongside Stephen Covey. Deaver brings his experiences together in the book brave together, which we’ll dive into today. Chris, great to meet you.

Chris Deaver
Likewise. Thanks, Adam.

Adam Outland
Are you in West Coast?

Chris Deaver
I’m in the Bay Area. So San Jose, south part of it a little town called Gilroy that’s the garlic capital of the world. Garlic capital of worlds. Yeah, that’s our claim at least and I can vouch for the garlic fries. But the garlic ice cream don’t don’t ask me about anything good to say so.

Adam Outland
Oh, man. Well, I’d actually love to start maybe a little bit earlier in life was a your one of your first professional experiences to work with Stephen Covey back in the day.

Chris Deaver
Yeah, yeah, that was my kind of dream. I listened to the audio, his audio tape of the seven habits. I had I had a Walkman. So this this’ll date me, you know, Sony. It was a classic. And I’d go for a jog or run and, and I had his the set of habits tape. And I just listened to it constantly. To the point that it literally broke, I think was like 1000 times. And I just couldn’t get enough. I thought this is the coolest thing. You know, it’s about principles. It’s inspiring. And it translates into business and personal development. And I thought that’s, that’s, that’s where I want to be. I want to be in that space. So fast forward, I had the chance to connect with, with Steven himself. He’s, he’s I was at BYU. And He has connections there and lived in Provo. So, you know, it all kind of happened just, I guess I say randomly. I was very intentional. But it was it was kind of a backdoor in his son had a, like a network marketing business meeting at his house. And my friend said, Hey, this is your chance. I said, I don’t know, interested in signing up for some random thing. And he goes, No, but it’s at Steven Kelly’s house. It’s like, okay, so cool. So I ended up walking up the stairs, nice big house. And, and I looked down the hallway I see is bald guy. I’m like, that’s well, you know, older guy thought there’s only one of those around here. But I’m not going to chase him in his own house. That’s a lock word, right? So I kind of stepped towards the door or the front door and I and I look at a garage, he pops out of the garage, I think his wife, he and his wife go to a Christmas party or something. So he’s putting gifts in the car. And I walk over and I just thought, okay, now’s my chance. And I said, Hey, you know, Steven, I really appreciated your books. But you know, I’ve made a difference in my life. And he looks me in the eyes really deeply. He goes, we’ve met before. And I said, I feel like I have I you know, I read your books that much. I feel like I know you. And he goes, No, we’ve met before. And you know, oddly enough, I had a, I had a dream years before about estimating. And I don’t know, you know, sometimes these things just happen for a reason. He just connect. But from there, we had him come speak at an event. And we started as we were doing this mentoring nonprofit, he said, I’ll be your PR agent started spreading the word. And he adores our work. And it was great. I learned a lot from him. You know, one of the things he said, that’s always stuck with me, and I’m striving to work on to this day. He said, You know, we have two ears and one mouth, and it’s the right proportion. For listening. So, so my introductory work with Covey.

Adam Outland
Yeah. I mean, how much of that influence? Do you feel like carried over to what you do today with BraveCore? And you know, the book that you wrote, Brave Together?

Chris Deaver
I think there’s a lot of inherent wisdom in questions. And I think especially needed in the world today. Right? We’re inundated with answers. You know, Google is like every tool has answers right? Spitting out an answer for us. And we have to kind of cut through this noise. And then when our in our interactions with others. This is something that both Covey I worked, I had the chance to be at Apple and Steve Jobs would would do this in meetings, he listened a lot. He would pivot and start to disagree with himself at times. And, you know, people would get confused by this. Your CEO, like you had a position and he say, well, now this this, this answer is better. Right? So a 180. And that’s the power of listening. Ed Catmull. He started Pixar. Also. His dilemma was he’s really smart guy had PhD and he said when it early days of the company, he would just answer fire off answers to questions everybody had, you know, we had the chance to meet with him, and we thought this is he’s the Yoda right of creativity and principles, you know, creativity, Inc, that has, you know, has a cabbie flavor to it. But it’s, um, it’s specific to Pixar is principles of their culture, right? And so we thought, well, this guy’s Yoda, we’re gonna click the wisdom button, and he’s just gonna dispense, you know, the wisdom. And he didn’t. So we ended up sitting there, my friend, co author and I, and we’re just sharing, and he’s listening and asking really great questions. This goes on for 1520, maybe 30 minutes. And at one point, I’m thinking, wow, this, okay. This it was it was an interesting dynamic. So I paused, I said, Ed, what’s your leadership philosophy? And he said that, he said, I lead with the question. And I think as we come upon this time, especially, you know, all these technologies, AI, you know, all these tools and things that are coming at us? Well, there’s a unique opportunity to unlock the power of questions. And you know, at Pixar, Ed and team, they would send out a question a week in advance, so rather than an agenda, they would send out a question, to just let that marinate creates that space, you know, there’s much more anchoring power in questions.

