---
title: "The Hidden Cost of Hustle Culture"
episode: 54
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Jack Jackson"
guest_title: "Executive Strategist, Startup Advisor & Author of 'The Reaction to Inaction'"
date_published: 2025-10-29
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:44:01
word_count: 7792
topics: ["sales-leadership", "gtm-strategy", "ai-in-gtm"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/jack-jackson-hidden-cost-hustle-culture/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# The Hidden Cost of Hustle Culture

_Jack Jackson on performative productivity, spheres of influence, and empowering every level to act_

**Episode 54 · The LeanScale Podcast**  
Jack Jackson, Executive Strategist, Startup Advisor & Author of 'The Reaction to Inaction' (ShelterZoom) · Hosted by Anthony Enrico  
Published October 29, 2025 · Updated July 22, 2026 · 00:44:01  
Canonical: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/jack-jackson-hidden-cost-hustle-culture/

**Topics:** Sales Leadership · GTM Strategy · AI in GTM


## Executive summary

Anthony Enrico sits down with Jack Jackson — executive strategist, startup advisor, and author of 'The Reaction to Inaction,' a book 18 years in the making. Its origin is a personal one: early in his career, Jack watched a passionate, talented colleague fight meeting after meeting, form after form, and approval after approval just to make a simple fix for the company's biggest customer. The company lost the customer, stagnated for years, and lost the colleague (who went on to become a Fortune 500 executive). That day Jack named the book — 'the reaction to an action; nobody can make a decision' — and started carrying two notebooks into every meeting. Twenty-three to twenty-five journals, 100-plus leadership books, and interviews with Fortune 50 CEOs, professors, and psychologists later, his conclusion is that everyone sells theory but nobody offers a practical blueprint from the janitor to the CEO.

The hidden cost of hustle culture, Jack argues, is performative productivity — the 11 p.m. email that signals effort but creates no value. The highest performers don't work 24/7; they make a few high-value decisions in the right windows and let the rest run itself. He traces how American business drifted from ingenuity (what he calls 'the idea of America') through the excess of the dot-com 'Rome' era, into a data-driven pendulum swing that measured everything and stifled creativity, and then into COVID's obsessive funding and meeting fluff, which turned work into activity theater and emotional temperature-check calls.

The antidote is his Action Framework, built on 'spheres of influence.' Drawing on schoolhouse research — children with no fence huddle by the building, but a fence 200 yards out lets them explore all the way to the edge because they feel safe — Jack argues that a clearly defined fence gives every role, CEO to janitor, the safety to push to the edge: to innovate, to fail, and to decide without asking permission. Anthony's 'grandma rule' (a 16-year-old server empowered to comp a meal) is the same instinct; the counter-image is CROs at billion-dollar companies who can't change a concession without the CFO and general counsel. Culture, they agree, is a flywheel driven by what you reward — and Anthony admits on air that LeanScale's 'most billable hours' pedestal celebrates clocking time over impact, commits to changing it, and recenters on 'do work our customers can be proud of.'

Disengagement — quiet quitting, the great resignation — comes from people feeling unvalued and unowned. Jack's parable is the janitor who spent his own money at Home Depot to make the office presentable for a make-or-break funding meeting, followed no shortcut, and got no credit even after the funding closed. Recognition and initiative are the fix. Jack is bullish on AI — months of deep research 'down to the code' — but insists AI is not coming to save anyone; the breakthroughs come from empowered, creative people, and pointing AI at a red-tape culture only automates the dysfunction. The book's final, deliberately courageous chapter reframes everything as a call to reawaken the 'hero DNA' in every American worker.

Who should listen: founders, revenue executives, and any leader whose organization has confused motion for progress. The biggest takeaway is a practical operating model for empowerment — define the fences, push decisions to the edge, reward outcomes over hours, and treat red tape as a defect — from an operator who spent 18 years watching companies bleed talent and customers because nobody was allowed to act.


## Key takeaways

1. **The real disease is inaction, not underwork** — Jack's book is named for the pattern he watched destroy a company with world-class technology: a talented employee fighting weeks of meetings, forms, and approvals to make one customer fix, until the customer and the employee both walked. Performative productivity and hustle culture are the visible symptoms; the inability to make a decision is the disease underneath.
   _Why it matters:_ Red tape has hard, tangible costs — lost customers, lost talent, lost revenue, and years of stagnation. Audit where decisions die in your org and treat approval friction as a defect to remove, not a control to celebrate.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, RevOps Leaders

2. **The late-night email signals effort, not value** — Jack (and Anthony) admit to sending the 11 p.m. email to look like a hard worker — then realizing there was no value in it beyond the optics. The highest-performing executives and CEOs aren't grinding 24/7; they concentrate a few high-value decisions in their best hours and let the rest of the system run itself.
   _Why it matters:_ Stop rewarding activity theater. Recognize the quality and impact of decisions, not the timestamp on the email or the density of someone's calendar.
   _For:_ Revenue Executives, Sales Leaders, Founders

3. **Spheres of influence: give people a fence and they'll run to it** — Jack's Action Framework assigns every role — CEO to individual contributor — a clearly defined 'sphere of influence,' a fence. Using research on children in a schoolhouse (no fence, they huddle close; a fence 200 yards out, they explore to the edge), he argues a wide, clear boundary gives people the safety to innovate, fail, and decide boldly.
   _Why it matters:_ Autonomy inside clear boundaries beats fluffy check-ins. Define each role's fence explicitly so people know exactly how far they can push without asking permission — and expect them to push all the way.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, Sales Leaders

4. **Empower the frontline to act without permission (the grandma rule)** — Anthony's teenage-server story — a 16-year-old trusted to comp a meal on the spot, no manager approval needed — is Jack's whole thesis in miniature. The counter-image: CROs running billion-dollar companies who can't change a concession without going to the CFO and general counsel.
   _Why it matters:_ You hired capable adults; trust them like a restaurant trusts a teenager to fix a customer's plate. Pushing decision authority to the edge creates ownership, speed, and pride — hoarding it creates paralysis.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, Revenue Executives, Founders

5. **Culture is a flywheel of whatever you reward** — What you celebrate — formally or informally — is what your culture compounds. Anthony realizes LeanScale's monthly 'most billable hours' pedestal, styled like an Olympic medal ceremony, rewards clocking time rather than completing projects or delighting customers, and commits on air to changing it.
   _Why it matters:_ Audit your recognition mechanics. Move dashboards, leaderboards, and shout-outs from hours and activity to outcomes and customer impact, because those signals quietly train the whole organization.
   _For:_ Revenue Executives, RevOps Leaders, Founders

6. **'Do work your customers can be proud of' — not just good work** — LeanScale's flywheel starts with work the customer walks away proud of and wants to share — not merely great work or meeting the status quo. That pride is what turns customers into evangelists and keeps the flywheel spinning.
   _Why it matters:_ Set the bar at customer pride, not internal satisfaction. Obsess over the customer experience and the referrals, reputation, and inbound take care of themselves.
   _For:_ Founders, Sales Leaders, Revenue Executives

7. **Recognition is the antidote to quiet quitting** — Jack's parable: a janitor spent his own money at Home Depot to make the office presentable for a make-or-break funding meeting, broke process to do it, and — even after the funding closed — got no credit while management fixated on the unfollowed reimbursement procedure. Disengagement, the great resignation, and quiet quitting come from people who don't feel part of something or whose work feels meaningless.
   _Why it matters:_ People who feel valued and owned innovate; people who don't, coast or leave. Catch initiative in the act and reward it publicly — that is how you build high-performance teams.
   _For:_ Revenue Executives, Sales Leaders, Founders

