Author, entrepreneur, Fortune 50 senior executive, and award-winning podcast host John Miles recalls ALMOST becoming an FBI agent, shares a cautionary tale from Microsoft and a story about the man who humbled Jimmy Carter, and explains why there’s no such thing as a practice mentality, the perfect recipe for greatness, the dehumanization of work, being a “gardener leader”, social impact theory, and how to NOT live like a pinball.

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Today's guest is John Miles, a former naval

officer and author, entrepreneur, Fortune 50 senior

executive and award winning podcast host, who has

established himself as an expert in behavioral change and

leadership. His book "Passion Struck", along with the podcast

and radio show of the same name have earned praise from many

including some past Action Catalyst, guests such as Matt

Higgins, Mark Divine and Marshall Goldsmith. So, John,

good to meet you.

You too, Adam.

You know, one of the things that I do like

talking to our guests about and I kind of probably wanted to

open with you some is focusing a lot on the journey. Most of our

guests didn't necessarily have a master plan from the age of 10.

On being where they are today. It's evolved over time. What was

the evolution that you went through different iterations

that you were considering doing along the way?

Thanks for that question. As I was growing up, I

had always had in my mind that I was going to be doing something

of impact to others, but I always thought it was going to

be in a way of some type of public service, whether that was

being a police officer, an FBI agent, fireman, I never really

saw myself sitting behind a desk of sorts, I kind of saw myself

being out there and living this life of exhilaration, etc. And

for me, that's exactly how my life was going up until about

the age of 28. I had gone to the Naval Academy and spent time as

a military officer, where I was working at the counter drug

mecca for the United States. And in this command, we had all

these different law enforcement entities and intelligence

entities. And they all asked me to apply and here I am making

the choice of do I want to go to the DEA, NSA, FBI, etc. And I

ended up taking the route of becoming an FBI agent, and was

literally a few days from going to Quantico when my detailer

called me out of the blue and said, I've got some unfortunate

news for you. Congress can't get their act together, you stronger

words than that. And your class has unfortunately been recycled.

And to my nativity, I thought he was telling me, I had a couple

month delay, and it ended up being closer to a four year

three and a half to four year delay. And by the time that the

opportunity represented itself, I had been forced to take a Plan

B when this plan a vanished in front of me, and that plan B

ended up becoming then the next 20 to 25 years of my career, a

career that I never thought I was going to get into and was

kind of forced to go into because of circumstances beyond

my control.

And in reflection, did you feel like that path was

the right one?

I think when we get immersed in it, we don't really

think that way. I guess I always had this mentality. Regardless

of what I did, I always aspired to do the best job that I

possibly could. So before long, I had really excelled at what I

was doing, and was on this rocket ship climb to the top, so

to speak.

I think in each phase of our life, we pull and

extract different lessons that we end up being able to leverage

later on. And I could assume some of the lessons that you

might have learned at the Naval Academy where I think you were

also athlete as well.

Yeah. What's funny, I think almost everyone who goes

to the Naval Academy is an athlete.

Fair.

Yeah, I was highly recruited to be cross country

and track runner. And that's where I got my start.

What are some of the lessons you pulled from that

earlier formative experience that you were able to leverage

in your professional and consulting career?

I would like to even go a little bit before I went to

the Naval Academy.

Please.

