Joe Hamilton 00:46
Joining me today on SPX is chip Webster. Welcome, sir. Thank you. Good to see you again. Joe, you too. I’ve always enjoyed our conversations, and I know this one will be no different. You’ve had a fantastic and interesting life. Cliff Notes are, well, at least the I know of you, professional Cliff Notes are ran Tiger 21 for many years,
Chip Webster 01:21
No, just a few years. I did the Vistage.
Joe Hamilton 01:23
Vistage, that’s it, but essentially, you were in the soup of high powered executives for a long time, and that’s a cool place to be. Bought an RV, did some traveling. It’s all the country, right? And you’re an author. It’s a new book that just came out, unity and service, right? Which we’re going to talk about. Let’s go back a little bit for that. So before Vistage days. And, you know, start a little bit at the beginning and come up, what was life for you before Vistage days?
Chip Webster 01:45
Well, you know, I started out of college working for Sears, thinking I wanted to be president, and worked my way into the Sears Tower. Realized that big bureaucracies weren’t my cup of tea, and I got recruited to leave to a small New York exchange company in Jacksonville called Save the stop. It’s no longer exists, and ended up being a Group Vice President, but there was a real cultural mismatch. I didn’t know that by name. Then it just wasn’t the right place for me, and back in California, went from originally in the design and graphics business, put together brands for Sears. Once again, it was owned by a public company, and I was an officer of one of their subsidiaries, but I really am entrepreneurial, and I figured out entrepreneurs are unemployed and unemployable, so I did different stuff, like selling vending equipment, published independent phone books. And then a friend of mine told me about this thing called Tech, which is now called Vistage, and,
Joe Hamilton 02:41
sorry, independent phone books ?
Chip Webster 02:41
Yeah, I published independent phone books.
Joe Hamilton 02:41
What is that business? And I mean, I get it, what it is, but how did it work?
Chip Webster 02:43
Well, this was back in the 80s, and people don’t know it, but the phone book was the most profitable thing the phone telcos had, and we found out we could compete with them. So we would go into smaller markets. The first market I did was west of Atlanta, so it was Carrollton, Bowden, fillerica and Bremen, they all had these little, tiny phone books, and Carrollton was really the center. So we came in consolidated directories and put all those phone books into one, white pages and yellow pages, we made the print bigger and the white pages so people could read it. And then we sold ads. And then we put local sports teams in the West Georgia College schedule and made it a real community. And the cover was always a local landmark. And we did that all in North Carolina, South Carolina.
Joe Hamilton 03:32
And so who owned data for that, all the numbers, and was that public record?
Chip Webster 03:35
Yeah, it was. They had to sell us. The telcos had to sell us the white pages, right?
Joe Hamilton 03:39
And it had to be at a reasonable price. They weren’t trying to hose right? And then so were you in situations then where you were delivering your telephone book and they were delivering their book, and you just, whoever you just wanted yours to be used. And sometimes people had two?
Chip Webster 03:51
Everybody had two, yeah. And what we found, what at each place I did it, there would be a small college, and I worked with a small college marketing professor and have them do a telephone survey, and we were the number one phone book in every market because everything was there. They could read it, and the other schedules, etc, were in there.
Speaker 1 04:08
And as your business progressed and matured, did a did they ever reach out and say, Hey, let’s not compete, let’s partner. Or did they ever just give up?
Speaker 2 04:18
At the end of my when I left Ameritech, which was a telco in the Midwest, was consolidating these independent phone book companies, and they made us an offer that we should not have refused. I had partners. I was minority interest, and they didn’t want to take it, and my good friends were we had all this cash, and they were buying airplanes and buying buildings. Never knew about leasing. They just didn’t understand cash flow. They were great guys, but not business people. And I called a friend of mine who was our house counsel at the company in Jacksonville, and told him what was going on. And he said, You need to get out of there. So I sold my interest. Never. Paid all the way through and then came down here. Started from scratch, Vistage. And I was the first successful Vistage chair in the Tampa Bay market. Interesting.
Speaker 1 05:08
And in your childhood, did you, you know a lot of entrepreneurialism starts very early. I was a baseball card guy. Did you have newspaper route or some kind of entrepreneurialism in your early days?