8. **Beware theory dressed up as help** — Jack read 100-plus leadership books and sat through six-figure retreats — including a C-suite of MBAs who spent four and a half hours with a professional-development coach to produce one sentence: 'we sell software.' Everyone has theory and 'theoretical playbooks'; almost no one has a practical blueprint from the janitor to the CEO.
   _Why it matters:_ Don't confuse expensive coaching and offsites with operating change. Demand a concrete framework you can run day to day, and measure culture work by whether decisions actually get faster and better.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives

9. **Redirect meeting sprawl toward the customer** — During COVID, meetings roughly 10x'd and shrank from an hour to 30 and then 20 minutes of emotional temperature-check calls ('How am I doing?'). Jack's fix was blunt: you're fine — don't book a call to feel productive; go talk to a customer, get feedback, and add value.
   _Why it matters:_ Kill the fluff check-ins that a wide, clear fence makes unnecessary. The fastest way to feel — and be — productive is a real customer conversation, not another status meeting.
   _For:_ Sales Leaders, RevOps Leaders, Revenue Executives

10. **Everyone reads the framework — not just the C-suite** — When CEOs tell Jack they'll implement the book with the board and executive team, he pushes back: everybody should get the book and read it with intent. Culture change that stops at the leadership layer never reaches the individual contributors who actually feel — and create — the culture.
   _Why it matters:_ Roll empowerment initiatives across the whole company, not top-down to the C-suite alone. The framework only works when the janitor and the intern understand their fence as clearly as the CEO does.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, RevOps Leaders

11. **AI is not coming to save you — empowered people are** — Jack has done months of deep research on AI 'down to the code, the feedback loops, the language models,' and is bullish on its power. But he's emphatic that the breakthroughs won't come from technology or a genius billionaire — they'll come from everyday people showing up with great ideas, wanting to be part of something and feeling empowered to act.
   _Why it matters:_ AI raises the premium on human ingenuity rather than removing it. Point AI at a red-tape culture and you just automate the dysfunction; build the empowerment culture first, then arm it with tools.
   _For:_ Founders, Revenue Executives, RevOps Leaders


## Frameworks

### The Reaction to Inaction (02:47)

**Definition:** The organizational cancer where no one is empowered to make a decision — approval chains, forms, and red tape turn every needed action into a slow, frustrating reaction that bleeds talent, customers, and revenue.

Jack named the book watching a passionate colleague fight meeting after meeting to make a simple customer fix; the company lost the customer, lost the talent, and stagnated for years. Performative productivity and hustle culture are the symptoms; the inability to act is the disease.

### The Action Framework (17:24)

**Definition:** Jack's practical blueprint 'from the janitor to the CEO' for building a high-performance, innovative culture by empowering every level of the org to decide, take initiative, and add value.

Unlike theory-heavy leadership books, it is meant to change how a business runs day to day. It ties high-value decision windows, outcome-based recognition, and spheres of influence into one operating model that the whole company — not just the C-suite — reads and lives.

### Spheres of Influence (The Fence) (18:10)

**Definition:** Every role, from CEO to individual contributor, gets a clearly defined 'fence' — a sphere of influence — inside which they can innovate, fail, and decide without asking permission.

Drawn from schoolhouse research: children with no fence huddle by the building, but a fence 200 yards out lets them explore all the way to the edge because they feel safe. A wide, clear fence replaces fluffy check-ins with autonomy and bold action.

### The Grandma Rule / 'How Do We Do Better?' (21:26)

**Definition:** Empower frontline people to act in the customer's interest without asking permission — do what you'd do for your grandma — and keep asking 'how do we do better?' to surface and implement their solutions.

Anthony's 16-year-old-server comp story and Jack's 'Anthony rule' ('just do it') are the same instinct. Frontline people already have the answers; forms, escalation teams, and process are what stop them from acting — and the credit belongs to the person who took the action.

### Culture as a Flywheel of Action (25:37)

**Definition:** Culture compounds from what you reward, formally or informally. Reward outcomes and customer-proud work and you spin a flywheel of initiative; reward hours and optics and you manufacture performative productivity.

Anthony realizes LeanScale's 'most billable hours' pedestal rewards clocking time over impact and commits to changing it. LeanScale's own flywheel starts with 'do work our customers can be proud of,' which turns customers into evangelists.


## Quotes

_Speakers inferred from an undiarized transcript — verify before attributing._

> "This is 18 years in the making. This is 18 years of making mistakes, getting some Ls, and getting some dubs too."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (01:30)

> "I named the book that day. I said, 'God, that's the reaction to an action. Nobody can make a decision.' And that day I began carrying two notepads."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (03:24)

> "Nobody says, here's a framework from the janitor to the CEO to build a company, to make it a high-performance, innovative company that will dominate over the next 100 years. My book does that."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (05:38)

> "You look back on that email and you go, there is no value to that. There is no value in sending an email except for signaling that I'm a hard worker."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (11:39)

> "The highest performing executive leaders, professionals, CEOs — they're not the guy that's working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They understand that there's high-value decisions in certain hours of the day. And then everything else should run itself."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (12:15)

> "Instead of putting a 30-minute calendar call on for you and I to talk about how you're on an island, the best way to feel better about that is just go talk to a customer. Add value, and everything else speaks for itself."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (16:44)

> "If you put children in a schoolhouse with no fence, they all stay very close to the schoolhouse. But if you put a fence 200 yards out, they will go all the way to that fence — because they have a sense of safety."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (18:10)

> "Whether you're the CEO or you're the janitor, everybody understands where their fence is and how they can play inside that fence. They can innovate, they can be creative, they can fail — all in the idea of making the company better."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (18:55)

> "It's the grandma rule. What would you do for your grandma? You wouldn't worry about asking permission. You just do it, 'cause you know it's the right thing for the customer."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (21:26)

> "There's CROs that are running billion-dollar companies that can't do that — that still have to go to the CFO, that still have to go to general counsel to change a concession."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (22:43)

> "We spent four and a half hours coming up with one sentence of what we do. And the end of the day, it was: we sell software."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (23:30)

> "We put the top five people who worked the most billable hours literally on pedestals. It looks like an Olympic medal ceremony. And reading that tidbit from your book immediately made me think I need to change this."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (26:12)

> "Do work our customers can be proud of. Not just do great work, not do a good job, not meet the status quo. Do work where the customer walks away proud of what you built and wants to share it."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (28:04)

> "I'd ask, 'How do we do better?' And you know what's crazy? They would have answers. They'd have solutions."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (29:20)

> "Guess who didn't get credit? That guy. And so I think that's that quiet quitting — people who don't feel like they're really part of something."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (34:08)

> "How do you build high-performance teams? By making people feel like they're part of a team."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (34:39)

> "It's not gonna come from technology. It's not gonna come from AI. AI is not coming to save you. It's coming from everyday Americans punching into work with great ideas, wanting to be a part of something."
>
> — Jack Jackson, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (38:43)

> "You're hiring adults, you're hiring smart people who are very capable. They trusted a 16-year-old me to make decisions like that at a table."
>
> — Anthony Enrico, The LeanScale Podcast Ep. 54 (24:55)


## Practical advice by role

### Founders

- Give everyone the framework, not just the board and C-suite — culture change that stops at the leadership layer never reaches the people who actually create the culture.
- Audit where a customer request dies in your org: count the forms, approvals, and escalation handoffs between 'I need a fix' and 'done.' That path is your reaction-to-inaction tax.
- Define your fences early. Give every role a clear sphere of influence so people can act, fail, and decide without waiting for permission.

