June 16, 2026 – Bully Pulpit Corp Comms Bradley Akubuiro and Radical Responsibility Fleet Maull

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. We got a cram-packed great show for you today. We’re going to be talking about crisis communications, crisis management with Bradley Acubero. You know, crisis communication is so important. You’ve got to have a plan, and Bradley’s going to teach us how to do that. We have a nice long conversation, and then Fleet Maul is going to be with us to talk about a new neuro word brain word. You know, my favorite word ever is neuroplasticity, the idea that my brain can change, your brain can change, and that’s just exciting. So I’m very excited to talk to Fleet, that’s a great name, Fleet Mall. Anyway, let’s go ahead and get started with our first interview right now. Here we go. Please welcome Bradley Acubero to the show. He has had an incredible career in the distress space, corporate communications disaster space. He is partner at a company now called Bully Pulpit, which is an advisory firm that helps communications practices in all sorts of different industries. Prior to that, he was the chief spokesperson and head of global media relations for a company called Boeing during the 737 max crisis, and we’re definitely going to ask him about that. He has also worked for United Technologies, helping them navigate some of their M and A. He has been a senior policy advisor to Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr. who just passed a couple of months ago. Sorry to have heard about that. And he is a very frequent writer and commentator. His articles appear in Ink Magazine, and he has been featured in Forbes, Business Insider, Bloomberg, Boston Globe. And he won 240 under 40 lists in the same year. How in the world do you do that? Turn 40 twice in one year. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern, and has just written a new book called Faster, Messier, Tougher: Crisis Communication Strategies in an Era of Populism, AI, and Distrust. Bradley, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Bradley Akubuiro 2:38
Jim, after introduction, I found doing pretty good, thanks for having me on.

Jim Beach 2:42
We also offer a service, Bradley. Every time you walk into a room, we will announce you thusly, and if it’s a bedroom, we’ll also throw in and world-renowned lover, Bradley. It sounds like it’s worth a little bit of money. We’ll talk about that. Yes, every room you walk in, just like you’re a duchess or something, just like you’re Meghan Markle. Every time you walk into a room, we will announce you.

Bradley Akubuiro 3:05
Okay. All right. How you

Jim Beach 3:08
talking? Congratulations on the book. Let’s start there. We have a lot of other places to go. Five star rated on Amazon. Tell us about the thesis. What do you want us to understand about crisis communication strategies.

Bradley Akubuiro 3:22
Yeah, first of all, the book was an incredible labor of love, but the thesis is this: right, when you think about crisis communications in the moment that we’re in, it has changed significantly from what we’ve seen in the past. The world has changed. This information is so much more prevalent and accessible, the ease of creating it, particularly with AI, is much higher, and the ability to scale and move that out quickly is really, really high. And so bad actors who have been incentivized to hurt us have the ability to do that now with greater ease than ever before. We have more polarization than we have seen at any other time, and we feel this not only in the corporate setting, which, of course, I talk about a lot, but also as individuals. It’s just harder to have a conversation with people in your lives, and you can go down and down the list between speed, polarization, weaponization, you know, all of these kind of factors that have changed our world so significantly, but ultimately the implication for businesses is this: there is no longer any such thing as a clean win in communicating. You’re always going to make somebody upset when you make any decision of any level of substance, and so you’ve got to actually be able to say, all right, we’re going to move quickly with some level of decisiveness. Understand that these decisions are going to cause messier situations than we had before, but we understand who we’re speaking to. We have understood what they expect from us, and now we are going to move forward in a way that’s in accordance with that with our convictions, and then ultimately we’re going to. And on those convictions, because we’re taking a tougher tack than we have in the past, and that’s what the book’s about.

Jim Beach 5:06
Very, very interesting. Should corporations have a set policy on DEI and politics, and all of these other issues, I kind of grew up old-fashioned southern, and you’re not supposed to be in the newspaper except when you’re born, you get married, and when you die. And I don’t like seeing my companies in the newspaper. I don’t like it when I read about Coca Cola doing this and doing that, you know. Make some syrup and sell me sweet drink. I don’t want you involved in the politics, you know, that’s my opinion. I just don’t like that. What are your thoughts? Why should companies be involved in political issues?

Bradley Akubuiro 5:51
Well, first of all, I’ll say not every company should be right, you know, the way that we think about the brands that we interact with is based on what our association is with those brands, and so if I’m interested in a company that produces, you call it any X product, whether it is a jet engine or to your point, the certainly goes in Coca Cola drinks, we have a very, very different impression of what we expect of those brands than we might have of a company that actually produces, you know, a certain kind of affiliation, a brand. You think about a Harley Davidson, and it makes you feel something, right? It’s a motorcycle, but yes, it’s also a dream that we’re selling. And so, when you think about kind of how people associate with everything, we may actually expect more from one institution than we expect from others in terms of engaging in that way, and so why do I say that? I say, if you have been an organization that has an employee base, that has a customer base, that has communities that really, really care about where you stand on these issues, and most importantly, you have been vocal on these issues in the past, even in terms of internally what we stand for with our employees to help build affinity to the organization. You have to do it not only when it’s easy to do, but then you have to do it when it’s hard to do, because otherwise you understand we’re all people, whether you’re a communicator or not. You guys appreciate this point. This is this is true of people in general. We can accept disagreeing with you, but we really can’t accept hypocrisy. It’s just not something that we really are willing to count. That’s and so people like Chick-fil-A because it makes really, really good sandwiches, and it stands for the things that it stands for, and that matters to some people. It doesn’t matter to others, but if they stop standing for those things tomorrow, there are some people that would say, ‘I’m walking away from that organization, and so we have to recognize that what we say we actually care about. It matters that we show up for those things when it gets hard, too. People are respected.

