July 16, 2026 – AI Systems Open Source Platform Ran Aroussi and Six Leadership Actions Susan MacKenty Brady

The Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning school for startups radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion. Jim Beach.

Jim Beach 0:26
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. Two fantastic guests for you today. Both fulfill our goal of being both motivational and educational. If I can do that, what else do you want? I mean, my goal here, I thought, was to create a mosaic of entrepreneurship where we talk about all of the minute issues, every single crack and cranny that we can get into. We try to explore anything remotely related to entrepreneurship. We try to talk about and learn from, and so that’s what I thought my job was, and then to make it as palatable and entertaining as possible along the way. Go out and find an amazing guest that are entertaining, a little bit educational. We mix that in. Don’t charge you nothing for it, and you tell your friends about it. And that’s the formula, right? And if we stick to it, we’ll all be happy. I’m doing my part today, introducing you to Ron Orusi, an amazing open source example. It is really cool what he is doing. I don’t understand it, and that’s how cool it is. And then Susan Brady is with us to talk about leadership, and she plays the Quick 10. So that is a lot of fun. We always love it when we have a quick 10 player. So Susan is going to play the quick 10. Thanks so much for being with us. We’ll get started in just a second. Oh, my book won a national-not one-it was a finalist for the National Indian Excellence Association. So please buy a copy. I need some sales and reviews. Time

The Real Environmentalists AD 2:01
for talking, no action on climate change. Introducing the real environmentalists, the bold new book by Jim Beach. It’s not about activists, politicians, or professors. It’s about the entrepreneurs, real risk takers, building cleaner, smarter solutions-not for applause, but for profit. The entrepreneurs in the book aren’t giving speeches. They’re in labs, factories, and offices, cleaning the past and building clean products for the future. The real environmentalists is available now because the people saving the planet aren’t the ones you think. Go to Amazon and search for real environmentalist. Thank you.

Jim Beach 2:32
We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. Very excited to introduce my first guest. Please welcome Ron Arusi to the show. He is, I think, one of the best examples of the incredible benefits of open sourcing our coding. He helps build software for software builders. His products, his open source code that he has produced, and we’ll find out about it. I’m so bad at this open source. I don’t know what I know what it means, but I don’t go there. Has had 100 million downloads. He has a podcast called Old School New Tech and a newsletter called Code Daddy. It is an incredibly impressive organization that he has built. And again, when you find out, when you hear him explain, it’s going to blow you away. Let me explain it that way. Here he is. Please welcome Ron to the show. Ron, I’m doing

Ran Aroussi 3:21
great. I’m doing great. How are you? Thank you for having me.

Jim Beach 3:25
Well, thank you. So, software that helps companies that build software is that the operating system, the OSS?

Ran Aroussi 3:35
No, I would say it’s the the business OS. So what I’m doing is developing tools that businesses can build software on top of in order to specifically serve their needs, be it in anything from financial infrastructure to AI infrastructure and anything in between.

Jim Beach 4:00
Okay, I think I understand that. So then, what does your software is it an automated creation process?

Ran Aroussi 4:09
So yeah, it all started actually way back in the day. I you know I developed my own algorithmic trading strategy as a hobby, and I needed a way to download the market data, and I created a library called Live Finance, and I released it as an open source, and it now is the de facto standard of using market data fetching in Python, and it gets around 30 million downloads every month for this little tool, and obviously a lot of anything from hedge funds to private investors are building on top of that, and that that’s very exciting news. And myself, I’m a builder in my nature, in kind of my my. Character. So every time that I build something that it’s that is not the actual business process that I use, I open source it. So the most recent thing that I’ve open sourced is an infrastructure layer called Muxy, and we use this to for the technical people here, it’s essentially an infrastructure layer that where agents can run on a server. It’s a server that was built specifically for running agent rather than just a software tool, and we’re using it to create AI transformations in different businesses, starting from also first, starting off from understanding, letting the AI kind of roam through the organization with permissions, of course, and the boundaries to explore where are the true bottlenecks from reading internal emails and from going over Slack interactions, kind of understand where the real bottlenecks are, and then builds the software automatically in order to most of it automatically. Some of it obviously needs a human in the loop, but it builds the software to automate this process or to speed these things along in order to free people from wasting their time in the waiting on status of a task, so that’s essentially the main thing that we’re focusing on right now.

Jim Beach 6:34
All right, I have so many follow-up questions. So for the why finance, that is an open-source tool that millions of people are using. What does it allow them to do in the finance space? So, what does the tool do? I didn’t catch that part.

Ran Aroussi 6:50
Yeah. So the tool fetches market data, stock information from places like Yahoo Information. So not sorry, Yahoo Finance, and not only stock prices, but also company profiles and PE ratios and option prices. So it allows a lot of businesses to model their either trading strategies, their hedging strategies, their FX strategies based on that. So a lot of companies now are obviously international companies, and the company makes money in U.S. dollars, but we are paying in however many different currencies to employees around the world. They need to make sure that they are protected for from currency fluctuations. So one of the things that they’re using this library for is to model their to fetch all the historical data, the fluctuation of the different foreign exchange prices, and model the options that they need to buy in order to kind of make sure that they’re not affected more than give or take, let’s say, few percentage points over the the currency rates that they want. So that’s one of the use cases. I’m using it for algorithmic trading. A lot of people are using it for algorithmic trading. It’s basically the easiest way with single line of code to get any sort of stock-related and trading-related information that you need.