### Revenue Executives

- Stop rewarding activity and optics. Recognize outcomes and customer-proud work; the late-night email and the busiest calendar are not performance.
- Push decision authority down. If your CROs and directors can't change a concession without the CFO and counsel, you've centralized the very decisions that should live at the edge.
- Catch initiative in the act and reward it publicly — the fastest cure for quiet quitting is people feeling valued and owned.

### Sales Leaders

- Empower the frontline to make customer-first calls in the moment (the grandma rule) — trust capable adults the way a restaurant trusts a 16-year-old to comp a meal.
- Ask 'how do we do better?' relentlessly, implement what your reps tell you, and give them the public credit for it.
- Replace fluff temperature-check calls with 'go talk to a customer,' then bring the insight back into the business.

### RevOps Leaders

- Treat red tape as a defect. Map and cut the forms, approvals, and escalation chains that slow the frontline; process should enable action, not gate it.
- Redesign recognition mechanics: change dashboards and leaderboards that celebrate hours logged to ones that celebrate outcomes and customer impact.
- Fix the culture before you point AI at it — automating a permission-based, red-tape org just scales the dysfunction.


## AI takeaways

**Thesis:** AI is a 'steam train' that raises — not lowers — the premium on empowered human creativity. The fix for modern work isn't a tool; it's a culture that lets people decide and act. Point AI at a red-tape, permission-based org and you simply automate the dysfunction.

- **AI is not coming to save you** — Jack has done months of deep research on AI 'down to the code,' and is bullish — but the breakthroughs come from empowered everyday people with great ideas, not from technology or a genius billionaire.
- **Fix the culture first** — Spheres of influence and outcome-based recognition have to exist before AI helps. Automating a workflow full of forms, approvals, and escalation teams just scales the reaction-to-inaction problem.
- **The stakes on judgment go up** — As AI handles more execution, the differentiated value is human ingenuity, customer obsession, and the courage to push to the edge of the fence — exactly what performative productivity crowds out.
- **Empower, don't surveil** — AI makes the 'activity equals value' illusion more dangerous. Replace fluff check-ins and busywork optics with autonomy and recognition for real outcomes.

**Agent & automation ideas**

- An approval-friction audit agent that maps every form, handoff, and escalation between a customer request and its resolution, then flags the reaction-to-inaction bottlenecks to remove.
- A recognition agent that scans delivery, project, and CRM data for outcome-based, customer-proud wins to celebrate — instead of a leaderboard that ranks people by hours logged.
- A meeting-hygiene agent that flags low-value recurring temperature-check calls and suggests replacing them with a scheduled customer conversation.


## Operations takeaways

### Revenue operations

- **Red tape is a defect.** The core RevOps job in this framing is removing the forms, approvals, and escalation chains that turn every action into a slow reaction. Process should enable action, not gate it.
- **Design decision rights to the edge.** Codify each role's 'sphere of influence' so people know exactly what they can decide alone — the operating-model version of Jack's fence.
- **Rewire recognition mechanics.** Change the dashboards, leaderboards, and reporting that celebrate hours and activity to ones that surface outcomes and customer impact; the metrics you publish become the culture.
- **Instrument the operating cadence for value, not check-ins.** Cut the fluff meetings a clear fence makes unnecessary and reallocate that time to customer conversations that feed the business.

### Customer operations

- **Obsess over the customer experience.** Jack's north star is how the company looks and feels to the customer; frontline empowerment exists to make that experience great in the moment.
- **Empower in-the-moment resolution.** Give customer-facing people the authority to fix problems on the spot (the grandma rule) instead of routing every concession through finance and legal.
- **Set the bar at customer pride.** 'Do work our customers can be proud of' — pride, not mere satisfaction, is what turns customers into evangelists and spins the flywheel.
- **Mine the frontline for fixes.** The people on the calls already know how to do better; ask 'how do we do better?', implement it, and credit them.


## Metrics mentioned

| Value | Metric | Context |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 18 years · 23–25 journals | Years in the making | Jack developed the book over 18 years, carrying two notebooks into every meeting and filling 23 to 25 journals with notes. |
| 100+ leadership books | Research base | He read well over a hundred leadership books and interviewed Fortune 50 CEOs, professors, and psychologists — and found theory everywhere, but no practical blueprint. |
| 4.5 hours → one sentence | Executive retreat output | A C-suite of MBAs with a professional-development coach spent four and a half hours to produce a single sentence: 'we sell software.' |
| ~$75,000 for 8 hours | Coaching day rate | Jack cites six-figure retreats and roughly $75k for an eight-hour session as the wasteful 'theory' spend his book is a reaction to. |
| $100–$150 at Home Depot | Unreimbursed initiative | A janitor spent his own money to make the office presentable for a funding meeting, broke process to do it, and got no credit — Jack's parable of disengagement. |
| ~10× · 60 → 30 → 20 min | COVID meeting explosion | Meetings roughly 10x'd during COVID, shrinking from an hour to 30 and then 20 minutes of activity-theater check-ins. |


## Entities mentioned

- **ShelterZoom** (company) — The company Jack is under contract with; he cites it as a strong-culture company that runs the Action Framework, whose co-founders (a Chinese-heritage, Australian-born American and a Persian co-founder) are 'obsessed with making the world a safer, better place.' · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/shelterzoom/
- **Amazon** (company) — Cited via Jeff Bezos as a leader who built one of the biggest companies in the world on empowering people — the same philosophy behind the Action Framework. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/amazon/
- **LeanScale** (company) — Anthony repeatedly applies the book to LeanScale — pledging to change its 'most billable hours' recognition ritual and recentering the team on 'do work our customers can be proud of.' · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/company/leanscale/
- **Jack Jackson** (person, guest) — Executive strategist, startup advisor, and author of 'The Reaction to Inaction'; creator of the Action Framework and 'spheres of influence.' · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/jack-jackson/
- **Anthony Enrico** (person, host) — Co-founder of LeanScale and host of The LeanScale Podcast. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/guest/anthony-enrico/


## FAQ

**Q: What is 'The Reaction to Inaction' about?**

A: It is Jack Jackson's book on the hidden cost of hustle culture — performative productivity, talent waste, and the organizational cancer where nobody is empowered to make a decision. Named after watching a talented colleague lose a major customer to weeks of forms and approvals, it offers a practical antidote (the Action Framework) rather than more leadership theory, built from 18 years of notes, 100-plus leadership books, and interviews with CEOs, professors, and psychologists.

**Q: What is Jack Jackson's Action Framework?**

A: The Action Framework is a practical blueprint 'from the janitor to the CEO' for building a high-performance, innovative culture by empowering every level of the organization to decide, take initiative, and add value. It is designed to change how a business runs day to day — not a coaching gig or a self-help book — and Jack insists the whole company should read it, not just the C-suite.

**Q: What are 'spheres of influence' (SOIs)?**

A: Spheres of influence are the clearly defined 'fences' each role gets — from CEO to individual contributor — inside which they can innovate, fail, and make decisions without asking permission. Jack draws on research showing children with no fence huddle by the schoolhouse, but a fence 200 yards out lets them explore all the way to the edge because they feel safe. A wide, clear fence gives people the security to push boldly.