Jim Beach 7:58
Well, when they changed their French fry recipe, a lot of people did leave Chick-fil-A, including me. Changed it back, they listened, and they changed

Bradley Akubuiro 8:07
it.

Jim Beach 8:08
Yeah, they interjected pea green pea vegetable extract, put that in the fries. The fries tasted like peas to me, just gross. So we got make choices, you know, they can’t always be the right ones. So, how do you deal with, say, the Boeing situation, and you bring up hypocrisy? That is just one of my hugest buzzwords. I, you know, the politicians today, I think every single one of them is a hypocrite. I find that all of them are trying to disleave me. I don’t trust a single one of them, and Boeing is right there in the middle of that. I’m one of these people that thinks we need Boeing, no matter what they do, simply because of defense and national economic competitive advantage, and we need to have a super strong airline or airplane manufacturing here in the United States, but on the other hand, damn it, Boeing seems to lie to us a lot about things, and obviously your job was to defend them. Walk us through what went through your mind as a crisis communicator during those plane wrecks, the one in Ethiopia, for example, what? How do you handle that? What do you do?

Bradley Akubuiro 9:25
Yeah, well, look, I say I’d say this right up top, you know. Ultimately, these are extraordinarily complex situations. You’re trying to figure out what to do with very limited information very quickly, so you know when I came into the organization was after both planes had unfortunately had their incidents, both to your point, in Indian Asia and Ethiopia. It’s a terrible situation, no matter how you look at it. 346 people died, and so ultimately the most important thing. That you have to think about in this situation is not whether you are going to be held liable, you know, not whether this is going to, you know, harm your reputation, but ultimately we have to figure out how do we contain the risk, and then how do we ensure that something like this can never happen again, and this is a leadership challenge, right, at the end of the day, the communications portion of this is we have to convey confidence that we have the situation under control, because ultimately I think most people are like you, Jim, I think most people say we need an organization like Boeing, we need a strong, you know, aviation sector, you know, at the end of the day Boeing, and when you think about this, is true, Boeing is an individual company, but it’s true the aerospace sector in general is our number one export in the United States, and so we need the jobs that it creates, we need, you know, the revenue that it brings to the country, and we also really, really need to continue to stay competitive when it comes to our ability to create these really, really hard to build things that folks around the world look at the United States for, and it makes us the envy, and so I say all of these things, and I think it’s really important to understand, you know, when you are trying to navigate a situation, you have a certain reservoir of trust that you built up based on what you have done prior to the moment of the crisis, actually striking, Boeing had about 100 years of history of building safe aircraft, and ones that people actually mean, I don’t know if you heard the chant before, but there used to be this regular kind of a thing that was, if it ain’t Boeing

Jim Beach 11:34
Boeing, yeah, sure, everyone knows that line,

Bradley Akubuiro 11:36
right, exactly right, and so what that means at the end of the day is the organization had built up quite a bit of credibility, and you know these things can be built over, in their case, 100 years and lost overnight, exactly destroyed

Jim Beach 11:51
in one flight.

Bradley Akubuiro 11:53
Yeah, that’s exactly right, 100% right, and you know you have to recognize that your responsibility is not just to protect that reputation, although that’s an important part. In particular, as a communicator, I think a lot about that, but it is also to say, what are the actions that I need to take to do right by the people who are impacted, and to ensure that our processes, and you know, the manufacturing sites through the engineers who are actually putting up the schematics in the first place to how these, you know, aircraft are built and maintained. How are we ensuring that all of these things are coming with it, so that when we tell the story of what we’ve done to ensure this can’t happen again, it’s credible and doesn’t just come across as talk,

Jim Beach 12:44
Bradley. I, my first business, when I was in my 20s, was the summer camp business. We were the world’s largest summer camp company, with 89 locations around the world, running camps at Stanford, MIT, Georgetown, UCLA, University of Michigan, all over the world, Sorbonne, Cambridge, Oxford, and we did some things during that time. We burned a building down at Stanford and got invited back. We flooded a computer room at MIT by melting an ice skating rink and got invited back. We had a child had his first girlfriend at camp, and then in October she broke up with him, and he committed suicide, and we were on the front time front page of the LA Times summer camp suicide.

