Ambition: The Missing Attribute in Your Employees
[00:00:00] From the Defense Acquisition University, this is The Learning Circle.
This is The Learning Circle. I'm Anthony Ritolo, and I'm joined today by Cheryl Johnson. Cheryl Johnson is an educational consultant who has spent years cultivating a culture of learning in various organizations. She enjoys sharing her knowledge with others. with others about successes, failures, mostly her passion for the future, because she believes learning will be the primary key to success for any individual and for all organizations.
She's the author of the book, Ambition. The Missing Attribute in Your Employees. It's available from Cresting [00:01:00] Wave Publishing. You can look for it at an amazon. com near you. I'd like to explore that book with her today, but first let me say hello. Cheryl, welcome to The Learning Circle.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Yeah, very happy to have you. Full disclosure, we have crossed paths before. We have worked together some years back. When I saw your book, I must have come across the wire on LinkedIn or, uh, some, you know, social media circle that we were common travelers in. I was very excited to see it, so I acquired it and I was really delighted when I read it.
It touches on some vital things that I think go to the, the learning development world, uh, concepts of motivation. You know, we, we throw around terms like extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. And, uh, this idea of ambition, though, you, you have coined some new terminology for it, and I'd like to get into that with [00:02:00] you.
Now, in your book, you sort of set the table for us by identifying some key terms. They include IQ, EQ, and a new thing called AQ. So there's IQ or intelligent quotient, I think we're most familiar with that as a measure of intelligence. There's a newer term called EQ, actually a lot of folks don't know it, but it is called the emotional quotient, it's emotional intelligence.
But there's also the AQ, and I'd like to begin. Here, Cheryl, if you can explain the Triad iq, EQ and aq, how do they interrelate and how do they kind of, um, form the basis of this thesis about, about ambition?
Well, like I said, I think everybody's heard of IQ and in very loose terms. I mean, uh, we think of IQ as, you know, how smart is somebody, and a lot of that relates to book learning.
[00:03:00] You know, in school we develop our IQ. That's not true in the purest sense of the word, you know, the term IQ, but that's kind of how the world views it. And then we have the emotional, you know, quotient, which is once again, and it's, um, I use these terms kind of loosely, you know, how well do you interact with other people?
You know, how good are your social skills, your communication, you know, those types of things, how well do you read and understand other people and, you know, do you have empathy, those kinds of things. And then there's the term I coined, it's called the Ambition Quotient, and it's interesting because when I first came up with this, I thought, oh, I was working with a person, you know, marketing person, and they were kind of helping me figure out how to market this concept of motivation in a way that would be appealing to people, and I, it just resonated with me right away, but I've had a couple of people as I've done, you know, a few [00:04:00] podcasts here and there, and other people who've talked to me, they're like, Oh, ambition, that's a bad word.
And I was like, Ooh, what do you mean a bad word? And then I thought, well, I guess it can be viewed in a bad sense. You know, if you look in the workplace and you think about people who are really ambitious, sometimes, you know, they're climbers and they have a tendency to, you know, step on other people to get where they want to go.
And I think sometimes we look at ambition in that way. Light, and I hope that, you know, for, you know, what I'm trying to accomplish here, that it's, you know, we don't look at ambitious, ambition, sorry, in that light, that it's more a driver, you know, it's motivation, it's what inspires people to want to, Excel and to achieve and not just for themselves, but also for the organizations with whom they, you know, serve,
you know, I totally get that connotation.
The negative connotation of the word climber came to mind this idea of clawing your way to the top, stepping [00:05:00] over whoever you need to get to where you want to be. But. When I read your book, and in the context, never occurred to me, that thought never occurred to me in the negative sense, um, I think you do a very good job of beginning with sort of, again, IQ, sort of that measure of, it's supposed to be this sort of measure of native intelligence, uh, perhaps it is very, you know, much geared towards how much book learning we've acquired up till that point when we've taken an IQ test.
But, you know, the emotional quotient is an important factor. You, you define it well. You, you speak about attributes of self awareness, how one regulates themselves, uh, self management I think of in like Peter Drucker's terminology. Uh, but motivation, empathy, your social skills, all these things, you know, um, I think about how we can have conflict and how we react [00:06:00] to it, how we overcome it.
EQ is very important. But this idea of, you know, Ambition, and it being a measurable thing, uh, was very, very interesting to me. But you describe AQ as the cream rising to the top of the IQ, EQ, AQ equation. That's a mouthful, but you, you, you talk about AQ, it seems to have primacy among all those measures. I wonder if you can sort of elaborate on that for us.
Well, the way I look at it and the way I tried to present it in the book is, you know, you can be the smartest person out there, can have a good IQ, you can also have really good social skills, and be able to, you know, interact with your peers and be self aware, but none of that is going to do you a whole lot of good.
unless you have the motivation and the drive to [00:07:00] accomplish your goals and to work toward organizational goals and just basically to, you know, to achieve whatever it is you're, you know, you're trying to accomplish in the workplace or even, you know, in your personal life.
Yeah, it's like you're saying it's, it's not enough to have the smarts and then the emotional stability.
If you can't translate that into More success at work, really in any sphere of life, then perhaps you're lacking in ambition. Is that, is that a correct way to paraphrase, um, what you're getting at?
Yeah, definitely. I, I guess one of the reasons that this resonates with me is because a lot of people have indicated to me that I'm a very ambitious person and that I'm very self motivated and that, you know, I am.
I set goals. I accomplish goals. It does, I, as we'll get into further, you know, down the road a little bit, you know, there are drawbacks to everything. [00:08:00] And there's, you know, I, I met some people that I consider to be highly intelligent, but sometimes they're lacking in the social skill department, you know, so even though they're really smart and everybody admires that attribute about them, you know, there's, there's upsides and downsides to everything.
And that's kind of the way I, I look at, you know, ambition and motivation and drive. It's great in that it helps us achieve, but it also comes with the downside, which we'll talk about a little bit more.
Sure. Sure. You know, this is now, this is a very unfair generalization, but the example is where, how people sort of type, um, programmers where very smart, obviously, they know how to do things with computers that most mere mortals can't, but maybe some of those types of folks are more comfortable with computers than others.
So they may not be the bear hug personality that you need in other situations. So again, I'm putting that unfair stereotype out there, but you know, [00:09:00] maybe it's a truism, maybe it's not. But I think it, it kind of speaks to some of what you're talking about is how, um, when you have kind of the full complement of these attributes, it's, uh, they all work together and they, they translate into success.
