Lifelong Learning and Leadership: Norman Leach on Embracing Change and Opportunity

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball. If you believe, you can achieve. Welcome to the Live in the Dream with Curveball Podcast. A show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today's guest is someone who truly embodies lifelong learning, resilience, and reinvention. Norman Leach has led major organizations, taught at college and universities, authored best-selling books, and spent his career leading people and teens through complexity and change. Norman goes by the saying that was given to him by his Ukrainian immigrant grandfather. Get all the education and experience that you can, because those are two things that the government can't take away from you. So we're going to be talking to Norman about everything that he's up to, his journey, and everything that he's gonna be up to. So, Norman, thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Oh, thank you, Curtis. I'm happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:14

Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 1:17

Um live in Canada. I have I was born and raised in Canada, but I've traveled the world. So I've done business in 37 countries. I speak four languages, um, know a lot about uh a lot of things, and so it's all trying to my life has always been trying to put together different pathways into one to make it um sort of I don't know, uh work for me anyway. I'm not a great big corporation guy. I prefer to the challenges, and I'm often seen the but my my favorite place, Curtis, is to be in the eye of the storm. Um when everything's changing and moving, that's my favorite place.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Well, you know, your grandfather's quote has truly shaped your life. So talk about how that advice has guided your biggest decisions.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Well, I I think that's it's interesting. He said that, and this is I'll just give you a little backstory. He um 160 acres of land, farmland, and he put seven kids through school, um, through professional school, nurses and doctors and teachers. And he always saw that there was a solution to the problem, and that's what I've always been looking for is how do we solve problems? And a lot of people stay away from challenges and problems. They prefer the sort of normal stayed, everything's the same every day. Never been my style. Um, my style is always to go out and look for those challenges and to accept challenges where, you know, the chance of success wasn't always great. It was sometimes questionable whether it was going to be success or not. But I saw the challenge was the success, not worrying about what the end result was going to be just yet. We'll get there. The the point was to, so, you know, 17 years old, I went and lived in Japan for a year as an exchange student. Came from a place in Canada that's much like Kansas, um prairies, um, farm country. Certainly Japan was the other side of the world and very exotic and very different. And I jumped on a plane when I was 17 and went as a rotary exchange student, not worried about at all what we were going to find, just knew it was gonna be an adventure. And so since then, I've grabbed every adventure I could.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Well, looking back, was there a defining moment when you realized that your career would not follow a traditional linear path?

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Um yeah, I think I went when I was in university, tried some corporate kind of jobs. They had me lined up to do some work um as an intern, etc. And I did the work as an intern, did my best job at it, but there was no joy, Curtis. There was no joy in going to work every day. There was no joy in trying to um see the day through. And I knew there had to be something better than that uh in my life. And so started grabbing up those opportunities that came along. But I don't know that there was an exact moment. I think it was it was an evolution, right? It was coming along and trying new things and saying, that went pretty well. I can do something else. So, same thing with teaching. When they I lived in Japan, worked in Japan, I still speak Japanese, and um, I was in a smaller city in Canada called Winnipeg, and the state-level university asked if I would teach a course on doing business in Japan. I was 28 years old. I never taught anything in my life. Um, I knew the topic, I knew I was a good public speaker, and so I said, sure, I'll try. And so at 28, I walked into a classroom where most people were 23 and 24 years old, and they were in their fourth year at a school, um, their fourth year in their diploma, and I was teaching them how to do business in Japan. And I haven't no idea. The first day I walked into the classroom, I had no idea what to expect. But now I've been teaching for a long time and have not missed a term. Um, always as a side gig, always as something to do besides whatever was keeping me occupied regularly. But the teaching keeps me sharp. It it the students ask good, tough questions. They ask um things, especially adult learners, they will catch out, right? They'll say, Yeah, no, we tried that at our company and it didn't work. Now what do you got? Teach. Um, and you have to think it through. And so teaching just fuels the rest of the stuff. But I did it on a not a whim. I won't say a whim, because I was scared that first day I walked into class. Wasn't sure what to expect. Um, but it was funny, I ran into one of my former students um last week, and he was with me about 15 years ago, and he said, you know, Norman, I'm still applying what you taught me today. Uh, I'm still doing what you taught me way back then, I'm doing it today. And I thought that's probably the best compliment I could possibly get, right? And so these things work out, Curtis. They they show us that it's worth taking that risk. And, you know, the the downside on that whole teaching thing, however many years ago, was I bombed at it, I wasn't good at it, I never taught again. Well, I would have learned what I'm not good at. So you have to take that risk every once in a while and jump in on it. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

