Interview of Joshua MacLeod

Joshua MacLeod: Interview Transcript

Lucy: Hi everyone! I am Lucy, a junior at Belmont, studying Global Leadership & German and today is my interview, so I will have Josh introduce himself.

Joshua: Hi I am Joshua MacLeod, and I am the founder of Growability. Our mission is to equip business and non-profit leaders to enjoy meaningful work by creating scalable, effective, and generous organizations. I also have two non-profit organizations, “Instruments of Joy” where we provide quality musical instruments to musicians in need, and “Picture the Nations” where we represent countries by the beauty of their people instead of the stigma of their poverty. Kind of like National Geographic but we give all the money to the people in the pictures. That, and nine kids and I have a very non-boring life.

Lucy: Yes, nine children and all the other endeavors!

Joshua: Haha, yah my life mission is to survive.

Lucy: To survive and thrive! Okay well, thank you again for joining me today. I chose you because our project is about leaders in the community and people who are successful and we look up to, and you always give good advice, and are eloquently spoken. So, my first question for you, as this is a global leadership class is, what leaders do you look up to the most, and why?

Josh: The single leader I look up to the most is my wife. It’s funny because she wouldn’t call herself a leader, but she exhibits I think one of the most important leadership characteristics that there is, which is kindness. I think of kindness like Noah and the Arc, with animals, and two by two of their kind, and so a leader who exhibits kindness sees all people as the same kind. They love on people the way they are and who they are and say “you are the same kind as me.” So I love leaders who exhibit kindness. I am also a super business nerd so I love reading old dead people, like Peter Drucker and Deming. If it is a big this thick that talks about boring stuff, then I like it.

Lucy: Haha, well at least someone does.

Joshua: So yes, business gurus and kind people are those whom I look up to.

Lucy: Nice I like those answers. Plus your wife has nine children so how could she not be a leader?

Joshua: Exactly right. And another thing that leaders do, is leaders should all be trampolines where people jump on you and you launch them as high as they can go. So yes, my wife is a good trampoline.

Lucy: Ah, I like the image.

Joshua: Yah a lot of time, people think their job as a leader is to stand on the wall and reach down and pull you up to where they are at, but I think that is okay leadership. Really great leadership is being a trampoline and jumping over the way, saying, “who cares?” just jump right over that. Lucy: So my next question is about you individually with your success and your life. What skill of your own do you think has helped you the most and do you think you developed it, were you born with it, and how exactly did that come about?

Joshua: I think the number one skill that has served me well in my life is curiosity because I love to learn. So I am naturally curious and I love to read books. I have the strengths and weaknesses as a dyslexic mind. I don’t look at things the same as everybody else, I look at them from lots of different angles so there is a term called syntopical processing that talks about how certain people process information and I am a syntopical processor which means it might take me a long time to answer a question but I enjoy learning and simplifying complexity. Simplifying complexity is my wheelhouse. I like to take things that are super complex and say, “okay what is the fundamental ingredient, or habit, or priority or whatever, and let us just focus on that.”

Lucy: Yeah I think that could be very useful for people because it is hard to put something into different parts and start where you are at, and people get so frustrated when they don’t do that and I struggle with that. I have a hundred things to do and then I am like, shoot I can’t do any of them!

Joshua: Yep. I am a fan of the strength finders test and achiever is one of them. Like you could solve work hunger today and then wake up the next morning and be like, “oh I didn’t get anything done” like you always have to get something accomplished. So I am cursed with that wonderful strength.

Lucy: Yah it is a struggle and a strength. Awesome. So my next question is related to your consulting business. As a college student, sometimes when people explain to me their jobs, I don’t really know what they are talking about. So can you kind of just explain what you do with your consulting business and give an example of how that works?

