Adam Torres and Norman Wolfe discuss The Living Organization.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Norman Wolfe, Founder & CEO at Quantum Leaders, explore “The Living Organization: Transforming Business to Create Extraordinary Results,” and Norman’s upcoming book.
About Norman Wolfe
Norman Wolfe founded Quantum Leaders to help leaders develop their organizations to be more effective at achieving their goals and become extraordinary. Drawing from over 40 years of experience leading organizations and researching how individuals and collectives create outcomes, he developed The Living Organization System to help organizations achieve extraordinary success.
About Quantum Leaders
Quantum Leaders help organizations achieve their goals by integrating business management with personal and collective transformation.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be part of guests on the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, today I have Norman Wolfe on the Line and he is the founder and CEO over at Quantum Leaders, and he’s also the author of the Living Organization.
Transforming business to create extraordinary results. And I should mention that this is a series with a part two that I’m told that breaking news over here. Part two I’m told is that the publisher and there’s even plans for a part three coming. So first thing first Norman, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Adam. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m really looking forward to our conversation. Alright, Norman, so first off congrats. I understand that the the second book is at the publisher and there’s even plans for another. So congrats on that. How do you feel, I mean, this is a, this is a long time coming.
I see The last one was published according to Amazon in 2011, I believe. So how do you feel? Yes, I, I feel great. I feel the energy around the living organization paradigm shift, if you will, is. Is beginning to pick up. I’ve learned a lot over the last decade working with clients implementing the core principles and developing some leadership work and and execution strategies.
So yeah, it’s pretty exciting to see the whole thing begin to take shape and it’s been a long time coming, but it’s quite exciting. Wonderful. Let’s start, I wanna start with that concept, the living organization. Sure. Was this like and I want to take you back in the day. So like, when you, when you first created this concept, like how did it come about?
Was it like an epiphany one day and it was just this burst of inspiration? Was it a buildup? Like how did you come up with that brand and or that concept? Well, it started with me after many, many years of consulting what I call now in hindsight, the sort of opportunistic consulting. I didn’t really have a specific focus.
At least I didn’t articulate a specific focus. I worked with prospects. They’d have an issue. I knew I could help them. They felt I could help them. We kind of. Did work together. A lot of it’s, you know, work around CEO coaching advisory work. Working on helping leaders execute their strategy.
But I didn’t really have a focus until one day I was talking to one of my previous clients, there was a CEO of a public cloud company. He invited me on the board and it was right after 2001 happened, you know, so right at the turn of the, of the century when we were going through a lot of changes 9 1 1 and a whole bunch of other stuff, I was asking him, Hey, hey Bill, why? Why do you hire me as a consultant? Why do you keep, I mean, why do you put me on the board and all that? And he, without even flinching, he said, Norman, it’s easy. You help me execute faster. That started the journey and as I began to look at what gets in the way of organizations being effective at executing their plans, I began to realize that there was a.
what I now call a paradigm dilemma. If you understand paradigms, it’s the framework of belief systems we have About the challenges we face and how to respond to them. Mm-hmm. And we all create frameworks to help us navigate life. And the traditional framework really started at, in the 19 hundreds where you know, people like Frederick Taylor and Andre Fa, who interestingly enough were two mechanical engineers by training.
Viewed the organization of the, the modern day corporation, you might say, as in a very mechanistic way. The leader designs the organization. The leader decides what the inputs are gonna be, the outputs are gonna be, and then the everybody else is sort of like component parts to the machine. And we even, joke about it.
I mean, we even say things like, people are our most important assets. That’s kind of a, mechanistic way to look at people. We say things like, put the right people in the right seats on the bus. That’s like saying get the right components to put in, you know, to plug onto the motherboard of the, of the computer machine designing.
Mm-hmm. So, so embedded in our thinking, and we don’t even realize that embedded in our thinking is a framework that. Defines how we’re gonna solve the challenges we face. Mm-hmm. One day I was at a conference and somebody, a woman was asking me what I did and I explained basically what I explained to you.
And she said, well, what makes you different? And I stopped and I thought, I. I think I see organizations more like living entities. They have a soul and a purpose and mm-hmm. There’s something that drives them. And I really saw that in the work I did with entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurs actually talk about it.