**Q: What is the hidden cost of hustle culture?**

A: The hidden cost is performative productivity — activity that signals effort but creates no value, like the 11 p.m. email sent to look like a hard worker. Burnout crowds out the rested, creative thinking that actually moves a business forward, and the highest performers instead concentrate a few high-value decisions in their best hours and let the rest run itself.

**Q: How do you reduce quiet quitting and disengagement?**

A: Make people feel genuinely part of something and give their work meaning and ownership. Jack's example is a janitor who took initiative for a make-or-break funding meeting and got no credit — the kind of experience that drives quiet quitting. The fix is empowering people to act, recognizing initiative and outcomes publicly, and rewarding contribution rather than compliance.

**Q: Why don't expensive coaches and retreats fix company culture?**

A: Because most sell theory and 'theoretical playbooks,' not a practical blueprint you can run day to day. Jack recounts six-figure retreats and a C-suite of MBAs who spent four and a half hours with a coach to produce one sentence — 'we sell software.' Real change comes from a concrete operating framework that pushes decisions to the edge, not from another offsite.

**Q: Will AI fix a broken company culture?**

A: No. Jack is bullish on AI but emphatic that 'AI is not coming to save you' — the breakthroughs come from empowered, creative people, not from technology or a genius billionaire. Pointing AI at a red-tape, permission-based organization just automates the dysfunction, so the empowerment culture has to come first and the tools second.

**Q: How should leaders reward the right behavior?**

A: Reward outcomes and customer-proud work over hours logged. Culture is a flywheel driven by what you celebrate, formally or informally, so a leaderboard that ranks people by billable hours trains the wrong behavior. Recognize the people who take initiative and create real customer impact, and the whole organization recalibrates toward action.


## Timeline

- **00:00** — Meet Jack Jackson: 18 years in the making
- **02:10** — The colleague who inspired the book
- **04:47** — 100+ leadership books, no real blueprint
- **07:03** — America as an idea: where innovation came from
- **07:42** — The 'Rome' era and the data-driven pendulum
- **10:12** — Performative productivity and hustle culture
- **11:39** — The 11 p.m. email that signals nothing
- **14:49** — COVID: obsessive funding and meeting fluff
- **17:24** — The Action Framework: from problem to solution
- **18:10** — The fence: spheres of influence
- **21:26** — The grandma rule: empowering the frontline
- **22:43** — Six-figure retreats and 'we sell software'
- **25:37** — Culture as a flywheel: what you reward
- **28:04** — 'Do work our customers can be proud of'
- **29:20** — 'How do we do better?' and the Anthony rule
- **32:29** — The janitor, the funding meeting, and no credit
- **37:05** — Putting America back in the lead
- **40:57** — ShelterZoom and a closing challenge


## Related episodes

- **Ep. 95: Why AI Means More RevOps Hires, Not Fewer** (Jimmy O'Halloran) — The operator's version of Jack's thesis — tools are great, but the human beings matter more; AI should make people superhuman, not redundant. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/jimmy-ohalloran-new-relic-revops-consumption-revenue/
- **Ep. 85: Why AI + GTM Engineers Can't Replace RevOps** (Tessa Whittaker) — AI and GTM engineers can execute human judgment but can't replace it — the empowerment counterpart to the Action Framework. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/tessa-whittaker-ai-gtm-engineers-revops/
- **Ep. 88: Why AI Won't Close Your Biggest Deals** (Michael Kiernan, CRO at Nextdoor) — A CRO's case that relationships and human judgment still win — the enterprise-selling echo of 'AI is not coming to save you.' · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/michael-kiernan-nextdoor-ai-wont-close-deals/
- **Ep. 15: Where Should RevOps Report?** (LeanScale) — Org-design companion to Jack's core complaint: when nobody is empowered to decide, the reaction to inaction sets in. · https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/cameron-legge-where-revops-report/


## Full transcript

_Machine-transcribed and not diarized; speaker attribution is inferred._  
_Transcript only, as a separate file: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/jack-jackson-hidden-cost-hustle-culture/transcript.md_

### 00:00 — Meet Jack Jackson: 18 years in the making

**[0:00]** (logo whooshing) Today we have Jack Jackson. I am so pumped up for this interview. Jack, thank you so much for being here. Jack is a seasoned executive, strategist, and absolute powerhouse in the tech and startup ecosystem. He's led go-to-market and scaled multiple startups from inception to exit. He's also been on the other side as an executive leadership role in Fortune 500 companies. And along the way, he has found a passion in empowering people at every level of an organization, aiming to equip employees with the ability to thrive in an era of speed and disruption. It's no secret why he won the most influential leader in tech award by TechNet

**[0:43]** and so many others. Jack is also the author of "Reaction to an Action," a powerful reflection on the organizational cancer of performative productivity, hustle culture, talent waste, and a practical antidote built on his incredible experience. Jack, thank you for being here. I absolutely love the book. You did an incredible job with this and would love to start off with what inspired you to put all of your thoughts and experience into this incredible book here. - Well, Anthony, first off, thank you. Completely humbled. I am so happy to be on Lean Scale Podcasts. Happy to be with you, a huge fan. So thank you so much for having me.

**[1:30]** Really, really appreciate it and for the kind introduction. This is 18 years in the making. This is 18 years of making mistakes, getting some Ls, you know, and getting some dubs too. This is a lifelong project. I mean, I literally would sit in meetings and have one notebook for the meeting notes of what people are talking about, whether it be the board, the C-suite, you know, just regular, you know, frontline manager meetings and employee meetings. And I have my notebook on the other side writing down stuff for my book, right? And what really inspired it is a really personal story. And I'm still friends with a person who inspired the story,

### 02:10 — The colleague who inspired the book

**[2:10]** but very, very early in my career, I was working at a very small company and a tech company, and they had every ability to be one of the biggest companies in the world. Their technology, their marketing, everything was incredible. And I just remember watching an employee that had been there for years, just loved the company, passionate for the company, worked the long hours, did everything he could to make the company great in the technical side of the business. And I just saw him fighting and fighting over and over again these battles of just trying to get things done. And finally, one day the company's biggest customer

**[2:47]** came to us and said, "Hey, I need a couple of fixes on something you're doing." And I watched him for about a week and a half, meeting after meeting, filling out forms and needing to get approvals and all this stuff. And I just saw him getting frustrated and I could just tell he was at his wit's end. And I thought this employee was just incredible. He was a counterpart of mine. I thought he was amazing. And I watched him get more and more frustrated. And finally, we lost that big customer. The business never really realized its true potential. It stayed stagnant for years. Went through C-suite after C-suite for years, never grew.

**[3:24]** And he left the business and went on and had this amazing stellar career. And he is now an executive at a very, very big publicly traded company in the Fortune 500. And he really inspired the book. And that day I named the book, 18, 19 years ago, I named the book. I said, "God, that's the reaction to an action. Nobody can make a decision." And I named the book that day. And that day I began carrying two notepads. And I've got 23, 25 thick journals later, full of notes from every meeting over the last 18 years. - Well, all the experience shows up so well in the book. I pulled so many things that I can implement tomorrow at Lean Scale.