Yes. So obviously, organizations want ambitious employees that are going to do great things. How can we be on the lookout for the traits of the ambitious? How do we identify it?
Well, we'll get into a little quiz toward the end, um, that I generally give. to employers to kind of, you know, when they're interviewing and looking at those type of things.
But one of the first thing that stands out in my mind is, you know, they tend to be mavericks. And I use that term because it's a term that once again has been applied to me. And course, because it's applied to me, I'm like, oh, that's a good thing, right? Um, but as I've worked in organizations, as an employee in particular, [00:10:00] not everybody sees, you know, being a maverick as a good thing, just like not all people see being ambitious as a good thing.
And one of the reasons is because mavericks, they have a tendency to always be looking out for new and better ways of doing things. One of the things that I've had to learn is that, um, you know, and this comes with age and wisdom and all those good things, is that new doesn't always equate to better. As a maverick, you know, every new thing that came out, and in learning, I, I entered the learning space, Full force when there was just so many changes in technology and, you know, we were, you know, online learning and we were doing gaming, we're doing social learning, you know, and everybody would always ask me, what's the best way to learn?
You know, and I'm, at first I was like, oh, well, gaming is the best way to learn. And then I was like, oh, no. You know, social learning, we learn from each other. And then one day, I, I actually sat down on a, on one of my websites is this little wheel and it outlines all the different types [00:11:00] of learning. And I learned that there's a time and a place for each one of those, that no one is better than the other, that they all just, you know, they complement each other in a lot of ways, but there's, you know, I get into the whole neuroscience behind the different types of learning and when is it best applied in the workplace and as, you know, as an individual.
So although being a maverick can be a really great thing. You know, you're, um, if you're an organization that's trying to, you know, rise to the top and you, you want Mavericks, you want people who are always thinking outside the box, who are risk takers and, you know, like to try new things all the time.
That's all well and good, but once again, that, that needs to be channeled. And one of the best examples I can give you on a practical level is my mom taught piano for years. And she used to tell me all the time, she says she would take [00:12:00] a piano student who was just over exuberant and just played way too fast and just practiced all the time and everything, as opposed to somebody who was a little more hesitant and a little more, you know, slow and, you know, she said, because, you know, Drawing things out of people and getting them motivated and getting them, you know, trying to, to do more, um, and, you know, in her world of playing the piano, get, you know, more feeling and more emotion, you know, into the music was much harder than taking somebody who had all that and just, you know, taming it down a little bit and channeling it and making it, um, go where the music, you know, wanted to go or needed to go depending on what you were trying to accomplish.
And also growing up, that was another thing that my mom used to tell me. She says, you know, that I was extremely headstrong. A lot of times [00:13:00] ambitious people are pretty headstrong. And she said, oh, it was a, Very difficult raising me as a child because I was so headstrong, but she said I knew if I got you pointed in the right direction you know, you were gonna have it made because you were so diligent and persistent and Like my husband says I you know Give I'm like the pit bull with the bone just latch on to something and I'm not gonna let go Like I said, there's always the downside to that.
And then there's also the good side to that.
Well, there's two sides to every coin, right? For every good attribute, there, there can be, you know, there's a con for every pro as you stack up the columns. So, you know, sometimes organizations, they just, you know, you're, yes, you're Disruptive in a good way.
You're, you're creating, you're finding new pathways and breaking the status quo. There are times though, we just want people to calm down and, and for a moment, um, it's like, can you just be a cog in the wheel? [00:14:00] That's a terrible thing to ask somebody to do. But, um, When someone is very innovative and intrapreneurial and that maverick, um, you know, sometimes it is a little bit too much when it's all the time.
So I under, I understand in an organization, how you have to sort of tame it, channel it. Sometimes, um, you don't really want to suppress it or throw cold water on people because you don't want to dampen, uh, that too much. But, uh, I definitely hear what you're saying. That is a, it's a management challenge for those kinds of people.
You want them, but they come with challenges. Where, um, and, you know, I, I think about talent, uh, there's the talent factor. Using your piano analogy, there's the, um, overly exuberant people. Uh, they may have a lot of talent. There's other folks who maybe, um, it's harder to put the talent in that wasn't there.
I don't know if that's a, um, if I'm running in the wrong direction with your [00:15:00] example, but, uh, some people, maybe it's just cultivation and learning and they learn how to open up and be more expressive, or some people are just sort of born with it and it has to be moderated and And as you said, channeled.
So yeah, very, very interesting things to think about.
On that note, I think that's a very important point that you're bringing up is, because once again, I get that question, you know, can you cultivate ambition or are you born with ambition? Well, I, I would say it goes both ways. I was definitely one that was born with it.
Um, but that doesn't mean that you can't take people who, you know, like the piano example, maybe aren't as exuberant, but yet there are techniques you can use to help bring out the best in them. They're not going to be your Mavericks. They're not going to be the ones always looking for new and better ways of doing things.
But that doesn't mean that they don't bring other attributes to the table that can be honed. [00:16:00] And in a way that makes them ambitious in their own way. Ambition doesn't have to equate to over exuberance type of thing.
You know, just in any kind of distribution curve, not everyone is gonna be living on the extreme edge.
You're gonna have a normal curve of distribution of people. People will find their level of ambition and, and I think like many things, yeah, there's talent factors, there's learning factors. You argue in your book, though, that ambition can be taught to a degree. So do you see a balance there? Do you see it mostly something that can be learned, or how does that balance out?
Is it more of one than the other?
I think it, it helps to on some level, redefine ambition. Like I said, in a traditional sense, when you're looking for, you know, traits of ambition, you're going to see the mavericks, you're going to see the risk takers, you're going to see people who are just [00:17:00] passionate about life or whatever, their jobs.
But if we redefine ambition as somebody who is goal oriented, and someone who can set goals and accomplish goals and systematically work through things to get to where they want to go. I think the rest of the book kind of lays out ways that you can do that so that you can be ambitious and not necessarily have to be this maverick risk taker type person.
And neither do you necessarily want everyone to be a bull in a china shop in your, your company either. But um, as far as getting people to their, you know, optimizing people for ambition, how do we foster that goal orientation that you were just describing?