Adam Outland
Yeah, it’s actually harder to come up with the right questions first, than to work on the answers. Right?

Chris Deaver
Definitely. But yeah, the feeling and definitely the business world, you know, to this day, it’s a struggle or to wrestle is, you know, we call it in the book, the expert model, right? There’s an expert model of, you know, it’s a temptation to kind of show up and say, dump expertise, put answers, you know, kind of pour answers into people or into the conversation. And, you know, and in a world where there are so many answers, it does beg that question of, well, how do we create? How do we unlock the space for people to be brave? I saw this at Apple where you had, you know, people that had written white papers that like nobody else had done it, right, their whole PhD was about this technical aspect of something. And yet, they would come to the table with kind of egos off the table, a humility to the universe, an unanswered question, right, that they had to kind of come together to pull something out of the ether with a belief that that could happen. And it’s something that didn’t exist prior to that meeting, that they were bringing their perspective and others were bringing theirs, but that the magic would happen. And it essentially something that it would be a revelation.

Adam Outland
And you had such a career, you know, being senior HR leadership at Walt Disney and Apple. And as a teenager in high school, like, how much of this did you predict who’s going to be your life path?

Chris Deaver
I was just trying to make it through in a survive. Yeah, I mean, I think I don’t know that I imagined Exactly. This course. I know. I knew something about, I enjoyed creativity. I also would find myself in those places thinking kind of commercially or about the business world. And you know, behind all this in the background, my foundation had started I’d say, really, my dad was a Scoutmaster. So the Boy Scout program for ever. And I just started, you know, I begged to go on these big trips, but you know, 50 mile hikes and these things were, I didn’t realize at the time, but I’m observing a version of leadership among these kids who are like trying to figure this out, and they have these responsibilities a patrol leader, go build it, you know, put a tent together, go find, you know, make a fire and, and all the messiness of that. And, you know, my dad, he was pretty good at like, just okay, go figure it out. The other dynamic that happened for me was, I was on an achievement orientation path. You know, I did everything to get Eagle Scout at 12. I, you know, it was in the grades. And even in college, I studied animation at BYU, who is a precursor to them becoming, you know, they’re, they’re recognized now is really the, you know, one of the best in the world is that, but this is like the first class, but I got there and I wrote a letter to Roy Disney, I wanted to work at Disney. And I get a call from a recruiter, I didn’t know this is gonna happen three or four months later, I forgot about the letter. But, uh, this recruiter calls and says, Hey, this is Lisa, your ROI said to talk to you. And, you know, there’s like pixie dust flying everywhere. This is I’ve wished upon a star. It’s actually happening, right? And all those things, all those achievements in my life, it all led to this moment, right? It was the weirdest thing to actually have my heart override this, where I said, thank you. And I didn’t hang up the phone. It was an existential moment that I realized, hey, right company. It’s part of a dream, but that’s not right now, it’s not what you need. And it was a shock to my system. Yeah. Well, I didn’t understand it at the time. I didn’t understand it. But what I’ll say is, hey, achievement is great. You know, we all have a baseline of fear, right? Conscious subconscious, in work or life. And it may be the territories that are new for us that were are unexplored, some unknown, right, we’re at and this happens on a daily basis. It’s like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with this. Sometimes it’s financial. You know, Maslow’s kind of hierarchy. And it’s like, well, I don’t know how I’m going to make that work. Yeah, we break Gotta that by being brave, and in the achievement world that can turn into hacks and hustles. And just optimization of what, how good can we get. But what I learned and what the focus of this book is, is that there’s a higher order approach, which is being brave together. And that when we unlock that shared dream, or shared future, just magic happens.

Adam Outland
Yeah. So obviously, you had some self belief and self confidence and your value and your worth to existentially say that that wasn’t the right time. But where do you feel like you’ve developed your self worth and value to teach this? Like, where did that come from?