**[4:06]** And I'm excited to share some of those personal experiences as well. And I really do think that's a root cause. That company lost incredible talent with, I'm sure, a wealth of knowledge about how the organization works, a book of relationships. I'm sure some talent left with that person as well. They lost the client, which I'm sure is sizable revenue. And it's really, really tough to come back from that. And there are real effects of what you're talking about. This isn't some fluffy idea from an ivory tower. These are real tangible results impacts if you don't get a handle on this. - Yeah, we were talking earlier, and I've put in about thousands of hours

### 04:47 — 100+ leadership books, no real blueprint

**[4:47]** in research and reading. I mean, I've interviewed professors, leadership, C-suite, Fortune 50 CEOs, top of their game, psychologists. I've read over, well over a hundred leadership books. And I realized there's a common theme that nobody has a practical, tangible, actionable solution. There's a lot of theory. There's a lot of quote unquote theoretical playbooks, but nobody really has a blueprint. Nobody says, here's a framework from the janitor to the CEO to build a company to make it a high performance, innovative company that will dominate over the next 100 years. And my book, my book does that. It offers a solution for companies who go,

**[5:38]** how do I really change a culture across the board? And I think that that's a really powerful thing that the world in every way, shape and form, whether it be government, flood fed, enterprise, private, public, they need that. You're seen as suffering across the board, whether it be Doge doing cuts in the federal government to companies laying off tens of thousands of people trying to figure out the bottom line. This book can help solve those kinds of problems. - I absolutely believe in that. And even a company like Lean Scale, I'm pulling so many things from it. And I think one thing you did really, really well at the front end of the book,

**[6:18]** you set the table of how we got here. So before you even start giving advice of where we need to go and how to get there, I think you did a great job at giving the quick history lesson. And then also it gave me a lot of realizations that I think I have a lot of biases towards what I value as a professional, what I value as a business leader. If you could, I think giving that story arc of how we got to where we are today and how some of those systemic problems have compounded over time, I think really helped set the stage of what we do next. - Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, in the book I talk about this and if you look at the history of America,

### 07:03 — America as an idea: where innovation came from

**[7:03]** America is not just a country, it's an idea. And the birth of American business and the birth of innovation through the 20th century, whether it be Ford, whether it be assembly line, whether it be all these kind of into the technology boom. America, the idea of America has been prosperity, innovation, pushing the envelopes of technology, health, science, medicine, everything you can think of. And I think it starts there. I think the idea and the story of America starts there. The rest of the world for so many decades have looked to America to say, how do we create something new? Whether it be social media, whether it be AI, whether it be a new vaccine,

### 07:42 — The 'Rome' era and the data-driven pendulum

**[7:42]** whether it be how we do business, right? The world looks to America. And I think when you look at the tech boom, fast forward to the tech boom, the 80s and 90s and 2000, I always joke about it, it was Rome, right? It was Rome, the joke amongst executives that we would laugh about was like, give me two lobster tails, throw one in the garbage. It just didn't matter, right? We just spent absorbent amounts of money, big expense reports. We would wine and dine ourselves and our customers. And it was just this kind of crazy time, but nobody was really pushing the envelopes. VCs were cutting money if you had an idea from a napkin.

**[8:21]** And I think it kind of almost went stifled, I think a lot of American ingenuity. You could do pets.com and it could be pets.com too. And then everybody throws money at you. And then you see this big kind of dip, right? Everything crashes and everybody kind of reborns the innovation of America. And I think from that point, everybody kind of the pendulum swung the other way. And they went to this other place where they said, well, now everything's data driven, right? There is no innovation. There is no new ideas. We just, we track everything to the data point, right? The ones and zeros tell us our story and they tell our customer story.

**[8:56]** They tell our board, our stakeholders, our investors, our story. And I think that really stifled American innovation. I think it really stifled the idea and the spirit of what American innovation is. And I think today you look at it and you say to yourself as a history lesson, you go, well, this is the first time ever that American is being beat by a Chinese car manufacturer around the world. Why is that, right? Why is that? And this is happening in industry after industry after industry. And I think it's a major lesson for American business, American business to look at it and say, it's time for us to change the playbook.

**[9:34]** It's time for us to stop doing these things. And so I try to set the tone in the book to really share that part. Like this is who we are. It's in our DNA. And I think that's important to remind ourselves as a country, as an idea, as the beacon, the light of the world that people look to for help, support, guidance, and a role model to look at us and say, what are we doing today? It's a reminder of what we owe ourselves, our citizens, our business owners, and the rest of the world of who we are. And I wanted to start there in the book. - Yeah, and it's a big responsibility we have. And it's something that we shouldn't take lightly.

### 10:12 — Performative productivity and hustle culture

**[10:12]** And over time, the way you laid it out, I thought something that was really interesting is how everything got data driven, especially during the Industrial Revolution, all of the focus on inputs, focus on activity, and then how do we fine tune that and just get the most output out of a person possible? Then we start to shift into this knowledge-based economy where we still have the measuring sticks of maybe Industrial Revolution, but we have different problems that we're solving. And the two things that emerged that I have absolutely seen. I've worked in Startup World. I've also worked for some Fortune 500. And I see it in both areas in unique ways,

**[10:55]** but performative productivity, I think is just an absolute killer of real productivity. And then the hustle culture where people are simply just burning themselves out. And then maybe you eked out another couple hours of emails and spreadsheets, but you didn't have a well-rested mind or well-rounded life where you could bring in creative ideas and then come up with new concepts that move the needle forward. - Yeah, absolutely true. And there's a few points on that and we'll get to COVID and how that exacerbated the problem, but you're absolutely right. I think, and I'm guilty of that, right? We're all guilty of going,

### 11:39 — The 11 p.m. email that signals nothing

**[11:39]** hey, I'm gonna send an email at 10 p.m., 11 p.m. and hey, I'm working, right? I'm working. And then you look back on that email and you go, there is no value to that. There is no value in sending an email except for, signaling that I'm a hard worker. But I'll tell you right now, the best performers, the highest performing executive leaders, professionals, CEOs, degenerators, they don't do that. They're not the guy that's working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They understand that there's high value decisions in certain hours of the day.

**[12:15]** There's a few decisions that are made in the afternoon that are important, that are impactful, that are valuable. And then everything else should run itself. And that goes back to the book, right? The Action Framework is all about that. I think you could probably look back on your day and go, there's probably a good hour or two hours where I can make these great decisions, have perfect clarity, purpose, focus. And then maybe it's after lunch, I'm more creative. Or maybe it's at 5 a.m. when I'm at the gym working out or I'm on the jiu-jitsu mat, I'm more creative. I'm coming up with better ideas. And so to understand how to harness those things

**[12:47]** and being within a framework at a company culture where you're allowed and you're rewarded for bringing those at the table and having a positive impact on your business is way more valuable. It's way more research after research after research shows that it's way more valuable to a company, to its employees, to the health of the business, to the health of the customers, how you show up every day, than just sending a thousand emails a day. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And I'm guilty of it too. I've definitely done send the email at 11. I could have scheduled that the next morning. I've been overly conscious of the optics

**[13:26]** of how leadership may be perceiving me or even in a leadership role, how my team is perceiving me and setting a tone, setting a standard, which I think we'll talk about a better way to do that. And I think what happened over history is this hamster wheel kept speeding up. And I was right in the middle of it, quite a tech boom, tech rise between 2010 and 20. I don't know where you wanna clock it, 21 or 22. And I think not only at an individual level, but at a company level, companies were very much so rewarded for optics, fake it till you make it, go raise a boatload of money, go get eyeballs, go get users, let's figure out profitability and revenue later.