Speaker 2 05:18
Yeah, I’ve been told by my mom, I don’t totally remember this. I used to sell yesterday’s newspapers to ladies in the neighborhood before I was in kindergarten in Burbank, California. And then when we moved to Ventura, we had avocado trees and stuff. So I’d sell fruit and vegetables. And the first guy who paid me to do anything was probably in the third or fourth grade, was Joe McConnell who washed our windows. We had a two story house, and guy would come and wash our windows, and he gave me his business cards, and he paid me to go knock on doors and hand out his window washing cards. And the rest is history,
Joe Hamilton 05:55
A long and varied history. So Vistage, which was called tech?
Chip Webster 05:58
It was originally the executive committee tech, tech.
Joe Hamilton 06:01
So talk about what those types of businesses are for people that might not be familiar.
Chip Webster 06:05
Sure it’s really a peer group with a facilitator, slash, we’re called coaches now, but it’s a wonderful organization where you bring together these CEOs that work together for a long time. Some of the groups have been together for 40 and 50 years. Second generation. I was fortunate enough to have some really interesting people, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But you get together once a month and work on opportunities. Where am I going? What do I need to do? What’s the strategy? And then you meet with the chair. In between each meeting, we really get down to the nitty gritty, and what you find out is everything’s related to everything. You know, when I got out of college, he said, leave your personal problems at home and come to work, the human shows up. Yeah, you know, so we’d end up with divorces or kids on drugs or and but work through with peers who had been there and done that and had this great and cared about each other, and we hold each other accountable, which was a really interesting part of it. You remember discount auto parts? They remember the group, and we talked through them going public, and Gordon Tungstal helped them go public checkers. Herb Brown was in the group, and he was running out of cash. I don’t know if you remember, when you’d be driving down the street, there’d be two checkers trucks with the kiosks that they would carry and then drop on pads. And he was growing so fast he ran out of money. And He came to the room said, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I may have to declare bankruptcy. And we said, Stop right now. Gordon tunckle said, I’ll get you some interim financing. Took him public and saved him. But it was, I mean story after story, those are the more visible ones.
Joe Hamilton 07:33
And what was the structure as you as a facilitator, the code was the structure of a meeting. Was it very free flow, or did you have an agenda?
Chip Webster 07:40
I had an agenda. We would bring in speakers. I was very fortunate to have Peter Schutz, the former president of Porsche, and many times talking about how he turned Porsche around, and then talking about life cycles of corporations. Clark Johnson, who built pyrwin imports from less than 100 million to a billion. He retired a long time ago before when bankrupt, just people like that, would sit for three hours and have a conversation with 1213, people. So it was a real interactive and they really could pick each other’s brains. So after the speaker would leave, then I’d have an agenda, and there would be, we call them issues, but they’re really, what are the biggest opportunities that you need to be working on? And members would come and say, I’m going to do this, this and this, and then say, you know, three months later, what have you done? Wow, you know. So it was a lot of accountability. Yeah, you may have remember a company called Southern culvert. They were the largest pipe manufacturer in the state of Florida, and you know, he Kelly been a member of the group for probably 10 years, and he came to one of the meetings and said, I’m gonna go sell my go meet a buyer tomorrow, and I’m going to sell the business. Well, I’ve been having lunch with this guy every month for 10 years. You think I have a feel for him? Yeah, and I just said, Who’s going to represent you? Well, you know, I went to Harvard and I, you know, I’ve been in the second generation in the business. I can represent myself. He was kind of tight. I stopped the meeting, and I said, How many of you think he should represent himself? Nobody raised his hand, and we got, I don’t remember Terry Aven Pizer. Terry represented him. So I knew that Kel would take 18 million for the business. Terry got him 36 million. Wow. And what he did, which was so neat, is this was a big international concrete company. They knew all the costs they wanted his P and L, so I said, I’ll tell you how much concrete I buy a year, cement to create the pipes. You tell me what it’s worth.
Joe Hamilton 09:35
This is a great story, yeah, just a clever perspective. Wow, yeah. And it was a somewhat higher end group, right? There was a minimum, oh,
Chip Webster 09:43
eYah, those days you needed to have, what do we say? $3,000,000 and 20 employees. But we had ring power. We had a lot of big companies. And what I found was interesting that it wasn’t necessarily how big they were, but who they were. I don’t know if you remember John West of system one staffing. He didn’t qualify on paper, right, but I saw this spark in him, and he sold his business for 85 million so and he will tell you, in his early years that the stage made a big difference.
Joe Hamilton 10:13
You know, nowadays, on YouTube and in places like that, sort of personal business Betterment is bajillions of hours of content, and this was essentially your life for a couple of decades. Yeah, and so, and you’re feeding that back all into helping them, but right, you know, for you personally, then how did you leverage that personally in your own career?