Well, you've led organizations through periods of uncertainty. So talk about what leadership lessons stand out from those experiences.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, uncertainty is um companies that I've I've worked with that have um that I've led that um we weren't sure the product was good, they could go out and try it. We had to um go out and see if the customers would want it. We've got had took on some pretty big gambles in terms of money, at least in my world, they're pretty big. If you're General Motors, it wasn't much, but when you're sort of living off your credit cards and you're taking a risk on starting a new business, you want to be successful. So, what have I learned? Well, first of all, our a team is so this is gonna sound kind of trite, but I just don't believe in the lone wolf idea of a business person. Everybody has people who support them and help them through the tough times, and I work really hard at building my teams so that they know I support them as much as I hope they support me. So never ask somebody to do something you wouldn't do yourself. This idea that we've got people who come in, lead big organizations, and they've never been on the shop floor is uh, I don't know, bizarre to me. I think that if you're gonna run an organization, you have to be able to do everything that the company needs in a pinch. If you have to go down on the floor, you have to at least know what the process is and how it's done, not just to sit and take a look at numbers. Learn that people are your most important thing. Look, if you're running a big company and you want to get out of financial trouble, the easiest way to do it is to lay off staff. In almost every company, maybe we're changing with AI, but in every company so far, the biggest single expense has been the human one. It's the cost of having people. So in North America, the average business person is the average senior business person is in their job about three years. So they want to get things done. And their board of directors is pushing them to get the best result they can in that three years. The simple and easy way to do it is to lay off people. You'll see a dramatic change to the bottom line instantly. Problem is, by the time that all rolls through the company, now you don't have the staff, you don't have the people, you don't have the knowledge, you've lost the corporate history. All of that's gone because we saved some bucks. The vice president gets his bonus, the president gets his bonus or her bonus, and then they walk away going there, I fixed it, leaving disaster in their wake. I'm proud to say that I in my career I have only laid off two people, fired two people, and I hated the moment with each one of them because I think part of the job of a leader is to bring his people to be the best that they can possibly be, not find excuses why they're not good enough. Curtis, I chose them, I put them on my team, I interviewed them, I trained them, I brought them onto my team. They're working for me. Their failings are mine, not theirs. So I have to accept that. And so, what have I learned is you have to lead from the front. Um, there's been people who say you can lead from the back, you can get you know lesser people to lead every day, and I'll worry about the big head office stuff. Yeah, um, I don't think that works in real life. I think it's a reflection on all of the churn that we see, at least in North America business, in terms of leadership and companies coming and going. Um, in Canada alone, where I'm sitting, we've seen major corporations disappear. Canada's oldest um company, almost 400 years old, a retail store almost 400 years old, closed across the country two years ago. Um, it was a huge loss. And when you look at what was happening, is the decisions were being made from headquarters, but no one really knew what it was like to work in a department store. And that just doesn't fly.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Well, as someone writing about AI and marketing, talk about what excites you the most about AI and what concerns you.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Um, what what's interests me the most is I think I'm a historian as well. Um, written a number of books on history, etc. And I love the idea of looking back and seeing what we can learn from the past. I think we are at an inflection point right now on in AI. We are at a place where the world is going to change around it. And I know we hear all kinds of people saying, hey, no, don't do it. Don't it's good, AI is gonna steal jobs, it's gonna do all of that. We've had these inflection points in history where the history turned and pivoted and went a completely different direction. We can look at the industrial revolution that happened in Europe when people went from small cottage crafts to working in factories. We can look at the early 20th century when the automobile supplanted the horse, when there was no longer gonna be horses, but it was gonna be mechanized. And we would have heard at the industrial revolution, we would have heard at the time of the automobile when Henry Ford was introducing mass production of automobiles, we would have heard the same things. Well, what about the cottage industries? How are they gonna survive? How are they gonna work? We would have heard that in the in the time of cars when they said, well, what's gonna happen to all the livery stable owners and what's gonna happen to all of the buggy whip manufacturers and the buggy manufacturers? They're all gonna go out of business. And that inflection point happened anyway, despite all of that, it happened anyway. And we built completely new industries out of the automobile and out of the industrial revolution. And we have seen lots of things change over time, lots of things have changed over time, but this feels different. This feels like it's going to be something that we do not turn back from. That AI will take us to the next place the same way the automobile did. That it's going to take us somewhere different in our history. And so I think like I told you, I like being in the eye of the storm. So this to me is the perfect time. We we don't know all the answers. We know that AI is coming, we know that it's going to change how we do work. I'm I don't know, Curtis. Um, you know, very few people go to work today in a horse and buggy. Um, we adapted, we figured out a way to go to work without a horse and buggy, and we built entire systems around that roads and parking lots and and all of those things got built. We will build those things, and I think it's an exciting time to be right at the front end of that, to see it right at the front end and and get a tilt. This is something that's 10 years old. Maybe more. Maybe people would argue it's old, certainly from the public knowing about it. It's been 10 been about 10 years, and we're just seeing it take off like a rocket. And I love with all the things it can let me do as a small business person that I couldn't do before. Um, that I can do things with my teams that I couldn't do before. Um, but it is what it is. There is no question that this is going to um change how we do business. And so that's exciting. That is absolutely exciting. But just like the time of the automobile, not everybody is going to be successful at it. Not everybody is going to make it through. You look at how many car brands went away um over the time from 1910 to 1950, um, they just went away because they couldn't keep up with the change in the evolution. So we are going to see that. No question, we're going to see people who do not survive this. Um, I don't mean physically, they'll be alive, but their jobs are not going to survive it. But I'm telling all of my students that AI is not going to take your job. It's going to be somebody who knows how to use AI better than you that's going to take your job. So, yes, I worry. Um, I think that I have a fundamental faith in humanity that we're not going to be building things that will take over the world. Um, those will get taken out of the system as we go along. People will recognize it, systems will adjust. But right now, it's a it's a hurricane of things coming at us with AI.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