**[14:09]** And I think that whole environment incentivized companies to make decisions in a really interesting way that cascaded down to how their teams are run. And you mentioned it earlier, on this already hot rise of performity, then you just have an absolute ignition with jet fuel on this after COVID and then the introduction of AI. So I'm curious your take on where things were and then how the problem got even bigger during that time. - Yeah, you're absolutely right. Post COVID was this obsessive funding.

### 14:49 — COVID: obsessive funding and meeting fluff

**[14:49]** And gosh, I remember just, I had to be raising our 20 million, raising our 50 million, raising our 100 million. I'm like, man, we haven't sold anything yet. We have like a prototype, right? And everybody was sending you money and you're flying around the world and you're just like, wow, I'm meeting customers and go, we're gonna have this thing, it's gonna do stuff. And then COVID hits. And you go from this story of all the data is telling us that this is a good idea to, wow, we're all distributed, we're all home. And then you go from being this kind of innovated, pushing the envelope, being able to sit in a room with your fellow workers

**[15:30]** and come up with great ideas and sit around at lunchtime and water cooler and have your ear kind of to the ground and understand what the culture is like and what's happening to everybody being distributed and everybody being a little scared, everybody being a little paranoid about, am I doing the right thing? Am I presenting myself well? Am I on enough Zoom calls? Am I in just busy work? I mean, during COVID, I remember I was running a global organization with hundreds and hundreds of employees and I would get these just invite for 30 minutes and I would jump on them in the beginning and it was just fluff. It was just kind of almost like an emotional

**[16:05]** temperature check like, hey, kind of almost like, hey, how am I doing? How am I doing, Jack? How do you see me, my performance? And I remember I think after the third call, I just started saying, hey, look, you're doing fine. Don't put calendar invites on meetings just to do it. The value comes with creativity, innovation, customer support, customer experience. I'm obsessed with the customer experience. I always have been how you look and feel to the customer is really what you should be obsessed about. So instead of putting on a 30 minute calendar call for you and I to talk about kind of how you're on an island

**[16:44]** and your funnel is disconnected, the best way to feel better about that is just go talk to a customer. Just go talk to somebody, get some feedback, push the envelope, come up with a great idea, innovative idea, deliver some, a great experience to our customers, our partners, our coworkers, add value and everything else speaks for itself. - Absolutely, absolutely. I think the number of meetings like 10 X during COVID and meetings used to be an hour. They all got to 30 minutes and then now you have 20, 30 minute meetings throughout the day. - Yeah. - Well, knowing where a lot of companies are right now, knowing that that zeitgeist of hustle culture,

### 17:24 — The Action Framework: from problem to solution

**[17:24]** performative productivity is still systemic across a lot of companies. Talk to the audience a little bit about the action framework. What can you do? Now that you know the problem, what's the solution? - Yeah, when you look at, there's a great, I always quote this, there's a great analogy. I spoke with a wonderful human being. She's the CEO of Gold Star Gamers and we'll definitely shout her out. She's doing some incredible work for children who have lost their parents in war, right? Their parents are veterans and she's doing some amazing stuff. It's called Gold Star Gamers. And I shared with her the book and what I'm doing

### 18:10 — The fence: spheres of influence

**[18:10]** and she said, "Jack, this reminds me of some research." And some of the research she cited was, if you put children in a schoolhouse with no fence, they all stay very close to the schoolhouse. They don't venture very far. But if you put a fence 200 yards out, they will go all the way to that fence. They will push, they will go all the way to that fence because they have a sense of safety. They have a sense of security with that fence. That's what this book is about. This book is about saying, hey, we're America. We're the land of opportunity, innovation, creativity, business, technology, science, medicine. Let's expand those fences.

**[18:55]** Let's put some fences around. I don't need a 30 minute meeting to know how you're doing because the fence is wide, the fence is great. I call them SOIs, spheres of influence. So whether you're the CEO or you're the janitor, I built this action framework for spheres of influences. So obviously CEO has the biggest one and then it goes down to the individual contributor in an organization. But everybody understands where their fence is and how they can play inside that fence. They can innovate, they can be creative, they can fail, they can make the wrong decisions, they can make the right decisions, all in the idea of making the company better,

**[19:35]** to serving the customers better. So there's no longer this, I'm going to be scared, terrified. I'm having these fluffy one-on-one meetings I talked about offline, right? Get on the one-on-one, it's like, how was your week? What did you do? What can I help you with? It's not that, it's like, let's talk about how we made this company better. Let's talk about how we pushed that fence, those spheres of influence. How did you go all the way to the edge when you spoke to that customer or when you spoke to the internal stakeholder? What did you do to cut a process down or to make it more efficient or to make it more intelligent? How did you do that, right?

**[20:15]** And so you're one-on-ones all the way up to how you go to market, how you plan your strategy, how do you innovate product, how you deliver that product to the marketplace. All of those things are touched within the book, within the framework, right? And I give case study after case study about how these companies just stop doing that. They stopped going like, everybody's almost like, I'm just trying to keep my job, right? And instead of going the opposite direction of, I'm gonna go all the way to the end of that fence, I'm gonna ask some tough questions, I'm gonna ask some great questions, I'm gonna make some changes. In my one-on-ones with my organization,

**[20:50]** and we'll talk about that a little bit later, it's like, what did you do this week to really fail or to really win? What did you really screw up? What did you really push? What did you really innovate? What did you really do that is exciting that you can tell that we can talk to with the customers? And those are the things that I think the book really solves, and I think it's at the heart of how America does business today. - Yeah, and I think that's fear of influence, expanding what people have autonomy to do. I think it's so empowering, and I know it's a big part of your mission, and a lot of the work you focus on when you're leading teams.

### 21:26 — The grandma rule: empowering the frontline

**[21:26]** And I can remember, this is an example from a job I had in high school, I spent a lot of time in restaurants, and I remember as a server, I didn't have to ask a manager to comp a meal if somebody said it was made wrong. I never had to check in. I could just say, no problem. You want me to make you a new one? You want me to fix this one? I can take care of it right here right now. And I can't tell you how empowering being able to make that call in the field was, and you call out to it in the book, that also is what gives, I love how you phrase it in the book. It's the grandma rule. What would you do for your grandma?

**[22:05]** And you wouldn't worry about asking permission. You just do it 'cause you know it's the right thing for the customer. You know it's the right thing for the company. It's just gonna make the customer happy. And how can you find opportunities of implementing that in your organization? I think something small like that makes a huge impact. Anthony, I'd like to take you back to that moment, that feeling right for a second being that server. God, you go, I'm proud to be part of this company. I'm proud that they've given me this small responsibility to do that, right? Well, I'll share with you the flip side to that coin a little bit. Fast forward till today,

### 22:43 — Six-figure retreats and 'we sell software'

**[22:43]** there's CROs that are running billion dollar companies that can't do that, right? That still have to go to the CFO, that still have to go to general counsel to change a concession and something. And I mean, it's scary. In a big part of this book, and I say this in part just and in part reality, we've wasted so much money on these coaches and professional development in our world, right? I've seen this across major companies in every industry. I have personally sat in retreats that were six figure retreats for a week in this posh, you know, posh snow town lounge or lodge and sit there and these guys come in for eight hours

**[23:30]** and we give them, you know, 75 grand to talk to you about how to communicate with your team and how to show some leadership and define the problem. I once sat in a professional development day with a C-suite. And you're not gonna believe this with a C-suite of brilliant MBAs and executives with a professional development coach, we spent four and a half hours coming up with one sentence of what we do. And the end of the day was we sell software. That was it, that was what we, and I remember looking at these executives and you can imagine notes I was taking that day and they're going looking at me going like, are we really doing this? Are we really doing this?