When I was coming out of middle school, going into

high school, I had always been kind of this chubby kid. And my

salvation from that was, I had always been a hard worker, my

family kind of gave us the basics. And anything beyond

that, we were kind of called upon to find our own way. And so

when I was in fifth or sixth grade, I actually started a

paper route, and having to do that paper out every day and get

that exercise and kind of reshape my trajectory. But I

still wasn't where I wanted to be going into high school. And

so I thought, I'll try this cross country thing, never

expecting to be any good at it. When I first started, the

seniors on the team, and no dedication or wherewithal to

make us a top performing team. And yet, there was this group of

sophomores and juniors on the team who were really serious

about what they were doing. And I started to watch them and

wanted to be like them. And the more I started to enter their

circle, which was difficult because they were faster than

me, so it meant that if I were going to go out on a training

run with them, it was really difficult trying to keep keep

up. I stuck with it and the more I stuck with it, the more I

started learning that not only were they working out there, but

they were also doing things outside of practice, such as

trying to get good sleep trying to eat well, and we're really

self supportive of each other. So they were trying to make each

other person good because they viewed it as a team effort. And

the nice thing about country cross country is sometimes you

think it's an individual sport, it's actually a team sport. So

you win by how your top five or six runners score. So I also

learned the importance of support and other things like

that. I had a huge issue at first where I was psyching

myself out so much before races, to the point that I was I would

get physically sick. And I started to approach practice as

if it was a race. And it completely changed the way I've

lived my life up until this day, because if you start treating

every day as if it's a game day, you don't have that anxiety

anymore. So those things were kind of a foundation that when I

went to the Naval Academy, I was so glad I had.

So you're out at the Naval Academy, you take this

kind of windy road that gets you to consulting, and then from

consulting into senior executive roles with fairly large

companies.

Well I started out at Booz Allen and then Anderson

Consulting. So I got to work in a lot of large companies, Exxon

Mobil, Halliburton companies of that size. But I was also when

by the time I got to Anderson, I started practice focused on high

growth mid market companies. So I was also working on WebMD in

the very early days, and other startups like that, and midsize

companies. So I was lucky enough that I had experience doing

both. I started a company called LendLease, headquartered out of

Australia, and when I started with them, they had about a $15

billion revenue, they were part financial institution, they own

the second largest bank in Australia, they had a whole

portfolio of mutual funds. They also had a relevant real estate

investment crossed area that fueled the other side of their

business, which was property management, and construction.

And then from there, I went to Lowe's, where I initially was

brought in to fix what had preceded me as the largest

hacking incident retail history, and went on from that to lead

all application development, and then eventually all big data and

integration for them. And then that led me to becoming a CIO at

Dell.

Yeah, one of the things that you write about the

need for curiosity, there's some points that you make about both

the need for curiosity and the bias to action. So you know,

where did this evolve for you on a personal level? And then how

have you explored this over the course of your career?

So take us all back to 2011. I was in the process of

leaving Dell, because so much of our business model was wed to

Microsoft, I had met Steve Ballmer a number of times, who's

the former CEO of Microsoft. And when Steve heard I was leaving,

he asked me to come to Microsoft to become the CIO. And as any of

these things are, it's not as easy a process as Steve says, He

wants you in this position. And it just happened. So for me,

this amounted into something like 16, to 20 interviews that I

had to go through. And what I found was that Microsoft, at

that time, had a very fixed mindset. And they really

couldn't see how to do things a different way. And on top of

that bomber, had this leadership style where he used his size,

he's a large man is a large voice and his intimidation to

get things done. So that's how the rank and file were treating

many of the employees underneath them was really an era of

intimidation to get things done. And I met this man who had been

there for a long time, at that point, who was talking to me

about things that were so different and foreign about what

Microsoft could be, if they would start doing things

differently. And that was sat down Nadella. And this was three

and a half years before he took over the role that he has. Now,

the reason I'm bringing this all up is I didn't end up taking

that position because I thought I was walking into a toxic

culture at the time, which would have been, but if you look at

what he has brought into that company, he has really brought

in a culture of growth, of constant learning, where he

really rewards people for being curious about how to do things

differently. But there's also a culture of deliberate action.

And when you combine those things, meaning you're choosing

growth, time and time again, whether it's in your personal

life, or in business setting, and then you're constantly

taking actions that go in concert with that growth you're

trying to creating. It's a perfect way recipe for

greatness. We think that in order to achieve these

monumental things in life, it comes down to these grandiose

moments. And what I have learned from talking to 50 plus behavior

scientists and reading hundreds of books is that's not how

things work. We as humans, are the ultimate learning machine

and coupling that with intentional actions that get

either you or the organization that you're working for closer

to the long term aspirations and the shorter term ambitions that

you're trying to accomplish.

It's hard to maintain a bias for action

culturally in companies at scale, right? Is there anything

that you could share where companies have worked around

that to create a better platform for allowing bias for action?

