Episode 44: Spearheading Change With Jonathan MacDonald

In episode 44 of the Professional Builders Secrets podcast, we’re joined by Jonathan MacDonald, best selling author and keynote speaker. Throughout this episode, Jonathan tackles how to embrace change, and leverage it as fuel to spearhead transformation.

 

Inside episode 44 you'll discover

• How disciplines from martial arts can be applied to business
• The fact that change happens by design, and how you can embrace it in your business rather than fear it
• Common reactions and approaches to change Jonathan’s seen in other large scale businesses
• How to truly think long term and beyond your niche
• How to successfully navigate through change
• And much, much more.

Listen to the full episode to find out exactly how you can shake the fear of change, and turn it into something that will elevate your business to new heights.

 

Jonathan MacDonald - Best Selling Author and Keynote Speaker

As one of the world’s most in-demand thought leaders, Jonathan is trusted by the senior executives of well-known global companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, P&G, Unilever, Nestlé, Lego, Heineken, and IKEA to translate the benefits of perpetual change into invaluable business insight and personal success.

Connect with Jonathan

 

Timeline

1:54 About Jonathan’s background and how his book Powered By Change impacted his business acumen.

6:55 As a Jujitsu title holder (British super heavy weight and world number 3 in sports jujitsu), Jonathan discusses how the disciplines from martial arts that can be applied to business 

11:15 The concept of the coin flip from his book and how it changed Jonathan’s life.

16:20 Jonathan’s discovery of the Chinese proverb: When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills, and how it inspired Powered By Change.

20:01 How change happens by design.

21:43 How change and the ability to handle change impacts success.

26:25 How to leverage change as a fuel to spearhead transformation.

28:29 Jonathan discusses the common reactions and approaches to change from the big businesses he’s consulted with.

33:57 How Jonathan has inspired the businesses that he’s worked with to think long term and beyond their niche.

37:57 How building company owners should embrace the changing landscaping in uncertain times.

41:46 Jonathan’s prediction on what the next industrial revolution looks like and whether he believes it will revolve around sustainability.

45:51 Where Jonathan plans to focus his attention over the next two years.

49:52 Why builders fear change and how they can navigate through change.

 

Links, Resources & More

Jonathan’s Website

APB Website

APB on Instagram

APB on Facebook
APB on YouTube

Join the Professional Builders Secrets Facebook group for builders & connect with professional builders world-wide.

Jonathan MacDonald:

For every 10 things that you do, six of them, seven of them are going to go to hell. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

Experience is a hard teacher because it gives you the test first and then the lesson afterwards. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

Historical analysis is not a predictor of the future. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

What we need is to be productively paranoid. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

If you are in a business where you know what would disrupt you, then you've got to build for it now. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

The fear of rejection is a bigger weight than the joy of the upside.

Bosco Anthony:

Hello and welcome to the Professional Builders Secrets Podcast, a podcast by the Association of Professional Builders (APB) for building company owners, general managers, VPs and emerging leaders. Here we discuss all things running a professional building company from sales processes to financials, operations and marketing. Hello and welcome. We have another great episode from the Professional Builders Secrets Podcast. I'm joined today by an award-winning bestselling author and keynote speaker, Jonathan MacDonald. Jonathan, thanks for being here today.

Jonathan MacDonald:

My pleasure. Great to be here.

Bosco Anthony:

Well, Jonathan, I actually picked up your first book Powered by Change and I spent the last few days getting into it and I was really, really inspired by your story. I want to start off for our listeners to actually get into your origin story and how it impacted your business acumen and what you took to the world after. Could you briefly share a little bit about your background and your story from the book?

Jonathan MacDonald:

Yeah, sure. I was given up at birth then put into an orphanage and some foster homes. I was adopted by two entrepreneurs who used to have proper careers and then decided to shelve them both to get into the entrepreneurial game. They found out they couldn't have kids, so I was adopted and I grew up literally underneath the checkout till of their little lighting shop selling light bulbs and lampshades, which wasn't tremendously successful for them, but my childhood was watching the entrepreneurial journey. It was only when I was maybe 10 or 12, that I realised that other people's parents didn't work seven days a week. I thought that Saturday and Sunday were just two extra weekdays at the end of Monday to Friday.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Also, people were talking about the 9 to 5, and it took me ages to work out what people meant by that. As far as I could see, it was more like 5 to 9, that’s 5am till 9pm, but maybe they were just saying it in reverse. So my work ethic kicked in then, and through my childhood I was significantly bullied from the age of five till 16. So, at the same time as watching the entrepreneurial journey of my adoptive parents, I was also under significant challenge. What I learnt from those challenges was not dissimilar to the entrepreneur journey. On the entrepreneurial side, the number of times you get knocked down is just more opportunity to stand up again, and from a bullying side, it's exactly the same. So, the adversity of things not going my way or being in a situation that was not ideal was my precise boiler plate template of my life. That's the architectural diagram of life.

Jonathan MacDonald:

One of the things I found interesting as I got older, so in my late teens into my 20s, I'd meet people who had a very different upbringing. They had stable parents and a nuclear family situation. They knew that they were always going to have a job as an X, Y and Z, and then when adversity hit, when they were around 23 years old and their first relationship broke down, to them that was like the whole sky falling in, whereas for me, I just thought, “Well, that's the way life is, anyway.” For every 10 things that you do, six of them, seven of them are going to go to hell and three of them might work, and even then, if you start a venture, things are going to cost three times more than you thought, they're going to take twice as long and they're going to make half as much money. I just thought that was normal.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I figured that as an entrepreneur, in life or in relationships, at least one in two people who you meet, you can't actually trust, and even the people who you can trust, at some stage can be untrustworthy and do untrustworthy things. But I learnt about the difference between an outright blatant line, a white lie and the importance of transparency in building trust and how it takes a long time to build trust and a very short time to lose trust. So, everything that I learnt was from the start.

