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Our guest today is COO Alliance member and COO of 15Five, Jim Morrisroe.
As a Technology Executive and recovering CEO with over 25 years of experience in the software and computer hardware industry, Jim is a results-focused operator with a successful track record of building high-growth companies.
Jim has a talent for developing winning strategies; bringing great products to market; executing against sales goals; controlling costs; deploying automated systems and efficient processes. He also has a track record of building real company value resulting in four consecutive company M&A exits, creating over $1B in shareholder returns.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
- Building a companionship to help the CEO to feel less lonely
- Defining the unique roles between the CEO and COO
- The importance of identifying the “mission base” for your company
- Best tips for reinforcing trust between the CEO and COO
- Managing the corporate politics within a staff of over 300
Resources:
Connect with Jim Morrisroe: LinkedIn
15Five – https://www.15five.com
Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn
Get Cameron’s latest book: The Second in Command – Unleash the Power of Your COO
Subscribe to our YouTube channel – Second in Command Podcast on YouTube
Get Cameron’s online course – Invest In Your Leaders
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Our guest is COO Alliance member and COO of 15Five, Jim Morrisroe. As a Technology Executive and recovering CEO with over 25 years of experience in the software and computer hardware industry, Jim is a results-focused operator with a successful track record of building high-growth companies. Jim is a talent for developing winning strategies, bringing great products to market, executing against sales goals, controlling costs, deploying automated systems and efficient processes. He also has a track record of building real company value resulting in four consecutive company M&A exits, creating over $1 billion in shareholder returns. Jim, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Cameron. I think I helped write that intro on my LinkedIn a few years ago, so it’s good to hear it again.
I’m having dinner with a guy who wrote my bio years ago, and he called me a world-renowned speaker. I’m like, “Christopher, I’ve only spoken in two countries.” He goes, “You’re world-renowned to me.” Every time people read the bio, I just laugh that it’s Christopher that wrote it. I’m excited to talk to you for a couple of reasons. One, I’m very enamored with the business of 15Five, and I’ve been around the company since the very inception. Dave Hassell, who’s the Founder and CEO of 15Five, I think he even may have heard the concept of a 15Five report from me speaking at an event at MIT. My mentor, who’s being groomed as the CEO at Starbucks, talked to me about 15Five reports. I think Dave built the entire company. I can’t take credit for anything past that.
Do we have a PIIA for your invention?
No, it wasn’t my idea. I’ve never had a unique idea. I’ve talked about that actually that my R&D stands for Rip-off and Duplicate. I’m excited to learn about the 15Five business and why you’re involved. I’m also really intrigued as to what it was that you saw to get involved with a guy like Dave, who I’ve known forever and a day, and he’s a wonderful human. Why don’t you talk to us a little bit about your backstory first, and then we’ll get into that?
As we highlighted in my background, I’ve done a lot in software, or I like to think I have, over the last several years. From the beginning of COVID in 2020 up until 2021, I was out of the formal tech workforce. I had vowed to myself that although I didn’t have enough money to retire given my lifestyle, that I wasn’t going to go back into tech, that there was some other calling for me.
I was doing a lot of service work with the homeless community in the Bay Area during the first year of COVID, delivering meals and doing some life-coaching to addicts. Although that’s not an economically fulfilling job, it was human-fulfilling in a major way. I really connected with myself during that process in a pretty meaningful way too.
When I took the first recruiter call that I had taken in fourteen months, it was the first call I picked up. It was David’s recruiter. This company that I had never heard of 15Five was looking for a COO. Obviously, I know the role, I know the job, I didn’t know the company. I didn’t know why I took the call, but I did. Something just clicked about the recruiter’s pitch, and I took a call with David. I took the call with the intention of turning him down very quickly.
Something magical happened with just the intersection of where my heart and soul were at the time, given my service work and the mission that David was on, which is to create a new paradigm in how people come to work. I call it the Monday morning effect. David calls it human thriving, but that’s the desire to want to jump out of bed on Monday morning and get after it. That psychologically is really complicated for us as humans.
The 15Five products and our education and training services are all designed to create that effect for people and to help companies enhance performance by focusing on the humans there. Just over the course of meeting the team and meeting David, I came out of half-baked retirement and literally, I’ve jumped out of bed every day for the last few months since I’ve been here.
I totally get it too. I get the probable connection with him. I’m curious what it was that had you even considered, because you’ve been the CEO a few different times with companies in the tech space. Why would you even consider going into the COO role? Not that I diminish either of them. Sheryl Sandberg has been COO of Facebook for many years, and she doesn’t want a CEO role. What was it that intrigued you to go that route?