I think one of the leading causes of disengagement

and people feeling unfulfilled in work is where dehumanizing

work, meaning it is so much about the spreadsheets and top

line and bottom line growth, that we're taking out the human

and we're trying to maximize profits by micromanaging or

robotized, or institutionalizing the work that people do. What

that approach is doing is it is helping with top and bottom line

growth in the short term. But it also weeds out creativity and

innovation, because people are so conditioned to doing the

tasks, that they're not really given the white space, to have

breaks to be creative to think differently excetera. And so one

of the things I am really calling for is that we need a

change in the way we're leading people. And so you can think of

a gardener leader approach is being very much the metaphor of

a gardener. And just as a gardener, needs to be there to

plant the seeds and give nourishment, them sitting over

the plants day in and night isn't going to make plants grow

any better. And so they really need to have this philosophy of

being eyes on but hands off. And I first heard about this concept

from General Stan McChrystal. And as Stan was talking to me

about it, we were discussing his role when he was in charge of

all forces in Afghanistan. And there was no way that him in a

situation room, or the president back in DC could understand what

a green ray team was doing in a mountainside in Afghanistan, and

tried to micromanage their everyone movement. So what he

could do is he could make sure that those people who were

fighting understood the mission, he could give them the best

training that he possibly could, he could give them the best

leadership he could. But when it came to them executing their

mission, he had to be hands off and trust that the tools,

learning experiences leadership that they had been given, they

would make the appropriate decisions in the fight. And the

way we can look at that in the business world today is we can

do the same thing, whether it's a project manager or leading a

team or a software developer who might be an individual

contributor, you could give them what the destination is you're

trying to achieve, and let them be creative and taking a

completely different approach to getting there. But if you do

this in an agile way, they're checkpoints. So if they're off

course, you can quickly get them back on. And it really humanizes

the individuals in the process. Do you feel that's a universal?

Like anything, it's a both and situation, you're going to have

individuals who require more oversight and more hand holding

than others. And you're going to have your breakthrough

performers typically, who require a lot less of that hand

holding, because they're free thinking and innovating and

inventing new ways of doing things. So to me, typically,

what I have found is is employees end up winding up on a

chart as either see performers, be performers or a performers

who are and I find more of the A performers are able to operate

more autonomously, we're more of your see or be what we used to

call as plotters, tend to need more structure in the way that

they're doing things. The other problem I see, we tend to see a

person in their current role, not understanding and really

taking the time to understand their backstory. And a great

example of this as I remember, I had this really talented woman

who worked for me at at Lowe's and I saw her and her current

position of being a director underneath me at the time. But

what I didn't understand she had prior to that been a CIO at a

smaller company. She had a lot of data experience. Not only

that she had started her career in the business side before

transitioning into the IT side and really had this wealth of

knowledge and I I think we don't spend enough time getting to

understand who the individual is some of their talents that

exceed the role that they're currently in, and how you might

be able to utilize them differently. The other side of

that is, I also don't think we spend enough time looking at the

person as a whole, both inside and out of work and realizing

that, that just is they have career aspirations, they also

have life aspirations. And so if you would know that, that

developer who's working for you, is trying to save money to buy a

house for his family, and they're expecting a child. And

you somehow bring that into how you're leading them. And being

more understanding of that and acknowledging it 100 times out

of 100, you're gonna get better performance out of the person,

because they see you treating them as a human and interested

in them both at work, and in their larger success in life.

I think that's really well said. You know, I

think almost every successful person that we've had on his

podcast has pulled some of their lessons, not from success, but

actually from from failure and shortcoming. A lot of our

listeners, it's really easy to just superimpose on you that

Okay, John was always this amazing guy. He did everything

right. And the life was just this perfect uphill chart. What

were some of the bumps in your road? And where did some of

these lessons come in, that you learned not from succeeding, but

from from falling short?

One of my favorite questions that I that I've

always gotten in an interview is Tell me about your your

strengths and your biggest weakness. And to me when someone

answers that question, saying they don't have weaknesses, or

trying to lessen them, I always know that they're not a good

fit, because they're not being authentic with their answer.

