Jim Clifton - Training for Startups

 

Intro: Welcome to Beyond Speaking with Brian Lord, a podcast featuring deeper conversations with the world's top speakers.

 

Brian Lord: I'm Brian Lord, your host of the Beyond Speaking podcast, and today we have with us the CEO of Gallup. Jim Clifton, author of a number of books and somebody who is one of the most knowledgeable people in the country. So, Jim, thank you so much for coming on today.

 

Jim Clifton: That's a little strong. But... (Laughing)

 

Brian Lord:  I was put up to that by your office to say that this guy... So one of the interesting... So a big thing we're going to talk about is entrepreneurship. But I was put up... They said... It was to ask you what it's like being the person that more people come up to you and say, in all seriousness, high-level people saying, "Could I be president?"What is that like wnd what do you answer?

 

Jim Clifton: Well, I don't- One of the things I found, Brian, is that I'm not going to say their names because you've heard of all of them. But I tell them the truth: They can be brilliant Americans, but they are too narrow and their particular message is never going to be able to be expanded enough. But I learned if I tell them "No, you could never be..." They don't talk to me. Then it takes them... they have to process that and kind of mourn it for about a year before they'll talk to me again.

 

Brian Lord: But do you remember who the first person was that asked you that?

 

Jim Clifton: I do.

 

Brian Lord: Can you share?

 

Jim Clifton: I'd rather not.

 

Brian Lord: Oh, come on! I was gonna say, there's got to be a statue of limitations-. 

 

Jim Clifton: Steve Forbes.

 

Brian Lord: Steve Forbes, OK. Yeah, yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: But I've got to tell you something else, too. They never listen to me.

 

Brian Lord: I think if somebody wants to run, they're going to run.

 

Jim Clifton: Yeah. And what they're doing is they're really looking for people to affirm it.

 

Brian Lord: Right. Right.

 

Jim Clifton: "Oh, you'd be great. Of course, people love you," you know and all that, but... And things have changed a lot, too. Because I've had the same- I've been CEO for 30 years, maybe 31 now, I don't know. But... And I watched elections before that- I'm so much older than you. But you know, there's always a certain demand. There's a real strong will of the voter. And if you're not within that will you don't have a chance because the will's driving much harder than you can persuade. Somehow you got to fit in there. But if who you are doesn't fit the will of the people, you don't have much of a chance.

 

Brian Lord: Switching sort of from politics to solutions, you know, what do you see as something that America really needs to change? I know you've done a lot of research on this. And, you know, innovation is a big buzzword. But what do you think we need to do to sort of change and improve those things, like you're talking about the living wage or what's kind of your idea of the solution?

 

Jim Clifton: Well, the thing that I'm most concerned about, and again, you just don't read much of this, there are only a few economists on it. And I had our chief economist, I said, "I want to know the truth out here. I want to report on it. I want to trendline right on the cover. I want to hand it to the biggest leaders in business and industry and all over Washington, want every senator to have it and everything else." But if you take GDP per capita... To remember, GDP oversimplifies just all the stuff we make and sell each other. [Inaudible] But if you divide that by the population, it's been going down for 30 years. But so what it is, is if somebody goes "Well hey look, GDP per capita is growing." It is, but it's increasing at a decreasing rate, so to speak. So it means, again, the amount of stuff- and you've got to have a strong free enterprise where you can't have democracy. I think I don't think that's political. I think that's...

 

Brian Lord: Right, yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: -But the way it is. But increasing at a decreasing rate so now we're at zero. That's the United States. When they say it's been the longest growth, ten years in a row, they don't finish that sentence. It's also the smallest growth we've had for across ten-year time series in the last hundred years. Isn't that amazing? But so we say, "Hey, look, it's real long." But, we're only running at about two percent. I feel like I'm boring your audience, but two and a half is break even.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: And so are you really need to be just 3.2 or something like that. But that's a long way away from where we're here. And if you go to the Globe the economist, I'm going to say ten years ago said we need to be up around six and a half then six and it just keeps going down. So now we're down around three and a half. But so that thing looks like a ski slope, but it's the other Global Warming. Economic dynamism is grinding down with a brutal force. And we say, "Well, was Carter a bad president or was Reagan bad or one of the Bushes or whatever?" It looks like the presidents don't affect it as much as you think. Something's happening, but one of them is that you can lay next to it is a number of startups. So I challenge some economists. I said, "I want to know the very, very, very, very origin of economic energy. Where does it start?" So if Memphis doesn't have enough Nashville, got lots of it... Memphis says "I want to have energy like Nashville," the answer is startups. Full stop.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah. 