Chip Webster 10:33
Well, it was funny, and a number of people, in fact, when Dennis Fontaine, unfortunately, was dying right after we went public, just that’s just kind of parts. He said he learned more at Vistage than he did at Harvard. Wow, because it was real bullets, real blood on the table. People’s net worth on the table. I mean, these weren’t theories, these were not case studies. And you’re there every month, and you see what happens. I won’t say his name. I had a member who kept bringing the same problem. He’s a significant business in the area, kept bringing the problem. And one day I said, stop. The group has told you what to do. I want you to leave the meeting right now and go do what we’ve told you to do, and don’t come back until you did it. He left, never came back, and the business tanked. If he had done what the group was trying to get him to do, he might still have been in business.
Joe Hamilton 11:28
You know, for you personally, that is a bold move. I mean, it probably seems logical to you.
Chip Webster 11:32
I was absolutely I can’t believe I did it after I walked out. What did they just do? You know, I didn’t want to lose a number. I like the guy who was a friend, but he needed to do it.
Joe Hamilton 11:42
And part of that is not only what’s right for him, but it probably is detracts from the group experience here. The same problem over and over.
Chip Webster 11:49
We’re not gonna sit here and listen to you whine. You’re either gonna play the game or go sit on the bench. Nice. And that’s what made the group work. You know, when I was president of Vistage, Florida, we were up to like, 75 groups and 900 members, and I would go visit. And some chairs, you know, it was just a nice social thing. And other chairs, it was like, No, we’re gonna play the game. Yeah, real bullets, real money.
Joe Hamilton 12:17
Well, I’d be remiss not to ask you, then, what are some of the most common traits of the most successful. I mean, you you had the, you know, your front row for a lot of the most successful people in business.
Chip Webster 12:28
You know, I, for a long time, said it’s passion, you know, I look at these guys, and passion can be demonstrated in different ways. It can be very steady, but just consistent. I think passion, I think curiosity, being willing to challenge what you’re doing, always wanting to take it to the next level, the ability to put the right people on the team. What’s really hard, I mean, I’ve suffered from this at times, is not wanting to let somebody go who’s not helping us. I think taking risks passion, curiosity and the ability to attract people and build trust. Trust, I now believe, is the foundation of everything.
Joe Hamilton 13:08
Yeah, it’s the lubricant for business, right, right? Everything runs smoother if you have trust, right, right?
Chip Webster 13:13
And you know, your job is to get the right people on the bus and in the right seats. That metaphor,
Joe Hamilton 13:18
I think, passion is, you know, I see it as a fuel for a lot of those other things. If you’re passionate about something, you’re going to be naturally curious, you’re going to persevere, right? You’re going to be more trustworthy, because the passion is authentic. It just underlies a lot of the other qualities.
Chip Webster 13:32
A friend of mine, who was in the direct selling business, used to say the secret to success is when you’re down, get up and don’t kick a skunk. Yeah? So I guess part of his knowing what battle pragmatism.
Joe Hamilton 13:45
So, you know, he basically then ran that you there was a transition to Tiger 21?
Chip Webster 13:49
Yeah, I retired from running Vistage Florida, and was kind of bored, and a friend of mine was trying to get a group going, and he never could get it going. He said, Why don’t you try it? And I did it for about 18 months, and covid came. And my wife’s immunocompromised. She’s a retired cardiologist, so she’s really dialed into all this, and she was still working part time, and this is in January, February of 2020 and we’re sitting, we live at beach drive, and we’re looking at the Yacht Club, and we just got this neat little cruiser. We were going to spend a lot of time on the water. And she didn’t ride up and down in the elevators, because, you know, you get if you’re immunocompromised, you got covid, it was the death sentence. So I said, Well, why don’t we buy an RV? I thought she’d say, no, but we have kids in Seattle, San Diego, St Louis, Philadelphia, in here, and we weren’t a fly to see grandkids, so we bought an RV, and we did five loops of the US for about six months at the time, and it’s fabulous. I mean, I had crossed the country a couple times before in a car. She had, and, you know, to go to a Monument Valley, places I’ve always wanted to go, but are in the middle of nowhere. You have to want to get there. You know, you can’t go through Monument Valley. And the only state I had not been in was North Dakota, right? You know, everybody makes a joke about North Dakota, so she’s from Minnesota, a little town, Alexandria, and I’ll never forget driving the RV and crossing the North Dakota border thinking, okay, you know it’s going to be ugly. It was fabulous. We were at the right time of the year that we were driving across North Dakota, and all the sunflowers were being were in bloom, and they follow the sun, so we were going east to west, and as we’re going, the flowers are turning with us, and then we ended up in the Teddy Roosevelt Badlands surrounded by a herd of buffalo. I mean, it was just, there’s no place in the country isn’t beautiful. And if you haven’t done what we did, spend the time appreciating this country and the diversity, you’re missing a great opportunity. Traveled in Europe a fair amount, you know, been to Tahiti, been to a lot of peripheral places, but this country is amazing, and the cultural differences, you know, you’re in RV parks, and you get to know people, and it just was fabulous.