I’ve learned enough about my zone of genius or pseudo genius where I just can’t see the playing field further than twelve months out. I just don’t have the entrepreneurial vision or the product insights or even maybe the mental capacity to see things 36 months from now, but I have a really good X-ray vision to see things quarterly and for the next twelve months. That realization that happened sometime over the last few years, plus the CEO job’s kind of shitty. It’s lonely and you don’t really have your crew. I empathize deeply with David, and I remember how I felt. My job really is to help him feel less lonely, but it’s something that maybe I’ll do again. I just think I’m a much better second-in-command than I am a CEO because of those things.
You said to help the CEO feel less lonely. I’ve often said that the job of the COO is to shine the spotlight on the CEO to make them iconic. Walk us through the whole feeling them less lonely part because you’re right and it’s intriguing.
Whether it’s your board, whether it’s your management team, although you have this trust and companionship and shared execution with your management team, at the end of the day, they’re still your employees when you’re the CEO. Their personal needs financially come out. That causes a situation where everyone that you engage with needs something from you, and everyone on the surface is your partner, but they’re also, at the end of the day, your employee or your constituency.
CEO And COO Roles: Although you have this trust, companionship, and shared execution with your management team, at the end of the day, they’re still your employees when you’re the CEO.
For me, personally, that created a loneliness that I didn’t have as a senior executive where I had eight peers. As a CEO, you have no peers. That to me personally created a little bit of loneliness and isolation. I think all CEOs feel it. What I’ve told David is, “Look at me as your partner as best you can, and let’s keep mindful that I am your employee. At the end of the day, you make the final decision. Let’s keep this thing as a partnership of equals the best we can because it helps both of us and ultimately helps the company.”
You’re touching on something. Harvard wrote an article years ago called The Misunderstood Role of the COO. One of the seven distinct types of Chief Operating Officers they uncovered was the partner role, and that’s what you’re talking about. Dave is in Forum and YPO. He’s got all these entrepreneur groups he’s a part of. You’re right, he can’t completely be open and vulnerable with the board. He’s got to be a little bit guarded and he can’t open up to his other C-level executives and say he’s scared or worried or overwhelmed or doesn’t know. What makes it okay for the CEO to almost be in the two-in-a-box with the CEO, where the other C-level executives are just on the org chart? Why are we different?
On the surface, we’re not different unless we position ourselves to be different. I’ve had the opportunity to really build a bond with Dave, although we’ve only met in person 3 or 4 times because we’re a remote first company and obviously because of the times. We’ve been able to transcend the executive bond to be very human bonds. Then we’ve drawn really clear roles and responsibilities, swim lanes for each other.
We’re unique personalities and that we are radically different. I talked earlier about how I can’t see things in 36-month increments. David really can’t see things in quarterly or twelve-month increments. It’s a perfect partnership. We almost have a personality alignment. As long as we just remember that and have complete trust in each other, I think we’re able to break through that challenge that we talked about.
I feel like you’ve been eavesdropping in on the phone calls I’ve been having. I’m working on a book called Two in a Box about the CEO-COO partnership, and talking about the roles and responsibilities in clear swim lanes and talking about the trust that’s being developed, our two key selling points I’ve been talking about with somebody who’s helping me on the book. Can you walk us through how you decided what the roles and responsibilities were for you and what they were for him, and how you divided and conquered there?
If we look at this timeline view that I’ve mentioned a couple of times, I really am responsible for everything for the next twelve months, including strategy and vision of that window. All of the go-to-market teams at 15Five work for me. I have sales, marketing, customer success. I have amazing C-level leaders for those teams, but they report to me and we collectively make up our executive team. I also have finance because we’re measuring things quarterly and annually. Our amazing CFO works also for me.
David is responsible for vision, culture of the company, things that transcend years and years, and also product and engineering. One, because yes, we can make quarterly product decisions, but it’s better if we think about those quarterly decisions under the umbrella of years or of a long-term strategy. David is also a former engineer and has a passion for the bits and bytes of 15Five. I do too, but it’s just a good swim lane for him to own. That’s probably where we have the most intersection. Sometimes conflict is, “What bets are we making that are two years out and how much capacity does that take from our current quarter ability to make a few bets as well?” We’re still working through that. Most days it’s great, but that swim lane is still a little to be determined.