Joshua: So there is a statement that I have attached onto that says, “Knowledge lies in the accumulation of facts, but wisdom lies in their simplification.” So if I go and I go on google and do a search on how to set goals, I am gonna have 60 different opinions on the best way to set goals, or how to create a budget, or marketing strategy, or all of these things. We live in a fundamentally knowledge-rich society but knowledge doesn’t necessarily give you something practical that is actually going to help you. The simplification of knowledge is wisdom, where you take those options and you choose what’s the ideal option for a given scenario. The primary role of a consultant is to ask the right questions. I was really challenged and thought this role was not for me because I cannot know everything that my clients need. They have a zillion different needs. What if I am working for a doctor and I didn’t study medicine, how am I supposed to help the doctor? But what I learned is you can ask the right questions, and that’s what all good doctors do. They ask a good question and then they can diagnose. So one of the primary roles of a consultant is to ask the right question, understand all of the fundamentals of organizational management, leadership management, and marketing, and then be able to ask the right question at the right time is a critical role of consulting. Another thing is that… in Growability, the company I started, we talk about the entrepreneurial lid. LID. So, the ‘L’ is Lack of Knowledge, which every leader has the problem of I don’t know what I don’t know. The ‘I’ which is Isolation. I don’t want anybody else to know what I don’t know. And the ‘D’ is Discouragement. I know I don’t know what I don’t know. So my passion in life is to help entrepreneurs remove the lid. If you don’t understand how to create a budget, let me show you how to create a budget. If you don’t know how to make a marketing plan, let me tell you how to make a marketing plan. Let me get you together with other leaders so you realize that everyone else is facing the same stuff that you are facing, and life is better in community. Get together with other leaders like you and learn and grow together.

Lucy: Yes, I love the LID. The LID acrostic is helpful, and it can be used for really anything, in life. It’s true, when people feel isolated and they don’t want to ask questions cause they don’t want to seem stupid, but then they never learn.

Joshua: Yah, if you bring knowledge to people, and wisdom is every better and you help to get people together and remove isolation and give courage to people, like no matter what you are doing, if you bring knowledge, community, and courage, it is going to be successful. Even if it is not monetarily successful, it is still successful, and a beautiful act.

Lucy: My next question is about failure, everybody’s favorite topic. So we talk a lot in Global Leadership about trials that leaders go through and how it inevitably ends up making them better leaders because they grow through it. So can you give an example of a trial or failure that has helped you grow as a person and/or professionally?

Joshua: Yes, let me give you a few specific examples. My first failure was my first job, climbing the corporate ladder. I was a put-up or shut-up leader at my company. I hired a bunch of people and I continually talked about how they weren’t as smart as me and they weren’t getting as much stuff done. And I was like, “You have better degrees than me. You have this. Why aren’t you putting this out?!” I realized that fear is a motivator, but love is a much better motivator and my first whole career was fear-based management, which was the biggest mistake ever. So as a twenty-something-year-old idiot, I was just like “I am the boss so I am gonna go do this stuff” and that was my first big mistake, to learn that fear sucks as a leadership modality. (

). I had some success in litigation technology for my first career, and then I spent seven years in 21 countries studying global poverty. On my first trip overseas, I went to Ethiopia and I thoughtlessly raised my camera and took a picture of this lady because she just looked super fascinating. She was an impoverished lady and she started screaming at me, and yah you should be screaming at me, like what was I thinking? I was thinking about my camera and the new lens and how this picture was gonna look great. But what she was saying, according to my translator, was “Don’t take my picture if you can’t fix my poverty.” And I think one of the biggest mistakes that any leader can make is trying to be excellent without taking into account the human cost of whatever it is you are doing. That mistake was beautiful because I never took a picture again without asking permission and even bringing printers along and printing pictures and giving them to people and all of those things. There are statistics that like 8/10 small businesses fail or like 60% or whatever. But then there are statistics that like 8/10 SECOND businesses succeed. The best education you can get is failure. If you fail at a business then great. I started at a marketing company and right off it totally failed. So now I am a business consultant. People say, “you had a failed business and now you are a business consultant?” and I am like, “yes.”

Lucy: Yeah, well now you know how to help people

Joshua: Well you just know what can carry the weight of a thing. If you don’t have integrity in a thing, and you step on it, then it will break. If a stand on a rock, it’s great. If I stand on a piece of paper, it may not hold weight. So failure allows you to know what can you stand on, that looks like you can stand on it. Failure is really good at helping you know that this is something you can stand on.