 

Jim Clifton: It's not giving tax breaks to Kawasaki Plantin or anything like that. You've got to have startups. And I didn't mean to depress your audience-

 

Brian Lord: Yeah, yeah!

 

Jim Clifton:  But what makes it worse is millennials don't start companies.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah. Yeah. And why do you think that is?

 

Jim Clifton: Well. There are some obvious things, but when I was... I don't know, kind of 22 or when I was in college, all of us started companies. I'm 68 and that's a long time ago. That's a real long time ago.

 

Brian Lord: Sure.

 

Jim Clifton: But we always had stuff but... But all my friends started companies so it wasn't even anything at all. So I just put my car parked my car, I'm going to do this kind of thing and all that. We're very entrepreneurial. But at the University of Nebraska, I think a semester was like sixty dollars. And so you didn't succeed in it. You really could work at the bookstore and pay your tuition or some construction during the summer. When you come out I mean, if you got to... What did you say? University of Indiana.

 

Brian Lord: I went to DePaul but my mom went to IU.

 

Jim Clifton: Yeah, OK. But now if you go for four years you gonna have debt about $160 thousand- But six-figure debt. You're not as likely to start a- I think there's a little bit of a brown cloud on free enterprise. I think an awful lot of kids are wondering about what they can do. They wonder if they can work in a nonprofit, what they can and which is which is just great. But I think it causes them to not start businesses.

 

Brian Lord: Well, one of the things I'm curious to know, because you've talked about when you were starting up, you were starting up companies, but you the purpose of a company was to provide a paycheck so that you could have the rest of your life. And millennials treat it now that the that the company they work for, whatever they're doing, is in a big way their life. It's where the social life comes from and the cause comes from the purpose comes from. How do you think you could rectify that with the need for entrepreneurs and startups?

 

Jim Clifton: I think, first of all, we just let it happen before. Boy, you know, when Americans get after something and figure it out. We can really change things. We're very good at it. But we haven't tried we haven't figured out how a business starts. You know, we always celebrate. We're just doing something with Richard Galicians, with Richard Branson. You know what? But what you don't think about: Nobody really does stories on the 500 people that tried to start something [Inaudible] that failed and then went, "I'm never doing that again." You know, they're paying off the debt and people are saying, "Don't you ever try that again, you know?" But we weren't born equal on this subject.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: On this particular capacity. You look at your own kids and. Yeah. And you have three of them and you looked at one of them and she gets up in the morning. All she thinks about is who she can sell something, something to. Well, that's the point. But if you're in music, we're here in Nashville, you know, I, I'm horrible at music, but if you put five violin player, I can if there's a real good one and the other four, I can tell we all can. Or in basketball. I was watching TV one night years ago and LeBron James was in high school. It was just a regular news show, it wasn't even sports and they want us to look at this kid in high school. I look now, he'll be good in the Pros. We can all spot it.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: But it's not visual or [auditory] having that particular gift. But that's why Gallup has built tests. We've been testing hundreds of thousands of kids. There is a solution. Schools have to get early identification of people that have a natural gift to start a company. These are alpha males and alpha females and put them in systems that are just as sure as baseball farm teams or the whole baseball thing. But if we just emulated the whole baseball thing, really spot those look... You know, in hockey in Canada, they spot them in grade school and put them in hockey schools. Then they teach him arithmetic or whatever they teach him as a side thing. And what they're there for is hockey. If we did that for business startups, the whole country would explode. I mean that in a good way.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah, and I love that. It's you mentioned this before we got on the air here. But, you know, I've kind of been stalking you for four or five years because I read that article that you had about, you know, we have these specific ways for people to make the most out of their musical talent, specific ways to make the most out of their sports talent. But we don't often have that from an entrepreneurial standpoint. So if you were to give a parent, let's say there's not that track here already. Well, let's say you're talking to a parent who has kids that are a child or one or more that has that entrepreneurial spirit. What would you tell them to do?

