Episode Transcript
[00:00:31] Patrick Jinks: Hello everyone. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Leadership Window podcast. Episode 121 we just keep moving on, keep growing. We are a part of Feedspot's top ten globally ranked podcasts in our genre, which is nonprofit leadership, which is really cool. Thanks for listening and making it a popular show. And it's episodes like today that are making more and more listeners interested in what we're doing. We have today a gentleman who has a wonderful first name. His name is Patrick. Patrick Hardy is with us. And Patrick boy, there's so many things I could say. His bio is extremely long, but let's just say he is a disaster specialist. And when disaster and or disruption strikes, there are actually few voices in the world as knowledgeable as Patrick Hardy. And again, we won't go into a whole lot of it, but he is a graduate of FEMA's advanced academy academy. He's gone through numerous certifications as FEMA's master of exercise, certified emergency manager, certified risk manager, master business continuity professional. We've talked about continuity a little bit on this show as it relates to just general organizational continuity. But Patrick specializes in, you know, I'm interested in hearing a little bit more how he would put this, but from what I can tell in our early conversation and in looking over his book, it's sort of two things. A little bit about how to prevent a disaster, how to keep it from becoming a disaster, what to do when it does become a disaster. And I think what I like most is just the very proactive approach that he takes rather than, oh my gosh, it's a disaster. This is all happening to us and we're just victims of what's happening and we don't have any control. And it feels that way sometimes when you're in a disastrous situation. But I think this episode is going to help us all feel a little bit more in control of things. And Patrick's got a lot of resources, including a brand new YouTube channel that he's going to tell us about that's very unique and very special. Disasterpatrick.com is the website for anything you want to learn. All of the resources. His new book out last spring, design any disaster. How about that? You get to design the disaster yourself, Patrick, I appreciate you reaching out. I appreciate the initial conversation we had. It made me excited about this show. Thanks for carving out time for us, and welcome.
[00:03:04] Patrick Hardy: Thank you, Patrick. I appreciate you having me. I appreciate that warm introduction. Yeah, I'm definitely excited. Disaster preparedness is something I love very much. So I'm glad to be able to talk with you and be able to have a conversation with you. Yeah.
[00:03:15] Patrick Jinks: I don't know how many people get excited to talk about disaster. We've been through some of it. I've worked with nonprofits who have lost a major grant, and that's a disaster for them, or shut down of a major company in their community that's a big supporter, or organizations that have had buildings burned down or, you know, active shooter situations, or, you know, I live in South Carolina, and along this east coast, there's this thing they call hurricanes, and those have hit and affected many of our nonprofits in many ways. Of course, everyone is still trying to figure their way out of the culture created by Covid, and that was a disaster.
And so I'm just guessing that when we say the word disaster in your work, it probably covers any kind of disaster you can imagine. But I'd be interested in knowing if there are specific kinds of disasters that you find yourself involved in more than others. Tell us about what you're doing and how you got here.
[00:04:25] Patrick Hardy: Well, disaster management, as a traditional discipline really categorizes disasters into three major categories. So you have natural disasters. We all know what those are. Earthquakes, hurricanes, fires. Fires that are naturally caused. Not arson fires, obviously. Wildfires, volcanic activity, seismic activity of all kinds, tsunamis, etcetera. Then you have technological disasters, and I think a lot of people forget this one, because technological disasters are things like power outages, hazardous material spills, transportation accidents. You have a plane crash or train accidents. You hear about those. What happened in Baltimore with the bridge, that's a technological disaster, right? That was not intentional. That that was not a belligerent activity. In other words, it wasn't some sort of terrorist attack or some sort of attempt to make a political statement. And they crashed the bridge. Matter of fact, uh, just yesterday, they finally allowed the ship to leave. Um, and it had been in port. The ship that was actually involved in the collision had been sitting in port for a very long time while the NTSB was investigating. And then you have the last kind, and it's the kind we don't, like, talk about what we call security emergencies. So mass shootings, acts of terrorism, acts of warfare, like, what's going on in Ukraine or what's going on in the Middle east, those would be obviously acts of war. Even if we don't consider it warfare, it doesn't matter if it's involves a military of some kind. We consider those security emergencies. And the reality is, most companies deal with security emergencies that are small, comparatively. So they'll have trespassers, people who are trying to break into their businesses. This happens all the time. I work with a lot of retail businesses, and when they think about people trying to break into their companies, that's obviously a big deal. And then it also involves cyber attacks. So a lot of small businesses forget about cyber attacks. So that's the other thing we talk about as well. So those are the three kind of major categories, but I deal with all kinds of emergencies. So just like you said, I think, Patrick, you categorized it very, very well, is that I get phone calls all the time. I get people who call me and say, Patrick, I have this going on. You know, how do we handle it? And every industry is a little bit different. So, for example, I work a lot with the beekeeping industry. So I work with a lot of apiaries, which are bee yards. These are sort of commercial beekeeping operations.
And they'll have a queen that will die or they'll have a hive that'll suddenly collapse. And those are disasters. And those are things we wouldn't consider a disaster. No other business would see as a disaster. But to a company that is a professional pollinator, that's obviously a big deal. A more humorous example. And I tell these people a lot. I said, you know, one night, by about three in the morning, my 24 hours emergency center got a phone call from one of our outdoor hospitality clients. They ran this rv park, and they had, you know, they had Internet, and their lot was filled. And as I said, they suddenly called us three in the morning and said, hey, we're having a disaster. We need some help. And so the representative I had on the line said, well, you know, what's going on? And they said, the Internet's out, and everyone tonight is trying to stream the last episode of Game of Thrones, and now all of a sudden, nobody can get on there. So I'm fielding 100 calls from all my guests who can't stream Game of Thrones. And to them, that's a major disaster, right?
[00:07:41] Patrick Jinks: Subjective term, I guess.
[00:07:43] Patrick Hardy: I guess it is. Right? So you have a lot of people who are sort of professionally transient, and they really enjoy rv. They're either semi retired or whatever. That's where they get their home. Enter. So when that happens, they call the park and say, fix this. And so they called us and said, you know, can we activate our disaster plan? We say, you know, of course. And so that's, that's the kind of disasters that people tend to deal with. It can from, from, from the very dangerous to the benign to the absurd.
[00:08:08] Patrick Jinks: So how, what was your path to get into this? Did you experience a disaster and say, hey, I want to, I want to figure out how to not experience this again. How did you get into this work?