I've been thinking a lot recently about Jimmy Carter,

given, he's kind of at the ending stages of his amazing

life. He's a Naval Academy grad. And I remembered this story, he

was interviewing to become part of the spring nuclear power

program in the Navy. And this was back in the early 1950s. And

during this time, you had Hyman Rickover, the longest standing

military officer of all time, he ended up being a military

officer. Until his 80s, he was known and feared for how

demanding he was in interviews, people would lose their minds

trying to think about how to prepare themselves for these

interviews. In this case, Jimmy Carter had already graduated

from the Naval Academy, he was in the fleet already. And he

applied. And he has this Interview with the Admiral now

Admiral is talking to him for about two hours. And he doesn't

really do this in a set interview style, he asks Carter

to start talking to him about areas of interest and areas that

he knows best. And as Carter is going through everything, from

navigation to propulsion systems to stoicism, and everything

else, he realizes that Rickover is a master and every single one

of these topics and an expert in them, and that he is basically

being put to task. And so as they're ending the interview,

Rickover asked him one final question. And he said, while you

were at the Naval Academy, did you always do your best? And

Carter was about ready to answer yes. When he reflected on the

conversations that they had been having, and the demand for

excellence that Rickover wanted out of the people who were part

of the nuclear Navy. And he said, Upon thinking about it,

no, I didn't. I could have studied harder for test, I could

have performed better in athletics, I could have learned

more about our enemies. And then Rickover ended the conversation

with Why didn't you and that really became this moment for

herder of realization that by him not always trying to do his

best, it was limiting Him in so many different ways. And it

changed his whole approach on life. So I mean, that's just one

example. But I've had so many mistakes, and misfortunes and

bumps along the way. And that is what has allowed me to learn and

become better.

When you wrote "Passion Struck", I was advised

once upon a time that if you write a book, you try not to

write it for everyone, you try to write it for maybe one person

that you really have in mind, who did you write Passion Struck

for in a way?

I guess if I would say I wrote it for anyone. I

wrote it for my two kids and their generation, this world

that they're entering professionally is so far

different from the life that I entered when we both walked in

to it feeling that we were facing change, and things were

happening faster than they were for those before us. But change

is happening at such a rapid pace now. But not only that, I

think we're at a huge inflection point where the world tends to

be cyclical and I write about Something in the book called

Social Impact Theory where over periods of time, history tends

to repeat itself. And I think we're at the state now of going

into one of these cycles. And we have, over the past 100 years

been in the cycle where we are breaking out of people being

entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship has been on a decline, ever

since the 1970s. More and more people are unwilling to make the

risk. And instead, they're going for the comfort of joining a

more established company. But I think we're entering a state

that just as in times before us, there were individual jobs like

a blacksmith, etc, a baker that people would do, I think, in

this new digital economy, we're going to have the same thing

where there's a real opportunity for people instead of being

employed by one company, where what I have learned working for

them is if there's anything that they can do to make more money

or lower expenses, they're going to take that opportunity at the

expense of view, for you to position yourself as an

individual entrepreneur, where you're almost a solo agent

working for a collection of businesses and living life more

on your own terms. Now, in order to do this, it's going to mean

throwing out the book that my generation and I would say even

the millennials, certainly my parents and grandparents

generations live by before us that you basically have this

recipe you're born, you go to schooling, get a college degree

or go to a trade school, get this job where you kind of lead

this portfolio career have kids along the way, you know, retire,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think more and more people

have an opportunity to break out of that matrix that we've kind

of been confined in and to live their life differently with more

freedom, and autonomy. If you look at the whole educational

system, the United States, I mean, you look back upon

Rockefeller and when his oil Empire was broken up what he and

others at that time were trying to do, where they were trying to

get rid of free or thinkers, they were trying to create more

conformists because we needed people in factories, we needed

people doing jobs at that time that were repetitive in nature.

And so our whole education system has really been fueled to

go down the set path, and I'm talking about and so large

institutions, our education systems, and our even government

has missed this inflection point that we're in right now of how

the world is changing. And therefore, you can't rely on

those things anymore. If you're listening to this, you got to

rely on yourself and take your own path. To me, that's really

what it means to become passion struck. It's this never ending

desire to try to become the best that you can become knowing that

you're it's never a finite destination. It's something

you're always striving to do.