I think so much of it is just It kind of, it goes back to, uh, man, it, it really lies in, in how we manage our employees and [00:18:00] what I find, and I find this, you know, especially in a blue collar world, but also in your white collar world, people get promoted up through the ranks because of their ability to do a job and perform skills well, whereas if it were me and I were hiring for managers.
I wouldn't necessarily be looking for someone who knows how to do the job of the people that they're managing extremely well. I would be looking for people who have the ability, you know, that do have good, you know, EQ and that they have great social skills and they can interact with people well and they're empathetic and I think, you know, this role, more often than not, organizations hire coaches, which I think is great.
I think we should do that. Nothing against that, but I also think that managers would. do well [00:19:00] to take on the attributes of a coach. One of the things that I learned, I got sort of, you know, certified to be a coach, was how to really listen to people, and how to understand what they, what their goals are, and not try to define their goals for them, or not try to, you know, outline a path to success I had taken or that, you know, some book defined as the best road to success.
It's really listening to your people, understanding them, and getting inside their head because whatever it is that excites them and motivates them, if you can tap into that and make it, you know, a part of what they do every day, then you're going to have people that are just naturally ambitious.
Yeah, you really have to learn your people.
I've had many direct reports through my career and taking the time to sort of learn your people, know how to [00:20:00] communicate with different kinds of personalities, but that's the key there. There are different types of communication styles and there are different kinds of people. I wonder if you can speak to that.
It's interesting to me that there's just so many things in the world we live in today where, you know, we have the Baby Boomers, the, you know, Millennials, the X, Y, Z, I don't know, there's all kinds of, you know, different groups of people out there. And especially in the workplace. I've done a lot of research into, you know, bridging the gap between these different generations.
And really what it comes down to is just simply getting outside yourself and saying, okay, I'm a Baby Boomer. But if we're talking about just say, for example, communication styles, because that seems to be one that comes up a lot, is that Millennials, and I don't even know anymore what all the different, you know, after Millennials are and XYZ generation.
I haven't kept up on all that recently.
I'm not a big subscriber to it anyway. [00:21:00] Um, I think it's just one of many factors. So I'll, I'll, I'll forgive you if you'll forgive me for not being up on every new generation that gets invented. Okay.
Exactly, and it's interesting because although I'm a baby boomer, I share a lot of attributes of Millennials, and I'm, and this kind of goes back to the whole cultural thing is, you know, we also live in a world where diversity is like, you know, the number one topic of discussion and a lot of, you know, circles, especially in the workplace.
And there's so many courses on diversity. When we start talking about unification, we start looking for what unites us, what common, what things do we have in common? Like I said, I'm a baby boomer, but I'm, when I want to communicate with a millennial and they're into texting and email and, you know, all kinds of electronic communication.
And I just want to get up and talk to you as a person. Because that's what I grew up with was talking to you [00:22:00] as a person. Well, as I've gotten older, I absolutely, you know, one of the things I'm old enough, you know, we grew up with was just a plain ordinary telephone that was attached to the wall with a cord on it.
Right. And. Um, I used to talk on the phone all the time and now I no longer, I, I hate talking on the phone. It's like, oh, please don't make me talk on the phone. But when I, I look at Millennials and I look at my kids, I have to tell the story because it's kind of funny, but it goes back to the idea that when we start looking at what unifies us as opposed to divides us.
I think it really helps. It helps us build that bond where we trust each other. And when we trust each other and we feel good about each other, then we're more open to communicating on a level that helps us tap into what, what is it that's important to you? And how can I help you achieve what you want to achieve?
Which drives that motivation and, and [00:23:00] You know, somebody ambitious. My daughter was um, she was 14, 15 years old and she was going through the goth and dark phase and didn't want to talk to her mom or whatever, you know, kind of thing. Very normal stuff, right? Well, one summer I ended up working from home and um, it was just hilarious for my daughter who wouldn't talk to me at all.
I was on one side of the family room on my computer and she was on her side of the family room on her computer and just. For whatever reason, I IM'd her and said, ask a question, and she responded immediately. And I was like, well, I've never gotten that quick of a response from you. So then I just started typing and over a course of an hour, we had a conversation like we had never had.
Well, that's not my, that's not my idea of a meaningful and, you know, conversation from a baby boomer perspective, but that's what worked for her. And I learned early on that once Once [00:24:00] you tap into something like that, and you realize that, hey, that may not be my main mode of communication, and I may not necessarily like it, but it opened up, it opened her up, and it created that trust.
Once that trust was there, then she would communicate with me, you know, verbally and in other ways. And, you know, we had a mixture of email, IMs, texts, and verbal conversations. It's building that level of trust with each other. And to do that, sometimes we have to do things that are outside of our own comfort zone.
And just respect the fact, it doesn't matter whether I like that you communicate 90 percent of what you want to communicate via text, that doesn't matter, that's not important. What's important is that we respect that that's the way you do things, and so I'm willing to compromise in order to build that level of trust so that we can have that kind of relationship where I [00:25:00] can learn.
And, you know, it's interesting because shortly thereafter she went to work for me, and she was by far, I mean, to this day, she's an incredible employee, and she was an amazing employee for me, and for someone who was very shy, and withdrawn, and whatever, she, Was one of my most ambitious employees.
That's a great story.
And it's a good example of how, where we're superficially different. We may have different preferences on how we communicate, different styles. We can build bridges to people and maybe meet them halfway in how they in this example, want to communicate. I'm not a big subscriber to the big distinctions about millennial versus boomers.
I think it's very true we did grow up under different shaping influence eras. But what's funny is, especially in this last, I don't know, think about the internet age, the mainstreaming of the web, we're all frogs in the same pot. It doesn't matter how old you [00:26:00] are, we're all simmering in the same technological pot, learning new skills like texting.
We all, everyone's walking around with a smartphone in my pocket. And, you know, like my 80 year old dad who, you know, on the one hand he's like, Oh, I don't know how to use this thing. It's the same guy who tells me the next day that he was doing trades on his, uh, Scott Trade app on his iPhone. So, I mean, it's just, it's just kind of hilarious.
And so like the stereotypes of boomers versus millennials, I think these terms go out of date the day they are minted because let enough time go by. I'm behaving like the supposed millennial. I've had enough time to learn how to use a smartphone or a, or a text app. So, and it just brings up a little side note is that the learning industry is filled with a lot of nonsense.