[00:08:18] Patrick Hardy: Well, it all started really when I got on the swim team in high school. So I became a swimmer in high school. And so I was the long distance guy. I was the guy that did all the events that no one likes to do. I did the 500, I did the 1000 and I did the miles. So I did these really long distances. And it wasn't very good. I actually was, I was really bad. I mean, I really enlightened swimming and I was a good swimmer, but I was not competitive. I mean, at the time I was only five, six. So, I mean, you're not going to be able to compete against guys who are 6263 have been doing this since they were little. And, uh, but I still enjoyed it at the end of the time on the swim team. At the end of the season, a bunch of guys said, we're going to go out and be lifeguards. And so I said, great, I'm going to go be a lifeguard. And so because I swam these really long distances, I, it was an open water lake. You had to swim all the way across the lake. That was part of it. You had to swim across, then you had to run around, you had to sprint. You do this whole thing. And I was in better shape than virtually anybody. And so I got, became a lifeguard. And then at the end of the lifeguarding season, a bunch of guys said, we're going to go be emts. And so I went to be an EMT and then a medic, and then I became, and then I went to college and I studied political science. And right when I graduated, the year I graduated was Hurricane Katrina. And I decided to put together my vocational background in EMS and my background in politics, in political, studying political science and studying these things and putting those together. And I wrote a letter to the governor of Louisiana saying, my name is Patrick. I have no political connections. I'm kind of a nobody. But I really did well in school. I graduated top of my class. I would love to come over there because I think emergency management is something that I can make a difference in. And I got a phone call back saying, we've never received a letter like this. The governor would like you to work with her chief of staff in the governor's office of Homeland Security. Would you be interested? I said, yes. And I was on an airplane, and they said, you're going to get paid $1,500 a month. You're going to get free room and board, and you're going to get a car, which you could just drive around, and in return, you're going to work 110 hours a week and get all the homeland security training you could ever want. That's the deal. I said, that's the best deal any young guy could ever ask for in emergency management. And I'll tell you something, it was the most worthwhile professional experience ever. My boss was amazing. In fact, she and I are still close friends to this very day. And I'd learned so much about emergency preparedness because you know what I said, Patrick? I said, you know, there's a lot of things that are really not solvable in my lifetime, but I believe that emergency management is one that can be solved if we put new minds to it, if we do a new approach. And that's how I got into it. And so from there, just moved on. And I did a lot, a lot of great things and worked with a lot of great organizations.
[00:11:09] Patrick Jinks: What a fantastic story, and what a specialized skill and value you're creating. Let me dig right into some of what I think a lot of our listeners are probably interested in. We have, I'm certain that a majority of the listeners to this show are leaders, most of whom are in the nonprofit sector or what we call the social sector, the volunteer sector, the third sector. There's lots of names for it, but the nuances of leadership that exist within that sector are many. Leadership is leadership across sectors, but there are some nuances. And one of the things that we talk about a lot in the sector is succession planning. For example, a lot of boards are interested in, well, what's our succession plan? Because when our CEO leaves, who's been here for 20 years, what are we going to do? She's the face of the organization. And what I learned to do a number of years ago was help boards look at even a bigger picture than that.
If a CEO leaves and it leaves a hole in a gap and there's not a plan or a good process for a transition in leadership, that can be a disruption at the least, and a disaster. I've seen it become a disaster numerous times. But what I try to get boards to understand is that there's more than just the succession plan for the CEO, that instead of thinking about a succession plan, have they ever thought about a continuity plan among, you know, in the continuity plan, succession is one element. But then I ask them, you know, why, why are you concerned about that? Well, because we, we want to, we want to have a seamless transition when it happens. And I say, well, do you want to have a seamless operation if you, if your database goes down? Do you want to have a seamless operation if your building catches on fire, if you lose a big grant?
You know, there's all kinds of things that can disrupt the continuity of your organization. So I just wanted to share that, that, that's kind of one of the things we talk about a lot with our nonprofit clients. Give me your take on that, because I know continuity is a part of what you've, you've worked on, the idea of being continuous. Where do you see that idea of continuity showing up, particularly when it comes to disasters?
[00:13:36] Patrick Hardy: Well, the first thing I ask any organization when I'm writing a business continuity plan, my father was actually a business continuity planner as well. And when I go to a new client and I'm working with them on business continuity, the first thing I ask them before I ask them anything else, I say to them, do you want to recover?
Do you want to recover and be, and people are always shocked. They would say, well, what do you mean, do I want to recover? And I say, I want to ask you something outside of your business operations. I want to ask you, do you really want to be doing what you're doing? Do you really enjoy this work and you're part of your life? Do you feel as though what you are doing is worthwhile, is meaningful for you as meaningful for your employees? Is it providing value to the community? That is a multi pronged calculus that I always ask people. And I say that because if you have a disaster and you don't really want to be doing this, then you know what? Don't recover. Just decide. Youre done. I had a client one time. She ran this italian restaurant in the Bay area, and I was doing her continuity planning, and I asked her that question, and she sat back and she said, no, I dont. And so about a year and a half later, her restaurant burned to the ground. And when it burned to the ground, I found out later she actually sold what was left of the business. She took the insurance, insurance money and sold what could be salvage. And she ended up going back and doing something else in their life. She became a graphics designer, actually, and she ended up working for a big company. She worked for a big ad company. And she said she was so much happier, and it was because her family had run that restaurant for a few generations. And when her parents had passed, she just said, this isn't my passion and this isn't what I want to be doing. And I think that that's a really important part. So before I move into planks of continuity with any organization, I say, what's the culture here? What am I looking at? Am I looking at an organization that really wants to recover, or am I looking at an organization that is really on the decline or doesn't want to? Because then once I have that established, now I can ask those questions. Patrick, now I can say, would continuity, if you lost your CEO, what is going to be the impact on your operations? What's going to be the impact on your culture of the organization, institutional knowledge, etcetera. Once I know that now I can plan really effectively a robust solution so that the planning fits what they need, so I can minimize the impact and do more than that. I actually can make it so that they're positioned to be stronger afterwards. Because now I can put the organization in a place where actually it can improve itself. It can make itself stronger afterwards. Because that's really the clarion call that I make to every organization that I write plans for, is I want you to look at continuity, not as something of, I'm recovering, trying to get back to zero. It's, how can I take that and put it to my advantage? How can I make that so that I give myself a disruptive advantage? That's what I talk about, disruptive advantages. If your CEO leaves, what if your CEO really wasn't great for the company culture? And what if by that per person leaving, this is a great chance for us to hire somebody new and take the company in a new direction? Now do you see how continuity all of a sudden and the succession planning doesn't seem so bad? It actually seems like a really great thing. Not that you want to see somebody leave, but because you say at some point, we want to see the culture change here, and this is a great opportunity for us to be able to take advantage of that.
[00:17:11] Patrick Jinks: I love that, Patrick. And a lot of people listening to this conversation might not still figure out how we're talking about disaster yet, but, but these things can be disastrous. Like the, like the queen bee dying for a, you know, a professional pollen company is a big deal. You. This is an interesting take. When you ask, do you want to recover?
I think it can be even levels of that. So for a nonprofit organization, yes, we want the nonprofit to survive. We've got a mission that was established 100 years ago. The community wants it, the community supports it. However, this might be a chance to not bring back this particular program.