I remember meeting with Boris Wirtz, who is one of the founders of AbeBooks. They sold for about a billion dollars to Amazon. He was helping us with our product development back at the 1-800-GOT-JUNK days. They really did struggle over that as well on how do you decide what parts of the product to be obsessing about and thinking about? What’s your return on people and time and money there versus, “Let’s get some crap out the door to keep our current customers really happy and to improve the core business.”
I like that you guys have really identified the areas that he’s passionate about and has that deep expertise. Also, it’s interesting that I think about 30% of COOs have finance report to them and 70% don’t. It’s what makes our role unique is we get to take the areas that we’re really good at and we love working on, but we don’t have to take the areas that we suck at. Were there areas of the business that you’re just like, “I’m not good at that?” Can you handle that?
I hit on it earlier, the long-term product vision, this ability to see the future, to see the intersection of secular trends with the amount of work that it takes to build a software product that’s skating to the puck or whatever that hockey analogy is. You know better than I do. It’s just not something that I can see. I do think I have a crystal ball to see things, certainly 9, 12, 6 months out, but the set of trends around where a product needs to be, it’s just really not where I’m fantastic at. That’s a natural swim lane.
Then entrepreneurial passion, we have the ability to change the world at 15Five, and David leads with that from his heart. He wants us to be a big, successful public company, but first and foremost, he wants to help people thrive at work. He wants to help HR leaders create environments within their companies that help their employees thrive at work for the benefit of increased performance. That’s what David wakes up every day to do. I wake up every day to make sure that we have the best quarter and best financial outcome that we can have this year 2022. Those are super complimentary but I’m not as passion-oriented when I get out of bed.
CEO And COO Roles: We have the ability to change the world at 15Five.
I get it. What about the recruiter call? If we go back to that recruiter call, what was it that she told you about the business that intrigued you? How did she set the hook?
I mentioned I was in the middle of this, and I still do a lot of this work, but I was doing it full-time for a couple of food providers that had housing and shelter and were providing food in a soup kitchen-style fashion for the homeless in the Bay Area. Their entire world was disrupted and they had to shut down their kitchens. They said, “How are we going to do this? Let’s pack meals up in our trucks. We’re going to go out into the encampments and build relationships and deliver meals.”
At first, I thought maybe I would have a nonprofit technology component to help coordinate service providers or somehow get involved with state and local governments so that they could be more effective. I finally realized that that’s a great personal passion, but to scale that is impossible for me to do. I just didn’t have the patience to deal with that intersection of nonprofits and state governance and all of those things.
It had created this service-oriented mindset and how I felt about service, where a mission-obsessed company that was helping people from a different spectrum, but still humans with hearts and goals and souls and passions, helping them at work, connect to their manager, connect to work in a new and improved way, and to jump out of bed on Monday mornings to embrace their careers. That’s something where I was at the time and how the recruiter framed our mission and vision just clicked. Again, I was ready to blow it off, but then David and his passion and heart for it all just reinforced it over the course of a couple of months of interview.
I’m curious on the mission-obsessed side because you’ve mentioned it a few times. I’ve never thought of 15Five as that kind of a company. I definitely see David as wired that way and very heart-centered leader. Is your org chart upside down where the CEO is at the bottom and you guys are all supporting the people and the team? Is that where the mission base comes in or is it really mission-based about helping your clients? Can you explain that to me?
We definitely eat our own dog food, but our mission is to help our clients. The original 15Five product is this simple software tool that allows employees to tell you how they felt at work this week on a simple scale of 1 to 5, and then to report back how their week went and what they need help with to their manager. This is something you and I have done through one-on-ones and structured communications. We have to realize that 90% of managers, especially first-time managers, have no formal manager training and probably only took one Psychology course in college.
CEO And COO Roles: 90% of managers, especially first-time managers, have no formal manager training. The 15Five product allows our most important employees, our frontline managers, to create a little bit of discipline to connect with their employees.
The 15Five product allows our most important employees, our frontline managers, to create a little bit of discipline to connect with their employees. The psychology of that alone changes how our employees feel at work. It changes how we feel at work at 15Five, but our customers get that experience. Then you add in what we do with recognition and one-on-one templates.
Now, we have formal engagement surveys as part of our product. We have performance reviews that we call performance reviews with a heart that allow people to actually not create that psychological baggage that performance reviews create. All of this is packaged up as a set of tools for HR leaders to start to create a more human environment with their managers and their tooling. That’s our mission, and David’s obsessed with it. He wants 300 or so 15Fivers to be the example of this, but we want our customers to feel that too.