And, um, I know that sounds heretical. I'm doing a show called The Learning Circle. It's about learning and development. But as one of my, my repeat guests and one of the [00:27:00] most respected people in the industry, uh, Dr. Clark Quinn points out, there's a lot of mythology. He has a book that busts all those myths about millennials and goldfish and all, all these other things that, uh, Are these, um, sort of memes that get bandied about until we, we exhaust them or, or finally realize that, you know, they were never true.
You know, we've, I think most of us have walked away from throwing around learning styles and all these other things like you had named. There's, there's a lot of flavor of the month things. And so, but there are things that do hold and are the, the tried and true and it's very important to see what works in, in learning.
But I, I do think you're onto something with the ambition quotient because these are personal traits and they're the kinds of things that everyone has to cultivate in their career. You have to, obviously your intelligence, uh, uh, measures of knowledge, uh, you know, um, your ability to work with [00:28:00] other people and have the emotional intelligence.
And then again, parlay that with the um, stick to itiveness, the grit, the other things that might be nicknames for this ambition quotient that you're trying to define here. Now Cheryl, you identify resilience. I love that word. Resilience. It's the word that's fun to say. Uh, but you identify resilience as something that is lacking in young people who are just entering the job marketplace.
So it kind of sounds like we have a deficit or a crisis of resilience. Tell us how you define it and what, if anything, employers can do to foster it, to build it up in their employees.
In the simplest terms, uh, resilience is just your ability to deal with setbacks in life. How do you deal with them? You know, failure.
And I have a whole presentation and a whole, I, I don't know if you want to call it a book, I'm writing on failure. And [00:29:00] as kind of along the lines of ambition, people are like, oh, why do you want to use that word? That's a bad word. People are like, oh, failure. That's too strong of a word. Don't use that word.
I'm like, we live in a world where we just, um, we're afraid of a failure. And so much of, you know, the book, you know, The Ambition Quotient is really not just based on my experience in the corporate world, but just on my experience as a mother and raising children. And one thing I found that was different between me growing up and even my kids growing up, and my kids are all adults now, is that as a child, When I went outside, when I went to play, first of all, I had a lot more free time to play because I didn't go to school all day and then, you know, I wasn't enrolled in numerous after school activities and then in the evenings, you know, either if you're an athlete performing in your game or, you know, playing in your games or if you're, you know, into theater or something, you know, performing [00:30:00] in the evenings, you know, kids lives.
Even my kids lives were so scheduled from sunup to sundown that they didn't have a lot of time for just free play. So much of what I did as a child was free play. And it was interacting with my peers, and that meant It's hilarious, I went back and read, you know, I was always a journal keeper, you know, my fifth grade journal.
You know, today I was in a fight with so and so, and then the next day we're best friends. No, no, I don't like so and so, and this is what I don't like about so and so, and I told her what I didn't like, you know, whatever, and then the next day, oh, we're best friends, um, is I had to learn how to interact with people, not because I went to a class and learned how to interact with people, but because that was just what we did every day, and when we played basketball, we didn't have formal teams that we played.
I mean, every day, we bunch of us got together, whoever had a basketball and a hoop, we played and we were on this team this day and this team next day and we were our own referees and we [00:31:00] learned to solve our own, you know, issues and we got in fights, you know, over, you know, you hit me, you fouled me, no, I didn't, you know, that kind of thing.
So growing up, you, you learn to be a lot more resilient just simply because. You have to solve so many of your own problems.
Yeah, there isn't the coddling and structure that robs a child to learn how to overcome adversity for themselves.
Yes. And we set, you know, our, our children up for success, which is nice, but we put them in, in classes and groups of, you know, sports teams and drama and I don't know, whatever else comes to mind, you know, music classes and all of that is done.
So that our kids can learn how to do things without failing. By doing that, we rob them of One of the most valuable, I mean, to me, resilience is a key aspect [00:32:00] of ambition, because if you can't learn to deal with setbacks, if you don't learn how to solve problems, if you can't be creative in finding solutions to things, you're not going to get very far.
And you're not going to experience any real levels of success, and success is a primary motivator for ambition and motivation.
It really is. I want to quote from your book in a moment, because I love what you said about the kids playing in the neighborhood. And just a little side note, I read your book, I have it in Kindle edition, and what I love about Kindle is when you're done going through a book and you've highlighted everything and you've taken notes, you can go back into your Kindle space and just see a synopsis of all your highlights.
and notes. So it's a great way to go back and re experience everything that stood out in a book for you. But one of the things that I highlighted, because it stuck out, was when you say that, uh, this is the quote, when kids in the neighborhood got together to play, they formed their own teams, set their own [00:33:00] rules, refereed their own disputes, and generally functioned on an independent level from their adult.
Caregivers. Really good. And you talk about the mental toughness is another, I just highlighted that phrase and how in today's more structured and formal activities and in the days of every child receiving a participation award, they are often not learning how to fail. Right, it's very important. The kids, you know, how, I just, I think of the child learning how to play baseball.
I'm involved with a 12 year old on Little League and I'm watching him succeed and fail. He has good games, he has bad games, and you know, the quote unquote bad games were learning opportunities. And thank goodness for them because, you know, may hurt at the moment, but he's. Building resilience. I hope that wasn't too long a reaction, but I think it's very, very important and it's, it's, it's, it's rather deep [00:34:00] rooted in our society.
And I don't know if, I don't want to make broad generational stereotypes. I think there's, there's a lot of quality young people coming out. But boy, I hope the participation trophy culture hasn't caused a deficit of resilience.
I think on some level it has, and if we go back to the word failure, once again, people really discouraged me from using that word, and I thought about it, and I, I took, you know, their feedback, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought, no, you know, because we all talk about learning, or failure being a learning opportunity, which it is.
We talk
about failing forward, right?
We do, but failure, I mean, true failure and we've all experienced it, no matter where we are in life or whatever, it hurts and it hurts really bad. So when we take and we massage that word and we try to find words that aren't quite as harsh, we take away [00:35:00] that pain and that pain is what drives us to do it.
to overcome challenges.
Yeah, there's a problem with euphemism when we sterilize things of their meaning and we're always blunting things. Everything has to be wrapped in velvet. It is a detriment because people, they, it's like, I think of the, you know, the example of the um, the chick, uh, working its way out of the egg.
And you know, certain birds could die if they're just let out of the egg versus struggling out of the egg. I think that applies here, that concept.
Yes. And so I think it's important to understand that we live in this world where people fail and either they don't have the support system that they need to help them learn how to overcome that failure and to rise above it.