Well, you've worked in education, leadership, writing, and consulting. So talk about which role has taught you the most about people and why.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Um, I think they all do, but teaching comes down to it's a microcosm. You see everything in the classroom. You see people who are in their 50s, you see people who are in their 20s, they're all coming to learn, they have different dreams and different values, and they want to just be successful. Now, successful doesn't necessarily equate to a Lamborghini and uh mansion in Florida. It's that they want to do what they want to do, that they want to do what makes them happy. Uh, someone once said, you know, find what you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life. Most people are looking for that, they're looking for that opportunity to do something that they would just do for free, except they have to eat and keep a uh roof over their head. So they're going to do what they want to do. In teaching, you see it all in a classroom, and you see it when they ask the questions. You can see the excitement in their eyes when they get an answer that makes sense to them. And you can see that look of disbelief when they go, Yeah, no, I've tried that. That didn't work. Now what are you going to do? And so I love the idea of teaching. I love being in the classroom. When you're with in consulting, you learn a lot about businesses. No question. You learn a lot about how a business runs and operates. But the company wants you to fix the problem as soon as possible and be on your way because you're costing them money. So they want to know the problem is solved and it's on. So there's not a lot of room for that looking and saying, Why are we here? What are we doing? How should we do this? They want you to fix the problem. And that, you know, if you're driving a car and you're on the way to your friend's house and you get a flat tire, you just want the tire fixed. You don't want to get into a long discussion about why the roads are bumpy or why there was a nail on the road. You just want it fixed and moved on. In consulting, it's like that. Most companies just want to move on, find the problem, solve it, and move on. Now you might get called back a year later for another problem, but teaching certainly keeps you humble. And I think that's an important part in every leader's life is that there's somebody there who's keeping you humble and making sure that you're asking yourself, am I really spending the time and energy I should on this? Or am I kind of just coasting? And if you're just coasting, time to review if you're really doing what you like to do.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Well, what lesson do you hope listeners take away from your journey long after this episode is over?