Jim Beach 8:27
All right, and I’ll ask the stupid question: How do you make money doing that?

Ran Aroussi 8:31
I’m not. Okay, let me ask. How do you

Jim Beach 8:36
pay for your food at night?

Ran Aroussi 8:39
Well, so I separate what I do for the open source community, which is completely free, a company where we provide software development services and bespoke solutions and integrations, and that that’s what we do. That’s where the money is coming from. But the actual libraries that I have and the actual software tools that I have, these are always going to be open source for the main reason that I don’t think that I would be where I’m at right now, or the internet would be where it is right now without the contribution of open source, without open source software and the contributions of developers around the world. So that’s that’s kind of my way of of giving back, and I don’t see it changing. I will not give the business secret sauce, but I would would give out the the toolbox and let people have at it.

Jim Beach 9:36
All right. Does Lucy? How do you pronounce the agent server M U X? Yeah, it’s

Ran Aroussi 9:41
a muxi. It’s Muxy. It’s a multiplex extensible intelligence. That’s kind of the acronym.

Jim Beach 9:49
Does is that also open source? It is.

Ran Aroussi 9:53
Yes. So it is open source, and it’s a it’s a mega project. Actually, it has the server in. Structure and the software development toolkits and the memory infrastructure layer and runtime. It’s it’s a huge project, and again, this is also free if you want to go use it, install it in your own server. Go right ahead. But if you’re a business, and that’s that was kind of the the thought process that went into that. So if you’re a business that values speed and you want to have it done for you, you’re you’re going to reach out and you’re going to have us do the integration and the build up for you, much like happening with with the Linux system. So the Linux operating system is completely free to use, but organizations do end up paying hundreds of 1000s of dollars per year in support plans and different licensing. But the core infrastructure is free for everybody to use. So I’m kind of going with the same model here. I’m assuming that whoever wants to tinker will tinker. If you’re an individual developer, you want to build something. If you’re a startup and you want to build something, go right ahead. But if you you want to have business integration kind of at a larger scale, you probably going to reach out and talk to the experts who’ve been there, done that more than once, and have them implement everything for you.

Jim Beach 11:25
All right, I certainly understand the open source. I think that’s an incredible decision that you’ve made, and the Linux example is certainly a great comparison and makes a lot of sense. Let me ask you this: What

Ran Aroussi 11:42
we’re hoping for?

Jim Beach 11:44
I’m sorry. Go ahead. What?

Ran Aroussi 11:45
No, no. That’s what what we were hoping for when we decided on this model.

Jim Beach 11:50
So, if you’re making 100% now, how many percent could you have made if you had not open sourced the code and retained all of the rights yourself. Would you be making 50% less, or would you be making 500% much, much, much more?

Ran Aroussi 12:10
Ooh, that’s a very interesting question. Let’s take Y Finance for example, because with Y Finance, when I first released it, it had I know a few 1000s of installs every month, I assume that if it was closed source and you had to pay for something like that, just like any startup, just like any business, I would have to spend money on getting the distribution, getting people to try it, and getting them to pay. So I think that in the grand scheme of things, I would certainly not have gotten to 30 million people downloading and using it every month. That that would never happen if it was closed source. So the theoretical bajillion dollars that I could have made is is exactly that. It’s theoretical, but I assume. assume that I would probably make a decent take-home money, like I say, a nice salary, if it was closed source. But I would have definitely not have that distribution. Probably a few 1000s of people using it, paying a few bucks a month for it, so that that would probably be along what I imagine it would end up being.

Jim Beach 13:28
Did you buy a theoretical yacht to go along with your theoretical model you were making?

Ran Aroussi 13:33
Not yet, not yet. It’s I’m focusing on on the theoretical airplanes at the moment. No, but trust me. If if I could figure out a way to make one cent out of every download, I I would do it. But I don’t want to do anything that would hinder that open source spirit.

Jim Beach 13:55
What happens when you simply say that I have open sourced this, but on the back end, could you please go send me $100 on Patreon or something like that. Does that ever work? Do those sort of campaigns?

Ran Aroussi 14:10
Yeah, I’m I’m getting a few hundreds of dollars a month in kind of donations of people clicking on the Patreon and paying few bucks. It was never meant to be a business model, a profit center for me. So these are all just very nice pocket change to go spend on the kids on a nice afternoon.

Jim Beach 14:34
Yes, got to spend on the kids. Got to spend on the kids.

Ran Aroussi 14:38
Of course, that’s what we do everything.

Jim Beach 14:40
Yes, go back in history a little bit and tell us more of the entrepreneurial story behind this. What did you do first when you had the idea? When you saw this problem, talk to us about entrepreneurial history.