Lucy: So you talked a bit about studying poverty, and that is not a small thing, so I want to talk about that. In our Global Leadership class, we talk a lot about poverty and non-profits and everything within that realm. For most people, living in America or a developed country, it’s hard to know how to help. You see all these problems, you see it on the internet, you get frustrated, so then you just stop thinking about it without taking any action. So for people who maybe aren’t gonna travel to these countries and be as active as you are, what is the number one thing you can do just as an average American to try and help poverty or in some way do your small part? So this is something that has grown into a deep conviction. I think that purpose is matured passion. So we all have passion. Like I am excited about fishing. Or I am excited about growing a business. Or I am excited about doing blah, blah, blah. And passion is good. Passion is awesome, love passion. Passion means you are willing to suffer for something that you love. The thing about passion is that it’s not as complete as purpose because what passion always has as the key ingredient is you. It’s like this is what I love, this is what I want. We even ask kids, “what do you want to do? Where do you want to do it?” Purpose has as it’s core, human flourishing, and helping somebody else. And I really believe that every passion finds it completeness in purpose. So I think that they single thing that every person can do to fight global poverty is find purpose in their passion. Okay if you love fishing, then great. Figure out how to fish and serve somebody else. You still get to do the fishing. But now you are bringing a friend who is discouraged and you are encouraging them, or you are teaching your kid, or you are giving the fish away. Whatever! Letting passion mature into purpose is a key ingredient for helping fight global poverty. The other thing that I have discovered, and one of the reasons that “Instruments of Joy” is so successful is one of the key challenges in poverty is that people lose hope. So if you grow up, like for instance when I went to in orphanage in Malawi, and it’s an AID orphanage, and you got about 60 kids who every one of their parents died of AIDS, there’s no electricity, and they eat once a day. You look around and there is no hope. But then this kid comes in with a gas can and a block of wood that he somehow fashioned into a ukelele-like thing and he started to sing. And his voice was beautiful and the song transcended the current circumstance. Now, he saw hope. So if you live in an impoverished community, you really need to see beautiful things, and I don’t think that there is enough art in poverty alleviation. We think about food, clothes, rice, and yes everyone needs that, it’s great. You need security and all of this stuff, but if you really see someone as as valuable as yourself, then you care about their soul and not just their body. I think that relief and development agencies can be defined by body servants, which is just crap. Like, they’re people, and they’re you! It’s you. So we don’t only need our bodies served, but we need our souls fed. So I think that beauty and art and inspiration and these like that are really valuable things to bring into the world.

Lucy: Yah I think that’s a good answer. A lot of people can relate to that and if you aren’t gonna, like I said, go to these countries, what can you do? But there's also value in knowing that if you aren’t good at a specific thing, you don’t necessarily need to do it. So use what you are good at, and use it to the best of your ability to serve others. If that’s music, then make music that will serve others. If it’s cooking then cook to serve others.

Joshua: When a passion matures it becomes a purpose.

Lucy: So you talked a little about how you are ambitious and the Strength Finder Test. So I am wondering, cause I have things I wanna do, and convictions. How do you take what you want and actually bring it to action? What would you say for people who have a dream or want to start a business or anything in that realm? What’s the rip of the bandaid? How do you go from the idea of wanting to start this business to meeting people who are gonna bring action to your plan?