 

Jim Clifton: First of all, Brian, I'd be real sure they know the difference between innovation and entrepreneurship because this country gets a mix it up.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: So universities are starting innovation centers and they're recruiting kids into it and all that, nothing comes out of them. So we've got a place where we're dead wrong. You've got to make sure that we're, you know it, cause you spotted it in your daughter. You've got to make sure that you're talking about that. But then there's a lot of programs around. If they're really young, there's a program called Lemonade Days. I was in that for a long time. People at Gallup and Washington, D.C. are in that. But it's a place where kids go out and they learn about money and, you know, and they do it in the summer when there's a lot of people and when they go out and sell lemonade. One little girl, one little girl, I say girl because she's so young. But she made three hundred dollars. But once you pay back the little sacks of lemonade or whatever it is, you start keeping the dough.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: And but alas she's just screaming and she's holding the money in her hand, you can just see it feels so good. But I watched her and she works harder to work it in the crowd. She goes 'You're so hot. Don't you want lemonade because we've got lemonade right over here." 

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: Where the other girls were, you know, they're kind of looking down and they're embarrassed to be doing it and all that kind of thing. But I would try to get them in the game as fast as I can. But there are things around in most cities. But make sure that you get them in the entrepreneurship, not not the innovation. Those are two ones, an inventor and the other one's basically a super salesperson.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah. And that's one of things I thought was interesting. You talk about Wayne Huizenga is somebody who, you know, like started three huge companies, hugely successful companies. But they weren't necessarily those glamorous things. It wasn't, you know, wasn't Apple or Facebook or something like that. It was, you know, the trash guy, you know, and or or selling cars or, you know, whatever it was in those things were just so different from that. And I think that's an important point, that people, when they think innovation, they think technology, which there is room for innovation in there. But I think entrepreneurship is a different sort of thing in a different sort of drive for change. But then disruption maybe. But not that. In the... I guess when you're talking to college students. So you've done a huge thing with University of Nebraska, you know, starting the is it the Don Clifton Strengths Center or...?

 

Jim Clifton:  I believe Institute. They call it center a lot.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah, but but, you know, in that when you go and, you know, I've seen you on the videos there. I know you're a part of it. What are the things that you tell those students there?

 

Jim Clifton: Well, what we do is so we build some courses and then you get selected into the Don Clifton Institute, but we run you through a battery. I'm starting to call them tests.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah. Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: So basically what you're looking for is somebody that has grit and they have high determination. Your superstar entrepreneurs, if you say to me, "Here's something I'm going to do" and I tell you, "You will never do that." Right? Well, then that moves to the top of the list because you have proved there's nothing to you want to go prove Jim was wrong. But they love determination for you to really fail your first six months out with your new company. It just doesn't work. And I go, "This will never work." That really gets you up earlier the next day because the determination there's kind of a governor, but the failure makes you keep getting up and keep going and going and going. And, you know, that looks like it's, you know, kind of one in a hundred. You think about basketball stars one or if you think about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and all that list of people. But to answer your question, we teach them a lot about customer science. And so you need to speed up their development. So we tell them what a good customer is like. What a bad thing... Think about how much fun you and I could have. I ask you about your customers. You ask me about mine. "What's your worst one, Brian? What's your best one?" But then they go out and they figure that out and they go out and see, you know, midsize CEOs or larger CMOs, as I call them, on the phone or whatever it might be. But then they go deep into what makes good customer, bad customer, how you can have more customers. What customers do you wish you had? How come you don't have them and all that sort of thing? Another thing is that if you get any size at some point, you have to be pretty good at running teams.

 

Brian Lord: Right.

 

Jim Clifton: And so to know how to be a team captain and how to figure out what your strengths are, what my weaknesses are and all of that is a really good one. But so some very special soft skills. A lot about disruption, too. But we expect those kids when you're on the down clipped Clifton School, we expect them to start a big business or a business within a company. But we expect them to be builders.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah. And that's I know your new book, Building. So, I love the the distinction you make. You don't ask people, what are you doing or what are you up to. You say, what are you building? Where did that idea come from?