Joe Hamilton 16:13
And you told me about that. I mean, in some of the people that you met, we were precursor for the book unity in service, right? One thing, I immediately thought that you didn’t really for you. It seemed really natural, but interacting with high powered executives on the daily and then hanging out on a mobile home park, two very different experiences, but you seem to find value in both of them the way you transitioned into that. It was impressive to me. It came to my mind when we talked about it.
Chip Webster 16:37
You know, Joe, I’ve never met somebody I can’t learn something from. Sometimes it’s what not to do, but everybody’s got a gift, and seeing that in them, and seeing the light in that was, yeah, I guess part of my shtick.
Joe Hamilton 16:51
Everybody’s an expert. I mean, I makes, if I sit down next to a plumber at a party, I want to walk away knowing a lot about plumbing, because that’s the valuable experience. And I, you know.
Chip Webster 17:00
So there’s this story I always if I, you know, sit in a bar or wherever I am, I just start talking to people around me. So I’m flying from Tampa to LA, but I had to go through Dallas, so I’m changing planes in Dallas, and I go in the bar to get a sandwich, and two guys come and sit down next to me, and I start talking to him, the guy who’s kind of rude. He said, Why are you even talking to me? You don’t know who I am. You’ll never see me again. I said, Well, I don’t know. What do you do? Well, I work for Sunset Magazine. Oh, really, have you ever heard the wall wizard? His face goes white. We’re flying to Minneapolis to meet the wall wizard. The wall wizard is my neighbor. When I was living in Brandon, the world is so small. I was in Tahiti picking up a boat in Taha, which is a little island outside of the main island, who walks in, but Maggie others, who was, you know, ami kids. Yeah, she was the executive secretary and assistant to the CEO of AMI kids. She’d married a guy, and they were sailing around the world, and they stopped into the moorings because they had great local charts. And here we are, literally on the other side of the world. It’s amazing.
Joe Hamilton 18:03
I’ve had experiences like that, traveling as well. Yeah, it’s fun. So Unity and service, which did come from a lot of your observations in how our society has sort of evolved or devolved, or devolved. So you write, what inspired, what made you think that these observations that you had needed to go into book form.
Chip Webster 18:21
Well, I’ve been watching this deterioration of trust and social interaction for years, and I think the final catalyst was talking to people around these you’d go to a motor park and you start talking, and you know, where are you from? And you know, oh, your RV is a Tiffin, or your IV is a Integra, or whatever, and how’s that working? And where do you get this done? And then all of a sudden you end up talking about the direction of the country, and 99% of the people were not happy. And I’d listen and I’d say, Well, you know, we have the government we deserve, and they look at me like I had three heads. Well, democracy is a do it to ourselves project. And they say, Well, what can I do? I’m just one person. Would you do anybody? That’s not just one person, and the evidence of this detachment of it’s our country. When you look at voter turnout, presidential elections range from 58 to 66% over the last five elections. That’s only two thirds of the people electing the president in the Senate in the four year and in the midterms. It’s like ranges from 36 to I think it’s 58 that’s unacceptable. I think it was an Air Force General said nobody ever washed or rent a car. Well, I don’t think people realize that we own this country. They think they’re renting it and they’re just passing through. There’s no equity, and that’s why, what the kind of work you’re doing in nonprofits and bringing people together in St Pete is so important.
Joe Hamilton 19:56
I think you hit the nail on the head is that I’m only one person, and so the disconnectedness, and they feel like that there is a machine at work that is partly, and again, sometimes immediately, point to is a dissatisfaction with the government, right? I think it’s also a dissatisfaction born of there being perceived evil next door to them. And this comes down to the entrenchment of the different sides of the spectrum, the left and the right. And so, you know, it’s so binary that it’s hard to ever be satisfied when you’re convinced on a daily basis and having that this perspective reinforced that half the country is evil and working for its destruction, right? And the other half thinks the same thing about you. And so you will never be satisfied in that environment, regardless of what the government does.