Joshua: For me, this was a faith journey. I mean 100%. So I was a litigation technology consultant, my income tripled, and I wrote an article that was the cover of the Nashville Bar Journal. I started getting stuck by success because now I am making more money and I have more responsibilities. I’m doing this and this program and I have kids and a house. You can get stuck on the corporate ladder, and so what I did for me, what okay if God is real I know that I am not gonna lie forever, Like 1/1 people will die. Everybody dies. So I was young and successful and I was fundamentally unsatisfied because everywhere that I turned I saw greed and power hunger. I realized if I stay on the ladder, I am gonna end up in greed and power-hungry-ville and I don’t want that. So I was like okay God if you are real I am gonna do whatever you tell me to do. You bring me 3 people to serve and I’ll serve them. So I quit my job, put in my notice and was like if this doesn’t work then I can go and work at any of the law firms in town and do whatever I want. So I did a whatever break. Not like “whatever” but like “God whatever you want! You made the universe if you want me to do something, then just tell me to do it. And that led me to seven years in 21 countries studying global poverty on 50 trips and documentaries that raised millions of dollars and gave 100,000 people clean drinking water and promo videos of Compassion International, and orphanages. I became a filmmaker which was a passion that became a purpose, which ultimately led to me realizing that the way I am wired is, the best play I have in fighting global poverty is organization development. So I guess the answer to your question is the golden handcuffs need to get burned and thrown away, and just take a risk. There’s a book called Halftime, and like one of the most dissatisfying things in life is success because you make all this money and you reach these achievements and you’re like, okay now this actually adds more stress than I thought it would and this adds more responsibility and I have all this stuff. Success doesn’t actually satisfy. Purpose satisfies, and serving people satisfies. The number one thing is to take risks to serve and it’s critical. I have done that will all my kids. Marry well so that your spouse will go along with your crazy adventures, that is a really important one. And takes risks. The emphasis on that is deal with God. I had to get personal with God and just say “Hey. If you are real, show my what to do and I’ll do it, and if you aren’t then I’m gonna go live like Hell and do whatever I want.” But yah get well with God, take risks, and marry well. That’s my answer.

Lucy: Get well with God, take risks, and marry well. I’ll write it down. So you have mentioned a couple of books, and people you look up to. I love to read so I am curious about your number one book suggestion for growing your human capital or skills as a leader, or etc.

Joshua: I’m writing it. So the Growability book will be out and when it is, that will be the book that I highly recommend. I think rather than a particular book, it is the rhythm of reading. I am an audible processor so I listen to books rather than read them. I will read four to five books a year but I will listen to a book a week. Everybody should do a good mix of fiction and non-fiction. Find your mix. Don’t be exclusive and make sure you are listening from either one. Leadership is primarily about growth, so find books that will help you grow. Management is primarily about profitability and stability. So books about how to stabilize and self-help books. Marketing is about influence, so books that teach you how to be the best you. Just self-help books. I read books that help me grow, stabilize, and live on purpose. Stuff that I thought was cool, not I read Drucker. It’s different things. But as a fundamental tool is getting a Strength Finder Test and understanding your primary strengths and if you have a chance to do the Growability training on that, it is a game-changer. I will be glad to help you, Lucy. You take the Strength Finder Test which shows you how to apply these strengths. We all have areas that are strengths, competencies, and areas of frustration zones that will wear us out. A lot of the time we get assigned to things that are either strengths, competencies, or frustration zones. We’ve got to avoid, or we need help in frustration zones. We wanna plug into our strengths zones. So understanding what your strengths are, and playing into those, and making sure you are assigned to an apt role to maximize your strength in an organization is critical. The Strength Finder Test is used by 80% of Fortune 500 Companies and there are like 80 million people who have taken the test, so it is not a come-and-go personality thing.

Lucy: I’ll have to do it. I have heard about it, but never done it yet.

Joshua: Yes you are in for a treat. Sorry, my power went out on my thing. I gotta go in another room, it’s getting dark in this one. The power is on in half my office and its on it here, so we will come over here.

Lucy: We talk a lot about leadership, but it is relative to where you are at in life. I am sure you have seen your opportunities change as you get older. But for younger people who aren’t running businesses, or specific leaders, how can they just be leaders within their community and just in general how can people develop their leadership skills when they are not in a leadership role?

Joshua: I mean really, leaders are listeners and leaders are learners. The number one thing that traveling 50 trips overseas has shown is, don’t go try to teach anything. Just go and learn. I don’t need to teach, I just need to listen. Especially if there are old people, just listen to them. Even if they aren’t smart, they are experienced, and there is value in experience. I hunted down old people who were in careers and life that I was fascinated by, and finding mentors who have been where you want to go, and then actually doing what they say is the most important thing.

Lucy: Haha and then actually doint it.