Bradley Akubuiro 13:36
Well,

Jim Beach 13:37
I know how I got through all of those. How does a small business get through situations like that. What’s your advice after you’ve burnt a building down? What should you do? What I did,

Bradley Akubuiro 13:51
yeah. Well, I’d love to hear what you did, because you don’t hear that one every day. Look, I’ll say this: when you have a situation, whether it’s a small business or a large complex organization, ultimately the plan is the same. The execution might look a little different, but the things you need to do are one, get your arms around what actually happened, right? What are the facts of the situation as we know? Two, I mean, I assume that was one building and people were not continually burning buildings down, and so the question then becomes, you know, how do I ensure to folks we understand not only what happened, but how we can prevent something like this in the future? Are there things that we need to do differently? And you say what you know, say what you don’t know, right? And don’t try to confuse the two, because when you speak out of turn and you’re kind of telling people you know we know this for sure, and it turns out not to be true, nobody’s going to believe you the next time you have something to say, but you know transparency is such a big part of this, and accountability is such a big part of this, it is true. In any situation, no matter the size of your organization, because if you’re honest with people and you tell them what’s going on, but you also tell them, hey, this is on us and we know what we need to do to make this right, and you can trust that we’re going to do it, people will actually give you the benefit of the doubt, and I think this goes back to your hypocrisy comment earlier, it looks like you’re trying to have the ball on people, even if you ultimately are doing the right things, they’re not going to trust you, and trust is what all of this is built on.

Jim Beach 15:30
Yes, well, the thing that I did was I ran to our connection on campus, the people we were sending money to immediately confessed, got supine down on the floor, crying, and begged for their forgiveness. Also, I got there before the fire chief did. You know, I went to them and broke the news myself, told them how it happened. Girl snuck a candle in, it fell over, you know, the standard dorm story, but we got invited back because I went over there and apologized as deeply as a human being could, short of seppuku Japanese suicide was the only thing I didn’t do. Bradley,

Bradley Akubuiro 16:19
well, listen, I actually love that approach, because it illustrates all of the concepts, right, transparency, right, accountability, and frankly, humanity, which I think brings up a really important point, because so many people mess up in these situations because they’re unwilling to apologize, I think they believe that if you apologize, then that’s guilt, and you’re like, well, I didn’t burn down the building, I’m not guilty, so what am I going to apologize for? But you understood that that accountability goes with that humanity, and it was a painful situation, no matter what. And so those three pillars ultimately achieve success in any circumstance, and so I’m glad you did not commit spook, or I also think at the end of the day, people saw what you did and said, “Okay, this guy gets it, we can trust them.

Jim Beach 17:08
Yeah, I think that just.. and I’m so worried about our current generation. Our current 30 year olds have almost zero ability to apologize. I think I was just the biggest apologizing machine on earth, and so you know we got away with it, so

Bradley Akubuiro 17:30
well. There you go

Jim Beach 17:32
back to the book. What are some of the lessons that we need to take from the book? Faster, messier, tougher. Faster, what? Messier, what tougher? What?

Bradley Akubuiro 17:45
Yeah, there’s two things I’ll say, because, because you know, I went through so many different potential titles for this book, and when I tell you, Jim, that probably I think my final kind of cutting board list was like 39 and most of them were terrible, by the way, so it’s not like I had 39 great titles, and any of them would have been great. I think I probably had like one and a half good titles, but when you think about faster, messy tougher part of the reason that I really like it is because it works in two ways. It is both what we are feeling in the world around us, right, it’s moving faster, and it’s moved to four with social media, with AI, and all the technological developments that we have seen with so many of the things escalating in the kind of world around us, from a geopolitical standpoint. Otherwise, we are feeling like things are moving fast, but particularly when it comes to the polarization and some of the stuff that we’re feeling in our day-to-day conversations, we’re also recognizing that things are feeling messier. I mean, from a communication standpoint and a corporate standpoint, we’re feeling like every day we’re hearing about a new crisis, a new issue, some of which is self-induced, right? When you think about some of the product issues and some of the ways that companies handle things, but some of this stuff is also just really, really, really hard. I mean, you think about Cracker Barrel, and what they went through, you know? They tried to change their branding, they knew that they needed to extend into a slightly different market, they wanted to be able to grow their base a bit, and they didn’t do anything crazy. I mean, Jim, if you look at the branding, I’m sure you’ve looked at it, they basically just wanted to make it a little bit fresher, a little bit more modern, and maybe they took a little character out of it, but it’s not like they had, you know, rainbow flags or anything that felt so unlike them, but yet that created a kind of national level of backlash, and so it’s fascinating to watch how all of these situations come with a bunch of commentary from people who now have platforms all over the place, you can weigh in, and then you know things are just harder. I don’t need to explain tougher things, you’re harder, but the flip side of all of those things is true, which is you can actually get a hold of these situations and never be able to control them, but you can navigate them by actually picking up this. Feed, so the same AI tools that have made the environment feel faster to us actually create opportunities for us to respond more quickly, and to do it in thorough ways. You can stand up and, you know, a Chat GPT or a clog without actually having to, you know, buy anything extra. A workspace that allows you to upload all of your kind of past decisions and messages to employees in situations that you’ve had in the past, or you know, customer notes that you’ve sent out to capture your voice, or you know, reporters that have reached out to you in the past and say, if I have a situation that looks anything like this in the future, I want you to put together a quick plan for me and put together what the first few messages are that I should put out, and it cuts down like 80% of your initial time to kind of putting these things together, and that’s especially important if you’re running a small business or don’t have a full communications team built out, because you already have the work in the beginning that cuts out that initial paralysis that we often feel and causes us to lose valuable time when we need to be communicating with people, right? You know, we can move faster with the tools to do it.