This is my baby, this is my child. and they talk in that very humanistic way. Yeah. So I began to look at what if we shift the paradigm from thinking of an organization as a machine to thinking of it as a person. There’s a lot of substance, there’s a lot of support for the notion, and even we begin to, I mean, if I ask you to think about your sales organization versus your.
Finance organization. I say describe the differences. You’ll describe it typically in very human terms, like mm-hmm. The sales department’s, this person who has this kind of personality and it’s a different person than the finance department they have, or the engineering department. And we explain it in, in human terms.
So I, I’ve begun to play with those, kind of, with those concepts and develop the living organization framework around it. Wow. And so now you’re coming out with the next, the second edition and a multi edition series. Mm-hmm. What sparked this next book? Like why now? What do you hope? What do you hope comes of it?
Well, when I first wrote the book, I was in a battle with my editor and he described, he basically said to me, Norman, you’re writing a trilogy. I didn’t understand what that meant. And he said, you’re coming up with a brand new concept, and if you look at. When new concepts are introduced it goes through a, journey almost like, you know, Joseph Campbell’s I forgot the name of his book, all of a sudden.
Mm-hmm. You know, the Man With a Thousand Faces? The, the, the Hero’s Journey. Mm-hmm. He said a trilogy follows a certain pattern. First is the encounter. That’s the new idea that you’re trying to introduce. Think of Star Wars as a, as a metaphor. Luke comes across, meets Obi one, and all of a sudden he learns about this thing called the force.
Mm-hmm. And he learns that it’s real and he can kind of touch it and taste it. The book and the first movie, second movie, the journey, the journey to becoming a Skilled Jedi Master. He goes to dab bot, he learns the, the skillset. he’s trained by Yoda and he becomes a Jedi master. Hmm. And then the third book is the return where you take the skills that you’ve learned and in the new way of thinking and the new way of living life.
And you bring it back to the world and, and save the world. That’s the return. So when I wrote the first book, there was always intended to bring out the encounter, the journey.
It took me over a dozen years of working with clients to figure out what the. Journey should look like. What kind of training do they need? You know, I have the principles, but principles and application are like miles apart. So it took over a decade to figure it out, working with clients and when I finally sensed working with clients, but I had the substance of it, the, the basic framework of it.
My wife and I, my wife’s a partner and she’s actually the co-author of this book. Oh, wow. She brings a lot of, a lot of different perspectives to my, I’m, I’m basically a philosopher and a model maker and a, an engineer and, I’m very logical and rational. My wife’s an, an artist an improvisation performer, very creative, also very grounded in business, so she brings a whole.
Other way to it. So we decided to write the second book as a narrative, as a story of, CEO’s the life of A CEO, who’s struggling with getting their organization to make certain changes and to, be able to move into new areas of, of possibilities. Mm-hmm. And this brilliant consultant named Merlin, because it’s all magical.
Comes along and, and helps ’em through the journey. And it’s a story of the two of them working together. It’s a, we’re quite excited about it and quite excited that publisher picked this up. So yeah, so that’s how it happened. That’s, that’s why it took so long. I had to actually work with clients to find it.
Everything about the living organization comes out, what you might call, grassroots development. It, it comes from actually working with clients over the years. Mm. Helping them. So it’s very practical, even though it’s a theoretical shift. Mm-hmm. It, it’s grounded in, in real life practice. Can you give an example of like, like from the book or it could be from the new book, upcoming book, the old one.
Like what exactly The living organization. I know you say a a comparison, but like, can you give May maybe put a little bit around that for us. Sure. Let’s see, where do I want to begin? I know there’s a bunch. I know only someone, you do a 20 minute podcast interview, and I know it’s a philosophy, so that’s the worst thing ever.
Tell a philosopher a slice example on plane. but you know, the think of a leader who has been moving along, being very successful. Achieving a certain level of results and they establish a new strategy. A new strategy is really a statement of saying, what has gotten us here really won’t get us there.
Mm-hmm. Right. A new strategy is in essence. Defining a new way we have to behave, we have to create new outcomes. It may be introducing a new product or moving into new segments of the market, or shifting from a, I’ll say just grossly a manual based operation to a technology based operation.