Jonathan MacDonald:

To some extent, and obviously this is post psychotherapy, so I can speak about this in a productive, cathartic way, I had a head start on the realities of life and the truism of the Chinese proverb that starts the Powered by Change book, which is actually my fifth book. But most people only know that one and think it’s the first one, even though there were four that no one bought beforehand. The beginning of the book says that when the winds of change are blowing, some build a wall and others build a windmill. That's the truest statement of my life – learning to be powered by change as a human and as a business person is the key education, I think. But just as a footnote to this, experience is a hard teacher because it gives you the test first and then the lesson afterwards, and that's it.

Bosco Anthony:

What a fantastic origin story. Your norm was overcoming adversity at such a young age, and it's a pretty humbling story to hear because it makes you appreciate the different struggles in life from different people, from all walks of life. I read your book and you talked a little bit about how the origins of your younger days led you to get into martial arts. From reading a little bit about your background, you're the jujitsu British title holder as well. Is that correct?

Jonathan MacDonald:

Super heavyweight and also world number three in sports jujitsu.

Bosco Anthony:

It took you on this journey, and I just wanted to know what are some of the disciplines from martial arts that one can apply or that you applied to business and that took you on this journey? A lot of the people who I know that come from that background talk about how the disciplines of life and martial arts aren’t just self-defence, there are so many different things that come from it. Energy, forgiveness, using it as a way to protect yourself, but also at the same time to use it not as a power trip. There's so much that we can get into, but what were your disciplines in the martial arts?

Jonathan MacDonald:

I think there are three key learnings that I've taken from my three and a half decades of martial arts and getting to black belt. Black belt kick boxing was my first discipline, full contact kick boxing, and then I went on to different martial arts. But the three key learnings are in no particular order. The first one I'd say is that martial arts help you deal with uncertainty in a very practical and a very real way. Especially if you're standing in a cage opposite someone who actually wants to kill you. That's a very real world, instantaneous learning of dealing with uncertainty because you have no idea what's going to happen next, and that's actually very true for life.

Jonathan MacDonald:

The second I'd say, again, in no particular order, is discipline. I think it was Steve Jobs who said that every overnight success takes 10 years and one of the things with discipline and martial arts and in business and everything else like that is that there's a reason why even black belts will still practise a jab. Today I was training nine hours ago doing a jab cross hook, and so that's now about 35 years of jab cross hooks. That's 20,000 or 30,000 hours of jab cross hooks. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

That discipline in life is very useful. For instance, if you're trying to maintain a healthy relationship, it's the same as maintaining a garden and maintaining a martial arts practice. If you completely ignore it and just leave the plant in the corner to gradually wilt and die, then guess what? It does. If you stop at training martial arts, sure parts of it are a bit like cycling, being on a bike, you can pick it up, but if you want to master it, then you need to do it all the time. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

The third thing I'd say is in terms of confidence. There is undoubtedly an amount of confidence that comes from knowing that you are increasing your ability to not only practise what you're doing, whether it's in business or in life or in martial arts, but also the improvement that you can see. Then in martial arts, you’re in tournaments 1% of the time; 99% of the time you're not in a tournament. In a tournament, it's you versus the other guy or the other girl, in the rest of the practice, it is about you and your potential. What's the distance between where you are now and what you could achieve? 

Jonathan MacDonald:

Of course, the irony is that when you achieve what you think you could achieve, you then realise that the bar is set much higher by yourself. The first day of martial arts is actually the day you get your black belt. That's the starting, that's the cornerstone of your learning. It's as if you realise, “Now I can begin to really learn.” So that takes years and years and years to get there, in a good school.

Jonathan MacDonald:

When we went to the world championships in Orlando, when we arrived, there were 60 of us all wearing Great Britain's team uniform and everyone was a black belt. We had six days of acclimatisation training and we started the training program and it was jab cross hook. Everyone on the team had either won a British title or come second in a British championship. There was a plane full of black belts, and then we start by jumping jacks, push-ups, chin ups, jab cross hook, six-mile runs, and that's the same thing.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Every single elite artist or elite athlete or elite business person is still making sure, let's take it from a business perspective, that the red numbers on the spreadsheet are mitigated by the black numbers. The cash flow has to be enough to actually take you through the burn rate to grow the business, and that's the same for people who are running the biggest business in the world and the smallest business in the world. There's actually no difference between a black belt training, a white belt training or a relationship of 15 years or 25 years, and a relationship of 15 hours. The discipline is still the same discipline, and you just have to keep doing it. That's the key thing.

Bosco Anthony:

Practice basically.

Jonathan MacDonald:

That's it.

Bosco Anthony:

When I started reading the book I was really impressed by this concept of flipping the coin, or the coin flips basically. I want to know a little bit about, and obviously without giving away too much of the book, where did the concept of the coin flip come to you and how has it shaped your life?