Bradley Akubuiro 21:09
We have to understand now that because things in the environment are messier, that there’s going to be no such thing as a clean limb, and that we are going to have to be more comfortable with that, but it does mean we have to be thoughtful about what it is that we’re trying to accomplish and who are the people, the stakeholders that are really important to allowing us to accomplish those things, and we’ve got to tailor how we operate to that set of people, but if we can do that and we can find the resolve to be able to be strong, knowing that we’re going to get some backlash, no matter what. So, this is the tougher part. We are going to be able to make decisions that make sense for our business, even if not everybody loves them, because the people who don’t love them, or the people who take great exception and are the loudest about it, are often not the people who matter the most to what we’re trying to accomplish, and so if we develop a little bit thicker skin, and we are able to move fast and decisively based on who matters to our business and what we’re trying to accomplish, we are going to be able to navigate this moment, and so the book goes into how you can do that and what it really looks like.

Jim Beach 22:18
All right, Bradley, how do we handle situations where we argue about the truth, you know, my truth. I hate that term, my truth. No, there is a truth. For example, gasoline and oil, we’re going to run out of oil. Everyone says we’re going to run out of gasoline, but it’s a statistical fact that proven global reserves, the amount of gas and oil that we have sitting in the earth has gone up every single year since 1970 Every year we have more gas than we did the year prior, even considering the fact that we used up a bunch. We still have more than we did last year. Proven fact, you can’t argue it, you know? I mean, every branch of the government says, yeah, we got 42 billion barrels, and last year we had 41 billion barrels. You know, how do we handle the fact when we argue the truth and people come out and say, well, my truth is different from your truth? No, no, no, there is a truth. What are your thoughts?

Bradley Akubuiro 23:16
Yeah, you know, this is as old as time, right? I mean, when you think about it, people have always disagreed and had debates with selective facts, almost as true of, you know, virtually any topic that you can cherry pick statistics that make the most sense for what you’re trying to accomplish, and people will do that to their advantage. What I think is interesting is, you know, as we’ve continued to go on, there’s, you know, this kind of, I don’t know if you call it an assumption, because it really is kind of indisputable, but like every generation has had more access to information, but yet less ability to reason, and it is a little bit scary to think about when we have our discussions in this way, but I do actually think that at the end of the day, this is this is what’s what’s in some ways scary in the environment we’re operating in now. It’s actually less about truth and more about trust. Truth should always be the absolute standard, but the way that businesses are interacting with consumers, and leaders are interacting with their workforce and with others. They’re finding that people actually generally expect that they are lying about many things unless they have a trusting relationship with that leader or with that organization, and even then they don’t just believe you, but they’re willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and that benefit of the doubt actually counts for a lot, especially in crisis situations, which is why I speak a lot about books, because many times the facts of what’s happening don’t actually move as quickly as the narrative about what’s actually happening. And people, in the absence of information, or just having not been exposed to information that exists, to your point a minute ago, will fill it in with their own beliefs, and those beliefs are almost never going to be either a in line with reality or be helpful to you or your brand, and so I say this all the time, you know, you’ve got to do the things that show people that you are credible, that you are trustworthy, that you are consistent, and that you are somebody that they feel like they can trust, because as you do that, and then you share your, you know, information, and I say information because people will either assume it’s the truth or not based on their level of belief in you as a credible figure, they’re more likely to be able to actually trust that information at the end of the day. That’s what you need.

Jim Beach 25:50
Part two of your book talks about the steps to take during a crisis. Can we walk through that kind of quickly? What are the things that I actually need to do? Number one, you say here is stop talking to empty rooms. What do you mean by that?

Bradley Akubuiro 26:03
Yeah, stop talking to empty rooms is actually a really important one that so many people make the mistake of doing so. When you are thinking about who your target audience is, who am I trying to actually reach? Those people get their information from very specific places, and so I think about this all the time. This is not to knock, you know, the standard channels, the New York Times or the Washington Post, or where other folks, you know, kind of like to have these credibility markers. They’re very, very important, but the reality is many times when you were an organization that thinks that the holy grail is going to top business publication, but the issue that you’re dealing with isn’t actually one where the majority of folks impacted are reading the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, you’re not reaching those people, so you know if you are a utility company and you have an outage and it is impacting a ton of people, and you think that going and, you know, getting your kind of operation in shape and doing the right thing and having your conversation with CNBC is going to reach the people who are in the community, who felt the outage the most significantly, if they’re already upset with you, because you know prices have gone up, and they now feel like they’re, you know, you know, energy is not even as consistent, because they have these disruptions, you’re not talking to the people who are actually thinking, you know, what, these people are terrible, and I want to call my politician about this. You know, you’re talking to your peers on the business level, and so I say this all to say I’m not Jim suggesting that everybody goes out and gets a TikTok account today, maybe some should, you know, maybe some should be on this program, some should be, you know, talking to folks on the radio, some folks should be, you know, figuring out whether they need to be on the Facebook, you know, community boards. Where are the places where the people I’m trying to reach actually get the information that’s relevant to what I’m trying to convey, and to let me speak not to the organization that feels the most prestigious, but the one that’s actually going to reach and influence the people who I am most trying to reach and influence, and that’s the entire game.