You know, it's. But we've been spending a lot of bandwidth on it and doesn't really have the impact. This is a good chance for us to say, let's. Let's let that program die. The organization lives, but we're going to move on to do something different now, and we're going to take it as an opportunity. I think Covid provided cover for some nonprofits to make some changes they kind of wanted to make anyway, but they didn't know really how to do it because they might, maybe some stakeholders might not have been happy about it, maybe some employees wouldn't have been happy about it, and Covid kind of gave them cover to make some changes on that. So they're still around, but it was a chance to reinvent themselves.
[00:18:35] Patrick Hardy: Yeah, you know what? I think you hit it perfectly on the head. That's why I was nodding. And I know that no one can actually see us, but one of the things is I thought that to myself was I went to my clients during COVID and every, you know, clients were complaining and they were sad, and they said, and I said, guys, listen, this is an opportunity for you to do something that we've always talked about in our professional life. How many times have you heard people say, gee, I wish we could just stop time for a week and a half so I could reset and rework my business. Well, guess what? This is the reset. Now's the time. Now is your chance to do all those things you could never do before, because guess what? You're not in business anyway, so why don't you sit down and work out the little things you would never had a chance to work on previously, projects that maybe you wanted to explore or projects you think, gee, I'm not really sure we want to do this. The other thing I tell organizations all the time is they said during COVID I said, take the opportunity now to talk to your employees about things, what really bothers them, what really concerns them, and do that before they quit, because there's a good number of folks who's going to be transitioning out of your business regardless of what happens with COVID And you need to get as, you know, gain as much of that organizational knowledge as you can before they leave. Ask them things, get their feedback. That really gives you a chance to give you that disruptive advantage. It gives you a chance where you can take what you have learned from them and apply it to future employees. Because everyone knows about the great resignation, right? Everybody left. And then they had this sort of large amount of turnover in healthcare. I'm not, I'm not gonna lie to you. I. I do a lot of nursing homes. I do a lot, actually, in South Carolina, I do a lot of nursing homes. And their turnover rate was 200, 300%. I mean, you had people who were there for two, three months, and then they would leave. And so I told, told them, I said, now's the chance for us to get. I mean, there are people who left who maybe weren't so great for the organization. Now, that's not so bad. Great. Now we get a chance to hire people we really want to have in there, or we get a chance to change policies we never could have changed when we're doing business on a day to day basis. And lastly, and this is the other thing I tell them all the time. You know how you tell me constantly that we never get the chance to do the disaster plan? You never have time. Well, guess what? You have time. Let's write the disaster plan now. Let's spend the time. I tell you, we probably finished more disaster plans in two and a half years than maybe we'd finished the previous four. I mean, because, you know, it gets delayed, people say, oh, we got this, then we got the holidays, and we have these things, or we're busy with this project. Once the pandemic came around, we said, if you're going to stick around after the pandemic, let's ride your wildfire plan. Might as well, and talk to these people before they leave. So let me find out everything we can learn from them so that we can apply that equally and make your disaster planning stronger again. That's always my emphasis. Creating a disruptive advantage by using the disaster and applying it to make yourself stronger afterwards.
[00:21:30] Patrick Jinks: Yeah. So a couple things. One, I'm obviously reminded of the famous Rahm Emanuel quote, you never want a serious crisis to go to wasteland. And I think that's what you're talking about here. You've got the crisis. It's happened. Now let's. Let's utilize this moment in a way that we might not have otherwise. The other thing is, you mentioned coming back stronger, and I might have mentioned this to you. In our initial call offline, I learned a couple of years ago of a term I hadn't really heard before picked up. It's actually a scientific term. We talk about resilience being the ability to bounce back and recover.
And we talk about fragility as the inability to bounce back and recover. And so a lot of people would say that, well, resilience is the opposite of fragility, the scientific term. And I got to go back now and remember who this was and where this came from. I looked it up at the time, and it was really interesting. It's a thing that actually, resilience is not the opposite of fragility. Anti fragility is the opposite of fragility. And what it means is that not only do you recover, but you come back stronger than you would have been without the trauma, without the disruption, without the disaster. It's one thing to say, well, we're fully recovered. We recovered from it. It's another thing to say because of it.
And obviously, our response to it, we're actually stronger than we would have otherwise been. Has that. Is that a term that's crossed your lexicon, or have you, have you seen that in action?
Guess you have, because you're talking about coming back stronger than before. But how does that. How does that concept hit you?
[00:23:22] Patrick Hardy: Yeah, because one of the things I do is I work with, I lecture a lot in front of mental health professionals, so, especially graduate students, and I tell them about antifragilitis because I say to them, you're talking to clients about that. Things that they're dealing with, with shocks and stressors and volatility, and the general zeitgeist of the world is such that things seem uncertain, and the pandemic only made that worse. So one of the things that I try to tell them is, is that antifragility, then what that allows you to do is not only become more resilient, but it allows you to take advantage of the situation and improve it, because that's what natural ecosystems try and do. Right? That's really the concept of it. It's a physics concept, but it's also a natural concept where they're trying to say, in the end, nature becomes stronger because it answers a lot of really important scientific questions, ones we don't have to get into today. But essentially, how is it that nature got stronger after all these shocks over epochs of millions and millions and millions of years? And the answer is, they were anthra fragile. So they actually put themselves in a position nature did and ecosystems did. So that they can always not only adapt, but then find a way to take advantage of it. You know, every time in my garden, you know, for, for example, whenever I move my plants around every season, inevitably I find spiders in the one place I don't want them to be. But you know what they found? There's always a lot of bugs there or whatever. They know exactly where to hone into. No matter what plants I put in or whatever, they find the best. And spiders are actually great in gardens, and so it's just, it's terrific. I just. But sometimes I put my hand there, I'm like, oh, I touched the spider web, and. But they find the best places because they know, okay, the environment around me has significantly changed. How can I take advantage of that and make it easier for me to use it? So that's one of the things that becomes really, really important.
And so I think it's a great concept and one in which I definitely apply. And I definitely talk about my keynotes, too. When I talk to people about getting.
[00:25:22] Patrick Jinks: Stronger afterwards, how much of your time and energy is spent? I pre disaster helping people avoid them, versus you're called on because there is a disaster. And, I mean, the preparation is one thing, recovery and response is another. Are you spending your time in both, or you really stay on the preparation side?
[00:25:45] Patrick Hardy: It's about 99% pre okay, and then about 1% afterwards.
[00:25:49] Patrick Jinks: Okay. Which is what you'd want.
If you're an organization, like, spend the time doing the work in advance, you never know what's going to happen. Again. We overuse Covid, of course, but I mean, it's a new and big relevant illustration. No one we didn't did. We just did not see it coming. I mean, there's arguments about, yeah, we did see it coming. Some people. Some people saw it coming. Yeah. But most of us didn't. And we sure didn't sit around in our organizations and go, there's going to be a global pandemic. Probably need to start figuring out some things in technology and how we're going to become more lean and how we're going, going to raise money and all these things. We just didn't do it. Why don't we?