Chris Deaver
That’s a great question. It’s really a great question. I think it’s an eighth. I mean, I think we had great parents, I love a lot of grandparents, people have been encouraging my life. And my dad was an engineer. And it’s his credit. The other thing that he would do, it was very co creative. I didn’t know at the time, but you know, I’d have an idea for something. And these are crazy ideas. Like, I build a Spider Man suit I want I want to create a, you know, a hovercraft. And you know, it’s easy for a dad to blow that off, you’re like, Okay, or just, Oh, that’s nice, you know, but you actually sit with me, and start to design, whatever it was. And actually, we’d start to build those things. So it became real, and it became experience where it’s like, wow, you can actually come up with a thought start to shape it together and bring it to life.

Adam Outland
So there’s, there’s some good parenting wisdom in that too, for all the parents listening, do do stuff with your kids, because it makes a tremendous impact.

Chris Deaver
I think so, I think for leaders too, and managers is we have this dilemma, where we look at it as such a box of employer employee. And then that’s so easy when we think in those terms, right. Like Covey would say, you got to change people’s behavior, change their perception of their role, right. But so often, this employer employee relationship, in our minds dictates that, well, we got to behave, then it’s very kind of disciplinary or performance oriented, and results based, which just honing in on orientation only or achievement only, it doesn’t really motivate or inspire. But it begs the question of what if, right, the what if is, what if leaders? What if managers saw themselves as CO creators? What if they saw their employees as CO creators? And so when they have those ideas, and one of the best leaders that I ever had, he would say, what if you’re in my shoes for a day? Like, what would you do? He really honestly wanted to know, you know, and usually, it’s something I was trying to, I was wrestling with, I’d say, Well, this, what I’m trying to figure out, I solve it this way. And then he starts to take that idea in the air and just start to shape it with me. And then he would go that direction and say, let’s do that. And that well, really, that’s the simplicity. And the power of co creation.

Adam Outland
Reminds me of the principle of buy in, right? Like you take that approach to organizational leadership. And a powerful vision is a shared vision. And so you’re equipping people to have their fingerprints on whatever it is that’s being done. And so the buy in is going to be infinitely higher. Definitely, one of your co creation principles is turning pain into power.

Chris Deaver
I think that one more than any other was most applicable. You know, the world teaches a lot that, you know, no pain, no gain. And I think that fits into kind of the brave, alone category. And I say, there’s nothing wrong with it. Well, that could lead to burnout. And I think we’ve seen that right in the pandemic, and some of the fallout from that and where people have readjusted their lives. But yeah, more specifically for me, if I were to pick a company that really had the pain, I mean, I showed up at Dell, and I was fresh off my you know, my get my MBA out of that mentoring network. And this was before Disney or Apple I, as far as business professional context. I wanted to go to those companies. But you know, they didn’t give me the time of day or my dream list. So I I kind of shelf that I thought you know, what’s available. You know, and Dell is a big company, they’d had some success. Of course, I didn’t know, I got an organization that’s about 2008, give or take, and the three or four VPS SVPs that hired me they were gone in three or four months, there was constant rounds of layoffs happening every three to four to six months, massive, and the stock price tanked down to like a quarter of what it was been. Dell had had grown in numbers as over the prior year, years before that, as far as business and growth with the PC, direct model. But what what has started to happen was that it got deteriorated as other companies like Apple took that approach. You know, I show up there and I’m asking all these existential questions, I realized, like, wow, this company’s got some problems. But what I also realized was, to Dells credit, what they’re good at and what Michael is particularly good at, is being extremely resilient, and extremely open to even criticism, right. And so I formed a team. And we started to look at these questions and wrestle with what does this mean as it relates to a hopeful future, and if there is a hopeful future for Dell How do you start to build that? And what are the elements required for us to get there? And so when we looked at holistically at what direct model, as a business model had met, it turned into a leadership model at Dell. So we had to empower innovation, they had to approach going back to the lead with the question. And so we realized that there has to be a shift here and the pain so that was the pain, right? Talk about pain, it’s like, oh, my gosh, like, this is existential, the sky is falling, we may not have a Dell right and a few years. And so this team, we started to shape what that future could be, you know, they wanted they had a target, it wanted to be $200 billion company. So this isn’t going to happen. If we have this the state of flow that we have, we have to shift how the culture operates. And to ground that in an anchoring question. We positioned this as what we call the Connect model, which was empowering innovation. Listen first. And, you know, keep those things at work, right? Keep execution. That’s good, right? But do it in a contextual way that’s with others. And think of it as a platform, right? How do you connect dots with each other as a leader, right in your teams, and then also with partnerships, I said, this word of Michael. And long story short, I show up in my manager’s office, and she’s like, what was this email to Michael? And I said, Well, he was in all hands. He said, He wants ideas, right? We’re struggling, we’re, you know, we have some challenges as a company. And he asked for ideas. And she goes, Well, you know, they say that sometimes. But yeah, they don’t really, I took them out in his word. You know, the next day, Michael at 5am, sends a response. And he says, huge respect for this initiative. What are the next steps? We started a think tank called game changers, where they would submit ideas kind of Shark Tank type experience. And billion dollar ideas came out of this people that had just been in the company, not nobody asked, right? Nobody ever asked like, Hey, do you think you could build something else? So mobile app emerged out of this billion dollar idea, other things, and the what happened was the culture started to shift, they were able to turn that pain into the power and it took a collective approach to do it. It was shared.