Chip Webster 20:44
And the big joke is, there’s now more independents registered, which is probably a great thing, eventually, at least it’s a seed of independent thinking, right?
Chip Webster 20:54
But the challenge is, in 48 states, they basically have what are called sore loser laws. They’re described and designed differently. So if you run in a primary as a Republican or Democrat, and you lose, even though you would be the one that they want elected, because the extremes are win the primaries, which is one of our problems, so you would be a good third candidate and probably one, and be someone who can work across the aisle instead of throwing hand grenades at each other, you can’t run Interesting. Yeah, the two party system is a duopoly that is really working hard to destroy the other side. And like I said, it’s not sustainable. And you know, third party that may be the answer, but certainly getting opening up when we go back to I was just at the Reagan Library about two weeks ago, which was, you know, and I think of Ronnie and tip sitting and having a beer on Friday afternoon. Yeah, you know, how do we move the country forward? We’re not doing that now.
Joe Hamilton 21:55
Yes, well, if I may offer this, you know, it’s a multi layered problem. Obviously, it’s that simple. Some core elements, I think are a I think complexity and the proliferation of expertise leads to actually homogeneity. Because, you know, as the internet has grown, you know, you can go on YouTube, and if you’re into left handed butterflies, there’s hundreds of hours of endless rabbit holes of left handed butterfly. So people in one perspective, and obviously issues have multiple perspectives, but people can go down and have an absolutely convincing experience in one perspective. That’s true. Doesn’t mean there aren’t five other perspectives that are also true. But because of that, that complexity is brought back to the average person, and that complexity about left handed butterflies mixed with 10,000 other complexities is overwhelming to a person trying to make ends meet, and so they rely on proxies. And so that’s where that you know, the Tucker Carlson’s of the world, or those folks come in and say, Okay, I’m this type of demographic. I’m this type of archetype. I’m going to find an archetype that is closest to me, and I’m going to trust them to distill this world for me, because there’s no chance of me. There’s no chance of me doing it on my own. And of course, those people are often in the media. And then if you layer in all the motivations of being in the media and becoming those proxies, a lot of them are tied to finances and call to personalities that are also back, you know, tied back into power plays and finances and stuff. And so, you know, the mechanism itself of distilling information has been, you know, is hijacked by people who aren’t necessarily in there for pragmatic, optimal good. They’re in there for other things, but it’s all people have to rely on. And so you have this sort of half informed,
Chip Webster 23:34
I think, half as generous, yeah, okay.
Joe Hamilton 23:37
And then, you know, the other piece of that is marketing has gotten so effective, you know, we, you know, we’re so out. The marketers are so far evolved over our brains ability to cope with that, you know? And there’s a weird example I read that in extreme sports, like nobody had ever done a, I forget what it was, a 540 or something like that. And, you know, somebody finally did it, and it was like the four minute mile kind of vibe, exactly. And then they engineered it. And now it’s a common trick, right? And it’s like the engineering of all this stuff has gone so deep now that people can’t, you know, it’s a new normal that people aren’t ready for. But what marketers want, and what cult of personalities want is devoutness, right? Because they want the maximum influence they can have, which then, you know, with social media and this whole mechanism people’s identities now it’s their political beliefs are their religion, and they believe as deeply as in a religion and the other and religious wars have toppled countries for generations, and now it’s in a more civilized environment, but it’s essentially the you know, the ingrainedness is so deep that it’s hard to separate any issue, because you can’t go to your priest and say, I believe in all these things about Jesus, but I don’t believe in this thing about Jesus, right? It’s just the law. The Bible is the Bible, and the priest distills that for you, and it’s individual thought. It’s not a part of that, because then you’re rejected by your tribe, right? If you get too individualized and stuff. And so the whole mechanism is now set up. To have partially informed but deeply emotionally connected people who incentivize the people who do that are incentivized to make the other as evil as possible, to keep this part in line. So it’s, you know, that’s sort of a structural overview that I see.