[00:26:30] Patrick Hardy: Speaker one, I think because everyone comes and feels as though a couple of things are in play. One, there's nothing that we can do. And two, things are inevitably going to get worse. So people begin then to psychologically feel they're powerless. And by feeling powerless, they just think, why try to fight it? Why try to fight the tide? And that's why when I go to clients, I found the narrative was so much better. Instead of saying, doing this whole doom and gloom, chicken little depressing thing where I was saying, oh, everybody, everything horrible is going to happen. I did that very early in my career. And then I finally said, why am I doing that?
Because there are ways in which we can apply basic management technologies, a basic application of equipment, a basic application of certain concepts, and then all of a sudden things will get significantly better and it'll turn it to their advantages. And so, but you have to apply it. I mean, in my book, for example, I talk about that in chapter 15, where I talk about a native tribe who lives at the base of this volcano. And the indonesian government used to come up to them all the time and say, listen, we're going to, we've created this evacuation plan. We're happy to relocate you. And the natives said no to the shock of national emergency management authorities. And they said, why would you do that? And they said, because we live in harmony with that volcano. Because when that volcano erupts, yes, it covers all the fields, yes, it destroys all the homes. But you know what? Afterwards, we build homes stronger, and it helps to, it helps to re fertilize the crops and the land because otherwise they live on an island. And so they utilize that as an opportunity to get stronger afterwards and to rebuild. And it's sort of a very natural process. And that's one of the things I think sometimes people forget is that they're so used to seeing things within a certain way and they don't want to see anything happen to it. But if it does, I say to people, use that to your creative advantage. Use that disruptive advantage. That's why when I go to corporate leaders, I say, use the disruptive advantage so that you can get an edge on your competitors, because if you're closed, they may be closed, too. And if theyre, and if youre only having a natural hazard occur where you are, so youre just having an earthquake and theyre not, theyre going to take advantage of that. So you need to put yourself in a position where you are constantly able to take that volatility and use sort of, sort of a parabola. So youre sort of like putting yourself where you seem to be going down, but in fact, youre actually improving yourself and improving your operations in the end.
[00:29:03] Patrick Jinks: Well, when you use the word disruption, you get into change leadership as well. And one of the concepts we often come across in our leadership coaching is, you know, change management and people saying, you know, how, how are we going to manage change? Well, there's, to me, in my experience, and I'm pretty simple minded on this, there's two aspects of that. One is how do we respond to change when it happens around us? And to us, that's change leadership. But also, when is it appropriate for us to actually create the disruption that we want to initiate a change? So I'm not talking about we want to create a disaster, of course, but we. But for some, when we create a disruption, smaller or large, for the. For the purpose of, you know, nudging the organization to the next place, to some people, that, that does feel like a disaster. But that, that approach, and I may be getting off track here and into change management versus disaster preparation, but when you use that word disruption, I'm just reminded that there are times when we're actually trying to create that disruption, but it's for the reasons you're talking about, it's because it's going to require disruption for us to get to next level, next scaling, better place, because what's got us here. Got us here. It's not going to get us there.
[00:30:31] Patrick Hardy: Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's absolutely right. In fact, I talked to, when I talked to business leaders, that's exactly what I say. I say, you know, there are going to be instances where it's really a good thing for you to be able to pivot, and the way that you do that is by putting yourself in a position where you're actually creating a stressor that you therefore have to respond to. Of course, nothing involving health and safety issues. Right. So. But what we're talking about is things that would otherwise would be something that nobody would ever think of. So, for example, just sort of an obvious example, Thomas Watson, who was the founder of IBM during the Great Depression, he put all his sales teams together, and all his salespeople thought that they were going to get laid off, and he turned to them and he said, he has something to tell you. And he said what? He goes, I'm going to double our workforce, so I'm actually going to hire salespeople. So now it's going to be more important that all of us work harder to get this done. And people couldn't believe it that he was actually hiring people during the Great Depression. And he said, everyone else is out of business except me, so I'm actually expanding my operations. And that actually gives me a better market position than anyone else because everyone is adapting, everyone is trying to get through this. I'm not trying to get through this. I want to take advantage of it. I want to be better in the end. And as a result, IBM almost quadrupled in size in just a three year period. So it was really a massive change. But again, not that he caused that depression, because he didn't, but he saw the situation and said, is there something that I can do that changes the culture of the organization? Because even though on a quantitative level, yes, he increased his sales force, yes, that is significant. But what really changed was that people realized the determination that he had to be successful and the commitment that he had to his workforce, to his people, to his operations, saying, I'm not going to let you go. We just have to do more. And that really told people this is somebody who genuinely cares about our operations and cares about why we come into work every day.
[00:32:39] Patrick Jinks: That's a great illustration, great story.
At a practical level, what should leaders of organizations be thinking of right now?
Right. They're sailing along now, Covid, you know, we finally kind of gotten past that, although I'm still working with organizations trying to get over the culture of the disruption of COVID But, you know, let's say that's behind us and, you know, everything's sailing along and we're raising money and we're enjoying our mission. We love our work. What are we not thinking of right now that we need to be, what are the tenets?
[00:33:17] Patrick Hardy: We need to be empowering our employees and incorporating them in the disaster program?
I still see it way too much. Corporations who write complicated, and I really mean this, they write very, very complicated emergency response plans, very complicated business continuity plans, very, very complicated risk management plans, and they don't include their employees. They say, you know, I'm going to hire a consultant. For example, I'm being hired by, by, by a multinational corporation based in the Middle east.
And they have said to me, I want you to write a seismic earthquake plan for our operations. It's a big petrochemical operation. Some of it's off sea, some of it's in the gulf, some of it's there and there. And I say, okay, great. And so I'm designing it. And I said, the only way I'm going to take this job, though, is that I want to be able to interview employees. I want to be able to involve them. And they couldn't believe it. They were like, why would you want to talk with them? We're the ones that know the operations. And I said, no, no, you don't understand. Your employees work there day in and day out. They work on those derricks, every single day they work in the refineries. Every single day. I want to involve them, not only because the knowledge that they have, it's because I want them to see that I care about the disaster program. Why is that important? Because when I engage them, all of a sudden they now have skin in the game, to use that term.
[00:34:38] Patrick Jinks: Yeah.
[00:34:38] Patrick Hardy: They now feel as though they were part of that process, that process of an outside guy who's being hired. He's a, he's a big consultant, whatever. He's coming in. Never met this person, and he's coming in, he wants to involve me. When I do trainings with companies, I, all the time, I'll turn to all the employees in the room and I'll say, listen, how can I improve this thing? And we go through the training and I ask them questions. I said, here's what we're planning to do with this. What do you think? And I get their feedback because I want to hear what they have to say. I want to know how it is that I can improve that disaster program. That's really, really important. And after drills, for example, we have a YouTube video which I'm sure we'll be talking about later. At the end of it, I ask the employees, how do we do? How do we do today? What do we do? Well, what do we have to work on? And when I involve employees, that instills the most important, the most important element of any disaster program. It is the culture of preparedness. It's that culture imbibing it organization wide, where I say this big, thick disaster plan doesn't belong to management, it doesn't belong to the C suites. It doesn't belong to the owner. It belongs to everybody. And that's why to this day, it still shocks me that business continuity plans are never made available to workforces. I've never seen a company in all my years. I've worked in Silicon Valley, I've worked with Big Pharma, I've worked with petrochemical, I've worked in amusement. They never involve them. And therefore, and the reason why I know that is during COVID so many employees were asking their employers, what are we going to do now that we're closed? Are we reopening? When are we opening? How are we reopening? Well, if they'd had access and viewed the disaster business continuity plan, at least gotten a briefing on it, they would know.