Jonathan MacDonald:

My sixth book, The Rise of Advanced Thought is available on Amazon and you can listen to it free of charge on Spotify. The Rise of Advanced Thought actually is book-ended by the stories of my coin flips. About 15 or 16 years ago, I was at a party with a group of friends and there was a guy who I'd never really spoken to, but who was a neighbour. I decided to strike up conversation, and I said, "So what's the most exciting thing that's happening in your life?" That, by the way, is a great icebreaker. If you just say, "What are you most excited about?" then it gets through all the small talk. You immediately get through what the weather's like and all that stuff. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

So, I asked, “What's the most exciting thing that you're doing?” and he said, "I'm running the Marathon des Sables." The Marathon des Sables is a group of multiple marathons back to back across the Sahara Desert, and only a small percentage of people make it, and a significant percentage of people actually get extraordinarily ill or die. You have to pack everything that you're going to need over the next six or seven days for six or seven marathons in your backpack whilst you're running through sand in 50o heat.

Jonathan MacDonald:

He told me this and I thought, "Wow, that's insane." We spent the rest of the evening talking about it. By the end of the evening, I got out a 50p piece, and I decided in front of him and then everyone else, all my family and friends, kids, I said, "I'm going to flip a coin now and I'm going to choose two things that I can't do. One of them is going to be swimming the English Channel and the other's going to be running in the London Marathon." I couldn't even run up a flight of stairs. So, I thought, "I'll run the London Marathon." I hate running, and I definitely don't want to swim through faeces and bacteria in freezing cold water for a day. That's the last thing I want to do.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I flipped the coin and it landed on the London Marathon. Three and a half months later, I'm at the starting line and 26.2 miles later, minus a few toenails, bleeding nipples, ruptured Achilles heels, I cross the finish line, after six and a half hours. It was the worst experience of my life, but then within an hour, it was the best experience of my life because I thought, “If I can do that, then surely, I could pretty much do anything.” So, the next New Year's Eve, I got out a coin, and I chose between two things. I did that for years and years, and I think five years ago, I actually outsourced it to Twitter, and I just said, "Right, okay, you choose guys. You've got one month to choose the top vote, and I'm not even going to choose the options. You choose the options and I'll do the one."

Jonathan MacDonald:

I think, and I may be misquoting myself in the book now because there may be a different challenge that was the outsource, but I think it was scale El Capitan without ropes, free climb – and I'm scared of heights, I can't even climb up a ladder. So, scale El Capitan free climb with no ropes or become a British champion in a martial art you've never done before, and it landed on the martial arts one. I thought, “Okay,” because for each coin flip you only get two years.

Bosco Anthony:

Wow.

Jonathan MacDonald:

What no one knew at the time is when I turned up to the British Sports Jujitsu Championship, I had done 900 hours of training and I was still a white belt. No one knew that; everyone just arrived, and I entered the open, and no, I didn't have a club representing me. I broke my rib in the first round of the first fight and I fought loads of fights that day, broke a rib first round, and then in the final, which was nine fights later, I broke my fifth metacarpal, but the fight only lasted for 31 seconds. He went straight to hospital, and I became British champion. The only reason why I was able to do that flip successfully was because those 900 and something hours that I did to train for it were specifically to how to win, it was less to do with discipline and more to do with technique.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I looked up what are the five most effective ways of submitting someone in jujitsu, and what are the top five ways of avoiding being submitted. What are the top five exercises that I can do to strengthen the body parts that are most needed for jujitsu, which is very, very different from Taekwondo, kickboxing and karate that I'd done before? There are other coin flip challenges that I won't go into now, but it was all inspired by hearing someone who was doing something that was ridiculously impossible, and now I’ve learnt over those years of the decade and a half, that nothing is.

Bosco Anthony:

I'm going to ask you later on what you're working on for your next coin flip. But before we get into that, I opened your book and I was mesmerised by this quote that said, “When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.” You alluded to this at the start of this conversation. How did you go about discovering this proverb, and more importantly, how did it play a part in inspiring you to write this book? You talked about writing other books that many people don't know about. Why did this book make it to where it went and why was this the one that you took to the market?

Jonathan MacDonald:

Well, there's a couple of questions inside there, so let me start with the proverb. I've spent years on stage doing thousands of keynotes and workshops and so forth, and I was always trying to find an analogy about change that resonated, and I became a historian on change because of that. You can Google search quotes on change if you like, but I wanted to look backward to the original texts. There's a Chinese text from thousands of years ago, multi-thousands of years ago, between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, called Ching, and it's one of the first books about change and change was a philosophical construct. The metamorphosis of life and the atrophy of the universe and the constants of change and the accelerant of change were very much discussed things, and in those days, philosophers were leaders.

Jonathan MacDonald:

You didn't have politicians, you had people who were seers or fortune tellers, and they were the leaders of society. Even if you had a king or a queen who wasn't one of them, then their right-hand person was one. It was only in Roman times that those people were chastised and burnt at stakes and were – in Socrates' case – murdered, and it was something that struck me and so the proverb that I found was from those days. Paradoxically, now that proverb, the winds of change, is now more in popular knowledge, and I played a modest part in that.

Jonathan MacDonald:

But the reason why Powered by Change had to come to life was because of the life experiences that I decided needed to be shared and the analogies between those life experiences and business practice. I then realised that I had helped huge companies with their processes using Powered by Change methodologies, and so I approached those companies and asked if I could write about them in the book, which is why there are case studies about Lego and Heineken and Amazon and Unilever and many others. Then I approached Ikea’s Chief Executive and said, “Hey, did any of the stuff that I’ve helped you with over the last six years help you?” And he said, “Help me? We call our innovation unit Powered by Change.” So, I said, "Well, would you write the forward to the book?" And he said, "Absolutely."