 

Jim Clifton: There's guy down in Austin, Texas. Have you ever heard of Roy Spence.

 

Brian Lord: No.

 

Jim Clifton: OK. But anyway... Yeah, well, he's kind of the new David Ogilvy. Ok, so, David, but kind of a new ad, yeah. But he and I were talking about- and he started an ad agency in his dorm, but a lot of it's about a dream and you really have a dream because all these kids really need independence, too. Having a boss doesn't work very well [Laughing].

 

Brian Lord: Right. Right.

 

Jim Clifton: But he started an ad agency that got big and famous. But we're talking about somewhere he got to a place where he said "Dream it, build it." And that's where I thought that word "build" is a better word. But when you go to Mexico or England, the word entrepreneurship doesn't have the status that it does here. In Mexico, it means you couldn't get another job so you've got to be one. You see what I mean? It doesn't translate well. And in England, Branson and some others have kind of they call them entrepreneurs. They're coming out of it. But it meant that you couldn't go to college or whatever and so you have to kind of sell fruit out of the back of a truck and all that. Yeah. So we needed a better word. So those are what drove it. And people really like the builder, really worked. It also works for the people that want to do non-profits, because as far as our economy goes, let's say that I want to start, I don't know, some kind of a new technology thing. But you want to start a children's museum. That's just fine. Nonprofit children's museum. I mean, you still have to it's still going to be jobs and it creates economic energy and everything else, just for whatever reason happens to be not nonprofit, but what can you build?

 

Brian Lord: So what are you building right now? To put the pressure on you?

 

Jim Clifton: Well, let's see. Well, one thing I'll probably talk to the audience today about it too, but our chief scientist kind of came out scratching his head and he said, "I think I can prove that the practice of management doesn't work anymore." I said, "Well, what exactly does that mean?" "Well, how would you show me that mathematically?" But if you look at how people are doing in the workplace, you know, with everything else shooting up, you know, we're getting huge breakthroughs in cancer and all sorts of things. Now, technology, you know, they got special words for Moore's Law and all that, but yet this thing just locked in. But people aren't- lives aren't improving in the workplace. I'm always kind of making stuff. But the one I'm most excited about now is we're creating the new way to lead. And so you come in, you go, "So what you're deal you probably got an MBA from Stanford. OK, great, way to go. Don't use it here ever again. Hang it at the door and try to forget everything and manage people this way." I was speaking of a dream... My team and I have a dream that we get everybody to switch the old way of managing performance management, ratings, rankings, and all that. There's no question it makes people worse. So you say, "OK, I'll unplug it." And we've had huge companies do it. But then they say to us, "What should we go to? We know how to shut it off. We don't know how to run a thousand teams." Or, you know, if you're Accenture and you have 500,000 professionals, I mean some of these companies... But so they need a system. But so we're... I'm really excited about making that.

 

Brian Lord: How has polling changed over time?

 

Jim Clifton: There was a time when I another guy and I started a market research company in Lincoln, Nebraska, and if you can imagine that we would do a poll of farmers and ranchers, sometimes hog farmers or whatever, in which you want to do is once a number comes up and you select it and then you call it and they answer. That's really a good one. If you had a bunch of them that don't answer, hang up. That's what you call nonresponse bias. Right. In the old days where corn farmers, ranchers in the Midwest, every single one would participate. Nobody hangs up.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah!

 

Jim Clifton: I mean, this is nuts, but sometimes the spouse would say, "Well, Homer went into town, he should be back. He went in to get a new shovel. It's snowing here."

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: "Oh, but he'll call you back."

 

Jim Clifton: I don't really want you to [call back]. It's OK. We can... But they would. They'd even call back! But the polls in the old days with telephones were so accurate. I mean you could hit elections and the only way to get them to a tenth of a percent now is cell phones and everything. You also have a whole bunch of people on the run with debt. They can't take any phone calls. So if you see something you don't know, but there's more people that are strange. You got communication, you know, used to be just one telephone. Nobody called long distance and everything else. But so now the nonresponse bias, one up to about 80 percent.

 

Brian Lord: Oh, wow.