And so, so that, that was a big problem. So that's a big deal. So that's one things I tell organizations involve the employees at all levels.
[00:36:33] Patrick Jinks: Yeah, well, I mean, a lot of organizations, I would say most don't include their employees, even in their strategic planning. And whether they're complex plans or not, I, so many employees of organizations who have told me I never seen our organization's strategic plan. I don't know if we have one. I'm assuming we do. You come find out. Yeah, they've got one. And, you know, the C suite has it and it's on the s drive, but nobody's actually seen it or been a part of it. So it's one thing to communicate to the employees what it is, but what I like about it is involving them on the front end. Yes, it gives them ownership, but it also gives leadership access to blind spots that they would otherwise have, because it's the people inside the company that know where the vulnerabilities are sometimes more than the leadership does. So they're able to bring ideas to the table that. Oh, yeah, we hadn't really thought about that. So I love that. That's a great, it's a great way to think about that. And they can't be. It's funny how you say so many of them are so complex. I mean, in the middle of a disaster is, that's not the time to of be struggling to even figure out what this plan is even saying, you know? So it needs to be pretty.
[00:37:55] Patrick Hardy: Yeah. And I turned down, and I actually turned down a client one time in Silicon Valley who hired me and said, okay, I want you to rewrite this particular portion of our disaster plan. I said, sure. So I did. So I rewrote it. It was part of their emergency response plan. And I said, okay, once we've done that, now what we need to do is train your employees. So at some point, we need to make arrangements. We need to bring them into rooms that we'll do them in shifts, and I'll train everybody. And they said, absolutely not. They said, you can put it on the p drive, you can create a little lms and you, but you can't force anyone to do it. And we're not going to do anything in per person. So I said, so let me understand this. So not only are we not going to do a live training at all, we're not going to do that at all, but that we're putting it on an LMS, which maybe some people will look at, but by the way, unless you force them to, most people are not going to glance at it at all. So we're not even going to be doing this today. They said, no. And if that's a no go for you, then we're just not going to take you. And I said, that's a no go because, and the reason is because most folks forget disaster response is a kinesthetic process. It is a process that involves doing touching action. And there is no way, and there is no argument I would ever be convinced of that. Says, if we do everything online where they just take an online module, they will be able to perform better. And as a matter of fact, I have actually challenged corporations before. I've actually said to them, I will waive my entire fee, everything you are going to pay me to write your plan, I will waive it. If I can put two teams together. One team is your team. They have not been trained in person. They just went through an LMS, a few modules, and then we're going to run a drill with them, and then we're going to take my team where it's been kinesthetic. I've asked them questions, I've engaged to them, then we're going to run a drill. And I can guarantee you that mine will perform better than yours every, say, a single time. And no company's ever taken me up on, although I've gotten some, some really strange looks from people because I've said in the end, they know that you, you can't let a company culture of, of, you know, just because we're all into tech, that doesn't necessarily mean, well, we can never do things in person. You have to do things in person. That's what disasters are about. Earthquakes are about moving around. Evacuating is a human process. There is no AI that can do an evacuation on your behalf. There is no AI. Even in the imagination of tech, people are doing top secret projects. There's no way that you can simulate doing an evacuation without actually doing it. Same with the shelter in place, same with a lockdown, same with, you know, a tornado response. You have to do it. That's the only way it makes sense. Because if you don't, it doesn't make any difference, you know, whatsoever. Because if it were true, I train emts, and one of the things I used to do is I used to take, you know, there was actually a book, really thick book, and the textbook said, here's how to respond to a mass casualty incident. So we would learn it. And eventually, after a few years, I said, I'm gonna stop doing this because these guys are not learning anything. So I literally would take teddy bears, 50 of them, and I'd put them all in a room, and I'd put a little note card around their neck, and it would have the four pieces of information they have to know in a mass casualty event. So those are, like, the four things. And each teddy bear had different information on it. And I would give them, and I have a timer, and I would say, okay, you guys have, you know, three minutes or four minutes or five minutes, whatever, to go through all these teddy, teddy bears. And the EMT students, we'd be running around trying to get it done, and they wouldn't finish. I'd flip the lights off and say, we're doing it again. I'd change all the note cards around, and we'd start overd. And after doing that a few times, they were better at it than emts who were on the job, who I was, who I was recertifying, and they were coming in, and they'd never done the in per person stuff. And all they were doing was just the book. Just the book. Didactic learning. The people who actually did the kinesthetic work performed so much better because by doing it, it makes a big difference. So to business leaders, I say to them, you've got to involve them physically in the room. Having them do things kinesthetically, you will see a massive difference in how they perform in the disaster.
[00:42:02] Patrick Jinks: Yeah. That's a great sort of overarching principle for what leaders need to be thinking about right now. Are we involving our employees, giving them ownership, training them in advance, going through those drills that we think are, you know, a waste of time?
What about when the disaster hits?
How does the leadership mindset need to shift? And what mode do they need to be in? What are some of the tenets that you would tell leaders when a disaster is happening? When it's unfolding, when it, when everyone's becoming aware of it, and, and it's, it's a thing. It's brand new, and people are scared, and we don't even know all the facts yet.
What's the leadership mindset at that point?
[00:42:55] Patrick Hardy: Well, the first person who should be in charge is the first person who finds out about that disaster. That's the first thing. So if you're having an incident on property, right, or in your offices, you have a fire, you have somebody's breaking in, something's happening. That person who discovers that disaster, that's the person in charge. Because that's the reason why I, if employees feel like I can't do anything, I am paralyzed with indecision because I need to talk to my bosses or I have to speak to the general manager. I'm not allowed to have freedom of action. Then all of a sudden, for a while, you have a disaster where no one's in charge, because from the time the disaster was discovered to the time in which she was talking to the manager and the manager actually does something there. That period of time is just as chaotic as before we knew anything was going on at all. So that's why I tell people, make sure that your employees are empowered to act in the disaster. That's why I talk about commanding, communicating and carrying out. The command portion is taking charge. And I use the word command, not lead. I say command because one person has got to be making decisions. And that's the second thing I was going to say to. The answer to your question is that someone must be in charge of at all times. So even now, and I'm not being hyperbolic about this, I'm not exaggerating. I really mean this. If your company is faced with, you're worried about AI, you're worried about the disruptive effects of AI, that's fine.