Jim Beach 28:33
All right, you want to go through any more of the steps?

Bradley Akubuiro 28:37
Yeah, I’ll talk just quickly about a couple, and you know what I’ll say,

Jim Beach 28:41
compelling content. Just give us about a minute on the rest.

Bradley Akubuiro 28:45
Yeah, exactly. I think that your

Jim Beach 28:47
entire career and everything you know, and compress it into one minute, please.

Bradley Akubuiro 28:51
Probably, probably doing less. I only know so much, but I will say, look, a few things. One, you’ve got to make sure that you have to, that you have the message tailored not only to what it is that you want people to understand, but what they understand already about you, about your organization, about the issue that you’re talking about, because when you put it in that context and you’re able to say this is the message that is going to resonate with them based on where they’re coming from. You’re not twisting words, you’re not, you know, branding or marketing. What you’re doing is saying this person is going to be able to receive this information because we are talking about it in terms that they actually understand, and that is something that you need to think about when you’re mastering the message, when you’re thinking about, you know, some of these kind of other aspects, use the tools that make sense to you, really measure whether you’re having impact or not with these things, and you know, if you’re a big complex organization, you’re going to use, you know, sophisticated tools to do that, but if you don’t have those resources. Versus, and what do you need to do? You just need to actually ask people what’s working, what’s not working, and do it when you’re not on fire, right? To go back to your building, when the building is not on fire, you should ask these questions, because people will be honest with you, but it’s not going to be as colored by that kind of moment. And also, I’ll just add one more. You know, there are several other kind of components to this, Jim, but the one other thing I’ll say is build your alliances, build the people trust with the people that you need to have on your side before you have an issue. So you need to be talking to people, including those who don’t necessarily love you, because those are people who, when a crisis hits, they’re going to be your biggest detractors, and so you need to make sure that they actually have a reason to trust what you say, even if they disagree with it, and those who do want to support you and do like you are actually going to say, all right, thanks for giving me the information that I need to understand where you’re coming from, because it makes it easier for me to defend you, and so you really have to build those relationships during peacetime, not war.

Jim Beach 31:09
Fantastic. How do we find out more? Follow online, get a copy of the book, Bradley.

Bradley Akubuiro 31:14
Jump online, it’s anywhere on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you like to buy books, faster, messier, tougher, crisis communications, an error of populism, AI, and distrust. And I hope folks will check it out. It really does, and I’ll just say it quickly, this does really speak to not only what’s going on in business, but a little bit more to some of the societal challenges we’re having, and it attempts to talk about how we got to where we’re at, and what you do about it. So, Jim, thank you so much for the time on this.

Jim Beach 31:44
Thank you. You were great interview with a lot of great information. We’d love to have you back, Bradley. Thank you so much. Yeah, love you back, and we will be right back with more, you We are back, and again, still, so very appreciative that you are with us. Very excited to introduce my next guest. His name is Fleet Mall, and he is dedicated to helping founders and scaling entrepreneurs step out of survival mode and become CEO, CEO level leaders. He has been doing this for over 25 years, and has been included in the Inc 5000 He developed a high-impact MBA program specifically for bootstrapped entrepreneurs looking to break through some of their bottlenecks. He has a show, a podcast of his own, called Radical Responsibility, where he interviews top thought leaders in entrepreneurship, neuroscience, and performance guests like Jack Canfield, and people like that. Of course, he has a new book out as well. We’re excited to learn about it, and it’s called Radical Responsibility: How to Move Beyond Blame, Fearlessly Live your highest purpose and become an unstoppable force for good. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Fleet Maull33:07
Thank you for having me. I’m doing great.

Jim Beach 33:10
I’m pretty sure that responsibility was outlawed in the last Congress. I’m pretty sure you don’t have to be responsible anymore. That’s what New America is all about.

Fleet Maull 33:21
Yeah, one would think that, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out so well

Jim Beach 33:27
when people are not responsible,

Fleet Maull 33:30
yeah, yeah. I mean, you almost think being irresponsible feels like you’re giving yourself a break, or it’s like a sense of freedom, or you know, or conversely, people think of responsibility as like a burden, but actually responsibility or ownership is really the only place where we have any real power. So, when we, when we, when we let go of responsibility, or worse, we get involved in blaming others, we’re basically giving away our power.

Jim Beach 33:59
How are we giving away our power? I don’t understand that connection

Fleet Maull 34:02
well. You know, if there’s some situation we’re not happy about, and we’re attributing the causation of that situation to people or forces outside of ourselves, we can’t control any of that. The only thing we have any influence over is ourselves, and that can be challenging enough. So, when we attribute causation of our life circumstances to two things outside of ourself or people outside of ourself, we’re basically putting them in charge of our internal state. It’s even true when we’re happy about things, right, and we, you know, think, worry about it as much there, but if I’m really happy about something and I’m attributing the causation of my happiness to something outside myself, then when that changes, I’m no longer happy, right? So this whole notion of attributing causation of my internal states to people and situations outside myself is always giving away our power, and, and you know, it’s not that things outside of ourselves. Don’t you know, have impact. We’re not living in isolation or bubble, but again, the only, the only thing we have any real control over is our own choices, and so that’s really where our power is. And it makes most sense to focus as much of our energy as we can bear on, regardless of what the present circumstances are. What am I going to do with it. What’s the most creative way I can respond to lead my own life forward in the best way possible?