**[24:13]** And so those are the moments that really, you know, inspire you to say, hey, I think it's time, we could be better. We can do better as a country, as the business leaders, as organizations, we can do better. And we owe it to our employees, we owe it to our customers, and we owe it to the rest of the world, to be honest with you, to do better, to set a better example of how we innovate, how we become creative, how we treat people, right? How do we empower people? And this framework allows for all of those things, right? It allows for all of those things to happen. So I love your analogy, I love your analogy. Man, that hits home, you know, that feels real.

**[24:55]** - Yeah, and I still remember today when I'm thinking about our team and what do we empower them to be able to do, and just trust them. You're hiring adults, you're hiring smart people who are very capable. You know, they trusted a 16-year-old me to make decisions like that at a table. So I think a lot of the professionals we have, like we need to really empower them. And another thing that you talked about in the book that I really, really love, and some people have a tough time wrapping their arms around this concept of culture, but how you can turn your culture into this flywheel of action, and a lot of it coming from what you reward formally or informally.

### 25:37 — Culture as a flywheel: what you reward

**[25:37]** And it was making me think, as I was reading your book, I was reflecting on something that we do, I'm gonna share this. This is a lean scale thing we do, and it's something we're gonna change after reading this book. We're a consulting company. A lot of what we do is around billable hours. So every month we have a company meeting, we go through results, performance. You know, a lot of it's around being a pep rally too, a lot of Kool-Aid at that meeting. And one of the slides we have, we put the top five people who worked the most billable hours, literally on pedestals. It looks like an Olympic medal ceremony. We put their faces on top.

**[26:12]** And the number one person is the person who's worked the most billable hours. And as, you know, we thought it was a good thing to do, but reflecting on it with the book, what it's really promoting is, hey, who's working the most hours, who's clocking the most time, rather than maybe who completed the most projects this month, or who made the biggest impact for a customer or pushed the biggest up, something outcomes based. And just reading that tidbit from your book immediately made me think I need to change this 'cause I know it's having cultural ripple effects and I need to change it right now. - Yeah, Anthony, and you know, we talked offline,

**[26:54]** you're a customer focused consultant. You know, people say that, right? People say, hey, we want to do right by our customers and things like that. But you know, you convey to me like, it's what's critical to our customers. We care where you're obsessed. You're obsessed with your customers. You're obsessed with giving them the best of value. You want to come in there and have this positive, amazing impact. And you could tell the passion comes through in our offline conversation, I could tell. And that's amazing. And I'll tell you, I work with a lot of consultants, right? You can imagine, especially now with the book, everybody's calling me up and going,

**[27:29]** hey, you know, can I use some of this framework and I steal some of this stuff. And for somebody with your company culture who really wants to have an impact, who really wants to make a difference, it's the outcome. It's the outcome. It's always, what do we walk away? What's our legacy with that? And by the way, you guys have a great reputation and it's stellar, you know, great brand. But, you know, it's one of those things you walk away and go, what's my legacy? What's that person, when that's the egoist in their company, you know, what are they going to remember, right? What are they going to say? - Right, and it really is true.

### 28:04 — 'Do work our customers can be proud of'

**[28:04]** We talk about flywheels in the book. We have our own flywheel. The first one, the part that we focus on the most, the way we phrase it is, do work our customers can be proud of. Not just do great work, not do a good job, not meet the status quo. Do work where the customer walks away proud of what you built and wants to share it with their friends or family or leaders or whoever. Because when you do that, that's what gets people evangelizing on your behalf and keeping that flywheel going. - Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, there's a few stories about me, about how do we do better? And I probably asked that question a thousand times

**[28:42]** in my career and I'd walk around, you know, in organizations I probably had no business in being a part of. And I'd walk into like the customer service team and I'd hear somebody on a call and they'd hang up. But you can kind of see this frustration. So I'd walk up with my four shot espresso cup of Starbucks and walk up and say, hey, tell me what happened. And then they would tell me this story. And I would say, how do we do better? And you know what's crazy is they would have answers. They'd have solutions. Hey, you know, Jack, we should do this or we should respond that way or here's a better way to communicate whatever that improvement is. And I go do it.

### 29:20 — 'How do we do better?' and the Anthony rule

**[29:20]** Well, Jack, you know, you're running this team, this organization over there. I have to fill out a form. I have to escalate to an escalation team. Escalation team's got to go, just go do it. Go do it. You know, they're just like, well, you know, it is funny, but, you know, half smart, smart, you know, they have them didn't listen to me, but those, some did. And they'd send me a quick note and say, hey, you know, I did what you said. It made a huge difference. And then unfortunately for them, I would say, you know, write it up and send it to your boss and copy me on it. And, you know, and they would write up what happened and what they did.

**[29:53]** And then all of a sudden, you know, three months later, that idea is implemented. And I always come back to, if it's the Anthony thing, and then if that person was Anthony, and then it was the Anthony rule, do the Anthony rule. You know, just do it. How do we do better? How do we do better? And that's, I get teased about it. I've been given cakes at office parties with that. How do we do better on it? Joking and messing with me. But it comes back down to that, right? And this action framework is all kind of built on that. How do we do better? And how do we allow our employees to do better? How do we allow? And with the invention of AI, right?

**[30:25]** With the steam train that is AI, and gosh, man, I've obsessed with it. I've spent months and months doing deep research all the way down to the code, to the feedback loops, to the language models, and then all the research of what's to come. You need that more today than ever. You need that American creativity, American ingenuity. You need that human empowerment. And gosh, man, we can make some beautiful changes to the world. - I think so. I think so. And a lot of that comes back to having a culture where you have a purpose. And 'cause I know you talked a lot about how there's mass disengagement going on and everything from the great resignation

**[31:17]** to people quiet quitting, everything that you mentioned in the book, there's some serious disengagement going on with organizations. And I think when you're saying, hey, there's some beautiful things we can accomplish, a lot of it has to do with your company has to have a purpose of doing something and tying those people in your organization to that purpose. How do companies do that? And it's part of the action framework, but how do some companies just seem to do an amazing job of integrating that greater purpose into all the way down to the individual contributor? Well, what's a framework for doing that well? - Yeah, in the book, I kind of lay out

**[31:58]** a lot of that part of that framework. I mean, I kind of give... And again, it's interesting as CEOs come to me and go, hey, Jack, I'm gonna read, I'm gonna buy your book and I'm gonna talk to the C-suiter. I'm gonna implement this with the C-suiter, the board. And I go, no, no, no, don't waste your time. Everybody gets the book. Everybody should get the book. If you're gonna read it, then you should read it with the intention of everybody understanding and reading the book, because I think it's really, really important to understand that. And I think how you weave that kind of innovation, that kind of empowerment, that creativity

### 32:29 — The janitor, the funding meeting, and no credit

**[32:29]** is the whole framework, right? You allow people to go to the edge of that fence. You allow people to fail. You allow people to feel like they're part of something. There's a story of somebody who was in janitorial services and there was this big meeting happening the next day. And he needed some supplies to make sure that it was presentable. It was a big funding arm that was coming in that could really change the whole trajectory of the business. And I remember having coffee with this person's boss, his boss's boss in the break room. And they said, hey man, this guy just upsets me. And I was like, why? And it's in my notes.