And then they succumb. And that's where we, you know, we, I also do a lot with, um, um, people who deal with addictions. And so much of that is self medicating. They, [00:36:00] they self medicate because they don't know how to deal with that pain. And so I think it's really important. And the majority of my work over the last 20 years as an independent contractor.
I also have worked a lot, won't get into all the reasons why, it's in my book, but I, I hired a lot of college students to help me, um, you know, because I wasn't a graphic artist or I wasn't a game programmer or whatever. I was an instructional designer and I needed those additional skills to help me with some of the work that I was doing.
So I worked a lot and that's where I really started noticing and then when I, you know, started talking to employers I started noticing that there was a lot of complaints from employers and I was noticing that in my own experience Is that these kids coming out of high school in particular and even out of college Were not ready for the real world because they had been shielded from [00:37:00] failure for the majority of their life.
And so when they got out into the real world, and it wasn't as nice and fun as they were taught, you know, throughout their life. And, you know, shielded from all of that. It just, it was a really, really hard thing for them to deal with and that, you know, how do we deal with that from an employer's perspective, you know, it goes back to coaching and it goes back to kind of a nonjudgmental view instead of saying, Oh, I'm so frustrated because I have all these kids who just got out of school and they don't know what they're doing.
And, you know, if I don't, you know, couch every single word I say to them, you know, in velvet, they just fall apart. We've got to get past that. It is what it is. They're coming to us and they are our rising generation of new employees and we need to look at it and respect the fact that that's where they came from.
It doesn't matter whether we like [00:38:00] it, we respect the fact that that's where they came from, and how do we help them deal with that? And it goes back to when I, when I talk about trust, trust is so important. Relationships and trust, that's what's going to help you develop the kind of attributes that you want, not just ambition, but there's several other attributes I talk about in the book that will help you.
Do that, but you can't do it if you don't, you know, if I were to go to my employer And I knew I had made a mistake And say oh I made a mistake and I knew I mean You're like a three year old who just got caught with your hand in the cookie jar Oh, you know i'm gonna hide and bury my head and or i'm not i'm gonna lie better You know my hands in the cookie jar and as i'm saying no, I didn't try to steal that cookie You know kind of thing.
I need to know that when I go to my employer and say hey, I made a mistake You And rather than wait for my employer to figure out that I made a mistake, if I'm willing to go and say, Hey, I made a mistake, and I know that there's going to be consequences, I'm not, you know, going to get let off [00:39:00] the hook.
But yet, I also know that you're also going to be my advocate to help me figure out how to fix that mistake, and how to move forward from that mistake. If I know that as my manager, coach, employer, that I have that kind of relationship with you, things are going to go a lot better for all of us involved.
We've got to get rid of the judgment and just start dealing with the reality the way it is.
Yeah, the words you said about trust are very important and use the word coaching. I think about how a good coach can draw, and I'm thinking of coaches, this could be a manager trying to coach the best performance from an employee and having the trust that makes it a safe environment for you to Make mistakes and, and even proactively come to your boss to own up to it and find the help that you need to resolve it and move forward.
But, um, [00:40:00] tying that idea with what we were talking about a few beats back, I think a good coach will create and sustain a trust that allows an employee to venture out of their comfort zone, to feel a little unsafe for a moment. because they can trust the coach, that the coach has their welfare at heart and, and grow that way, right?
That's the only way you can grow. You can't just keep employees coddled. They have to be corrected. Even going back, you know, the old, old, um, Ken Blanchard book, The One Minute Manager. It's great advice. The one minute reprimand.
It is, but I, it, it brings me back to a presentation that I put together for, um, Alcoa.
Um, Many years ago, and I can't remember what it was titled, but it was probably one of the most interesting training that I built for them. One of the things that they wanted to do was honing a culture of learning. They had a lot of employees who were just, you know, they, [00:41:00] it was a very negative environment and people were always complaining and they always were like, well, we have a better way of doing things and nobody listens to me and nobody cares what I think, kind of, you know.
um, environment. And so they put out this new program and it was so simple and powerful. It was okay, you know, a lot of employers will put out a suggestion box, right? Great. We read the suggestion, sounds good, nobody acts on it, nobody does anything, nothing changes. Instead of a suggestion box, what you did is if you felt like you had a solution that was worthy of acknowledgement and that you wanted to pursue it a little bit more, you, number one, you did not go to your boss and say, Hey, I have this great idea.
We have this problem and we have this great, I have this great idea. Because what happens is I have a great idea. I gave it to my boss. But now there's this subtle expectation that my boss is going to run with it and [00:42:00] that's not the way it should work. So what this training did was it taught employees who had great ideas to think through their ideas.
to do some research to talk to people on a very small scale to implement something and then work through some of the, you know, this worked and this didn't work kind of thing. And once, and there was a whole template that they used to follow for, you know, when they had an idea. And then once they had gotten to that point and they'd worked through a lot of things and done more research and everything, then they took it to their boss and they said, Hey, I have this great idea, and here's everything that I've learned in the process of trying to implement it on a really small scale here, and the employee learned so much more, they were taking initiative, you know, and they were encouraged to, on a very small scale, try it.
Be a risk taker, try something, [00:43:00] learn from it, then bring us your ideas.
Exactly. You know, this brings us to the, it's the old adage about identifying problems without bringing solutions is just complaining. So you, you cultivate that culture of empowering employees to, not just identify the problems, but maybe try something a little bit intrapreneurial and come up with a solution, see if you can enact it, get some traction for it, pilot something.
So, that's a terrific solution, that's a terrific story. You've got a strong current through the book about learning. And you identify learning as a key to ambition. But it seems like kind of a chicken and egg thing, at least I don't understand it, fully how you draw the distinction. Do we have to learn in order to be ambitious or do we have to be ambitious to learn?
I wonder if you can sort that out for us.
Um, I think it is a chicken and egg thing. And I think it kind of goes back to I was probably born with more ambition than most [00:44:00] people, you know, for whatever reason. And so I, I was willing to go out and believe me when I say I put together a presentation on failure.
I'm not joking when I say I've probably experienced more failure in my life than 10 people. Um,
But not Abraham Lincoln because we have that famous list of Abraham Lincoln's failures, right?
Yes, his, his are on a grander scale. He's impacted more people. Me.
You got a longer list though. Yeah.