 

Jim Clifton: You can still mathematically correct for it pretty well. But if you make one little mistake down in that 20 percent, it blows the whole thing apart. It's much harder to do. We do polls in 160 countries around the world, b it's always so interesting... Because if we're doing an election, remember, we don't work for Democrats or Republicans or anything else, but we do more polls and everybody else put together. But there's a poll in Kenya, it's all in-person. And so if I come to your house and I start asking you a question, how's your life going and all that? Yeah, you everybody takes it. And so we're I mean, we are... We can hit elections in Africa and the Middle East and all that. I mean, just write down two-tenths of a percent. But you get to England, France, Germany or the, you know, Canada, US or Japan or whatever. It's really getting hard.

 

Brian Lord: How does that change your perspective? So when you took over Gallup, you know, it was primarily a US-based company. Now it's in 40, 50  countries. And how is that sort of changed what you do and maybe change your perspective on the world?

 

Jim Clifton: I'm a hundred percent red-blooded American, but it's very difficult. I never really saw the world through their eyes until you really sit and work. I mean, when you're doing a lot of polls and all that and you set up an office, you got to hire a bunch of people and [Inaudible]. I mean, so but so I tend to know an awful lot of people in our offices and that but I mean this humbly. But I have a lot better world perspective than I did before. There's nothing like being in business with somebody in another country. I mean, there's... I mean, there's no way the government, the State Department, nobody can- We're better ambassadors as business people than anything America has ever done. And George Washington, actually, one of the things he said before he died, "Relationships with other countries going forward should be more about business, not about politics." So that'd be my short answer.

 

Brian Lord: So one of the questions we got in for you from- This is from Leah Hayes, who actually she runs a podcast her story of success on... That actually focuses on female entrepreneurs. But the question was, "What is the most surprising poll result you've ever had?"

 

Jim Clifton: One of the most surprising ones was right after 9/11. And this is public, but we do a lot of stuff for the military and all over the place. But so we were here. Nobody knew what a Sunni or Shia or anything, but so we were asked to build sampling frames. I don't know, maybe about 1.5 ten billion Muslims. You can get most of them with just ten, ten countries or something like that. But anyway, we're all told that that they hate us for our freedom. Were most mad about is their lives were falling apart. We have a question of "How is your life going?" "Well, not very well, especially with the young males." When young males don't have jobs. Here's a big one. No hope for a job. That's where you find hope. They get really uncomfortable and dangerous. "We say is there anything about that you admire about Americans at all?" "Yeah, I'd give anything for their freedom." You see, we had it exactly- America had it exactly backward. You gotta be careful with that kind of thing, because then once you start doing all the communications, because your premise, your basic premise is wrong, the more you communicate, the worse you make it.

 

Brian Lord: How would you balance that with the American need- You talked about that for the American need for entrepreneurship and you've talked about how America has just taken off growth. Everyone predicted that Japan and Germany, you know, 30 years ago would blow by America. And America has their right on those, too. And America just blew by all expectations. But how do you balance that with other countries that have that need where the young men aren't getting jobs? How can America kind of build-out and maybe assist the rest of the world in that way?

 

Jim Clifton: Well, I think one of the things we've done so well, we've got to do it better, but we've got to do business with them.

 

Brian Lord: Mm-hmm.

 

Jim Clifton: And that's why I think the United States can and will rise up again. Where again, I think it's okay with your audience here. This is awfully American, but the world works better when we lead it. Mm-hmm. And it works better when we lead it in a way with real positive trade.

 

Brian Lord: Yeah.

 

Jim Clifton: When we're helping them grow their GDP as well. You know, we've always been the very best at entrepreneurship. And I think that... And you get so many of them, as long as we can be a beacon, you know, for the best entrepreneurs in the world. I mean, I think it's okay for their countries who don't want to lose them, but they're going somewhere. But if we could become that hub or that watering hole for the whole world, I think it fuels. What America's got to do is we got to see our market as a whole world and we got to get our GDP growing at about three and a half percent when we do it lifts the... All the boats rise.

 

Outro: Thank you for joining us for the Beyond Speaking podcast to learn more about today's guest. Go to BeyondSpeak.com. Make sure to leave a review and subscribe wherever you listen.

Book Jim Clifton at https://premierespeakers.com/jim_clifton.

 

Beyond Speaking is hosted by Brian Lord and produced by Eric Woodie