Ran Aroussi 14:55
Yeah. So my first my first entrepreneurial. Was actually I was around 17 when I when I first started and I went through pretty much anything you can imagine during my time. It was all in software. I’ve been in ed tech and health tech and fintech, and as a developer, as a CEO, as a CTO as a tech lead, but you name it. And every venture that I started, it was always kind of part doing the marketing and the product thing and part development. So I’m very geeky. I’m a builder, as I mentioned. I love I love to build things, but I also understand that some of these things have to turn into profit centers for me to make money off. So the entrepreneurial journey was specifically with with why finance is I had a hobby. I wanted to do some algorithmic trading. In order to do algorithmic trading, I need to get market data. I couldn’t find anything that was able to do it quite as good as I wanted it, and quite as fast and for free. So I just created it and then I placed it on GitHub and with literally zero marketing. I probably just tweeted about it once or twice, and that’s it. And it just started to take off. I remember that I was blown away by the fact that I was at around 200,000 installs every month five years ago, and now we are at 30 million. And now, for every if you if you go to any of the AI tools and you’re asking to generate code and to fetch market data, they’ll use this library, which which is great, I guess. But yeah, but other than that, I mean, other businesses that better John be in the ed space, or where we you know, the heydays we used to serve over 3 billion ads every day, and now I’m heavily focused on the AI stuff, where we are really transitioning businesses from 50% manual labor going towards the 10% manual labor, and this is all done using a different toolset that we’ve built, starting with Moxie as the open source layer. But on top of that, we have an engineering control plane, and an organization-wide stenographer, and personal assistants, and they’re all working in a very both efficient way and very enterprise ready way in terms of the their observability and their role based permissions and everything, and that’s kind of the where the revenue comes in from and from serving our software development clients, so yeah, it’s it’s been a ride. I’ve been doing this for the past 30 years in different variations, but it was always kind of the same type of service. At the end of it, it’s just let me build something that I can have a base boilerplate, which I can then custom fit into each organization that wants to do the implementation.

Jim Beach 18:29
I love it. I love your way of thinking and the way of giving back to others. It’s just amazing. Can you explain a little bit more about Moxie now and how you have agents that live there, right? It’s a server for agents. Explain that by getting that right, please.

Ran Aroussi 18:50
Yeah, yeah, you you get it exactly right. So why does my

Jim Beach 18:54
server, or why does my agent need a server? Can’t it just live on my computer where I created it,

Ran Aroussi 19:02
yeah. Well, that that would be a server. Now it depends on which environment you want to give it. So there are several personal agents like Hermes and Open Claw that are doing great work, and the recommendation is that you run them on their own computer. The problem is first that they’re personal assistants. They run something like a cloud code type of interface at the backend, and they have access to your computer, which is both good and bad depending on your risk profile. The problem is that are these are not enterprise ready. They are not built to serve different groups in the organization with different permissions level. They are not built with the security features. They are not built to handle the business operations. So they are completely focused on being really cool to. Not saying a toy tool. It’s it’s not a toy, but they’re very focused on the personal assistant type of activity. Now, well, if you want to go to something that’s slightly bigger than that, kind of more organization level, your only options right now are is to develop custom code. You need, and for custom code, you need to use different frameworks and libraries, and essentially build the entire infrastructure for yourself. And the philosophy that that we took with Moxie was: look, when you create a website, you don’t, you’re not also developing a web server. You’re not also developing an application server. You’re just focusing on building your website or building your web app because you know there’s already infrastructure in place that you can just pick the right tool for you. You can pick nginx to be your web server, and you can use whatever to use to be a video renderer. There are different engines that are made for that task, and Aegis didn’t have anything like that. So with Moxie, what we’ve done, we kind of follow the approach that Docker did, and we say, okay, let’s build a runtime for them. That runtime would need to have a server infrastructure for it, so it would need the Moxie server, and the Moxie server can run multiple runtimes, each serving a different process and a different purpose for being. And with that type of architecture, you don’t need to focus on coding your agents from scratch and building their system prompt and their security feature. You just define them using configuration files because everything else is just is just bare bare metal, if you will. Is just you need access to memory. You need access to historical data. You need access to to run tools. You need you need all of that. There’s no reason for you to code them from scratch every time you build something new. So you just need to focus on what you want your agent to do rather than tell, explain to it, and equipped with it with the knowledge of how to do it because the server is already taking care of it, and it’s portable. It’s observable. It’s fully. It has full audit log. So yeah, the agents are finally being treated as primitive and not just as a software, which is what they are, but they they are being treated on the technical affair as a software that is type of agent. And what we’re trying to bring with Moxie is no, no, an agent is its own thing. You need to give it the right environment to to to run free without any security implications, essentially.

Jim Beach 23:06
All right, that makes sense even for a beginner neophyte like myself. It’s an amazing story. I had no idea all of this was happening. It is just so impressive. Why are you still based in the UK, aren’t you afraid that you’re going to say something, put out a tweet, and get arrested for violation of freedom of speech? And it sounds like it seems like England has lost itself. And I used to go to London every two or three years. It’s my number one favorite place in the world to go visit, other than Hong Kong, and Hong Kong’s British too. So see the trend there. I don’t want to go anymore. The last visit was not pleasant. I was not enjoying being in London anymore. What are your thoughts on the macro story going on there?