I want to go back to the tool itself. COVID must have been great for you guys. I would think that where companies are no longer in-person and around all their employees, they’re looking for tools like this to be able to help them, to grow them, sadly to manage them. I don’t think that’s what this tool is really for. Has that been true?
It has been true, but it’s bigger than that. It’s a really complicated time to be a Chief People Officer, and COVID is part of that. There are other longer-term trends that are probably causing even more complexity. We’ve heard about the great resignation, and that’s really the result of what’s happening with this generational shift in the workforce. As Millennials and Gen Z-ers have come into the workforce, there’s this different set of motivators that they have and different types of things they look for in their jobs and in their companies.
That trend plus COVID plus all of the DEI and work that we all have to do have really forced this Chief People Officer from a tactical role to a very strategic role. The Chief People Officer has gone into the boardroom, and at many points, is the right-hand seat to the CEO because of all these trends. We have by far benefited from these trends but that’s only part of it. We’re here to help those CHROs navigate that as well.
I see this whole Great Resignation as awesome because I think many employees were working for crappy companies, crappy bosses, and they were driving 40 minutes each way for that privilege, and now they realize they don’t have to. It’s going to have to up the game for the middle-type company. The average company can no longer be average. They’re either going to change or die. It’s going to raise the culture for the mean. It’s going to be really strong.
It’s called Great Resignation in the papers, but we call it the Great Reshuffling because it allows companies that are doing this well to really revamp their employee base. There’s some amazing talent that’s available right now if you have the right culture.
It’s pretty extraordinary. You hit the nail on the head when you talked about that most managers have never really been given any skill development around running one-on-one meetings or doing coaching or delegation or just leading people or situational leadership. They’ve had no depth around that. I actually launched a course called Invest in Your Leaders for the sole purpose of giving what I think are the twelve core leadership skills that every manager and leader needs to excel in. Do you guys bundle any training into the 15Five platform? Are you thinking about that yet as a way to grow people as well?
We do. We launched in Q3 of 2021 a product called Transform Manager Accelerator. That is a subscription training and coaching product not focused on directors and executives. Although, we have some customers that target those titles, but it’s a coaching and training offering just focused on frontline managers. We use it to help customers upgrade all of the soft skills of those leaders. We also tie it into best practices so that it reinforces the software and the tooling as well. It has become 30%, 40% of our business in a very quick amount of time because there is so much draw for that. There’s nothing there that cohesively addresses that frontline manager.
It’s really smart. I’ve always said the more that you grow your people, the more they’ll grow your business. I don’t think we’ve done enough, especially for that next generation of leaders or the emerging leaders too. You talked about trust being built between you and the CEO, you and Dave. How should CEOs or COOs go about building trust with each other? From both sides, what can a CEO do better to build trust with their COO? What can a COO do better to build trust with their CEO?
Probably if you were to look at the textbook of two people, CEO and COO, how do you build trust? We don’t have it as natural as you think, because what it takes for any relationship to build trust is vulnerability. It takes a commitment to listening, a commitment to not being right. Vulnerability and listening and admitting when you’re wrong are not traditional leadership skills, and they should be.
I don’t believe in that, but when you look at the traditional folks that have grown into these jobs, “You don’t listen enough and you’re not vulnerable enough. You don’t say, “I know’ enough.” You don’t say, “Help me understand this better enough.” David naturally is a vulnerable inquisitive human. I have learned to be better at that, and I take his lead on this. We have gotten there quickly because of his starting point and then my ability to want to be more vulnerable and connected.
Do you think it is more of a description or an example of a leader in a mid-size organization that vulnerability is a strength? Do you think that changes sadly when you get into the big corporate world where it feels like people get more political and vulnerable become a weakness? Let’s say you’re 1,000-plus or 3,000-plus employees, does vulnerability start to become a weakness, do you think sadly?
Traditionally, it has, but let’s go back to that conversation we just had about the Great Resignation and what it takes to build companies moving forward. Gen Z-ers and Millennials are not going to put up with BS corporate politics and CEOs that aren’t vulnerable. They’re not going to put up with being told what to do unless they felt seen and heard. For sure, there are 80% of leaders out there in thousand-person companies and bigger that aren’t ready for this, but if they don’t change fast, the world’s going to change that.