Jonathan MacDonald:

He wrote the forward to the book, so I had the chief executive of the largest private company in the world and a couple of hundred case studies from the biggest companies in the world that I've impacted. Then we put it within a marketing vehicle of a large publisher that made the book available at every airport and every news agent and petrol station, then I was grateful that it went to best-selling status on Amazon and Sunday Times Bestseller, and it sold ridiculous volumes.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I was getting a medical test done today for a travel trip that I'm going to do, and when I walked in, the doctor's first line was, "I didn't realise I was going to meet the famous author." He was so proud because he's just ordered my most recent book, The Rise of Advanced Thought. It's really strange when you can Google search your own name. Google has actually now put up “Jonathan MacDonald, British author.”

Jonathan MacDonald:

It's weird because all I've really done, over two decades, spanning the six books in total, is write about things that I've found, like the insight that I've got. It’s a bit weird how I’ve written something like 400,000 words of text that no one's ever read, and then since I wrote Powered by Change, people say, "Ah, this author!" I’d say, "Well, I've always written it, it's just no one ever bought it before, but I wasn't writing it to be bought." It's great to be a bestselling author, but that wasn't the point. The point was so that I had a legacy of thoughts that people could take with them. That was the point.

Bosco Anthony:

It almost sounds like it happened by design as well; it was a series of different events that complemented to go there.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Well, it's funny you say that because I must admit writing Powered by Change was a conflict. The coin flip was writing a Sunday Times Bestseller or becoming a yacht captain, I think. So anyway, it landed on Sunday Times Bestseller, and so I learnt about what makes a best-selling book a best selling book. There were these components: a huge publishing house, a massive marketing arm and a giant personal story, backed up by heavyweight executives at the right price point with the right cover and the right title with the right editor; actually, that's the model. It's an architectural diagram of the bestseller, and it was not surprising at all that it reached bestselling status because that's exactly the point. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

Similarly, it wasn't an accident to fight the world championships and win a medal, or it wasn't an accident to finish the London marathon or learn the languages I've learnt or forgive all the bullies who beat me up when I was at school.

Jonathan MacDonald:

All of these are coin flips that you can read about in The Rise of Advanced Thought, and the outcome is always success. Not because I'm good at it, because in fact, none of the things that I achieved are things that I was good at. The reason that they've become successes is because there was no other option. You make a decision and then you execute, you don't stand in between the decision and execution pontificating as to whether or not I can do this. I think, “Can a human being achieve this?” And as long as we're not talking about breathing underwater unaided or flying without wings, the answer is yes.

Bosco Anthony:

What you're talking about is also going into the mindset of embracing whatever those challenges or fears or whatever those might be involved. Let's switch into the business side of things, because our listeners are builders who own building companies, and they'd love to hear your thoughts around how do change and the ability to handle change impact success, and what goes into that mindset.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I think I have an affinity to the building trade. I'm an investor into properties and I've flipped nine houses in my life, and I fancy myself as a bit of a handyman, which is an absolute insult to the building trade. But what I can tell you is that it is actually a crucial set of decisions that everyone has the ability to make or to have, and the first part of that decision is, “Do I believe that I am somehow ahead of the change? Can I foresee it? Can I predict it? Have I got enough money to buy it or whatever it is?” These are business poisons, all of which are found, by the way, in my third book, which no one bought, called Business Poison.

Jonathan MacDonald:

The first choice is, do we believe that we are better than change? A bit like the Alcoholic Anonymous 12-step program, there's a position – I think it's maybe the second or third step – where you actually admit defeat and you say, "You know what? I can't control this. This is controlling me. I'm not controlling it." With change, that step is the same. So, “Am I going to somehow out-think change?” If you can accept the fact that today is the slowest pace of change you will ever experience, do you think that COVID is the last pandemic? The only thing we know is that change happens and the other thing we know is that we die, but we don't know when we’ll die or how fast change happens.

Jonathan MacDonald:

So, the best thing to do then is go to step two in the thought process and realise, "Right. Now I accept the fact that I can't out-think this. How can I use it as a power rather than rebelling against it?" Let's look at this from the building perspective, and I'm saying this on the back of the fact that arguably some builders will feel as if they've never had a better year or two. But the truth is that the historical analysis is not a predictor of the future. Just because the last two, 10, 20 years or months have been successful doesn't mean that the next two, 10 or 20 years or months are going to be successful. So, what we need to be is productively paranoid.

Jonathan MacDonald:

We need to actually have a level of paranoia that says, "You know what? Things happen that aren't great in life, and let's assume that things that could disrupt us are going to disrupt us." We can see these things, and as Bill Gates said, "We often overestimate the change in the next two years and underestimate the change in the next 10." If I say the words, “3D printed houses” or “bio-fabrication” and things like that, people will say, "Yeah. Oh yeah. I heard about that in China. It's going to hit our shores in 30 years’ time." The safest way forward is to see if it’s 30 years, just knock off the zero. If you think of something that's going to be 30 years off, just play with the idea that it's three.