Ran Aroussi 23:59
I agree with you. I mean, I’m originally I’m from Israel. I’ve moved here six years ago, and I’ve seen in my own eyes kind of the the decline that’s happening. And I don’t like the direction that this is going. And we are having thoughts of moving, but my daughter is currently in university, so we’re here for the next two years, and once she’s done, we’ll decide on the next venture. We are definitely considering moving to to the the U.S. We we need to see how to actually go about doing that. But this is this would be a much better place, both for in terms of innovation and in terms of just a different type of can’t do mentality, which here the mentality is a lot more. If if you know the show Little Britain, there’s this character that says computer says no. This is the the the poster of the mentality here in. In the UK, there’s a procedure, there’s a policy, and we cannot move into any sort of direction that’s hasn’t been stipulated and agreed upon by 30-one committees. So yeah, I can I can feel you know coming from Israel, which is very kind of go-getter type of culture. and a lot more, I would say, in in that can do attitude, a lot more similar to the U.S. This, yeah, we would we should have probably do we should have probably moved to the U.S. instead of the U.K. But yeah, we’ll see what what happens in two years when my daughter finishes university here.

Jim Beach 25:46
Where’s she in school?

Ran Aroussi 25:48
She’s in Surrey University, not actually not far from where we live now. Yes,

Jim Beach 25:54
you don’t have to be close by for your children to go to college. My parents never visited me during university in four years. So yeah, but within the U.S.

Ran Aroussi 26:05
you’re you’re only five hours away. If we move now, we’re going to be 10 hours away. It’s going to be it’s going to be a lot a lot harder. But yeah, so we’ll two more years. We’ll see what happens then. We always joke that it’s either going to be the U.S. or a beach in Thailand, so we’ll

Jim Beach 26:22
see. I love it, Ron. Absolutely amazing career, and thank you so much for sharing highlights with us. How do we find out more? Follow online, sign up for your newsletter, listen to your podcast, get it entertained and educated better, please.

Ran Aroussi 26:40
Yeah, so I’m on X. That’s where I’m most active. It’s x.com forward slash Arusti A R O U W S I, and you can join me and Maximus, which is my AI co-host on the podcast@oldschoolutech.com

Jim Beach 26:58
Fascinating! I’ve got to check out the AI host. How does that end up working? Is it been a success?

Ran Aroussi 27:06
So far, so good. Yeah, we’ve done three episodes so far together with with the AI co-host. It’s very responsive. Actually, today I’m literally working on giving it a more expressive voice. It’s already very expressive, but I wanted to be cooler. So the next episode he might already have a new voice. We’ll see.

Jim Beach 27:28
I thought it was going to be my voice, is what I had heard.

Ran Aroussi 27:32
You know what? Your

Jim Beach 27:33
publicity. I was going to sample the asking about my voice, and I had given permission. Open source. I’m

Ran Aroussi 27:38
going to sample your voice now, and yeah, the next episode will be fun. You’re gonna hear yourself talking to me,

Jim Beach 27:47
Rod. Thank you so much for being with this great stuff, and we’d love to have you back.

Ran Aroussi 27:50
Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure, man.

Jim Beach 27:53
And we will be right back.

Intro 2 28:09
Well, that’s a that’s a that’s a wonderful question. Oh my gosh, I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow, that’s that’s a that’s a great one. You know, that is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and and I don’t have a great answer. That’s a great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio.

Jim Beach 28:31
Welcome back to the show again. Thank you so very much for being with us. You know, being a leader is so difficult these days, and it just seems like every day they’re coming out with a new paradigm. I’m excited to meet someone who can help sort through all of this and tell us what we actually need to do. Please welcome Susan McKinti Brady to the show. She is the CEO of the Simmons Institute for Inclusive Leadership and co-author and author of several different books. Just a new book called “All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Break Perspective, Strengthen Teams, and eight. She has a podcast of her own, various called Building Understanding, and she has appeared in all of the big media like Good America and that. She’s worked with over 500 organizations, helping them their culture and all aspects of their business execution. Damn impressive, Susan. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Susan MacKenty Brady 29:34
Thanks so much. I’m doing fine. Just a quick, a quick thanks for having me. Just a quick correction. My my podcast is the the better understanding podcast.

Jim Beach 29:44
I’m sorry. I think building building.

Susan MacKenty Brady 29:48
Anyway, I want I want I want your you know your your listeners to find understanding.

Jim Beach 29:51
Thank you. Yeah yeah yeah. All right.

Susan MacKenty Brady 29:56
All good.

Jim Beach 29:56
Congratulations on the new book. What number is this?

Susan MacKenty Brady 30:01
Thank you. Well, depends upon what you refer to as a book, right? So, technically, this is my third professionally published. I call them big book. My first two with were with McGraw Hill, but I have two other. I have two playbooks, which which are kind of meaningful to me as well. But so it’s fifth or third. A playbook is a short book. I mean, I love the idea of a playbook, especially for busy working professionals trying to get stuff done, navigating family and community, and running a home and doing all the things. I don’t know. My first one was like 26 pages of illustrated love. I thought, you know, they don’t need more than that to get what I’m trying to to get what I’m trying to say here. Is this like a special book? No, it’s it’s like it’s like no, it is it’s about the first one was about 32nd guide to coaching your inner critic.