Chip Webster 25:17
Can I read a poem? Please? Yes. It’s called micro validations. You know me in poetry, yeah, you taught me the word frastic. I still love that word, yeah, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. English proverb, microclimates, microbiomes, microaggressions. We live in a micro climate. Microbiomes live in us. Microaggressions are part of life. What we need more of are micro validations, more micro affirmations. We’ve become trapped in our silos. We’ve become contemptuous of those who don’t agree with us. They must not be human. Our country, our cities, our friends have become divided. We can’t keep dancing ourselves from each other. We must all hang together, and most assuredly, we’ll hang separately. Benjamin Franklin, our children, our grandchildren need us to hang together for their future. A healthy democracy requires its citizens to work together to remain free what we need to see our interdependence and break down the barriers that divide us. We need each other. Start with micro validations. Open the door for someone and say hello, talk to your neighbors, look people in the eye and acknowledge they exist. Reconnect with each other, affirm the humanness in everyone, perfect and you know, having what I would walk all these places too. And Minnesota Nice other, you know what’s what they’re trying to put in the news now. But Minnesota Nice is real. And Alexandria, Minnesota, little, tiny town where Deb was born. She hadn’t been there since she was, like, six or seven, and people just so friendly. Hi, how are you walking down the street? And the car would have the right of way, but they’d stop and make you, I mean, it’s just unbelievable. And then I’d be walking in Chula Vista, which is just south of San Diego, along this beautiful walk along the bay, and people would just, they didn’t want to even look at you, you know, they turn their head. So I do different things different times, like I’d say hi to everybody, yeah, you know, 90% would normally mean others would light up like a Christmas tree.
Joe Hamilton 27:23
In the small Minnesota town, there’s homogeneity there, right? In Chula Vista, it’s more diverse. Very statement, right?
Chip Webster 27:32
Yeah, but I don’t think that’s the only variable. But yes, culture, you know, you know this in business, culture, each strategy, every time,
Joe Hamilton 27:40
So yeah, in culture, again, I think it’s figuring out where the connection points are and making those the focus versus the non connection points, right? Yeah.
Chip Webster 27:50
What’s our common ground? That’s why I urge people to go and volunteer. Yeah. I’m on the board, chairman of the board now, of Tampa Bay. Watch great board, very diverse, politically, great human beings, and what’s so much fun is we actually another board member articulated this so beautifully. We’re working on something bigger than ourselves to make Tampa Bay healthier. It’s not about who we voted for. It’s about the bigger the greater good working together. And I don’t know if you know this or not, but we now filter a billion gallons a day through the oyster beds that we put out there.
Joe Hamilton 28:25
That’s incredible. Yeah. And I think that the key there is this is, again, what I think is one of the real and nefarious elements of social media, is you have all this energy, this intellectual and emotional energy, and no place to go with it. Only place that energy gets expressed is by verbally defeating someone in a semantical argument. You know, if you’re talking about the Ukraine, you’re not going to impact the Ukraine, no. And so the only place, and you, but you have energy about it, right? And you have emotion about it, and the only place for that to go is in these semantic values. You go back to Tampa Bay, watch, you can do something about it, right? You’re there, local, you’re experiencing it. You’re hands on, right? It completely changes the dynamic and the place you have a place for the energy to go at a very basic level,
Chip Webster 29:05
my guess is Joe, correct me if I’m wrong. If we took all the people in the United States, adults and put them in a room, probably 80% of us are going to agree on 90% of the issues. Yeah, 100% but yeah, thank you. 100% of the whole game is to divide us. Yeah, it’s a bit of 1984 Yeah.
Joe Hamilton 29:28
And for me, I’ve been thinking about, and we have a community voices section on the catalyst, and I actually wrote this in there. This, you know, exact example to me, if I could push any one concept out there, is that people, you know, there’s, I think, the statement, people who can hold multiple opposing perspectives in their head and make sense of them, that’s real intelligence. And to me, that’s multi perspective ism right. And so in the example I have in the catalyst is if you have asked someone to describe a house, if there’s, you know, there’s a funnier example with an elephant, but if you ask somebody that you know to describe a house, if they’re standing in front of. It, or in back of it, or if they’re in space looking at it, or if they’re looking at it through a microscope, or if they’re inside of it, or if they call it home, if it’s their home, they’re all going to describe that house differently. Sure, they’re all true, right, right? And so leaders and thinkers should be the people who take understand all of those perspectives and can distill those out and get us to a place of alignment with all that being considered, whereas the person in the front of the house is seeing their thing and arguing with the person in the back of the house, and they’re never going to meet because they’re seeing two different sides of the house.
Chip Webster 30:33
I used to when I did strategic planning, is one of the warm up exercises. I’d write an E on the flip chart, and then I turn it, it’s a W, it’s a three, it’s an M, and we needed all those perspectives. So then I draw sort of a weird object, and then put a circle around it. Know where you are on looking at exactly what you described. And what we need is a leader, or leaders who sit down and say, Okay, we need to work on this together. I need your perspective. This democracy requires a pluralistic society. Otherwise, you you know, it’s just what monolithic, and that’s taught totalitarianism. I can never say the word right? And that we know what that leads to. You know, if you want to live in China and have your social score kept every day, I guess you should go there, yeah, but that’s not democracy. That’s not where creativity happens, and that’s not where freedom happens. I couldn’t write this book if I was in China, yeah,
Joe Hamilton 31:34
I was gonna ask, you know you are in we? Can we share your age turning 80, and Mark, congratulations. Haven’t made it yet. That’s the Age of Enlightenment, right?