Jonathan MacDonald:

If you feel as if you're so comfortable that the rest of your career is always going to be pretty much using the same goalpost you've got at the moment, what you're not considering from the last 50 years is the fact that around 86% of the Fortune 500 companies have gone out of business. And that's just the Fortune 500 companies. The truth is that nine in 10 small businesses go out of business in any period of time, whether you want to look at that from one year, three years or five years. Then of course the listeners will say, "Yeah, but I'm the one in 10." Are you, and also your three competitors, are you all four of you the one in 10? Because statistically one would say that can’t be correct.

Bosco Anthony:

That doesn't work out.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I think it's okay for us to have some humility. Of course, for me, it's innate because most of the things I've done went wrong. If in an entrepreneur's life you shoot five things out the door as ideas or concepts or business ideas, three of them are going to go really badly wrong. If you can have the humility to think, “Okay, what will go wrong?” most of the things that go wrong are based on decisions we make, thoughts we have as opposed to external factors.

Bosco Anthony:

So what you're really saying is it's not just death and taxes that are certain; it's imminent change as well. It should be the third entity there too.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Well, taxes are purely based on domiciliation. People who are in the Cayman Islands and other places wouldn't say that death and taxes are certain. I would say change is the one that is certain, and death is one of those changes, because it's the change from life to death. So, all there is is change.

Bosco Anthony:

How do you leverage change as fuel to spearhead transformation? You've talked a lot about some of the brands you've worked with and some of the journeys you've gone on with them as well. How do you fuel it to spearhead change?

Jonathan MacDonald:

It depends on the circumstance. Some companies are easier to work with than others and it's purely mindset. Sure, part of it is budget and whatever, but it's the mindset of the leaders that is key. There's a Japanese proverb that says that a fish rocks from the head. If you have a leader who is willing to accept the mindset shifts, then the chances of success are high. Let's take Jesper Brodin, the Chief Executive of Ikea, who wrote the forward to the book Powered by Change. The most powerful conversation we ever had –  I'm not sure whether he would say this, but what I viewed as the most powerful – was when we were in a Marylebone London cafe for breakfast, and he was telling me excitedly about all the new innovations they were going to be building in the Powered by Change division.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I said, "Yeah, of course the thing is that you are actually – because of your catalogue – the largest printers of any material on earth, therefore you have the most direct impact on felling trees, and therefore through the processing of that, you have the largest corporate impact on climate change. So, I reckon that out of 1.3 metres increase in sea level over the next 30 years, during the time that your daughters become adults, you'll be responsible for at least 10% of that,” and he started crying.

Bosco Anthony:

Wow.

Jonathan MacDonald:

He has now spent two billion Euros a year, every year for five years on the Ikea sustainability initiative. Every single member of the Ikea staff has a grant for a solar powered system for their house and electric vehicle for their transportation. Every single time a tree is pulled out of the ground, two trees are planted. There's a recycling agenda. If you just Google search Ikea sustainability, that's the outcome of that conversation.

Bosco Anthony:

You actually see the sustainability initiatives in stores. There are so many different subtle things that you look at and you say, "This screams of sustainability." You've worked with some of these amazing brands over your lustrous career, Ikea and all these other brands as well. Have you noticed some form of commonality with the business approach when you've consulted these brands?

Jonathan MacDonald:

Yeah. Most people don't want anything to change. That's about 99% of the time. It's like a mass formation psychosis against change. The psychosis is a mind numbingly mediocre hypnotic belief that today is the same as yesterday is the same as tomorrow. Out of that psychosis, a third of people are completely oblivious and will remain oblivious to the hypnosis. Now those companies eventually get out of business. That's a guarantee. Then you have a third of people on the other end of the spectrum who are completely change positive.

Jonathan MacDonald:

In my first conversation with Heineken, with Bruce Reinders as CMO at the time, he said, "John, we don't want you to come and help us scale Heineken across the world anymore. We want you to work out how we can hit Africa." So, after a few days of conversation, we came up with a subsidised water offering that enabled people who didn't have water to have water brought to them by Heineken. No one even knows about this stuff because it's not branded Heineken.

Jonathan MacDonald:

They're change positive, whereas you get the hypnotic side and the other. So, you've got 30% on one end, 30% on the other end, and then you get 40% swing votes. That 40% swing vote is the hard work because you can't change the hypnotised. Once, I was just about to go on stage to speak for a particular mobile network, and the CTO came on stage just before I went to do my keynote and he said to the audience and to all of his staff, "Whatever this next guy says, we're not going to implement."

Bosco Anthony:

No pressure at all.

Jonathan MacDonald:

“Ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan MacDonald.” There's nothing I could say. It was the shortest keynote of my life. I was on stage for three minutes. I basically said what I've just said to you, and that was the end. I was thinking, "Thank you very much and good luck in the future," and then I sold all my shares in that network. They're the hypnotised, and then change positive look after themselves with support, for sure. For the swing votes, I've realised that there is this one metric that is the most powerful, and it's part of Powered by Change methodology; it's inside the book. It’s powered by change because it's based on the windmill theory of walls or windmills; each of the windmills in Powered by Change has got four blades, and inside the four blades, which are purpose, people, products and process, you've got three sub-blades in each.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Inside one of those sub-blades is this methodology and it's called ‘risk of inaction’, and it's my alternative ROI. It's the most laser sharp swing vote influence you can have. That’s okay, that’s cool. You're not decided as to whether you need to do anything different in business. You're not decided yet, you haven't seen enough data. Whatever it is, you haven't been convinced. I want you now to write out your return on investment business plan for the next five years. I want you to write your risk of inaction; another ROI plan for if you do nothing and other things change.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Let's assume that these things that won't happen, do happen. Let's assume that this particular material logistics thing changes or the logistics industry changes or harmonisation taxes change, or the port authority mandates change, or the government legislation changes on certain materials and planning reform changes and all these things. Let's assume that those things change, and the likes of Amazon get into real estate, and let's assume that these things change, and you do nothing. What's the material impact over three, five, seven years? Gradually, over time, and this can happen over the period of 30 minutes, 60 minutes, a few hours, a few days sometimes.