SPEAKER_00 18:04

I love it that they there's always someone who can say you cannot do it. It won't work, it's gonna fail. Don't do it, don't try, don't do this, don't do that. There's a hundred people in our lives that will take the easy route. Um it was it was interesting. My father spent 37 years at the same company because it was safe and secure. He got a pension and he got all of the things that came along with 37 years at the same company. And that's what he saw as safe. That's what he saw as what I should do. And um, he's now gone, but I think towards the end of his life, he realized that he wasn't sure what I did for a living, but he knew I kept my family in I created a good life for my family and that my his grandkids were being taken care of and all of those things. But for him, safety was 37 years at the same company. For me, and and I hope people take this away, that safety is not, in my mind, 37 years at the same company, because they can come in at any time and give you two weeks' notice and you're gone. Your whole life is twisted and turned because somebody who doesn't know you in some corporate head office in a city that you probably don't live in, um, decided we just need 10% less people across the board. And now you're on your own. You're you're out there without the infrastructure, the the things that protected you for 10, 15, 20 years, they're just gone. So I love the idea of being self-employed. That is, I find the opportunities, I build those, and I want people to have the courage to try that, to do that. I had that discussion with my bank manager. They called me in for a once-a-year review, and she said, you know, Norman, things are a little slower this year than normal. And I said, Yes, they are. They absolutely are. She said, Well, that concerns us. And I said, But why? I've been through slow periods before. Things have gotten better before, they'll get better again. She said, But how do we know that? And I stopped for a moment and I said, How do you know you will have a job in two weeks? And she stopped for a moment and I said, You don't, because somebody from headquarters could just come in and take your job away. I can see the problems coming, I can fix them. I have the fluidness to fix them as I need to. And I really want people to feel that it's it's available to them. It's not for everyone, not everyone can live this life. But if you've been sitting there chomping at the bit, saying, I really want to do this, give it a shot, give it a try. That doesn't mean walking away from your full-time job. Try it in the evenings, try working part-time. You know, if you really want to run a, I don't know, a grocery store. Um, if you really want to run a grocery store, then go and work at a grocery store. Work there part-time in the evenings and the weekends and see what it's like. Is it what you do? My wife and I, my wife and I love to um entertain. We just love entertaining. And somebody once said, Well, why don't you run a bar? You like entertaining so much. You make a good bar owner. And I said, I'd make a terrible bar owner because I don't want to clean out toilets at three o'clock in the morning and then crawl home to bed. Um, there's a difference between entertaining and running a bar. So I know from experience I'm not going to be good at a bar. So if you're gonna want, if that's your dream, go and try it. Test the waters, put your toe in the waters and test it. But don't listen to the no's. The no's are everywhere. Everyone says no. Your parents will say no, your brothers and sisters will say no, your spouses will say no, your kids will say no. But if it's inside you, you have to go and try it. You have to go and take that opportunity to be an entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Well, I know you've wrote multiple bestselling books, so you know, kind of give the listeners uh An overview of your books and uh what they can inspect when they read them and where to get them.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

So um they're all available online, of course, through Amazon. But um, so I'm a Canadian. I live in I've lived here all my life, um, with a couple exceptions, a couple of years here and there. Um, but Canada doesn't tell its stories really well. Those of people who like yourself who are in the United States, you tell your stories really well. You you hold up the people who have built your country, you hold up the people who have um done good and sometimes bad, but you talk about them and you they're part of your history. Canada has often sort of said, yeah, it's just us, we're just Canadians. And so I love telling those stories. So I end up telling stories, they're not fiction, they're all nonfiction books, they're mostly military history, where I look at where Canada did amazing things and what that meant for Canadians. Now, there's a couple of books that are focused on the American uh history. Um one of my books called Broken Arrow is about a B-36 bomber. True story, B-36 bomber that was flying from Anchorage, Alaska to um Carswell in Texas, in Dallas, just outside of Dallas, and um it accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on Canada. Now, it didn't go off, but a fat man bomb escaped from the airplane, hit the water, and sank off the coast of Canada. Um, it's an American story, it's a Canadian story, it's a Cold War story, it's a history story, but it has some really neat characters in it who um were incredible people in real life. You don't have to make these people up. So, my books are always looking for those people who um lived extraordinary lives and did it because it was just what they did. They led incredible lives. Um, they didn't, if you had asked them at the time, they'd say, No, I'm just a pilot, or no, I'm just a navigator in the Air Force. They wouldn't have seen what they were doing was amazing, and I love um telling the stories because they won't. Most veterans will not talk about their time in the military, and so I try to tell those stories for them.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