He's one of my heroes.
There's no doubt. He's definitely on the top of my list because of that. But I think that what I have found with my kids and this, and when I say my kids, I mean my own biological children, as well as all these college students that I worked with, I considered them my kids was they didn't come to me with a lot of ambition.
Sometimes As a matter of fact, they, they, they really were lacking and not the daughter I told you about earlier, but my other daughter was also working for me. [00:45:00] And she was one that kind of struggled a little bit with ambition. And so I, I talked to her a lot and I, I, I picked her brain a lot. I'm like, what am I doing wrong?
I understand all this stuff, but I can't implement it. You know, how can I get these people, you motivated to do stuff. And so she really helped me sit down and put together an orientation. When I brought somebody on board, I didn't outline the expectations well. I really failed in that. That's one of my failures.
Um, not a grand one, thank goodness, but I just kind of expected people to come to the table with a lot of things that I attributes that I had, I didn't expect them necessarily to come with the skills, but I just assumed that people worked on the same level that I did. And so she really helped me hone a lot of ideas, and it really it made a huge difference and that's where I realized, you know, if you're somebody like me.
Ambition probably came before learning, and I have a passion for learning because of [00:46:00] my drive and my motivation and my ambition. But if you're not somebody that actually has that, learning breeds success, and success drives motivation and ambition. Because the more success that you experience, And of course the failures too.
Um, like I said, if you can fail in a way that you fall forward, then you're moving toward that goal of becoming ambitious. And I have seen people who've, once again, kind of back to the piano example, that came a little hesitant, not banging on the keys really loud and playing really fast. Once they learned how to play, Then they wanted to practice more.
Then they wanted to put more emotion and energy into their playing because they were experiencing success. So, I think for some people, it's like me, and then other people, it's the opposite.
Yeah, there's kind of a carrot and stick dynamic. There's failure, there's success. Both of them can be motivators.
One [00:47:00] negatively, one positively. One is sort of the driver, especially if you're frustrated with your efforts and you want to do better. And then success is, you know, the sweetness and the reward of, I like the example of music. I play guitar, I play piano, things like that. And, uh, to gain either, you know, to finally master, you know, A song that you can perform and then you're at that level and then you're motivated further to add your embellishments or if it's on the guitar or, you know, whatever, transitions and other, other things that even heighten the success that you're at, those become positive motivators that are like drawing you forward where the failures might be the sort of the goads that, stick you, uh, to, to make you move forward, maybe from the recovering from the, the failure.
I mentioned euphemism earlier. It's not always a bad thing. I think about like we, we have the famous example of Edison, you know, all [00:48:00] those exploded light bulbs weren't failures. He just learned how not to make a light bulb. It is helpful sometimes to reframe things. We can view things as experiments and just know that, you know, they're experiments there.
You're going to keep trying until you hit on what works, right? So you don't have to necessarily cudgel yourself with the idea of, Oh, I failed. I failed. So, uh, I'm trying to distinguish that from the, the healthy stress of failure that where you, you do acknowledge that something didn't go right. You lost the game and you're going to try harder and analyze what you did.
So maybe you win next time. So just wanted to put that in there. I do want to ask you, I was remiss in the beginning for a definition of ambition. I believe you break it down into traits. I just want you to, I think some of it is creativity. There's several traits. I just want more of that anatomy of.
ambition, if you would define that.
Like right around 2010, I was doing a lot of [00:49:00] research, you know, working with employers to figure out, you know, what it was that was going to help them, their employees perform better. And there was a lot of studies and across the board, they all I identified five things that they felt employees were missing when they came to work for them, and they felt like these were the key things that didn't allow them to be ambitious or motivated.
And the first was always creativity, and team building, and communication, and resilience, and problem solving. I'm good. I got all five off the top of my head.
I went back to my much touted Kindle notes and you ticked off every one of them.
If you have those attributes, you will find that you are going to be ambitious.
And in our notes as we communicated back and forth, one of the things you wanted me to bring up was this Boston story. And I will briefly tell it because I think it is such a powerful example that [00:50:00] really highlights all of these different characteristics. First of all, many years ago, I know this sounds insane, and it was, I started a business, training people with disabilities to use assistive technology on their computer.
And this was in the days long ago before, you know, it was brand new. The assistive technology was brand new to the computer world. Having never even touched a computer, I was starting a business in computers. Talk about setting yourself up for failure, right? And believe me, I had more failures in that business than you can imagine, but it really did set me up for a lot of things moving forward in my life.
And I paid 10, 000, which was a boatload full of money back then. And especially at a time when I absolutely did not have any money. My husband, one of the reasons we got into this business, cause my husband was blind and we wanted to, um, start a business for him. It [00:51:00] wasn't really for me, it was for him. And so we put it on a credit card and then of course we had to spend all this money to go back.
We were living in Wyoming, we had to go back to Boston. But needless to say, through numerous weather delays and all kinds of things, I was scheduled to start Monday morning at 9am this class on using voice recognition technology and I didn't even get to the hotel or to the class until 7am. Now for most people, they drink caffeine.
or have stimulants that help them. I am highly sensitive to those kind of things. So I can't drink coffee or caffeine or any type of stimulant. So being tired is a huge detriment to learning. And I was beyond tired and frustrated. And I got there and I, they gave me a computer and they gave me a tutorial and they started down this road of teaching everybody in the class.
There was probably, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 people in class. Can't remember. But for whatever reason, whatever they were demonstrating up [00:52:00] on the board was not working on my computer. And after a while, they noticed I was very frustrated. They came over and they were like, Oh, well, that's because your computer isn't working.
And they sat there and did some things to make it work and fine. Great. Now I'm behind. I'm tired and I'm behind and trying to catch up. And this cycle just continued for five days. I can't tell you how many times that computer, and they switched out computers several times. Nobody else was having problems with this, just me.
It was like, okay, is every computer that I touch going to just break? Is this just how things are going to work for me? And I was so frustrated. And by the time I got home, I was in tears and I'm not an emotional person and I don't cry. That's a
pretty demoralizing experience. So I can commiserate. I think I would be crying after that too.
Yeah. I mean, I'd spent all this money. I had no way to recoup this money. It was just horrible, horrible, horrible. So I, I did. I [00:53:00] took my laptop computer because I'd also had to buy a new laptop and I, I threw that in my tutorial book in the closet and just cried. And for about three weeks, I think it was, I just, every day I'd wake up feeling like a failure, feeling like how stupid could I be?