Jim Beach 35:26
I love the honesty in the book, and some of the topics you talk about. It starts off with a really unpleasant story. Would you like to share us that story? Share with

Fleet Maull 35:42
us being my background.

Jim Beach 35:43
Yes,

Fleet Maull 35:44
yeah, sure, absolutely, yeah. I’m an open book, and it’s a big part of who I am today. So I spent 14 years in federal prison. I have a lot of regrets on what got me there. I was involved, came through the counterculture, and I’m a baby boomer, and I went. I was an angry young man graduating from high school in 1968 with a big hole in my gut and a lot of anger and so forth and related to alcoholism in my family and things like that. Anyway, no excuses, but I just went headlong into the counterculture and that was big part of those times, but at any rate I ended up getting involved in some small time drug smuggling, and I have a lot of regrets about the impact that had on anyone, and then when I was incarcerated, I have huge regrets around the impact I had on my son and my family, but, but it was a very transformational journey for me. Fortunately, I’d had a lot of, you know, I had a lot of good values, apart from all that. I grew up in a family that was good values, and also I’d had a lot of training and education before I went to prison. So, when I got locked up, when I managed to get myself locked up, it was a big wake-up call, and I was devastated over what I’d done to my son, who was nine years old at the time, and I became radically dedicated to getting any negativity out of my life, and really doing something good with everything I’d received in life, and so I was able to accomplish a lot, and I realized the minute I got there that, you know, I was originally sentenced to 30 years no parole, and I didn’t realize at the time that being sentenced prior to 1987 which I was, thank goodness, if you stayed out of trouble, you got a lot of good, they call good time, time off your sentence, and you kind of knew ahead of time how much you were going to get, as long as you stayed out of trouble. If you get in trouble, they start taking it away in chunks. Some people say, probably say, I did my all my time, day for day, I don’t have something to be proud of, but at any rate, so I eventually figured out I’d serve 18 and a half on the 30 if I stayed out of trouble, and then when my appeal went through the courts, which took about two and a half years, they knocked off one count, so reduced my aggregate sense to 25 then I knew I’d serve 14 and a half if I stayed out of trouble, was still felt like forever at that point, but anyway, that is what I ended up serving, 14 and a half, and but I realized when I got there I was 35 years old, and I originally thought I’d be 65 before I had any chance of release, but I realized if I was going to any chance of surviving my time there, having any kind of life inside, much less being able to create any kind of life for myself. If I was fortunate enough to survive my time, when I got out, I was going to have to embrace like 500% responsibility for having gotten myself in there, what I was going to do with my time, and what I could create for myself. Right, so that’s really where that model for me of radical responsibility of radical ownership was was developed. It was just very clear to me, and I’m very fortunate for that, because most people end up incarcerated. They have a big victim story about being in there, and, and, and fortunately, I had enough education and training that I didn’t get caught up in that, and also realized I was that I was in a really negative, corrosive environment where everybody does have a big victim story, and that if I didn’t really work hard at it, I could end up coming out of prison broken and bittered and with a big victim mindset, and I didn’t want that at all.

Fleet Maull 39:14
I didn’t want to live that way while I was in prison, much less come out of prison that way, and so, and even once I knew that I’d served 14 and a half, I knew I’d be 50 years old when I got out, and not easy to start a life at 50 when you’re, you have a criminal record and you’re broke, and actually the IRS had a big judgment against me and assessment, and so I knew it wasn’t going to be easy to start a life, so I knew I was going to work really hard and really take hardship for what I could create for myself, so that’s kind of where that was born, and you know, there’s always there’s always people you can, you can attribute causation to, or even blame with some justification, you know, when I was, I did a lot of people’s time, I, I refused to cooperate with the government, not because I was trying to be some. Hand of Kaiba, but I’ve been a long time Buddhist, and it’s kind of basic question why I was involved in drugs as well, but nonetheless I came to the counterculture and had some mixed things going on, but nonetheless the idea of trading, you know, somebody else could go suffer and somebody else’s family could suffer, so I could get less time, that never made sense to me, so but a lot of people that did make sense too, and so I did a lot of people’s time, and also when the government prosecutes you, they break all the rules, break all the laws, they play hardball. So I could have focused on all that, but I knew that was completely useless. It’s complete waste of time, and you know, when stuff happens to people, I mean, maybe you need to take a few minutes to convection complaint, but you know, at some point you got to let it go and say, “Okay, what am I going to do with this now? Certainly, there are things that terrible things that happen to people that are very unjust, and they may need to have it affirmed that they were in fact victimized, and they may need a lot of support, but at some point, at some point, they’re either going to let that take them down, or they’re going to find a way to move forward in their lives, and that’s when they start embracing ownership, because you know something may have happened to them that shouldn’t happen to anybody, but there it is, it did, for whatever reasons, and now what are they? At some point, the most standing questions, what are we going to do with it, right? And, and even when we’re supporting people who’ve been victimized, I think we can support them in a way that kind of reaffirms their identity as a victim, which isn’t helpful, then we can support them with a lot of empathy in ways that we leave the door open for them moving forward in their lives. So, anyway, that’s that’s kind of the whole idea of radical ownership, radical responsibility, that the only place we have any real power is with our own choices, and of course we need to embrace a lot, we need to do that with a lot of self-compassion. This isn’t about beating ourselves up, right? It’s we need to have a very empathic and self-compassionate relationship with ourselves, but still rationally, very objectively, you know, the place where we have any real power is with our own choices, and that’s what creates our future. You know, a lot of us think, I think a lot of people, in fact, there’s a famous Marcus Aurelius point, I think I’m paraphrasing here, that the majority of people feel their destiny is created by their circumstances, but in fact that’s not the case. Our destiny is determined by our response to those circumstances.