Chip Webster 31:44
80 is the new 70.
Joe Hamilton 31:48
You know, what’s your general feeling? If I said, in your mind, describe the average 18 year old, what are the first things that pop in your mind?
Chip Webster 31:58
Well, first of all, there’s no one single definition. So I’ve met some that are working hard in specific areas. They give me great hope for the future. And then I’ve met some who it’s this one kid who’s graduating from high school. Well, what are you going to do? What do you want to do? Oh, I just want to be happy. I’m going to do what makes me happy? Well, how are you going to add value? What are you doing now? You know, the parents have let these kids sit in the basement and play video games. They haven’t had to go out and work. Amazing number of kids don’t drive now, which is about independence. I can’t remember when I was listening to a podcast like I talked about the 30 year old kid in the basement smoking dope and right? You know, mom and dad taking care of them. So I think it depends on how they were raised, who they are, and their basic core personality back to are they curious? Are they passionate? Do they have a goal? Do they see themselves as something bigger than themselves? So I didn’t answer your question exactly. I don’t think one size fits all. I think the common thing is that they’re lazy and don’t everybody gets a trophy.
Joe Hamilton 33:05
And what I’m kind of going with is I’m trying to juxtapose the environment, you know. So I guess I would say, when I grew up, in your book, you have the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, you know. And to me, those were sort of the best way to say it, but they were seminal basic documents, right? But extrapolating that out, I feel like when I grew up, if I was super intellectual and super academic, that I could almost touch 10% of all the knowledge in the world. I mean, it’s just a made up number, right? But I feel like the average kid today couldn’t touch 1% of one subject, right? Because the proliferation of information with the internet and with experts and with media channels that, literally, if you just wanted to play, we’re in St Pete athletic now recording this, just really get into pickleball, that there is legitimate progress, both academic and physical mindset emotional, that you could go deep down a rabbit hole to the exclusion of everything else in life. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think there’s a beauty in that depth, right? But it does preclude a generalism that I think we had, you know, and maybe this is Rosie glasses looking at the past. I think it precludes a generalism that actually was responsible for a lot of the connective tissue we had, because in Minnesota, the same 100 thoughts are in most people’s head, and it was much easier when there were only 1000 thoughts to have, right? And now I feel like every kid could have 10 billion thoughts, and we just aren’t by sheer volume, aren’t able to have those many connection points, to have connection in the way we used to. And so even some of those things about service and understanding our history and our nation and things like that are so diluted with everything else that is made important to people that it’s hard to find enough common ground at at scale. And so I feel like we have to define new common grounds at scale that can be that connective tissue that makes sense in our current input landscape.
Chip Webster 35:10
You know, you just teed up my big, hairy audacious goal, okay? Be universal service. Yeah. You turn 18, yeah. Serve the country for a year. You leave St Pete, you leave Alexandria, Minnesota, and go someplace else. Work with kids from around the country on the old remember the Civilian Conservation Corps on those kind of projects? Interesting. When I was in Alexandria, the county building was built by the WPA, which was a similar kind of program Yeah, Roosevelt, and it was an executive order. It wasn’t passed by Congress, created the CCC, yeah, and people would get involved with each other, know each other, and understand it’s my country. I guarantee you, if we had this kind of a program, having just been to 30 these trips have only, only been 37 states. Some states are garbage pits. I grew up in California. It breaks my heart. You go to a rest area in California, there’ll be a sign $1,000 fine for littering, and literally, the trash is all around it. I guarantee you, if one of the things I would have people do as a part of the boot camp CCC was pick up and recycle the things along the side of the road. This would be a cleaner country, yeah? Because it’s they, it’s my country, right? It’s not just throw it out the door. Driving to, I don’t know if this ever happened to you, we’d be sitting at traffic sign and see, see somebody throw a McDonald’s bag out the window.