Jonathan MacDonald:

You see the enthusiasm of “Yeah, well, I'm just not convinced yet,” becoming, “Hold on a minute, we’re screwed if we do nothing,” and then they start selling it to you. They start convincing you that they're going to do this, this, this, this and this, and then I say, "Right. Well, let's call it a pledge. So, what are you going to do by May the 30th? What are you going to do by August the 30th? What are you going to do by December?" Then actually make that pledge. They write it to me. I write it back to them. It's now a contract, and then I hound them for every single executable point, for money.

Bosco Anthony:

I think Blockbuster should have consulted with you as well. I read that in your book as well. That was mind blowing.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Dude, I got in so much trouble for writing that. That dude, that Chief Executive of Blockbuster emailed me. He read Powered by Change, and he emailed me, and he was furious, he was absolutely furious. I said, "I just wrote down what you didn't do."

Bosco Anthony:

Yes.

Jonathan MacDonald:

“Just what you didn't do. So, as an eye-witness inside the boardroom to your decision to do nothing, that's all I wrote. You can't retrospectively come to me and say, "Look, how dare you insult us and defame us. We demand you remove it from the book." I said, "Okay, sure. If it's not factually correct, I'll remove it," and I never heard anything back.

Bosco Anthony:

How do you inspire these brands you work with to think long term? Because again, many business owners think short term, many business owners think narrow focused as well. We are constructed to niche and focus on that niche, that's what they tell us, and your thought process here is something that they're not used to. So why is it so important to think beyond the niche and think long term?

Jonathan MacDonald:

I think I'm not even sure whether the word, the taxonomy, is long term. What I’m doing is I’m enabling people to think near term, or now term. If you can really accept that today is the slowest pace of change you'll ever experience, that means the change in the next five years will feel like the change in the last 20 years, as an example. So, everyone should think back to the year 2002 or 2003. Think about the change that’s occurred between 2002/2003 and now. We are talking analogue phones, not smart phones. This is pre most of the digital technologies that we use now. Pre-broadband, mass scale broadband, pre-3G. Let's go all the way, 20 years back. That change between then and now is going to replicate between now and five years into the future.

Jonathan MacDonald:

So, the near-term philosophy of change is less to do with thinking what's going to happen in 2030, 2040 or 2050, because everyone just says, “Oh, flying cars.” That's not practical. We need to think what future we want to design now because we tend to wait for the future to come, and this is one of the reasons why I'm really suspicious of futurists because they tend to talk about how everyone's going to be living on the moon or Mars. It's cool. I think that extra-planetary exploration is extremely important, but as a builder or as a builder's merchant today, if I can't construct something on Mars in the next 36 months, it's an irrelevance.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I would suggest, instead of that, we should be thinking, “What are the three technologies that could completely obliterate your business model that you think are five years away, 10 years away? Good. Now we've got them, let's build a strategy around how we can leverage that now,” so we are the people who disrupt it. Two other consultants and I did that with Amazon. They were relying 100% on books, and so we said, "Well, what would disrupt you?" And the answer was digital books. Amazon said, "Great, well, let's build a digital book strategy," because why would you not? "Oh no, no, we'd prefer to wait for someone else to, and then eat our lunch." No, you create the thing that's going to disrupt you.

Jonathan MacDonald:

The biggest disruptor ever to an iMac or to a MacBook is an iPad. So surely you get better MacBooks, better iMacs and better iPads and a better iPhone. Why don't you just disrupt yourself? Funnily enough, for years I worded as a consultant with Apple. The first product when Steve Jobs came back in was the iPad, and that came out after the iPhone. The iPhone was to transgress iPod users and iTunes users in the ecosystem to walking around with more capable iPods. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

Then of course you then need a bigger iPhone, that's all an iPad is, a bigger iPhone, an iPad. And then you also need an iMac because it's got a different operating system. You can't actually do all the things that you want to do on your iPhone. You need an iPad and MacBook or an iMac. So that's creating the future you want, as opposed to waiting for Dell or Microsoft or HP to do it for you, because they will, if they're given the chance.

Bosco Anthony:

Right. If anything, the last few years have taught everyone about the unpredictable certainty of how life has gone and for many of us and for builders, you've got issues like supply chain issues and ordering materials and pricing and everything else, fixed contracts, I could go on all day. But in a world of uncertainty, I think you've already alluded to why we need to be paying attention to this, but how should business owners embrace the concept of this changing landscape, because it seems to be the new norm?