I heard a great quote years ago. It might’ve been on a Nike t-shirt. The Nike one I saw was, “Somewhere right now, someone is practicing, and when they beat you in head-to-head competition, they’ll beat you.” The quote that I was thinking of was, “If the rate of change outside your business is greater than the rate of change inside your business, you’re out of business.” That’s so true on every level right now. It used to be, “Technology or going online is going to change.” Now it’s like, “The game has changed. The way businesses run has changed. It’s adapt or die.”
Look at how many businesses were taken out with just this internet era and COVID. I know you have college-aged kids. My boys are brilliant and they’re competitive, but they’re wired differently than I was because of the era that they grew up in. If we don’t accept that and figure out how to harness that, we will be out of business as quickly as if we missed the internet era as well.
It’s very true. This is a product, tech question. I gave David some unsolicited advice years ago, and I’m glad he did not listen to me because I think I was wrong now. I told them to make 15Five simple and to keep it simple, and to not add products and not add features. It was basically don’t keep listening to the enterprise customers and adding more to the tech stock because it’ll over-complicate the model, and that we need to teach salespeople how to sell what we’ve got and not say that I can sell it if we have these next three things. How do you balance that? How do you balance keeping it simple versus constantly evolving and adding to? Does it get over-complicated?
It does. It’s one of the things we worked on in 2021, and we still have more work to do. 15Five’s platform is a lot. Any customer over 50 or 100 employees cannot digest it all at once. We actually broke the platform up into discrete solution. You can still buy it as a platform, and many of our customers do, to go on a journey with us. We want the bite-size to be digestible in a quick time. We call it time to value. We want to make sure that first experience gets to value fairly quickly.
You’re right, we had to also because different customers have different starting points. Some want to start with their manager up-leveling and coaching. Some customers want to start with performance reviews because they’re dealing with compensation during the Great Resignation. Some customers don’t even have a baseline of engagement and need to get that psychological survey out to the org. Breaking it up allows us to start at the customer’s pace without asking them to swallow the whole pill.
It makes sense. Instead of saying, “Here’s our seven different software products.” You don’t have to use Microsoft Word and Excel and PowerPoint and Outlook. You can just use Outlook if you want. You can just use Excel if you want. Do you cross-sell to them later?
That’s right. We allow you to unbundle if you want to buy that way. Then we’ll take you on, we call it a journey. Ultimately, it is cross-selling. We’ll take the customer on a journey to add more value over time.
I don’t remember the company, but years ago, 15Five got into a fairly major organization and they were in the Finance Department, maybe it was Starbucks or something. If you’re in one department, how do you build out a virus inside of that company into the big enterprise? You’re not going to try to sell all 10,000 people to do X. How do you get in with 50 people and then grow? I guess a virus is a wrong term. I’m sure you have a better one.
The virus in software companies is usually not great. It’s a good point. The original 15Five product was sold to CEOs and general managers that wanted to create this connected workforce, independent of what HR was doing. We still have thousands of customers, most of them smaller. Those purchases are led by those general managers.
We have been somewhat successful in being able to go lateral within an organization or going from that work group to HR. We did flip the model on its head and realized that the HR pain and the HR buyer, there’s just so much opportunity right now because of these trends that we want to be more focused on where we start with customers. We really have gone from two primary buyers, the general manager and the HR leader to one. Not that we’ve abandoned our general managers, we still want them to find the product, but we just got very HR-centric in 2021. It’s just because we can’t serve two masters, and there’s just so much opportunity with HR right now because of these challenges that we just got focused on.
It’s almost like the Xerox spin cell, the situation problem implication needs a payoff. HR knows what the problems are. You can build it out, then you show 15Five as the solution to all their problems. Whereas, ops doesn’t see any of this as problems. They’re focused on other stuff and now you’re trying to sell something. They’re not trying to fix. That’s really interesting.
HR in the past was a G&A function that didn’t have a lot of juice. Now, that leader has been thrust into the most strategic partner in many ways that the CEO has.
CEO And COO Roles: HR in the past was a G&A function that didn’t have a lot of juice. Now, that leader has been thrust into being the most strategic partner in many ways that the CEO has.
This is not our dad’s or mom’s or grandparent’s HR division anymore, is it?
It used to be, “Collect the taxes and make sure we don’t get sued.” It’s totally different than that.
That’s super interesting actually. That’s got me spinning right now. We have an event for our COO Alliance, and it’s all around sales, marketing, funnels, automation, joint ventures. I’m going to bring this in as a discussion topic around, “Who are we selling to, and is HR the better path?” Two more questions. One is how many employees does 15Five have now? When was your last cash raise? I know you guys have raised money.