Joe Hamilton 36:36
Luckily, I’ve not seen that. Yeah, that’s terrible. Yeah, you know, it’s anecdotal, but I, you know, I backpack. I think we’ve talked for about five years, and as I traveled the world, and maybe it’s just how it came to me, but I always felt like Israelis were just more naturally comfortable and connected to each other when I would go into a hostel. They, you know. And again, there’s obviously reasons for that. There’s religion in this smaller country and but, but they all had service. They all it was military service, right on. They all did service when they turned 18, or 19, or whatever. And I actually it made sense to me when I heard that. So I had the feeling before I had the knowledge, and the knowledge really validated the feeling, right?
Chip Webster 37:11
You know, I would go for military service, but it’s going to be hard enough to sell a CCC kind of project. And one of the options would be, you turn 18, you do the CCC kind of thing, or you go into the military for two or three years, we would be traveling. I love this story. I’m in Caldwell, Idaho. This is west of Boise RV park. We would always hike wherever we were, and we’re out hiking around this reservoir, and we come to this weather worn monument, CCC project 1937 that project built a reservoir that allowed farms to exist, and agriculture exists in that valley. And they built a lot of national parks. They built dams. And that I read one thing, it’s a theory. I don’t have any evidence of it, that when we went into World War Two, one of the reasons we were able to mobilize so quick Is there a lot of people have been in the CCC, and they knew how to work together with people different than them. And once again, I don’t have the statistics, and what you just described about Israel is spot on. I would say that our military has done more to integrate people than any other organization, any other institution, and so if we all serve together, when we come around together, we have this common bond right now. We don’t have a common bond. We don’t have a common vocabulary. I saw this speaking about going online. It was about Singapore, and I didn’t realize that. And I think the 1950s the British left, and Singapore was this island with very diverse Indians and Chinese and British, and they go, what do we do? And they were very vulnerable. And so they created required national service. There was a video of guys who had started, this was in the 50s, so now they’re in the 60s. So they were probably in their 20s, then talking about I never would have spoken to a Muslim or a Sikh if I hadn’t had to serve together. And now we’re friends, and we’ve been friends for 50 years.
Joe Hamilton 39:09
Yeah, it’s the antidote for social media. And, yeah, we need to get this going. And to be clear, I mean, it doesn’t have to be mandated, right? There are other paths, right? You could be incentivized. It could be locally, done, and I grew up with the easiest way to do it.
Chip Webster 39:23
But here’s my challenge. During Vietnam, you know, Creedence, Clearwater Revival song, and one of their lines is, I’m no senator’s son. Let’s get out of the draft. They got out of the draft. I mean, I got a draft by going to college. No, we all need to turn 18 and serve until we do something like that, we’re still going to be sitting here in 20 years, for 30 years or not be what we are today, if we don’t do something dramatic. Yeah. Well, so I need your help. That’s over coffee, right? Kahwa, that’s we ended up in this guy. Conversation, so we need to help each other.
Joe Hamilton 40:01
Yes, agreed. So let’s wrap up with some actionable items. So if you’re you know, from the book, from your experience, from your time working with executives, you know, assuming we have a decently wide demographic listening to us today, what are a few takeaways that people can integrate into daily life. Just a couple, I think, will be good so they can, you know that they can take away.
Chip Webster 40:26
Number one is get your news, your information, from multiple sources. I listen to Fox, I listen to CNN, I listen to NPR, I listen to CNBC. It’s hilarious because they’re talking about the same thing, but it doesn’t even sound like we’re on the same planet. Right? But triangulate, learn to look and be open to other things. And to that end, vote for people who put nation ahead of party and are responsible stewards. We vote for what Uncle Harry says, or whoever that you’ve decided that you’re going to follow. I don’t care who it is, Tucker Carlson or Omar anybody doesn’t matter. Think before you vote, get out and volunteer and get out and work in a Habitat for Humanity, but get out of your silo and work shoulder to shoulder with people who see the world through a different set of lenses and validate other people let somebody in, in the traffic, open the door of somebody. It’s hilarious. I now open the door everywhere I go. Some people walk through and say, Thank you, thank you. And other people walk through and grunt, and other people don’t say a word. They just are totally disconnected from the rest of us. Micro validation. Micro validation.
Joe Hamilton 41:42
Yeah, wonderful. So the book is unity and service. It’s available on Amazon. I will say the Kindle is on sale right now. So grab it. Enjoy the conversation. Always enjoy our conversations, and enjoy all the wisdom you put back into the world. And both in one to many with the books and the poems, but also in one to one with practicing what you preach, and it’s great. It’s a positive force in the world. And much appreciation for that.
Chip Webster 42:05
Thanks. Joe
Joe Hamilton 42:05
Chip Webster, thank you.