Jim Beach 30:53
Okay, but the book was just pictures in it. That’s what I was asking.

Susan MacKenty Brady 30:57
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s kind of like a yeah. That one was I call it my 26 pages of illustrated love because because it didn’t feel worthy of being called a book,

Jim Beach 31:07
okay.

Susan MacKenty Brady 31:07
Which is why I might be a good student and teacher of coaching your inner critic if you pick up what I’m putting down.

Jim Beach 31:15
I do, I do. I think a lot of words have been redefined by Amazon. Book has been redefined. That used to be 200 pages. Now it’s anything over six pages. Best selling used to have meaning. Now your books are Wall Street Journal best selling. I remember that actually add value. Being a yeah, but Amazon best selling means nothing.

Susan MacKenty Brady 31:39
Yeah, but you know what? Did you know that Wall Street Journal got out of the race? They no longer award. No, they don’t. So like either it’s the

Jim Beach 31:49
whole system.

Susan MacKenty Brady 31:50
It took women. It took women, Jim. That book was

Jim Beach 31:56
there. I wouldn’t count the number either. Yeah.

Susan MacKenty Brady 31:59
Right. Uh huh.

Jim Beach 32:00
I’m sorry to hear that about Wall Street. I had not heard that. So who’s left now? We have the New York Times and USA Today. Yeah. I mean, yeah,

Susan MacKenty Brady 32:08
yeah. Well, publish publishers weekly, really, and USA Today. Right. I know. I know. It’s sort of like I. I don’t know if if you’re an Olympic medal. I I I think the Wall Street Journal was like a solid silver. I mean, New York Times is sort of the coveted gold medal, right? And it’s a mystery how that’s awarded. But I’m honored to have written books that people read and and that are helped by. I will lead it there. Well, let’s talk

Jim Beach 32:39
about it. All the different six leadership actions to bridge perspectives in teams and create values. I didn’t know that leadership was supposed to create, or didn’t know it was supposed to bridge perspectives. I just thought you were supposed to do what I wanted and strengthen teams. That’s not a leadership function. Do what I want, damn it!

Susan MacKenty Brady 33:00
Yeah, yeah. That’s you know who really messes that leadership style up is this latest generation. I mean, no, they want to say like the kids. They all want to. They all want to say yeah. And then the entrance of women, boy, that was disruptive. We weren’t going to follow the orders. But but look, this is really about what happens when we encounter people who think, feel, prioritize, or experience the world differently than we do. How do we get people to work together effectively to achieve the mission? That’s what my co-author Les Stu. I wrote this book with two of the coolest guys I know. I mean, one is a three-star general. Okay, he was our 66th Inspector General of the United States Army, and the other guy that’s Les Smith, and the other guy is Stu Kleiman is a disciple from the Harvard Negotiation Project. I mean, between the three of us, we have like I don’t know 100 years, and then we interviewed like 20-three incredible human beings who sort of proved out the the premise of our book and about creating value from from difference, right? Because you know, to be human is to be confronted. You will inevitably encounter difference if you volunteer, if you’re a parent, if you’re in a relationship, you know, if you work with a group of people in any setting, you know. So we got to nat. We got to make the most out of that, creating create value from that. All that difference.

Jim Beach 34:18
Okay, I certainly agree with that. Let’s dive in and talk about the six leadership actions. Can we do that?

Susan MacKenty Brady 34:26
Yeah. So I mean, these are really about how you can strengthen your ability to navigate all the difference. And let me just underscore, like, for your listeners, like, difference is the daily tension of life and work. Whether it’s decision-making style differences or generational differences, or you know, even your comfort levels with risk and ways of processing information. Never mind politics. Never mind how you relate to artificial intelligence or not. So, so we need sort of a playbook. And Lestu and I narrowed it down to six target actions. We think help a lot, and these are moment to moment as well as sort of things you can work on much in much larger ways. Do you want me to run through the six?

Jim Beach 35:12
I’d love to. Yeah, go slow though. I’m not very smart.

Susan MacKenty Brady 35:16
Sure, you are. You. I’ll take one at a time for you just to slow it on down. Okay. The first, and it starts in sort of in all of my work for sure. The kind of red thread through the book is you you got to know yourself. You got to know your triggers, your biases, your capabilities, your blind spots, your defensive tendencies, all of that, so that you know you can lean in on the stuff that lights you up and that you’re strong at and that you’re good at, and then you can bring other people in for the things that you know they’re strong at that you might be less strong at. So you got to know yourself. That’s that’s target action one. Any questions about that? Thoughts, reactions?