Why would I, why would I have done this? What was me? What was I thinking? You know, all those things that you go through. But that pain, that pain is what drove me to open that closet door and say, I have to recoup some of the money somehow. I opened the door, I got the laptop out, got my tutorial out, and sure enough, first thing is the computer didn't do what it was supposed to do.
But guess what? I knew how to fix it, because I'd been through that in class. Although nobody else in class was going through that, they were going through the tutorial. I was learning how to fix computers. And the tutorial was, it was a decent enough tutorial that you [00:54:00] kind of could walk yourself through it.
But this went on for, you know, a period of, I don't know, a month or two, and I just, Every time I got something out and was trying to work on it, something wouldn't work and I knew how to fix it. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And so I was briefly inspired, motivated, whatever you want to call it, to, to keep going.
And then I remember, um, vocational rehabilitation that was ended up being one of our biggest clients reached out to me and was like, Oh, we have a person for you to train. I'm like, Oh good. I haven't even really been through the tutorial yet. Cause I'm still too busy trying to get all the things to fix the computer.
But I agreed because I was the only person they didn't have anybody else wasn't like I had a lot of competition So I'd have to worry about that and I remember joking that I literally with this first client was one lesson ahead of them
Hmm,
I would study a lesson go to teach them study a lesson go teach them and Even throughout the next several years There were many things that still continued to go wrong with the [00:55:00] computers and it was It's just, it was the nature of the beast because assistive technology was so new and it needed to, the software needed to be compatible with the hardware and the hardware just wasn't designed to run it.
So there was just so many problems. And I just, over the course of five years, just cried and cried and cried a lot because we didn't have cell, this is how old it was, we didn't have cell phones. I was living in Wyoming. I remember many times being on top of a mountain in the middle of Wyoming and not having any way to call anybody.
to help me, you know, there was no tech support to call and just having to sit there and figure it out all by myself and based on what I'd learned. And now people will say that's probably not the best learning experience because nobody wants to experience that level of failure. in order to learn. But yet, when we design training programs and build cultures of learning, and all of these things that we talk about, once again it goes back to the idea of our children, you know, setting them up for success.
We train them, we teach them how [00:56:00] to do everything right so that they never do anything wrong. Then when they get in the real world, they don't know how to deal with anything because they've never had to do anything. They've never experienced that level of failure or doing things wrong. We're so busy teaching them how to do everything right.
And when we build training programs, we do the same thing. We build all of these experiences that, you know, walk everybody through everything, just. So that everything works perfectly. Yeah. And then they get back to the real world and it doesn't work and they don't know how to problem solve.
Sorry to break in on you.
A good coach will or a teacher will bring a student to that level of frustration that they can bear so that they can, through grit, through determination, through struggle, Learn. I think, I think you actually were the better for that struggle. You didn't have the smooth experience where it was like water through the cognitive pipe, you know, in one ear, out the other.
You had to grapple with that [00:57:00] material and you knew it better, I imagine, than the other people who took that program.
Yes. And I, you know, like I said, it goes back to I had to be creative. I had to solve problems at times. I had to reach out, you know, from a team building perspective and have other people help me as much as I possibly could.
I had to be resilient. You know, I had to communicate with people, you know, as a trainer. All of that came into play. And I think that's where, like you said, we need to bring our students to that level of frustration where we're not discouraging them, but yet we're allowing all of these attributes to be developed while they're learning.
Exactly, right. The opposite would be the coddling and the participation trophy, and they feel good for a moment. But long term they feel badly because they, they haven't learned, they haven't grown, they're not prepared to deal with adversity. Now I wanted to ask you about real learning. We, we [00:58:00] spoke a little ways back about how the learning industry is, has got a lot of, you know, interesting ideas.
but some of it is tried and true, some of it isn't. You define real learning in your book as that which is acquired, absorbed, and applied. It's applied to a gap or to a performance challenge that the learner is facing in real time. You also speak a bit to the problem with online learning. I want to get your thoughts.
We live in an online world. If you could fix modern learning, what would you do?
Well, if you would have asked me this 10 years ago, I'd say, get rid of online learning. But once again, if I go back to my wheel that I talked about earlier, way earlier in this conversation, there is a time and a place for online learning.
But online learning, for the most part, ends up being a presentation of information. And that's okay. Because sometimes there's knowing and there's doing. [00:59:00] And I use a very brief example here of changing, you know, if you want to change the oil in your car. You don't want somebody to just learn the mechanics of changing the oil in their car.
That's doing. That's fine. But if you don't understand and know which type of oil goes in which car or, you know, whether, I don't even know if this applies anymore, but, you know, winter oil and summer oil and all that kind of stuff, and why you would pick, you know, one over the other and what exactly does the oil filter do and, you know, how to dispose of things properly so it doesn't harm the environment.
There's a time to know something and there's a time to do something. and we need to know too often, especially in corporate America, we teach people, we don't teach people, we, we present information to people and then expect them to know how to do it, because they know it doesn't mean they can do it, so they need that opportunity, and um, video games get a bad rap in this [01:00:00] world for a lot of good reasons, and I won't go into all that, but I love the video game analogy as it applies to learning.
If you take a student and sit, or student, a child, and sit them down in front of a video game, do they ever read the instructions? No. Do they ever talk to their friends? How do I do this? No. They just sit down and start playing. And the reason that video games, that kids are able to have such success, is because of that scaffolding.
At the very beginning, They're presented with a way to interact with the game in a way that doesn't require instructions. There's instructions if you want them, and there are cheats if you want them, and some people use cheats, which are nothing more than instructions, and they fail. They learn through failure.
But that failure isn't in the video game world painful per se, unless of course you've, you know, [01:01:00] worked way up to a certain level and then all of a sudden you fail and boom you go clear down to the bottom again, which sometimes happens. But if you look at that whole video game analogy, if we built training like video games were built, where people are given the opportunity to read instructions if they want and if they need them, but if not, they can just kind of dive in and start doing things.
And through scaffolding, start with something simple and gradually work your way up to more complex and more higher level thinking, I guess, kind of things. And the reward system, you know, oh, you've moved on to the next level. You get whatever you get in video games, you know, to kind of, carrot and stick kind of thing.