You need to appoint one person in the company whose sole responsibility is. No, I mean, they're. It's not their sole responsibility, but they are the sole person in charge of handling the AI disruption, because that person's role is to figure out one thing and one thing only, how to turn AI from a disaster into a disruptive advantage. That's what I tell people all the time. Take that as that opportunity. And the reason why I say put one person in charge is because it really helps people to have a point person, someone who we know that is what they're doing all the time. So I remember being an economic student when I was young. I learned about something called the tragedy of the commons, and it's a story that has stuck with me ever since. Patrick, I don't know if you ever. Have you ever heard that story before? Have you ever heard this parable before?
[00:45:20] Patrick Jinks: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:45:21] Patrick Hardy: Yeah. So anyway, so there's a, there's. There's essentially this plot of land, and it's. It's. Has a lot of vegetation. It's beautiful. And so one day there's a bunch of farmers who say, we all want to be able to have our cows graze this land. And so they say, well, who owns it? Well, nobody. The three of us will each, quote, own it collectively. And the cows go over, and very quickly, they destroy all the grass, they eat it all, and there's nothing left. But there's a second plot of land where one person owns it. One person owns it. And what he does is that he has his cows grazing that land and they only graze a certain part of it. He doesn't destroy the whole field because he wants it to rotate so that eventually you constantly have the vegetation going. So one person being in charge of it is really important because that keeps the accountability there. When its a small disaster, I say to folks all the time, if you have a trashcan fire and a random employee runs across that fire, that employee is now in charge. That employee is in charge. It doesnt matter, I dont care. And as a matter of fact, I do this all the time. I say, listen, listen, when we go into training, I tell everybody, take off your name badges. I don't want to see a name badge. I don't want to know who you are. I don't want to know. I thought, I don't want to know who you are, but I don't want to know what your position is in the company. I don't care about your titles or anything. And vice presidents say, why don't take off my badge for anybody? And I say, okay, well then just take your jacket outside because I just don't want to see who you are.
I want to know how we can work collectively as employees to focus on a problem or a stressor. And when we look at the disruptive effects of whether it's a technology, whether it is a succession issue, if the CEO is really going to leave and people are really agitated about that, put someone in charge. Put someone in charge of just that, so that employees can go to that person and say, these are my concerns. This is what I'm worried about. That's feedback you want to hear. We talk all the time about our employees, our most important resources. So why are you cutting them out of the conversation? Involve them and the person who they're talking to. It doesn't have to be an EVP, it doesn't have to be a coo. You can make it a manager that everyone really likes so that someone is at least acting as a liaison and working on this problem actively so they can get this information, but high enough in the company where they can influence policy, because the last thing you want is a bunch of employees providing you with Sora Sarda, the cacophony of feedback and then turn into nothing because employees will, will notice. They will notice. And matter of fact, when I've talked to bosses before, he said, okay, Patrick, I'm glad you have these these folks talking to you about the disaster plan, I don't really want to hear about it. And I go, that's not going to happen. Like, if they say something to me that I think is worthwhile, we're going to put it in the plan because they know what's going on day to day basis. You're gone half the year because you're traveling, you're doing this, you're going to CEO conferences, which is wonderful. And it's great. I'm a CEO myself. Totally get it. But in the end, these are the people who are here eight to five, you know, five days a week. They know what's going on here, and I'm gonna hear what they have to say and incorporate that into the planning. So that's really why it's so important to put someone in charge and have people involved every step in the process.
[00:48:48] Patrick Jinks: So I'm hearing two different person in charge things, tenants from you. And maybe I'm hearing, tell me if I'm not hearing it right. So there's one thing to say that you're in charge of the executive transition process, okay? And everybody knows that's the person in charge for the succession plan, the executive transition process and all that. All the limbo time during the transition. This is the go to person about where we are and the decisions.
It's another, or you're the person, you know, dealing with the AI thing, but it's another thing when an unforeseen, like, disaster, I mean, go the go, the ranks, the fire in the building, the active shooter, the whatever.
Because your first thing was the person who encounters the problem initially is the one who needs to be in charge. Makes me think of the Ritz Carlton and their famous customer service stance, where every employee of the Ritz Carlton, if they come across a problem that a customer is facing, that they own it, and so they're given the empowerment to, you know, make the. Make the decisions, even give a free night or whatever to that customer, even if they're the housekeeper, they have the capability of doing that.
My guess, my question is, isn't, is there a time. I can't imagine they're not being. But I might not be seeing it. Right. Isn't. Isn't there a time, though, where, okay, I see the problem. I'm going to make some initial decisions. I'm going to alert people. I'm going to direct people out of harm's way, I'm going to do whatever. But then there comes a time when, okay, now somebody else takes command, but it's clear of that. Because maybe this person isn't qualified to take the next steps or think of the next execution or have the leadership chops to, you know, to pull. Pull the rest of that off. So when you say the person who encounters the disaster is in charge of, which I'm imagining, that can only be temporary in many cases.
[00:50:50] Patrick Hardy: Yeah, it is. And it's intended to be that way. But the purpose that, the reason why I say that is because someone should be in charge at all times, right? There should never, ever be a time where someone isn't in charge. Right? So once you have someone in charge, but you're right over time, you can then pass it on to someone else. So, for example, business continuity plans, if any of you've ever seen one before, before. These are long, complicated, drawn out processes. They require vendor interactions, and they require high levels of executive privilege to be able to execute a lot of these steps. But there is a bandwidth of steps that employees can handle without executive leadership. That's why you have a plan in the first place. But then once you get to that point, Patrick, you're completely right, then you can get to this point where either one of two things happens. One, you have a higher level person arrive on scene and they actually can say, no problem, brief me. I'll figure it out. I'll take the binder from you.
[00:51:49] Patrick Jinks: Yeah, okay.
[00:51:50] Patrick Hardy: I'll take it from.
[00:51:51] Patrick Jinks: That's what I'm.
[00:51:51] Patrick Hardy: Or Planck numbered. Well, and you're right. And. But plank number two is they're not there, but they can authorize it over the phone.
[00:51:58] Patrick Jinks: Yeah.
[00:51:59] Patrick Hardy: Because when I was an EMT, for example, I'd be on the field. There were times where I was a long way from a hospital, and I would be on the phone with a nurse, and the nurse would say, I authorize you to do x, y, and zenith. Just do exactly as I ask you to do. That is outside my scope of practice. But they say you are allowed to do it. As long as I am on the phone and I am telling you what to do, she's in charge. But really, I'm in charge because I'm the one that has to execute these things. But she acts essentially as, like a prime minister, almost like, you know, I was just about to say somebody who's, like, directly advising you, like, almost like a Jiminy crick cricket in your ear, telling you, here's how this has to go, go. And. But those are the two things. But what I don't want to see happen is what happens an awful lot. Where companies say, I don't trust employees. I don't want to have them do anything. Just wait till I arrive.
[00:52:45] Patrick Jinks: Okay, that makes sense.