Jim Beach 35:53
Certainly, I believe in that delegation and getting stuff off your desk. I believe the number one thing an entrepreneur to your first step being able to afford a virtual, but past that, so our job is is to make the team not hate each other and yeah yeah so I’m all in on that yes

Susan MacKenty Brady 36:18
okay all right well here’s the thing like everybody sadly you know we’re imperfect, and and so are the people around us. And so we’re going to be disappointed in ourselves. We’re going to be disappointed in others. We’re going to be hard on ourselves. We’re going to be hard on others. We’re going to be frustrated. You know, all that difference is going to wind up causing tension in some way, shape, or form. So, so target action number two is recognizing when you’re drifting from what we call your best self, and return to respect when it matters most. So it’s staying respectful. This is the hardest part, and I don’t know. Lessons too might tell you something different, but I think it’s the fulgrum of the whole model. It really is, because if you proceed with someone who you’re annoyed with from a place of looking down your nose, or dismissiveness, or contempt, or harshness-they’re not going to want to work with you for very long. And if you proceed with yourself, if kind of beating yourself up, right, you’re going to undermine your opportunity or relationship. Full stop.

Jim Beach 37:13
Very true. People hate it when you tell them that you’re better than them.

Susan MacKenty Brady 37:17
You know what? It’s not usually a motivational technique that works, I found. So the third, the third target action is telling the truth about what’s hard. You know, so it’s like, you know, through your own honesty, you know, truth telling and courage, you can, you know, you can activate honesty with others. You can, you can actually activate honesty, truth telling, and courage in others, which creates all this psychological safety that we now know is a prerequisite to like innovating and failing fast and risk taking and problem solving and winning, all that stuff when humans work with other humans needs to happen. So we got to tell the truth about what’s hard.

Jim Beach 38:00
All right. This is, of course, optional in today’s world, right? Not talking. You’re not actually expecting the youngsters today to do this.

Susan MacKenty Brady 38:08
Well, I got to tell you, there’s no chance we’re gonna we’re gonna be able to maximize the value of all the difference we’re surrounded by if we don’t do these steps. That I that I will tell you. I know for sure. And you know, difference is leaders determine whether it compounds or collapses. I’m just giving you an insight here as to how to compound it. We we we want to compound the value. You can create value. That’s why that’s the motivator, financial value. And the book tells stories about financial value created by leaders who do this. Leads me to target action four, which is staying curious, and we’re talking about maniacally curious, right? So to maintain a deep level of humility about the limits of your own views and reasoning paths, and be curious about the views of that are different than your own, you will get a better outcome. How do you see that?

Jim Beach 39:05
I certainly agree with that. I’ve seen that in my different ways. I think the hard part, though, is simply because I’m such a great leader. The hard part for me is just shutting up and have the time to express. I mean,

Susan MacKenty Brady 39:21
yeah, that’s it’s annoying. I mean, to have to, you know, to have to actually listen to others. I get you when you when you’re self confident and think like you got the right answer and can lead the way your yourself. You know, I don’t know if you heard this little ditty, but it’s like if you want to go, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.

Jim Beach 39:41
Yes. On the other hand, let me tell you a little story. My business-we were five or six years old from zero. At this point, we were probably 70-five locations around the country, maybe 500 employees, and my brother graduated from. I don’t know if they even exist anymore. That school at Arizona, the Thunderbird, Thunderbird.

Susan MacKenty Brady 40:08
Oh, Thunderbird! Yeah, yeah, Thunderbird exists.

Jim Beach 40:11
MBA, right? Yeah. He came in. I hired him fresh out of the school, and he didn’t know anything about our industry. And boy, did it take us a long time to tell him to shut up and just learn first, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just learn first because your suggestions are good, but every single one of those is tried. If you had listened, you would have heard the outcome, you know. So,

Susan MacKenty Brady 40:35
so can I put a finer point on that? Because I think that is 100% is what it what it affords is actually the next target action, which is alignment. If you don’t listen, it’s going to be really hard to create alignment, and if you don’t create alignment, you’re going to have a hard time achieving your mission. So it’s like creating a sense of we’re in this together by knitting together disparate perspectives and views, and tapping into those differences to create value requires that you actually practice the previous four target actions, including staying curious about what other people think, you know, telling the truth, returning to respect, and knowing knowing yourself. Right. So these these actually build on one another. And then I’ll wrap up and say the last. And then I’d love to hear what you think of all these is holding yourself accountable to stay self-aware and return to respect for yourself and others and tell the truth even when it’s hard and staying you know maniacally curious and creating alignment. We call this modeling the way and it’s about you know day to day and you’re going to mess it up. You’re going to do it. You’re going to do it bad some moments because you’re human, and so then you have the opportunity to be like, ah, I messed up in front of your people. I really want to do it this way. I understand that my impact is always my intention. Beautiful. Now I got to get back to work, and so should you. That gives permission for other people to do it around you, and then we can get back to work.

Jim Beach 42:00
Well, I love all of these. Number six, the accountability. I certainly agree with that. I’m finding that has. I’m not trying to be facetious here and funny for the show. Has almost literally disappeared our society today. No one stands up and says, “You know, you’re right. I messed up. We’re just-I just don’t see it anymore. Why? Why are today 30-year-olds? Our 30-year-old has almost zero ability to up and say it was me. I screwed up. I’m so sorry. Or if they okay, so have any accountability, they’re masterful at making you responsible for them failing at their accountability, that’s just my two cents. And I have kids this age, so that’s where I’m particularly. No, I wanna,

Susan MacKenty Brady 42:47
I wanna know why you think that is.