**[33:06]** And I was reading this and I was like, why is he upset? He's like, well, the big wigs are coming in and this guy just goes out to Home Depot, throws a bunch of stuff on his card and buys all this stuff and he cleans up. He does all his work, made the office great, but he didn't follow the process and procedure. And now he's asked us to reimburse him. And I remember like thinking to myself, like, okay,

**[33:31]** what is their response? And like, how does that guy feel like he's part of something? How does that person feel like the initiative and the thing he did is actually part of the big mission, right, of the business? And you go to the middle management, you go to individual contributors, you go all the way to the CEO. How you implement that is some situation, just so small, so minute of a $100 bill or $150 expense that didn't follow process and procedures, you're rewarded. You go, here's that and then some. Let me buy you a lunch. You took some initiative, you took some action and you did something amazing. And by the way, they got the funding. It was wonderful.

**[34:08]** Everybody celebrated. Guess who didn't get credit? That guy. And so I think that's that quiet resignation. That's a quiet quitting. That big wave of people starting their own businesses, doing anything they can because they don't feel like they're really part of something. And if they are part of something, what they're doing doesn't have meaning or value. And if they don't have meaning and value, then why are they gonna innovate? Why are they gonna be creative? Why are they gonna push the envelope? How do you build high performance teams is by making people feel like they're part of a team. How do you make people feel like they're part of a team

**[34:39]** is everything they say and do is part of the company culture. How do you build that company culture? You create fences and allow them to do that, right? So that's what this book is about. It's a blueprint. It's a framework. It's not a coaching gig. It's not a self-help book for leaders. It's not a book where it says, hey, read this and you're gonna be able to learn how to communicate to your org. It's like, let's change how you manage your business on the day-to-day. Let's change how your business does the business of doing business, right? That's what this book is about. And the feedback from executives from some of the biggest companies we all know and love

**[35:17]** was like, wow, I wanna implement this. This is different. I needed to really soak this in. One said to me, this is a piece of academic work. It's just the research you guys, it just doesn't lie. It's there. It tells you. The research is there. The history is there. The academic research is there. From psychologists to professors to MBAs to CEOs to individual contributors. Everybody I've interviewed and talked to, all the data says the same thing. If you feel like you're part of something, if you feel like the culture is part of the culture and the culture is an innovative, high-performance business, we all act accordingly.

**[35:56]** And if you look at the biggest companies in the world today, you look at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, he believes in the exact same thing. His leadership style is the exact same way. Empowering people. I really haven't read something as impactful as this since Good to Great. And I do think the amount of research you put into it, the amount of case studies that are layered in, the history, and just, of course, your own personal practical wisdom layered in throughout has just made this an absolute complete piece of work. And I'm already taking notes, making changes at lean scale based on what you put in the book. Thank you.

**[36:38]** And I'm just so excited to get it out into more people and excited to get my company reading it as well. And I know something that you've been alluding to throughout the conversation, and you put it as the last chapter in the book, which I think is really, really powerful, and I shouldn't have to say this, but I also think it's really courageous to put it in your book, is using these concepts to help put America back in lead

### 37:05 — Putting America back in the lead

**[37:05]** in terms of business. And I would love to hear you talk more about that, and practically and tactically as a country, how we can kind of stop this business leadership decline that we're experiencing, and then reinvigorate the growth that we've seen for the last couple centuries. - Yeah, well, thank you. I think of all the parts of the book, business leaders love the framework, but everybody else loves that portion of the book, and I've got a lot of questions around that. America, their culture is built on being the hero. We are a hero culture. We have saved hundreds of millions of lives around the world, right? From World War I to World War II,

**[37:55]** to the Industrial Revolution, to all these amazing things that makes America America, the idea of America. We've led the way in medicine, technology, human rights. I mean, we've done so many amazing things as a country, as an idea of what America is. And I think we have to get back to that. We gotta get back to our DNA as heroes, our DNA as businesses that solve problems that affect real world issues. People that are affected around the world with the real problems, real challenges, and how we solve those problems, and how do we make life better for everybody. And I think the world looks to us for that. I think the world truly looks for us

**[38:43]** to make it a better place. And I think it's our responsibility to do that. And the way we do that as a country, as an idea, as a concept, is by empowering, by innovating, by solving these complex problems. It's not gonna come from technology. It's not gonna come from AI. AI is not coming to save you. It's not coming from some genius billionaire. It's not. It's coming from everyday Americans, coming in, punching into work with great ideas, wanting to be a part of something, wanting to feel valued, wanting to feel empowered, wanting fences around them where they feel safe. And every one of them has a little bit of that hero DNA

**[39:30]** inside of them that makes them Americans. And so the book really comes back down to, how do we bring that back? How do we empower the DNA of what is America? What is the American worker? That steel worker, that plumber, that coder, that programmer, that CEO? That janitor who discovered, who created spicy hot Cheetos, right? How do we empower all of them? You know, it's not a political thing. It's a human thing. And that's what I talk about in the book. And that's why it's so important. - Well, I'm really, really happy that you added that into the book because I think, you know, America recently sentiment, there's a lot of criticism. What did we not do well?

**[40:17]** Or where have we fallen short? And of course, yeah, there's areas we could have done better. But if you look at the total body of work, of what we've done as a nation, compared to any other nation in the history of the world, we have done so much more good. And of course, no country is gonna be perfect, just like no person's gonna be perfect. But I think as long as we continue to strive to be better every day, which also I think is built in that DNA, I think we can accomplish really amazing things. And it's a very special place to start a business, cultivate a business. We have so much in our country's culture

### 40:57 — ShelterZoom and a closing challenge

**[40:57]** that helps make it conducive to take calculated risks and make something special. And I appreciate you putting this in the book so we can make sure we don't lose that. Let's keep amplifying that. Let's not walk away from it, but let's celebrate it and harness it for more progress. - Yeah, you know, Anthony, and I'll leave you with this, you know, that illustrates that point. I'm under contract with a company called ShelterZoom, and it's an amazing, amazing culture company, and they use the Action Framework. The founder is this brilliant Chinese, Chinese heritage, Australian-born American. The other co-founder is Persian, and their whole life is obsessed

**[41:49]** with making the world a safer, better place. They think about it every day. How do we create products? How do we serve our customers and make it a better place every single day? If there's a great idea, then it's a great idea. Let's look at it and let's go down the rabbit hole. And I think that goes back to what is the idea of America? What is that final chapter about? It's let's go back to that. Let's go back and revisit. How do we dominate this business world as American companies? How do we take that American ingenuity like we always have done and make it have a huge positive impact for the world? And how do we do that again?

**[42:27]** And I really hope that this framework will provide that kind of blueprint for everybody. - Amazing, and I think anyone who reads that part, I hope walks away really inspired to do better work and make America a place where, like we were talking about, you can take calculated risks. You can celebrate the progress and really, really just build some beautiful, special things that make the lives of others so much better. Jack, this has been awesome. For our audience, this is absolutely a must read. I'll say it again. This is the best book I've read on business since Good to Great. And I think you have done an incredible job.

**[43:17]** It's packed full of resources, frameworks, history, case studies, data, you name it, it's in here. And I've already made a few major changes internally here at Lean Scale based on what I've learned from the book. So Jack, I just wanna say thank you so much for being here today, for sharing your story, for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. And I hope this makes the impact I know it can. And I also can't wait to see what you do next. Jack, thank you so much. - Thank you, Anthony. I'm honored. I'm bold to keep doing what you do on Lean Scale. So proud to be on the podcast. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. - Thank you.


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