Whatever the strategy is that you’re trying to implement, it fundamentally requires moving from. A set of behaviors that have been honed over, typically over years, to get the collective people to operate a certain way, to respond to customers in a certain way, to carry a certain brand image and so forth.
And now you’re gonna change it somehow. Mm-hmm. Well, the dynamics of changing that is more based on changing human behaviors than it is changing the way a machine. Operates. Mm-hmm. We look at it as one of the core principles of, the Living Organization framework is that to machines create results by optimizing its activity.
Mm-hmm. Humans results are really an interaction of three dynamic forces. The activity we do that’s like a machine, but we also are greatly impacted by our relationships. And also greatly impacted by. Context. Context is fundamentally the, set of rules. We have belief systems we have about how I should respond to an event in life.
We all have it. Every single one of us, we couldn’t navigate life without it. It’d be like, you know, that, that movie about 51st days, right? Every mm-hmm. Every morning she wakes up doing, you know, having to start all over again. That’s what life would be like if we didn’t have this ability to create sort of an inner set of behavioral rules of how we respond to life.
But that’s what happens when an organization develops a set of. Behavioral rules of how we respond to get the results we want. But once you have to change that, now you’re stuck. You can’t change it by just simply changing activities. People don’t respond that way, so you have to learn about. How to change relationship dynamics and how to change context, not only at the individual level, but at the collective level.
And that’s a lot about what the book attempts to do is to, and that’s why we get stuck in why 70% of all strategies fail. So we don’t understand. We’re really dealing with a human system, not a mechanistic system. And so we, we address the problems from a wrong perspective. I know there’s a lot there and a lot to go through, but I hope I been able No, and that’s where No, no, no.
And that’s why you got a book out, man. That’s right. And soon to have two books out. That’s the point. And now soon to be a second book and then a. Third, that’s why there’s gotta be a lot of information there. No, this is wonderful. I love it. Norman, this is great. I wanna spend a little bit of the time, with the time we have left here, maybe tell us a little bit about quantum leaders and your work there.
Well, actually it’s interesting because Quantum Leaders was the core of, my consulting. I just named it was a, what I do is I help CEOs advise them on how to more effectively execute their strategy. So it’s all of these principles that we’ve talked about, how to apply ’em. We’ve developed a set of leadership skills.
I’m also. Expanding now and building what I call the living organization community. Community. So yes, I still work with clients. Usually I limit it nowadays, but what I’m doing is training other consultants and building this living organization community so that other consultants can. Work with other, you know, CEOs and, really expand our impact and reach and, really transform the way businesses operate.
Hmm. What does, what types of companies normally get the most value outta working with you in your, in your team typically? Well, it actually applies to, it’s interesting because when you look at an organization as if it was a person mm-hmm. Then it really doesn’t matter what size. Organization you’re dealing with, you can be a single individual.
So a model applies to coaching people. It could be a team, could be a, small company or a very large company. Because the principles are all the same. The dynamics get a little bit more complicated, the bigger you are. Mm-hmm. But it’s, it’s all the same, of course. and, and so I tend to work with my, personal preference is working with what you might call the middle market company.
So. 50 million to 500 million sized companies is my sweet spot. I do work with, I have one client now that’s only drinking about a million. But I enjoy, I enjoy him and I enjoy, you know, one-on-one coaching. Mm-hmm. But most of the, most of the deep work I do with organizations are in companies that are 50 to about 500 million.
And that’s just my sweet spot. I have other members in the community that, that like to work with startups. Others like to work in larger corporations, so it’s, gonna be expanded throughout, but let’s just say quantum leaders, my company is focused on that middle market company.
Amazing. Well, Norman, this has been really a lot of fun having you on the show today. If anybody, you here watching this? If they wanna pick up a copy of your book, if they wanna sign up or if they wanna learn more, go to your website. Anything else? Like how do people connect with you? How do they follow your content in general?
the book is, on Amazon. They can also get it through our website. The website is quantum leaders.com. You can sign up on the website, a contact page. We invite you to sign up for our newsletter to follow us. Mm-hmm. there’s gonna be some UA YouTube channel. We we’re starting to kick off.
Certainly you can find me on LinkedIn Norman Wolf on, on LinkedIn. Then pretty obvious. So those are the ways people can follow me. Perfect.
And for speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is the Daily Show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Norman, thanks again for coming on the show. Adam, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.