I think we would do ourselves a favor. I think learning has become in everybody's mind, and it's such a paradigm shift that we have to get out of, that learning is not something that we take people away from their job to do. Learning can just be, best example, I just finished up a [01:02:00] contract with the University of California, had five student interns, and more often than not, I would just throw a project at them and they're like, we're interns.
We're kind of only supposed to get coffee kind of thing. You know, that was their mentality. I was like, uh, I don't know who told you that, but no, you came here to work. And they're like, but I don't know how to do that. So I would sit down sometimes, I would sit down and walk them through it and do this step.
Come back to me, do this step, come back to me. No, that didn't work. Oh, okay. Oh, that, yeah. Ooh. Feedback. And then oftentimes I would get the project to a certain point and then we do a presentation for my boss who happens to be the publisher of Cresting Wave, by the way. And he was so good. He was just awesome.
He was very good at providing feedback and being very direct, but very tactful at the same time. And sometimes they would have to go back and start all over from the beginning. And it wasn't because they had done things wrong. but it was more because they [01:03:00] could do things better.
Right. You know, it really breaks us out of this knowledge recall kind of a learning that we're in a lot of the time.
It's, it's doing versus merely knowing. Uh, I love the video game analogy. There's a rhythm to video games that's kind of parallel to storytelling, but it's, it's active for the participant, uh, where you are presented. Think of the hero of a story. Okay. They have a goal, and as they take their journey, they're presented with one complication after another, so there are successes, there are setbacks, and in a video game environment, in a well designed one, like you said, you can jump in, it's intuitive, you kind of know what to do, it trains you as you go.
And then you experience the, the frustration of like, Oh, I'm just, you know, I was close, but no cigar to attain that next level. And it makes you, uh, even makes you angry in a constructive way. And you try it again [01:04:00] because you're driven and the, the grit helps you, uh, overcome. So, yeah, it's a very powerful way to.
teach and it can be, it can be really put to good effect. And again, I think even in just standard online learning formats, we can kind of mimic a little bit of that structure so that there is that rhythm where we bring them up a level, let them coast a little bit, bring them up a level, let them coast and with scaffolding, let them have their, failures and then lead them to success.
Cheryl, as we wrap things up, I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about the ambition quotient and how you've devised a way to measure it.
I've been through several iterations of this, kind of like my students. At first it wasn't bad, but it just keeps getting better. So I'm sure it will, it will keep doing that.
A lot of times employers will ask me, okay, if I'm going to hire somebody and I'm hiring for that. you know, ambition quotient. We've already decided that they're smart enough to do [01:05:00] the job and that they have the, you know, emotional intelligence to do it, but now we're looking for that ambition. When you're interviewing, when we build a resume, we always put our best foot forward, right?
People are more inclined to do this in an interview because, you know, you always want your best foot forward in your resume and your cover letter, but if you're just filtering through resumes and cover letters, where did they fail and how did they overcome that challenge? And so, I remember, you know, I kind of took that advice to heart and I kind of, I thought I did a pretty good job on one of my resumes of portraying that.
And oh my goodness, that resume fail, it failed miserably, fell flat. Nobody, I got no calls for like 10 different jobs. I'm a contractor, so I'm always going after jobs, right? And I was like, oh, okay. As soon as I took that off the resume, I was like, you know, things were looking up again. But some of the things that you can ask.
In an interview, you know, given a challenge in the workplace, do you [01:06:00] determine that it's not your problem? Speak up at meetings with your superiors, but once a decision is made, go with the decision that was made. Find ways to work around the decision in order to do what you feel is right, or persist in trying to persuade others, you know, to your way of thinking.
And you know, there's a couple of answers on here. Depending on how you answer it could be right, but I think asking, you know, some of these types of questions, and I have these posted on the website where you can go look at them. I won't go through each one in detail, but you can, you know, when your boss gives you a task that you're unsure, of how to complete it.
Do you tell your boss you do not know how to do it, or do you tell your boss that you do know how to do it and, um, when it doesn't work out so well, you know, how do you deal with that? Or do you tell your boss you'll do it and then get somebody to help you do it, you know, or are you going to reassign it to someone else who has better knowledge and skills in that area?
Let's say, for example, there's a company sponsored event on your day off that supports a local charity that is not on your list, on your list [01:07:00] of preferred charities. Your company has volunteered to support the effort by providing some of their talent to help pull it off. Do you figure it is your day off and do nothing?
Since it's not a charity you're not interested in supporting, you do nothing? Do you volunteer for a small assignment? Or do you volunteer to lead the effort and organize your organization? You know, organization's efforts. See, these are questions that you don't typically get, but can you imagine in an interview the kinds of responses that you will get?
Those responses will be extremely telling. And there is no right or wrong answer. You know, you think like on the last question is volunteer to lead the effort and organize the whole project. Well, that seems like the right answer, but sometimes volunteering for just a small assignment could be the right answer.
Sometimes delegating is the right answer.
Exactly. So I, I just, when I had somebody help me, you know, put this together, cause I am not a, um, industrial psychologist. Is that what they're called? I really think [01:08:00] that the conversation that will come out of these questions will really help you determine if this person is the right person.
Cause you're not going to want to hire a maverick. For every position that you have, like we talked about earlier, but you're not going to want that person who sits in the corner and just kind of does their own job without interacting with other people. You can't
have every employee being the employee who waits to see who's going to step up and, or if it's okay, or, you know, so yeah, you have to strike a balance of the mix of your, your team.
Like any team, you're building a complement of personalities and talents. and some of the go getters are going to be balanced by people who prefer to work in the background. So, I think it's a very case by case thing, but you've given us some tangible tools to begin to measure this, begin to assess people on these things, because they are really vital traits for people trying to survive in today's workplace, especially with all the disruption, with [01:09:00] all the change that's going on, you're going to need ambitious people.
But Cheryl, this has been so helpful. I want to remind people, the book is called Ambition, The Missing Attribute in Your Employees. You can get it from Cresting Wave Publishing. I found it on Amazon. I've got the Kindle edition. I recommend it. It's a great read. Cheryl, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for this opportunity. I really love talking about it. So you've, you've given me a great platform to share my ideas and thoughts. I appreciate that.
Oh, so happy to have you, Cheryl. Thank you again, and hope we can do this sometime in the future. Sure. You have a wonderful day.
You too,
thanks. All right.
Thank you for listening. To catch up on all of our shows, subscribe in iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. The Learning Circle is produced and distributed by [01:10:00] the Defense Acquisition University.