Adam Outland
True North is one of your other principles. I feel that what you meant by that, I think is the alignment once you’ve uncovered and hopefully discovered the principles, right, you know, how do you help put the guardrails on on meetings and conversations? How do you put the kind of the bumper lanes in place so that people stay ahead of the general right direction?

Chris Deaver
Yeah, I think as is just a practical question, you share principles. First Principles are key, right? We talk about landing a rocket right from the moon, back to Earth. And, you know, it’s not just a matter of like, hey, let’s just, you know, throw some materials, aluminum or this or that. Right. And it’s, you know, we have to figure what are the, what are the first principles, what gravity is always key elements. And I think building intention into things like meetings into one on one conversations, and it doesn’t have to be all mapped out, right, where we have it all buttoned up, and, you know, make it a show, it’s, you know, the first principles could be shared wisdom, right, which is leading with the question deep empathy, right, which has to do with another principle, ours make others the mission. But these kinds of things that help set the course. And I think more specifically for meetings is allowing space for brave conversations to happen. Or you could call it brave space where people feel inclined to share and that they’re not punished overtly, you know, or, in a subtle way, right? That they feel genuinely like, why I can shoot, you know, because that’s where the, that’s where the goodness is where it’s a bit messy. Scott Belsky, he’s the head of Adobe chief product officer, you know, he talks about being on the edge of reason, as a collective group, right. And, you know, and I think what he’s expressing is, so we have to kind of be in a, in a bit of a fuzzy call it an art zone, that we haven’t been as much in if we speak traditionally, about how business or leadership has operated the past or culture, right, a lot of has been very oriented toward a scientific, you know, have the answers approach, efficiency, effectiveness. But this is where that wave of co creation, it’s not only possible it actually if you look at a company like Nike, right, we’ve spent a little time we spent time with with them. And you could actually chart this based on the data as to the difference between their investment in culture, and it’s in the investment and the things that we’re talking about, which is, okay, so practically speaking about meetings, give people five to 10 minutes to check in. Right. And it could be the one on one meeting or in that group meeting. And it’s a small thing, right? Maybe it’s a 10 or 15 to 20% investment of time, but what we see is, if you look at the comparative performance between Nike, and and we’ve charted this based on both internal culture and external perception of culture, so we partnered with a company called Varuvai. And they actually He shared this with customers and asked him the question is how much belonging do you feel with your shoes right or with your, your, the products you use, and then they can gauge essentially our external culture, right impact of and so with Nike, the difference between them and ASICs and Skechers and other brands is not just like 3x or 4x. It’s 10x difference as far as performance, but based on just like a 15 to 20% consistent investment in culture. And then also with the first principles we talked about before, they’re very clear. There’s actually a guy named Rob, I forget his last name. But when they were early making CEO Phil Knight, they’re doing their thing business wise. And Rob, just one day starts to intuit these principles about Nikes future you may you probably seen these online, but he starts posting on people’s doors. And this historian of Nike asked you whenever asked, he was like, was this real? Like, dude, like it? Well? Was it just robbing Rob? Or was it like, something that was meaningful? And people started confirming? They said, Yeah, he actually intuited what the first principle and you could say the first principles of their future culture. That’s it’s a little interstellar of us right to go there. But that idea that like, the your future, self, but the future self of the culture, but those are powerful for grounding people. And it’s obvious, I mean, Nike success explains a lot, right? We did that kind of work at Apple as well. And it was not a fixer upper, there was not as much pain, as with the Dell experience. But there’s It was simple, it was like, Hey, we have pain points, when we go New Territories, AirPods, Apple, watch the VR headset with Apple, literally, the secret lab was right next door to my office. And so I see people go in and come out really excited. And these are things that that occasionally get friction, right or struggles. But the challenge for Apple was how do we go from thinking different, and that could be any extreme, that could be an individual approach to really working different together, and connecting dots horizontally as well as vertically? And to their credit, they, you know, took it to the next level.