Yeah, I love that. So just in tie up, one thing

that we always do with our guests is is a quick lightning

round. These are just short responses, but get some insight

for our listeners. And so if you don't mind for you, what's one

of your favorite quotes that you tend to reference most?

Well, there are a ton of quotes that I love. But I

think the one that I've been using most recently, do you know

who Sharon Salzberg is?

I don't.

Sharon Salzberg is a New York Times best selling

author, she's probably one of the most well known meditation

experts in the entire world has been working with the Dalai

Lama, since she was in her early 20s. She has this great quote,

There is no commodity that we can take with us. There's only

our lives and whether we live them wisely, whether we live

them in ignorance, and this is everything. And when I think

about what she's talking about here, I discuss in the book that

a lot of people hear this phrase that they're living life on

autopilot. And I think it's the wrong analogy for how so many of

us are living our lives today. Because when we're on autopilot,

we're typically doing the same thing, but it's generally taking

us into a positive direction. I think the better metaphor for

how so many of us are living our lives is a pinball. We let the

world around us influence everything we do. And we get so

distracted, just as you do in the game of pinball by the

noises, the lights in human life, social media influencers,

all these people who tell us we need to be more, that we're not

intentional about learning how to play the game instead of it,

playing us. And I think that's exactly what Sharon was talking

about here. You can make the choice to live intentionally and

live your life wisely, or you can choose to continue to live

it as a pinball and live in ignorance and never achieve the

potential that you could.

In relation to that and some of the things that

you said, What's one thing that you own that you should probably

throw out?

So I remember earlier in my life, it was like

I wanted to have bigger and bigger houses, I think we all

think about having more than our parents did. And I've certainly

reached that point. And I'm now in a stage in my life where, you

know, both my kids are out of the house, and I'm now trying to

downsize. And I recently had had my house on the market. And in

order to do that, I had to declutter the house. And so it's

amazing. Once you do that, how much you realize certain things

you don't even miss a month later and what you do mess. So

one of the things that I have really missed is I had to put

away my record collection and my record player, and I have really

missed that enjoyment in my life. But what I haven't missed

was I have a whole bunch of DVDs that I've had for years that I

don't know why I've saved that I haven't even thought about

watching over the past four to six weeks, so I will get rid of

those DVDs. I think another thing that I need to get rid of

is right now I looked in my garage, and I love to cook and I

think I have five different grilles, so I think I need to

get that down to two. But there are a bunch of other other

things from shoes and clothing that I need to declutter. And I

think Gretchen Rubin has a great book on this where it's called

outer order inner calm, and there is such truth to

simplifying your life and how much it will bring you that

inner calm and confidence if you do so.

I love that. You know, we accumulate so much over

life and thinking it makes us bigger, but then it actually

just adds a lot of stress in many cases and more things to

manage right now. I always say I prefer to be friends with a guy

that has a boat and have one.

Yep.

I love this. Thank you so much. This has been a

really enlightening episode just because of your history being so

unique in your pathway and some of the lessons and been frankly,

some of the lessons you've learned not just from your own

life, but from some of the people you've interviewed.

So I'd kind of like to end on this quote. Buddhist

philosopher de Sacco Ikeda said what is defeat in life, it's not

merely making mistake defeat means giving up on yourself in

the midst of difficulty. What's true success in life. true

success means winning your battle with yourself. Those who

persist in the pursuit of their dreams, no matter what the

hurdles are winners in life for they have won over their

weaknesses. And I bring that up because I think it was a core

kind of a core theme to everything that you were asking

me today. And it's a core theme to my book. And you can find

this if you want to learn more about me at John R. Miles Rs, my

middle initial.com And if you want to learn more about the

passion struck podcast, national strike movement, and some of the

educational things we're doing, and you can go to passion struck.com.

John, thanks for your time so much today. Great

interview.

Yeah, Adam, thank you so much for having me. It

was such an honor to be here.