Jim Beach 42:51
Just the experience, live life. You know, I haven’t met one. They’ve done it yet. I just have no, no, but like

Susan MacKenty Brady 42:58
why?

Jim Beach 42:58
Years.

Susan MacKenty Brady 42:59
But why? Why? Why would they? Why? Yeah. Why? Be

Jim Beach 43:02
ass parenting like mine. I don’t mean my parents. Entitled

Susan MacKenty Brady 43:07
children. Have you raised entitled children? Is that what you’re trying to say? I

Jim Beach 43:13
don’t know. Unapologetically, right? I don’t find them being entitled. I just find that they have zero accountability, which is a different situation. So

Susan MacKenty Brady 43:20
is accountability okay? So so accountability comes along with humility, right? So so when I think about accountability, I have to think of myself as a fellow traveler. So I am not above in I’m not above the rules. I don’t get to play one game while the people around me play another. If especially if I want people to perform on my watch, I better be performing alongside them. I better be saying, “Hey, if I want people to be accountable, I have a virtual team, 100% virtual team, and I have for seven since the pandemic. And you know, and there we got someone out in California who’s in a different time zone. Like it’s it’s great from a resource perspective, but I don’t worry about. I’m not. I don’t worry about trusting any of them, and the reason is is because we’re accountable to each other. And I think the reason we’re accountable to each other is because we’re we’re accountable to each other, and that includes me too. So hey guys, I’m going to be you know doing an interview today, going to be offline for for a few minutes, right? It’s not necessarily that detailed, but I do really work hard, imperfectly, to model the way so that I get the same in return. So that when I have to have a difficult conversation with someone who I don’t think is behaving the way I would like them to behave, I can say, “Hey, look, I have two tactics with this. Look, I noticed you weren’t your best self. Here’s what I’m noticing. How can I remove any barriers that are causing this, or how can I create some enablers that’ll help you do this more? Period. Right. So, like, we can also use this language to kind of get people to show up the way we want them to. But you know, there are there are you know things that get in our way that we also included in the book. I can talk. About those, or we can stay on accountability.

Jim Beach 45:02
You can’t bring it up and then not talk about it. That’s well, ADD will kick in.

Susan MacKenty Brady 45:09
I mean, come on. I here’s here’s the honest to god truth about this is that we lesson Sue and I were in the middle of of really codifying all of the target actions because we want to make this simple for people. Like, oh my gosh, I’m a woman, and I’m in a group of men, or worse yet, I’m I’m a man and a group of women, or you know, I’m I’m an extrovert, and I’m I’m surrounded my I’ve surrounded myself by introversion, and and no one’s talking, and I can’t reach them. Like, name the difference. You’re never going to be. We’re all never going to you know sort of learn how to show up effectively in all the difference on the specific difference itself. So we got to learn like subterranean skills. Like how do I navigate this? What we were realizing, speaking of subterranean, what we were realizing while we were codifying codifying the six target actions is that there are essentially landmines. And I remember this conversation with Les. I was like, because he was in charge of all the explosives for the U.S. Army for a period of time, and I said, if you spot a landmine, could you can can you deactivate it every time? And he was like, yep. So now we’re talking about landmine recon. So here are the four landmines, and these landmines are mental models that get in the way of practicing the pretty, you know, I don’t think it’s basic because it’s hard to do, but pretty straightforward advice around the the six target actions. You ready?

Jim Beach 46:32
Yep, I’m ready.

Susan MacKenty Brady 46:33
Okay, the first one is certainty, believing we’re right and others are wrong. Let me assure you, you will always agree with your own logic. Two is inconsistency to minimizing the gap between what we say and what we do. Third is reactivity. Everybody comes in with their own emotional, you know, templates for reactions. What might make you laugh might make someone cry, and we have to navigate all that emotion, and then the last is my favorite. It’s justification and rationalizing away behavior instead of learning from it. I mean, to be human is to you know explain why you did something right, and so certainty, inconsistency, reactivity, and justification, if left untended to, erode value on a team, and therefore our results, and eventually, you know, you know, our impact.

Jim Beach 47:32
I love those.

Susan MacKenty Brady 47:33
So, so

Jim Beach 47:34
I like that little list.

Susan MacKenty Brady 47:36
Thanks. Let me give you. Let me give you one one beat more on this. So, our job, like today, and I, I do this. I’m a fellow traveler because I’m a human, and I, I mess up, you know. And I got kids, and they’re like, you know, you’re not being your best self today, mom. Um, so I have to say, like, what’s irritating me? Do I think I’m right? Am I being aware of my gaps? Am I aware of differences in emotions and logic between me and this person or others, and am I justifying my own behavior right now? And so I-that’s modeling the way for me. Is I have to mentally tick through those sometimes so that I’m not the perpetrator of the bad behavior.

Jim Beach 48:14
Very well said, Susan. I heard that you wanted to play our little game, the Quick 10.

Susan MacKenty Brady 48:19
Yeah, I mean, I think I can keep up. I don’t know. Talk to me.

Jim Beach 48:23
Are you currently sober?