Adam Outland
Absolutely. A lot of things that are occurring to me while you’re talking about the side camera, what book I read, but it was, you know, more philosophical in nature and discussed, you know, that one of the unique traits of human beings that separated us from animals in the beginning was our ability to create things that didn’t already exist in nature, like the earliest forms of art that we find are things that, you know, depicted things that didn’t really exist yet. And that that’s, you know, one of our our abilities is to create things that don’t already exist. And so having almost like a disincentive, sometimes incentives get us really channeled towards one way of thinking and limit our creativity to solve problems. And so being careful of the incentives you put in an organization that might stifle the creativity for the future, right.

Chris Deaver
That too, you know, and it could be, are there ways to tie this to a team success, right to the impact that the team is having? And we’ve seen that I’ve seen this work really well, when they can, you know, IT companies could solve for a reward system that it does both? Right? It’s an answer. If you look at Apple, it’s teamwork, innovation, and results. Those things are all important. The tension that lies between them is it’s a good ecosystem.

Adam Outland
You know, I always love asking guests, you’ve had a life of experience and you’ve isolated in some cases, some of these principles that you personally and and put into motion over your career. You know, some of them you’ve learned along the way what what advice would you give to the 21 year old Chris Deaver, knowing everything that you’ve known now?

Chris Deaver
Well, I’ll caveat that with, I share some advice with my son occasionally. And I went to I went on a coaching spree with him one time, it’s like 45 minutes of like, just heavy coaching related to stuff, you know, and it was emotional. There were some things going on with his life. But he’s a great kid. So we end off and I, we hug each other. I tell him, I love him. I go to my room. He comes back later, he knocks on the door. And he’s like, Hey, can you coach my friends? And I said, I don’t know. I said, why? And he goes, Well, they were listening to the whole thing. Like, what? He’s like, Yeah, yeah, there it is air pods in. And they were listening, apparently. Really, because there was a lot of like, Oh, he’s a personnel but it was, you know, it was some serious stuff. And I said, Oh, it did keep it posted next time. I’m on you know, on a live mic?

Adam Outland
You’re being live-streamed to TikTok.

Chris Deaver
Exactly. But yeah, finding I mean, I would say like, largely, it’d be like, keep going, right? Sometimes the struggles that we see feel so overwhelming. I mean, there’s so much going on, right where they could feel like, where’s my place in the world? I keep thinking gotta go back in my mind to like Walt Disney when he was younger. He would go to the train station in Kansas City and or Missouri, and the one to La he’d stand there and he thought all my dreams, somebody else’s dealing, like it’s already been done. And that was his that was his like, call it a pre regret or a feeling of just, you know, kind of that pain, right? And now he turned that pain into power. But I think that’s I think part of it is is like don’t get discouraged. We have a mental health crisis. But to simplify it down and boil it down, I’d say, find a way to, yes, be successful, but also to create shared dreams, right? It’s not just a dream board. It’s a shared dream board. How do you be brave, you know, with those you love. And like Charlie Munger talks about this, Warren Buffett, and they’re a classic example. Like they’ve been brave together for a long time. And it’s just, it’s unbelievable, right? The results they get from that, just imagine what you can do. Right with in building with others. I think that’s something to you know, we haven’t explored it enough on the educational front, we have not explored enough on the business front personal level that will unlock so many things in your world. It will unlock your dreams and accelerate and amplify things like you wouldn’t believe. It’s just amazing.

Adam Outland
Yeah, I really appreciate the conversation for people to dive deeper into this they can read your book brave together, lead by design, spark creativity and shape the future with the power of co creation. Love it. Any other direction you want to point our listeners to for resources.

Chris Deaver
Yeah, thanks. I just add a website BraveCore.co We’ve got a lot of resources on there and, you know, content that can help power what you’re doing.

Adam Outland
Yeah, thank you for this great conversation. A lot of a lot of wisdom.

Chris Deaver
Thank you, Adam. I’ve enjoyed it been fun.