Jim Beach 42:19
That’s a great line. I will tweet that one out. I like that. My favorite word in the entire English language is neuroplasticity, the idea that you can change your brain. What is neuro somatic mindfulness?

Fleet Maull 42:39
Yeah, neuro, neuro somatic mindfulness. So, neuro is all obviously neuroscience informed. Somatic is body centered, body oriented. So this is a deeply embodied, neuro somatically neuro, I’m sorry, a deeply embodied, neuro scientifically informed approach to meditation, classic mindfulness and awareness meditation, and so really about learning to feel into our body again at a very, very deep level, all the way down to the bones. Our entire body is a living organism, and it’s all sensory, all the way down to the bones, and including the bones. And most of us lead very disembodied lives. In part, I think it’s the human condition. You know, we all have this super computer on our shoulders, and we tend to get fascinated with that, very busy minds, and then you know we’re very visually and auditorially oriented and focused on the world out there. That’s how we get our needs met. But in earlier times, when we didn’t have the protection of our homes and cars and all the modern conveniences, living more in a natural world, I think we’re naturally more grounded and connected with the earth. But for modern human beings, we live very disembodied lives. I have a friend who says in modern culture the body has been relegated to being nothing more than a brain taxi, something to carry this super computer around on our shoulders, and I think a lot of our individual problems, social problems, economic problems, climate change, you know, all the disconnection and ongoing conflict and craziness. Our world has a lot to do with collective disembodiment. You know, we’re all living from the shoulders up, and we make a lot of decisions we would never make if we’re more embodied, because when you’re more in your body, you’re naturally more connected to your heart, because we experience emotion in the body, the physical body and the emotional body are either one or deeply connected, and then also your body is naturally part of the earth, so being in your body, you’re more earth connected, right? So I think when we’re, when we’re up in our heads, is cognitively focused and focused on the external world, we make a lot of decisions individually and collectively. They’re not that good for us, not that good brothers, and not that good for our home, the earth. So, so this is a practice of coming home to the body and and learning to self regulate. We all have this autonomic nervous. System, which is a major part of the overall nervous system, and the autonomic nervous system operates most of the complex systems in the human body and brain, and it has two branches: one up regulates a sympathetic branch, we need that for alertness, but it goes beyond that in distress, and can go into fight or flight, and panic, and acting out, and then we have the parasympathetic, which is a relaxation response, rest and digest. It’s sometimes called because we need that for digestion. So, those are two are happening all the time, and there’s an ideal balance training human activity, from responding to a crisis to wanting to really turn it off and go to sleep at night, right? So, we can learn to regulate our own autonomic nervous system, and when we don’t, until we take ownership for regulating our own autonomic nervous system, it’s being regulated by everybody but us, by the world around us, and we all live in an interface between our childhood conditioning that we had nothing to say about and the world around us, and now our childhood conditioning was absolutely benevolent, and the world around us was a bubble of benevolence. Maybe we could be in there with a lot of mindfulness, on a lot of ownership, and it might work out, but for most of us, our childhood conditioning is a mixed bag at best. The world around us is certainly not a bubble of benevolence. So we’re in there just kind of getting shoved around, living very, actually very mechanical, reactive lives, you know. We all like to think we’re free thinking, autonomous adults making free thinking autonomous adult decisions all day long, and if that were the case, that’d be wonderful, but it’s not. It’s really stimulus A one happens, we respond with response b2 every time. In fact, it’s we need very reactive mechanical lives until we don’t.

Fleet Maull 46:35
This super pain on our on our shoulders is highly programmed, so the place where we can start to take ownership is by taking ownership for regulating our own autonomic nervous system, because we can regulate our nervous system, we can then regulate our emotions, which means we can regulate our behaviors, which means we can then start living a choice and be in the driver’s seat of our life, right, instead of being just passive consumers and really passive victims of our own conditioning and of the world around us. So this is when we practice meditation as deeply embodied way. We start off with learning to intentionally regulate our nervous system, but over time, because our brain and nervous system is an incredible learning machine based on neuroplasticity, it can continually evolve and change, and very, you know, for better or worse, but when we’re doing it with this intention in this way, it’s gradually transforming our neural architecture, such that we can move from intentional self-regulation into auto regulation, and we just learn our nervous system learns to be in better flow with life and learns to regulate itself, and then mindfulness and awareness become much more effortless, and all this leads to being more empowered, really being able to be in the driver’s seat of our own life, and to live consciously and live a choice rather than just being driven along by the reactivity of our childhood conditioning with whatever circumstances we happen to be in.