Jonathan MacDonald:

Well, firstly, it is definitely the new norm, and in fact the only reason it feels like the new norm now is because the speed of change is more apparent to people who have lived through the last two years of COVID. So even from a non-business perspective, everyone has witnessed faster change, which is good, because this is the slowest pace of change you'll ever experience, so don't get used to it. It’s important of grasping the power inside that.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I first wrote the book in about 2015 or 2015; it was published in 2018 and I updated it a bit in the years since then. So, the one you've got there is the latest version, then The Rise of Advanced Thought is its sequel. The reason why my first four books didn't sell is because they were set in the future and then the future came. But now these books and the thought processes and this conversation in fact is a survival podcast show rather than the way it was in the beginning, which was something to consider. Four years ago I was thinking, “You know what? My view is that if we can be powered by change, then will be set to escape significant disruption and become the disruptors ourselves.” That's four years ago, and everyone said, "Yeah, cool. All right, relatively inspirational."

Jonathan MacDonald:

Then the future played itself out and the companies that have gone under, the speakers who were staged keynote speakers who have now gone out of business and are working flipping burgers were people who didn't skill-up on online presentation skills. When I wrote Powered by Change, I had to apply it to myself in terms of what would disrupt me, and the thing that would disrupt me would be if suddenly conferences were cancelled. And guess what? 2020 came and all of the conferences were cancelled.

Bosco Anthony:

Conferences were wiped up.

Jonathan MacDonald:

But by then, I'd already released an online program called How to Be a Professional Speaker and Presenter. All of the speakers who took up that course then became professional online keynote speakers. That was about 30% of them and the rest went out of business, because they didn't know how to present online, which is a completely different discipline. Speaking online is nothing like speaking on a stage at all. The only similarities are that words come out of your mouth. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

How you present yourself online and how you can get messages across in an empathetic way, in a concise, charismatic way through a video screen is a completely different discipline. I looked into that two or three years before COVID happened, not because I knew that COVID was going to happen, but if you are in a business where you know what would disrupt you, then you’ve got to build for it now, it’s the only way forward.

Bosco Anthony:

It’s interesting you say that because as a speaker I had to recalibrate towards consulting and storytelling because the world changed. As a speaker, I had to survive and find a different entity, and like you, I had 53 events in a year and all of a sudden, no one was travelling, no one was leaving the door, no one was flying, and the borders were shut. I basically had to improvise. I really resonate with what you just said there.

Bosco Anthony:

In the book, you allude to the fifth industrial revolution being around AI. I love the examples; I love some of the thought process around it. I'm curious because that book's still timely. I read it in the last few weeks, and I've got to say there's so much in there, the concepts around the blades and how you came to the notion of the blades when you were designing your mind and all of a sudden it fell into play. All of that was just beautifully mastered, but I'm curious, what does the next industrial revolution look like and is it around sustainability?

Jonathan MacDonald:

No. But it needs to be, and maybe the sustainability is part of the next revolution. However, the next revolution, I am increasingly convinced, is a philosophical revolution. Within that philosophical revolution will be the upholding of civil rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought – and also therefore freedom of health and therefore sustainability, hopefully. Those components are sub-blades of the prime windmill of philosophical revolution. What I mean by this is that there is an introversion that's happening now and COVID helped it. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

That introversion is us starting to look at ourselves more and ask, "What is it that makes me happy? What are the things that actually drive me at my purpose? What is my purpose? Am I doing something that I really want to be doing? Do I believe media outlets? Do I think that the government has our best interests at heart? Do I think that the way that things are is the best way for them? Do I believe that just because you're a massive building firm, you are actually an exemplary character of the building world? Are you doing things in the right way? Are you managing your cash flow correctly? Are you accounting for things in a way that is truly methodological or are you actually basically blagging it and thinking that $300,000 in the bank means you're worth $300,000, even though you've got $300,000 of liabilities?

Jonathan MacDonald:

That introversion of starting to look at why we do what we do is by nature a philosophy. We are starting to account for why we are here and philosophy and ratio reason, which is our new way of calling ratio. The reason that we look for things in our lives has become more important because we are now more aware. There's a division between noise and signal, and we are addicted to noise, we are addicted to worthless pop stars and stupid TV shows while we eat awful fried food, why we’re friends sometimes with people who we wouldn't cross the road for if they're bleeding to death, working for people who treat us worse and signal, which is actually why we are here.

Jonathan MacDonald:

There's a beautiful ancient Greek practice called telos. Teleology is a study of why we exist. In those days, gravestones or tombstones didn't have people's names on them, they had the purpose of the person being here. “Why were you here? Were you here to teach and inspire? Were you here to construct and protect?” No. We are now arriving back almost in devolutionary perspective to a few thousand years ago where we actually ask, "Well, why am I here?" The revolutionary structure of that is immense. It is the same size if not bigger than the industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution that came before it, and the digital revolution that we're in now. A philosophical revolution is one that starts and ends within us, and if you think about how that then manifests from the introversion outward, so coming from the universe into the innerverse, that has manifest capabilities that change the structure of capitalism, the structure of industry, the structure of how we do business and more importantly, why we do business.

Bosco Anthony:

You're talking about the great realignment at this point too because we're questioning everything we're going through right now. People are changing jobs, and it's funny, you mentioned this too, because six years ago, actually yesterday was my sixth year anniversary for my last Ted Talk, and I talked about how to live life with purpose, and I can’t tell you how many people have reached out digitally to tell me how they're all questioning what they're doing today as part of their purpose and what they're doing for work and questioning everything from relationships to family. It's a testament to what you're just talking about. You've talked about coin flips. You've talked about the fact that this book that you've written is all about the coin flips. I'm just curious if you're willing to share what your last coin flip alluded to and what are you focusing on for the next two years?