Joshua: You know, I have had mentors that would charge people thousands of dollars an hour to talk to people. But because I would just bug them, they would give me time. I would question the crap out of them, about this and this and this. I was always able to keep the ones that when they told me to do something, I did it. But I would lose any of the mentors who when they told me to do something, I was like “no I don’t want to make a budget.” You call them and then they aren’t available anymore. So critical is finding mentors and doing what they say. The other two things we have touched on, are travel and books. In my life, travel and books have been the primary education that allows me to make money. Education has given me great opportunities to talk to people. But travel and books allow me to make money. If you graduate and you are like, “I am done. I’m smart and I have a certificate.” You are gonna get lost in the group of people who continue to learn even when they are done with school. Keep traveling, keep reading books, and then you will always be marketable.

Lucy: Yes, a lifelong learner.

Joshua: Yah, lifelong learner. Leaders are learners. Leaders are listeners.

Lucy: And marry somebody who will take risks.

Joshua: Haha, no I was the risk-taker. Sarah was the stabilizer. Don’t marry somebody who is exactly like you, you’ll be imbalance. Marry someone who is the opposite of you, and then figure out how to live together. That is mostly marriage.

Lucy: I didn’t know I was gonna get relationship advice as well, haha.

Joshua: Haha, well maybe I should keep my mouth shut. But hey, we’ve been married 25 years, we have 9 kids, and we are happy. So I’ll give some marriage advice.

Lucy: Yes, something is working! We just have a few more minutes. So I am gonna ask just a broad question. I always like asking people, what is the number one piece of advice, not even related to leader or business. But what is the takeaway that you would want to tell your younger self or someone that you wanna help.

Joshua: I just read a book called, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. I think that there’s so much truth in, like I have a global perspective because I have been able to travel all around the globe. There are some fallacies in the American way of life, one of them is that faster and bigger is better. That is just not true. Faster and bigger is not better. For example when I was running my non-profits I was always focused on how big should it be? “Well as big as it can!” Well, no. Your non-profit should be a beautiful size for what it is. What is the ideal meal. Well it’s not as big or as fast as it can be. Well is it Italian, do I wanna cook it for a while, and sit down and enjoy it? Fast food is not as good as slow food. Fast and big should not be primary life objectives. The other thing is that ‘with’ is almost as important as ‘what.’ Who are you doing this with? Even in our relationship with God. We want to do things for God, but God is actually better with God. Like if the creator of the universe walks with you, it is a big deal, and a lot better than walking by yourself. So slow down and be with people. See your career as more of a meal, than like an accomplishment. So there you go. I gave you like six different things.

Lucy: You heard it here first, folks! I think that is some really good advice, especially for the younger generation. And this is global leadership, so learning that America obviously doesn’t have all of the answers. It is always good to have a global perspective and see where we are flawed.

Joshua: Yeah, America has all of the tools. We definitely don’t have all the answers, but we are ridiculously tool-rich. I am a huge fan of giving people tools. If you are digging a hole with a spool and I give you a shover, then you are going to be more effective. Americans might think, “well you aren’t doing good enough, cause you just dug that hole!” But you dug that hole with a spoon! Like you are smarter and more capable than anyone we know, you dug that hole with a spoon. Watch what happens when we give those people a shovel. Poverty in the developing world is more about tool provision than it is about knowledge provision. But there is a really important book called, The Culture Map, that talks about eight different cultural realities that are geographically specific, like hierarchical cultures vs. egalitarian and high-context, and low-context. The Culture Map is a fundamental book if you are actually going to do any work internationally, that is a top read. So understanding culture, don’t try to help somebody if you don’t understand their culture.

Lucy: Yes, makes sense. Alright, well those are all the questions I have for you today. Thank you so much for your time! I learned a lot, and now I have some book recommendations. I really appreciate you and your wisdom.

Additionally, Joshua wanted me to add an important strength he missed in his interview. He said, “The only strength I should have mentioned is praying when I don’t have wisdom!” The Bible verse he quoted for this strength was, “If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.” - James 1:5. Joshua continued saying, “The only way I’ve been able to do anything in my life is because God answers prayers.”