We raised money in 2019, and we’re at just about 275 employees.
When you go from the 100 to 300 mark, politics tends to creep into the organization. How are you dealing with that?
We haven’t dealt with it perfectly. I’ve talked about a lot of things we did over 2021, but we upgraded our executive team. I’m new, our CMO is new, our Chief Product Officer is new, our Chief Customer Officer is new, and we just hired a new Senior VP of Engineering. What my concept to deal with this is, one, make sure that there’s as little daylight between the eight of us, including David and Shane, our other Founder, Nazar, our CTO, make sure there’s no daylight between us. It sounds cliché, but the Lencioni Five Dysfunctions worked perfectly for us. There used to be a coach with some of this stuff.
We’ve run through that as our framework and it’s worked perfectly. We got trust, alignment, commitment to our goals, and we have nice clearing conversations when we think each other is full of crap. That’s working. From there, I’m like, “The faster that we can create many CEOs within each of your orgs, the better.” We’re breaking the company up into these functional areas instead of David do all hands. Let each of these functional areas run their big tent team meetings as best we can. We still have all hands meetings on Mondays. We’re transitioning, but I want the personalities that run each of those departments to start to take over the big tent leadership.
I’m going to flip my second to the last question now based on that with each of the big executives. That’s the other thing that happens between 100 and 300, you all of a sudden have a management team at 100, and it’s maybe your first leadership team, but they’re not really the truly skilled, seasoned. When you get to the 300, you build out your first truly seasoned leadership team.
When you do that, each of those members of the leadership team that you just rattled off is like a big boulder. Your job is to sink to the bottom of the pond and you will because you’ve got all the expertise. You’ll all sink together, but all of you cause ripples, good ripple effects and bad ripple effects. How do you manage the bad ripple effects and some of the good? How do you keep your eyes open for that? Were you cognizant of that as a company?
It’s interesting you say that. I love how you framed it ripple effects, and it’s something I have to think a little bit more about. I’ll just tell you how I’ve personally had to deal with it, which I’m a little further along than this conceptual ripple effect. In 2021, I went very quickly into, “This is where I need to make some changes and this is the impact that I can have.” I was very much in the command and control seat. The puppet master comes to mind, but that sounds a little too Machiavellian. I knew what had to get done and I just went out and got things done.
That won’t work this year, 2022, because I have these big boulders. I really convinced myself into, “You’re not the command and control.” 2022 is not about command and control, it’s about the partnership with each of these executives and making sure that just like you and David are peers in the best-case scenario, you’re peers with your executives, and you’re helping them see around corners, but it’s their baby and you’ve got to let go of the strings. That’s what I’ve personally done this year 2022, and I think it’s working. It’s certainly empowering and letting the sunlight shine through to those folks.
My last question is normally, what advice would you give to your 21-year-old self? I’m going to flip it a little bit based on something that you’re doing and you’re passionate about. You’re doing a lot of work with life coaching of addicts. I’d love to know, based on the work you’ve done with them, what advice would you give to people?
There’s obviously a tremendous amount of self-help and spirituality and various things out in the world that I missed. Back to my 21-year-old self, I missed it for 30 years. I had a career. I had four kids. I had a wife. I had a lot of pressure, and I just missed nurturing my heart and soul. To relate this back to 21-year-old, what I would tell my kids is don’t forget that component. It’s not all about ego and brain and overcoming fear through brute force. It’s really about embracing it at the core. That wasn’t how you asked it, but let me just answer it that way.
It’s relative to the learnings that I’ve seen in the trenches of addiction. All of our dysfunction comes from the same place: fear and shame. Some of us weren’t hugged enough. Some of us just have it naturally. It really doesn’t matter, but until you can overcome your shame and actually love yourself, and until you can overcome fear by saying, “I can’t change yesterday. I can’t predict tomorrow. I just have to stay present and mindful and in the here and now.” Those are really powerful tools, both of them. Get to the point where you can love yourself, and then you’ll be more effective in everything you do. Don’t let fear run your life. Just worry about what you can control today.
Jim Morrisroe, the COO for 15Five, I really appreciate you sharing amazing insights, and great conversation. I’m looking forward to bumping into you on the road. We’re both global nomads with our spouses. This will be fun to catch up.
I can’t wait. We should make it a date for sure. Thank you very much.
I appreciate it. Thanks for the time.