So, a bit of a shift. Um, I've been asked by a textbook company to write a textbook on AI and marketing. The goal in the goal in marketing is to be personal. Now, so Chris, I don't want to just know you're a guy living in Wichita that has a radio show. Uh, I want to know that Curtis likes this and he likes doing these things. And so we want to know that personality part of you. So we're not wasting your time with what we used to call junk mail or blanket ads on the radio. We want to put stuff in your mailbox, your email box, that you are really interested in and that you're ready to purchase. Um, so if you're looking for something, a trip somewhere that we advertise to you at the right place. AI can do that. The problem it can lose is the humanity. It can lose that personal touch. So, a textbook company in New York has asked me to write a textbook on AI and marketing. How do we make it personal without making it artificial? That's not the actual title, but that's the working premise. How do we make sure that we keep the human touch when we introduce AI to marketing? Because it's relatively easy to jump on and have AI write an ad for us, tell us what's the best time of day to play it. But it still needs a human being to know if it's going to connect with the customer. Is it going to connect? And if it will, then that's where we want to be. That's the place we want to be. But it's not so easy. And as I say, we're very much in the eye of the storm. So you can't point to something and say, we have 20 years experience. Here's how you do it. At most, we have three to five years experience, and it has changed dramatically in that three to five years. So the point of the textbook is to be a working document that someone can say, I'm running a small business or I'm running a medium-sized business. I'm going to grab that book and I'm going to follow it chapter by chapter, recognizing that the actual names, things like, I don't know, chat GTP, may not be there five years from now. Who knows? It may be supplanted by something we don't even know exists today. And it's to give people the tools to adjust as those adjustments are coming in their business life. So that's um got to be to the publisher by July 1st. It's probably a couple months after that, before it'll be on the bookshelves. Um, but um I'm my first textbook I've written, so I'm very happy to do that.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Well, so people can keep up with everything that you're up to, though at your contact info.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

Well, the best place to reach me is um on LinkedIn. I'm at Norman Leach, the Chaos Navigator. Um, so if you look up Norman Leach and you see the words chaos navigator, that's me. Um, I think there's only one other Norman Leach on LinkedIn. But anyway, uh look for the link uh chaos navigator handle, and that's me. And that's the best way to reach out because I check that almost hourly, but happy to do it. And then if someone wants to contact me there and wants my personal email and stuff, I'm happy to give that out once we've made some contact on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Close us out with some final thoughts, maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on. Any final thoughts you have for the listeners?

SPEAKER_00 27:43

I don't think there's anything we've forgotten necessarily. I think what we have to remember. I have a sign hanging in my office, Chris, and it says, doing new things is easy. It's letting go of the old that's difficult. And I think that has always been the case that we do things the same way, even with new technologies. And I see that around me that people are using AI the way we used to use Google. They're not using it as a tool, they're using it as a search engine or something of the nature. It's letting go of those old things, and we have to. If we are going to succeed in what's coming at us in the future, we have to say the old is gone. You know, Henry Ford was famous for saying if I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, because that's what they knew. They knew horses. So give me faster horses, that'll get me fast to where I want to be faster with a faster horse. Henry Ford said, You don't need horses, you need an automobile, and it'll get you there much faster. But you had to let go of the idea of the horse. So I'm encouraging everybody I talk to and meet through this kind of a medium and forum to say, look, guys, it's coming at us. You need to be ready, let go of the old.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

All right, ladies and gentlemen, visit Norman Leach, the chaos navigator on LinkedIn and get in touch with him if you want to link up with him and please follow rate review, share this episode to as many people as possible. Also, if you want to keep up with all things living a dream, please visit www.curveball337.com. If you haven't done so, sign up for the newsletter, leave us a review, leave us some voicemail, we might even play it on the show, and share the website and the show to everybody you know. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Norman, thank you for all that you you do, and thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

Thank you for the time.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

For more information on the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, visit www.curveball337.com. Until next time, keep living the dream.