Jim Beach 48:02
Tell us about your MBA style program for bootstrapped entrepreneurs.

Fleet Maull 48:07
Yeah, well, it’s really not MBA style so much, and we actually have dropped that part of the name because people associate MBA with academic programs, and this is not an academic program, it’s a very practical, hands-on program, and it’s we’re really, we’re not calling it operator to CEO accelerator, and so it’s really about it’s for early stage entrepreneurs, could be for some people just starting a business, but more likely early stage entrepreneurs or small business owners who maybe have owned their business for quite a while, but they’re still wearing all the hats, or wearing too many hats, and they’re feeling overwhelmed by it, and you know, a lot of the star businesses and become entrepreneurs really looking for that freedom, right, rather than, you know, working for someone else and having to live according to someone else’s clock, but then we find out the business owns us, and we’re more overwhelmed, and sometimes we go, I’d rather just go work for UPS or something, but so you know that overwhelmed operator, we want to teach that person how to become a true CEO, and you know there’s a lot of challenges there. We have to learn to delegate, we have to learn to hire people, we have to learn to trust people, we have to, you know, get beyond that thing. Well, nobody will do it as well as I will, and that may be the case, although there’s there are people that do a lot of things we end up doing much better than we do it for a lot less money, but there may be some things that you know that are right in our core strength that somebody isn’t doing anything quite as well, but like I think it’s Stan Martell who wrote the book Buy Back Your Time, if you can get somebody to do it 80% as well, that’s golden, right? But there’s a lot of things we have to learn to allow our company to grow and scale without it just driving us into complete overwhelm, and it’s completely doable, but you have to learn the skills, and you have to have to have the right context, you have to really change your mindset in becoming a visionary leader, CEO for. Is you know just an overwhelmed operator who’s you know holding on too tightly and controlling everything, and, and you know, it’s so.. I mean, I think entrepreneurship is such a.. it’s a.. I believe it’s a really noble path, and I also think it’s in here in the West, and especially in the US, I think it is is the direct path into financial security and financial freedom and wealth building, and and I think it’s an exciting and a glorious journey, but if we don’t learn how to get beyond that original founder stage and operator stage into becoming CEOs, it can instead become an overwhelming journey, and we keep pushing harder and succeed.

Jim Beach 50:44
Elite, I hate to do this. We’re already out of time. Boy, it goes quickly. One quick question, if I have a response, if I have an employee who just refuses to accept any responsibility, what do I do?

Fleet Maull 50:56
Well, there’s a great methodology where you first, you listen to them, right, and maybe let them vent, you know, you invite them, so this is not happening, this is not getting done. What’s going on? And so they’re going to then give you all kinds of excuses, right? And maybe they can, so you track them, you know. Okay, I see you got six things here, you know. And so, which one of these might you be able to have some influence or control over? And they said, well, no, and I just told you, sales falls, marketing policy, shipping assistance. I own, if you had to choose one, I would just humor me. If you had to choose one, and inevitably they’ll choose one, and that is because it is something they actually could influence. They say, “Okay, what? What could.. what could you do? And you help them brainstorm some steps they could take, and then you test. Okay, would you be willing to give this a try, and we can check back next week, right? So you just try to get them to crack open the door of ownership, and rather than being totally focused on all these things that they’re attributing causation to everybody else but them, find something they’d be willing to work on, and then just keep testing around that, and you can gradually train somebody to slowly begin to see that really their future success. The pathway to that is ownership, even radical responsibility and ownership, rather than blaming and shirking responsibility.

Jim Beach 52:14
How do we find out more? Follow you online, get a copy of the book.

Fleet Maull 52:18
So, Book Radical Responsibility book.com Radical Responsibility book.com and if you go there and then purchase the book on whatever online provider you want to go to, you can then get the, you know, the receipt number from your purchase and just put that into the website. You’ll get lots of free bonuses with over $1,000 in bonuses when you purchase a book at whatever price it sells for these days online, probably 13 $14 something like that, and that’s where you can get the book, and you can also find out about our work at Heart mind.co Heart mind.co and we have our Entrepreneurial Mastery Summit coming up in July, which will be Entrepreneurial Mastery summit.com Entrepreneurial Mastery summit.com

Jim Beach 53:06
Fantastic, Lee. Thank you so much for being with us. Great information. I love your openness and transparency, and congratulations on an incredibly successful life, despite the setbacks. It’s an amazing story.

Fleet Maull 53:17
Yeah, I got out of prison 2627 years ago, and I’ve had nothing but opportunity ever since, and that’s because of that philosophy of radical responsibility. I actually started two national organizations and two national movements while I was in prison, and I’m still running those nonprofits, and they’re still adding huge value to the world, and really all came out of making that mindset shift from blaming to ownership,

Jim Beach 53:43
fantastic fleet. Thank you so much. And great, great success. Thank you for being with us. We’d love to have you back. We are out of time for today, but you know what? We do that’s right. We come back tomorrow. Be safe, take care. Go make a million dollars. Bye now.