[00:52:46] Patrick Hardy: And that's proven not to work. Right. But you are absolutely right. That is the next obvious step because in like it, I mean, you're not going to have a line employee handling, you know, information technology issues, right. You're going to have a specialized manager doing those things. But if someone doesn't leave, start the process, you lose a big advantage in time.
[00:53:06] Patrick Jinks: Well, it does seem obvious, but I just didn't want it, I just didn't want to have it go without saying. I mean, again, I figured that was the case. I just didn't want to make the assumption for people listening, going, wait a minute, you mean that person's now in charge of the whole thing? Well, so in a moment and in context and as long as there's a handoff and there's no vacuum and, but again, and the continuity plan outlines all that.
There's a whole process for that. So that makes good sense. We use an illustration a lot when we're doing disc assessments. So disk is the leadership behavioral assessment we do for leaders. And long story short, a high d is the command and control.
They're decisive, they're direct short answers, short answers to short questions. And then you have people like high cs and high ss who are more than nurturing and distributed leadership and, you know, get it right and be accurate and take your time and follow the process. And so we talk about an extreme illustration of you're in a meeting in your training room and the fire alarm goes off.
Well, that's not the time to put flip charts in corners and divide your team up and say, okay, let's all figure out what we believe might be the best solutions and what's the best plan of exit right now. And how should, what are the things we should take with us and what are the things we should leave and where should we meet outside? Let's, I want to get everybody's ideas and we'll, we'll compile them and we'll come to a consensus. That's not the time for that kind of leadership. That's the time for somebody in that room to say, grab your laptop and your phone and let's, follow me. We're going out this door. We're going out to the south parking lot. Follow me. Don't hesitate. Go now.
Right.
[00:54:59] Patrick Hardy: I mean, that's, and then you're absolutely right. Because what I tell people, it's like disaster response by committee. It never works because there's too many people who are chiming in, you know, I think we should do this. I think, you know, we should do that. That one person. And the other thing I'm going to say also to workforces is I say there are people who work for you you never realized or never thought would have any leadership ability whatsoever. They might just surprise you. There are people who will do things that you never expected. They will be more decisive. They will be more effective. They will be, you know, they can make choices much faster than you initially realized, especially at a place now where people are so transient in the way in which they work. They'll work for a company for two or three years, and they'll work somewhere else in a different kind of position where, and in doing something completely different. For example, I was actually, I have an employee who I have doing graphics design work. I didn't realize she used to be a press officer, and, in fact, public relations was actually her undergraduate major, and she ended up up interning and working for a major sports team. And so this was somebody who I said, if we ever have an emergency, this is a person who can help us to work with the media if we ever had that situation come up. In other words, I'm not stilted by the fact that she, quote, just works for me in this department or that department. This is someone who actually has a lot of skills that I can utilize and implement. So ask your employees. Talk with them, train with them, drill with them. You'd be amazed at the things you will discover, the skills that people have, skills that are, quote unquote, you know, blue collar skills or, you know, white collar skills. I mean, you'd be astonished at some of the things that people will acquire over time. And you, you will discover, and they will pleasantly surprise you because those are people who you can actually utilize in disaster much more than you thought you ever could.
[00:57:02] Patrick Jinks: All very, very well said. Let me get to a couple things quickly. Before our time runs out, let's talk about the book for just a minute. It is, you referenced part of it a moment ago, and you did it kind of quickly. I'd like for you to at least kind of come back to those three c's, communicate, command, communicate and carry out.
I don't know that that's necessarily the, the core construct of the book, but it seemed like it when I looked at it initially.
Tell me what the basic core concept of the book. What will someone get out of the book and just walk through those three c's? One more time for us, if you don't mind.
[00:57:44] Patrick Hardy: Absolutely.
The main concept of the book is that you never have to experience a disaster ever again. Because disaster, having a disaster is not dependent on, you know, the size of the hurricane or the severity of the earthquake. It's none of those things. What it comes down to is what are your dependencies? What are the things that you are dependent on as a manager? That those are the things that will make you weak. Otherwise, an earthquake is just an earthquake. It's just a shaking of the ground or a hurricane is just a major windstorm. That's what it is. It's a windstorm. I've been through them, but in the end, people who turn them into a disaster do so because they are dependent on something. They're dependent on one thing happening. And when that breaks down now, everything else stops working. So whether it's out of business or whether it's in a family, whatever, you know, that's why I tell people, do everything you can to take responsibility. Don't leave the dependency to some, someone else. So in other words, you are in charge of your own disaster response no matter what it is. That's why I talk about the three c's, because how do you take control? How do you really control a disaster and turn it into an advantage for yourself? The first is taking command, which is, and this is the main thrust of it, you are responsible for your own, for whatever goes on around you. You are responsible for this disaster. You are going to turn it around. That's why I call it design any disaster, because you can design it the way you want to. It can either design it to be worse or design it to be better. And so if you take command, meaning you are taking control, then you are not putting it in the hands of someone else, because all too often I hear FEMA will handle it, the insurance company will handle it, the upper level executives, they'll handle the disaster plan. I'm not going to worry about it. And I say to people, that's a dependency. You are dependent on them for your disaster response, and they're going to disappoint you.
[00:59:48] Patrick Jinks: Strategy is the same way it is.
[00:59:51] Patrick Hardy: Yeah, exactly. And that's absolutely right. And that's why it comes down to communicating as well, because communication is more than just the interlocution, you know, that you and I are having now. It is being able to construct a team around you. So you have taken command. Can I form a team around me to do things effectively? And then the last thing is carrying out which is can I get things done with what I have around me? And that's where the major planks though, that we would understand about disaster planning come into play. Do we have backups? Do we have evacuation locations? Again, if you don't do that stuff, you are now dependent on someone else to do your evacuation for you and you don't want that to happen. If you can design it yourself, you don't have to experience the disaster at all. And that's really what the three cs are about. And in embodying those principles on a cultural level, in your organization, in your family, in your life, that's excellent.
[01:00:44] Patrick Jinks: Thanks. Thanks for that summary. And design any disaster, again is the name of the book and we'll direct.
We'll have a link on the episode page to disasterpatrick.com. dot tell us about the YouTube channel. This is brand new and it sounds really cool and unique.