Susan MacKenty Brady 48:26
Yes.

Jim Beach 48:29
Are you? Do you want to accept the standard wager? Do you want the standard wager?

Susan MacKenty Brady 48:35
I think so.

Jim Beach 48:38
All right. Well, good enough. All right, let’s play then. Number one. Oh, I forgot the wager. Yeah. Okay. Hold on. Are

Susan MacKenty Brady 48:48
you are you are you currently sober?

Jim Beach 48:50
Oh God, no. I can’t do this if I’m sober. Absolutely. Okay, that’s what I thought. That’s why. All right. All right. Yeah.

Susan MacKenty Brady 48:56
That’s fair. That’s fair. Nine

Jim Beach 48:58
a.m. interviews. We still do the 10 a.m. Right, but I was having trouble getting drunk enough by nine to

Susan MacKenty Brady 49:04
do it. So I was wondering why this was at midnight. Anyway, okay, yeah, go ahead.

Jim Beach 49:08
You know, so anyway, yeah. All right, number one, your favorite creativity hack:

Susan MacKenty Brady 49:15
walking. Seriously, get out of the room. Some of my best ideas have come when I am moving and walking and just rattling around in my head, but I have to be moving.

Jim Beach 49:26
Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick.

Susan MacKenty Brady 49:29
Oh my God, the free thinking of the geniuses around us. Build with people, not for them. Invite customers, partners, skeptics in the process early. They’ll give you their ideas for free. Bing.

Jim Beach 49:40
Number two, three. Name your top passions.

Susan MacKenty Brady 49:44
Oh God, I don’t know. Helping people be their best selves, the ocean, creating beauty. I like collecting stuff and making spaces beautiful. What else? Adventure, travel, discovery, that kind of thing, and. I don’t know the people and my dogs who I surround myself with. Love them.

Jim Beach 50:04
Number four. The first three steps in starting a business are

Susan MacKenty Brady 50:10
I don’t know solve a problem that actually matters to some extent to people. Listen, you know, longer than you pitch. Three. What’s my third? My three steps. Start before you feel ready. Like you’ll learn faster by doing than by perfecting.

Jim Beach 50:30
Number five. The best way to get your first real customer

Susan MacKenty Brady 50:34
is be delightful. No, earn trust before you ask for the business. business,

Jim Beach 50:42
number six, your dreamiest technology

Susan MacKenty Brady 50:47
is oh my god advanced versions of artificial intelligence who tell me you know I’m fabulous.

Jim Beach 50:54
Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice:

Susan MacKenty Brady 50:59
don’t confuse certainty with conviction. Hold your purpose tightly, and your assumptions loosely.

Jim Beach 51:09
Number eight, your worst entrepreneurial mistake.

Susan MacKenty Brady 51:14
Probably waiting for perfect clarity before taking action. I tend to overthink things.

Jim Beach 51:21
Number nine, your favorite entrepreneur. Why?

Susan MacKenty Brady 51:26
Oh, Maggie Cook. Maggie Cook. She built a remarkable business from from salsa, but her her real legacy is showing what’s possible when you know resilience and and generosity come together. If you are having a bad moment, a bad day, and you want to quit, you know, go find stuff about Maggie. She’s so inspiring. Love her.

Jim Beach 51:47
And finally, number 10, your favorite superhero?

Susan MacKenty Brady 51:51
Not who you think. It’s ready for this, Batman. He doesn’t have. He doesn’t have superhuman. He doesn’t have superhuman powers. He has like self awareness. He’s he’s disciplined. He has courage. Like he’s he’s got unwavering commitment to keep showing up despite all his flaws and setbacks. To me, dude, that’s that’s superhero. I mean, I I grew up with with superwoman, and I feel like given my my whole past, I I should be saying that. But but she’s I think like she was born of Zeus. I mean, she she’s not real. She’s not flawed. And I I I just I rather a superhuman who who who makes me laugh because of their own I don’t know fallibility.

Jim Beach 52:35
All right, excellent excellent answers, Susan. While we calculate the score and find out the winner of the wager. How do we get in touch with you? Find out more and get a copy of the book, All the Difference.

Susan MacKenty Brady 52:46
Gosh, well, I’m on LinkedIn, Susan Mcentee Brady. I’m also available at LeadingAllTheDifference.com, where you can learn more about this book. And I run an institute for inclusive leadership that can be found at inclusiveleadership.com at Simmons University in Boston.

Jim Beach 53:06
Fantastic! Thank you so much for being with us. I’m just kind of pausing. Oh, oh, oh! Gosh, this is. I’m so sorry. We got a 94, which is an absolutely excellent score. But you have to have a 95 win. We had a judge from across the Charles, and so maybe that was some sort of Boston rivalry going on there with Simmons, one of the other schools or something. Oh, I should never have said that. Jeez. Okay. All right. We win the wager, and as always, I will play for Tesla. So I’m excited for that. I’ll look forward

Susan MacKenty Brady 53:40
to New Zealand. Thanks for having me.

Jim Beach 53:46
Thank you for being with us. We are out of time, but back tomorrow. Be safe. Take care, and go make a million dollars by now.