[01:01:01] Patrick Hardy: It's awesome. We are so excited about it. My channel isaster Patrick and what I am doing is taking on a series of disaster challenges all over the world. And for those of you who are hearing this, if you want to challenge me, I welcome you to do so. I'm taking on the biggest disaster challenges because I want to show you that disaster preparedness doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be depressing. It doesn't have to be chicken little. It doesn't have to be awful. It can be fun, it can be interesting, it can be empowering. It can be a great team building experience. And that's really what this is about. So I'm taking on a series of challenges. So for example, I just, our very first video just went up three days ago, just past 2000 views. We're really excited about it. I evacuated 230 cats and I did it in less than 2 hours. And I did it with an organization that didn't have a disaster plan, had never trained anyone before, and had never run a drill before. I literally wrote the plan with them. I trained them, and we actually evacuated all 230 cats in essentially 2 hours. And it was down to the very last second. None of it was scripted. Everything you see in that video was absolutely correct. And I, I, you know, put little obstacles and things around them and we solved it. Another video I'm doing is I'm going to do CPR non stop for 30 hours and I'm going to be doing that in San Francisco at a brand new CPR facility that they have there. So that's going to be really interesting. I'm going to be doing all kinds of other disaster challenges. I'm actually going to be creating a hurricane rated shelter, the very first one in the world. It's going to survive category five hurricane winds. We're actually taking it to a specialized facility, the university. And we're going to put this structure, and I'm going to actually build it. And we're actually going to test it in front of the winds. And guess what? But the building is entirely made out of legos. So these are just really fun things. Not saying you're going to build an emergency shelter out of legos, but we're going to show people, here's how best to prepare yourselves. Here's how to make yourself hardened. Here's how to make yourself anti fragile. Here's how to do all these things and put yourself in a position where it's advantageous for you. Because I want you to get past that initial stage of the emergency and get yourself into a place where you say, now I'm prepared. Now I can move on to the next step. So we have so many wonderful challenges coming up. So please subscribe to the page. We've got dozens of videos coming through now. Now that we've done this first one, we're going to do about three a week. So we've got a lot coming out. And then it'll go down to two a week for a while. But we've got tons of challenges. Gonna be really fun.
[01:03:46] Patrick Jinks: Sounds like it could be more than a YouTube channel. It sounds like it could be a Netflix series or something. That sounds amazing.
Fun stuff.
[01:03:54] Patrick Hardy: Hoping so. It may be great because we think that we want to make this mainstream. I want to show people, I'm so enthusiastic about this. I want people to know that you can do this stuff. And just to prove it, I want you to challenge me to do it because I'll show you how to do it. Because in the end, the purpose is not to shock and all the purpose is to show people. You can be educated on this. It doesn't have to be boring because I want more than 3% of America to prepared for disasters. I want to flip that switch so that we have a statistic where most Americans are absolutely prepared for disasters because that is how we can effectively attack this, quote unquote, age of disasters.
[01:04:34] Patrick Jinks: Yeah. So I know you do keynotes and trainings and these different things in terms of what you would call client work and the work that you do most. Who should call you you like you should call Patrick Hardy if. Fill in the blank.
[01:04:52] Patrick Hardy: If you. You mean as far as titles go.
[01:04:55] Patrick Jinks: Or like who, who is it you're mostly helping if you, who's your ideal client? Who's your, who's your profile client?
[01:05:06] Patrick Hardy: Well, if you want me to change the culture, if you are interested, if you are a business leader of some kind. So I'm going to put this strictly within business terms. So not necessarily within the channel, but within business terms. If you are interested in creating a disaster culture that is positive, that is empowering, that is innovative, and that is really interesting and fun and one that engages everybody, then call me, because I will do a training there. I'll do a keynote. I will engage people. I'm a very effusive, dramatic guy. Go on my website. I've got a video up of me speaking. I've been, I've been a competitive public speaker since I was a little kidde.
I just really enjoy it. We'll do drills in the room. We'll do a fun training. People will be laughing.
We'll talk about equipment, we'll talk about technology. We'll talk about all this stuff. Because I want you and your team to feel as though you are empowered in anything so that you turn it from a disaster to a disruptive advantage. That's why you hire me, because I will change that culture so that never more are you going to be in a position where people say, I have no involvement in this disaster program at all. In fact, not only am I part of the team, I actually can help lead it when the company needs me to do so.
[01:06:23] Patrick Jinks: Fantastic. Fantastic. And again, the website is the best way for people to reach you.
[01:06:28] Patrick Hardy: Yes.
[01:06:29] Patrick Jinks: Two questions, Patrick, as we sign off, that I like to ask all my guests. And the first one is, I love to hear stories of, you know, just brief stories of the leaders in people's lives that have had the most impact on them. And I hear some just great stories. They're inspiring. Who comes to mind for you as that leader, whether you know them or not, whether they're past or present, who you would say has had a profound impact on who you are as a leader today and what your, your point of view on, on leadership?
[01:07:03] Patrick Hardy: Well, there's a lot of people I've had in my life who have had a massive impact on myself, but there is one person who I have never met and I will never meet, at least in this lifetime. It's Harry Houdini. I think that Harry Houdini is, to me, he's really my spirit animal in a lot of ways, because he was somebody who said, magic doesn't have to be this compartmentalized, you know, very sidelined kind of discipline. It's mainstream, it's fun, it's really engaging. And a lot of the things he did in public, a lot because he was an escape artist, he loved escaping because he wanted to show people that magic can be interesting and empowering. He wanted people to feel like, no matter what, even if you are chained up and you are placed into a chest and locked with a strict padlock, and then you're thrown into the bottom of a lake, even then, he could get out of it. And that kind of inspired people at a time in the early 20th century, when the world was changing fairly dramatically, countries were changing, the Ottoman Empire was in decline. You saw the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. You saw the beginning steps of World War one. And he gave people a feeling and a sense that we can accomplish things. An individual can do amazing things. And that's what I really feel like. I'm sort of a showman in emergency preparedness, because I want people to see that cultural change, because that's how it goes. And when I. When I saw him, I've read a number of biographies about him, and to me, he's just an amazing person who really pushed the limits. But he told people, in the end, you need to find your own straight and jackets. It doesn't mean you have to literally be at the bottom of an ocean. What holds you back? What prevents you from being successful? Whatever it is, you can get out of it, no matter how insurmountable it seems. That is a message that has resonated with me, no matter what I've done in my life, saying, no matter how hard this is, I can do it. If he can do that, there's no doubt that I can do this.
[01:09:10] Patrick Jinks: Well, that aligns so much with the work that you're doing in the mission that you're pursuing. I appreciate that. It's kind of an unconventional example of a leader in that way, and I hadn't thought of Houdini that way. I dabble in sort of amateur fun, little magic stuff, and obviously everybody knows who Houdini is, but there's a bigger message behind that. I love it. Last question. You've got 15 seconds. You're at the top of a mountain with a megaphone to all the leaders of the world. World. And they're there to hear the Patrick Hardy number one tenet of leadership. What do you tell them?
[01:09:47] Patrick Hardy: There is no such thing as a disaster. You can turn any disaster into a disruptive advantage. All you have to do is empower your people to lead.
[01:10:00] Patrick Jinks: Wow.
Well done. That's hard to do in 15 seconds, but you just summed it up.
Patrick, thank you so much for what you're doing. Thank you for carving out time. It's a great program. Great. Such insight and inspiration. You know, you don't usually think of inspiration coming from a conversation about disaster, but you just did it and I think showed us a lot. So I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on disaster. Patrick.com is the website. Everything's there. The YouTube channel is there. It's got its own page, information on the book, information on booking Patrick to be a keynote Patrick Hardyt your conference or in your company or with a group, information on how to contact Patrick if he can help your organization or business get better prepared for and design your own disaster. Reach out. Make it happen. Lead on.