Jonathan MacDonald:

Well, here's the thing, the final coin flip was between doing the splits, losing a bunch of weight and some other things and I just executed them all. I took heads and tails and something else as well. I got to a stage, and I guess this is the point of The Rise of Advanced Thought, that when you finish The Rise of Advanced Thought, if you actually use the tools that are inside it, its five primary tools, they will enable you to do anything. If you actually apply those tools, then there's no need to coin flip because you basically just think of what it is that you want to execute, and then you do, because you are armed with the tools to do it. 

Jonathan MacDonald:

So, I don’t actually need to do coin flips anymore because I’m doing at least three or four things that are ‘ridiculously impossible’ and it's desensitised me to the impossible because now it's just, “What do I want to do that will fulfil my values?” That’s one of the tools inside The Rise of Advanced Thought, it's called the values matrix or values grid.

Jonathan MacDonald:

In fact, anyone can go to the academyofadvancedthought.com, and click on resources and you can actually see some of the tools that are inside The Rise of Advanced Thought. The values grid is really important, because if you can actually map out what it is that you really stand for, then it's just a question of, “How do I want to manifest these things? How do I want to manifest freedom? I want to buy a boat and I want to be able to charter it to other people and I want to sail around the world. How do I manage freedom from governments and freedom from taxations? Well, I want to be on assignment to the Cayman Islands. How do I want to manifest peace? Well, I want to get even deeper into transcendental meditation.”

Jonathan MacDonald:

All I do now is I look at how I can manifest my values more in life and then execute the thing that would give the highest probability of that value being hit. So, it's like a constant coin flip. It's like a quantum coin flip that I live within, as opposed to having just two things to choose from. It's more like which of my nine boxes on my value grid do I feel as if I'm underperforming in? Then I look at that and say, "Okay, well, this is health," because that happens to be one of my values on my grid. Then I think, “How could I improve my health? Am I not training in the right way? What am I putting inside my system that is suboptimal versus optimal?” Some of those things become really hard questions. I love cold beer, but cold beer doesn't link to my health very well. Therefore, I don't drink cold beer.

Bosco Anthony:

It's a choice by design.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Yeah. You just design it. Like running a marathon, it turns out the way to do it is to not get drunk and then start training. You do 100 metres on the first day, and then by the end of the first week, you can do a mile or two, by the end of the sixth week, you can do five miles and so forth and so before the marathon you get to about 17 or 18 miles. It's tough, but you know the adrenaline is going to carry the last 10 miles on the day – and then it does. So, it's not rocket science. None of it is complicated. There isn't one coin flip that was methodologically complicated. It's emotionally complicated. The hardest part of a marathon, by the way, is actually turning up. The hardest part of any coin flip is actually doing the work – that turns out to be the case.

Bosco Anthony:

So, it’s the concept of comfort over fear. I could talk to you for ages, but I think we need to save you for another episode. When I've read the next book, that I've just ordered, I'd love to ask you questions around that as well. But I'm going to ask this question because I think this is the question that really spearheads this conversation and that is, “Why do builders and other people fear change?” If you think about your last or your current fear, how do you navigate through that? Because a lot of the things that you're talking about is comfort over fear.

Jonathan MacDonald:

I found there to be probably three reasons. Actually, there's a duality. I'm going to be really fast in this one. Duality: there's two lots of three. The first is inertia-based resistance change, which is when people don't know that they should change or they know they should change, but they don't know what to do, or they know what to do but they just can't be bothered. So that's the first three, and I've noticed the building trade is unlike any other trade in terms of that inertia. Then you've got another three, which is in parallel, and there’s three of these.

Jonathan MacDonald:

The first is fear because people fear change because it's uncertain, unknown and so forth and therefore it could go wrong. The second is lack of understanding, and understanding encompasses why they should move versus what would happen if they don't. The third is that we would prefer to know for sure the facts to begin with before we change, which is a fallacy because the only way of getting to facts is through experimentation, and the only way of getting through experimentation is from speculating.

Jonathan MacDonald:

What we really are when we're resistant to change is we are resistant to speculating. Even if that speculation is the only way of getting to the facts, we would sometimes prefer to suffer and not speculate than to speculate and potentially lose. That is a human condition, and it happens; it's the reason why we don't try things, because the fear of rejection is a bigger weight than the joy of the upside, and that's a human condition. That's the reason why.

Bosco Anthony:

So really, you're a provocateur of trying new things and reframing your thought process as well.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Yeah, and that's the rise of advanced thought, in the book.

Bosco Anthony:

Just for our listeners is out there, can the book be found everywhere, anywhere?

Jonathan MacDonald:

Everywhere. Absolutely. I'm shamelessly megalomaniac.

Bosco Anthony:

Well, I'd highly recommend both books to our listeners. I've had an amazing read and I thank you for nourishing my thought process before this interview, because I actually wanted to really immerse myself in this conversation and really get to know you a little bit more. But interestingly enough, I had a coin flip moment when I was in Sydney, because Russ called me and said, "You really need to get this book. I highly recommend it." 

Bosco Anthony:

I had three QBD stores that I was trying to get the book from, and I picked one and it turned out that was the store that had the book. All the others were all sold out. I couldn't find them, but internally my gut was thinking, “While I'm here, I'm just going to go pick this up,” and I just made that moral choice to go get it, and it was sitting right in front of me before I even asked someone where can I find this book by this author? Synchronicity is an interesting thought. 

Bosco Anthony:

I really appreciate your time today and your energy and I really appreciate the knowledge that you've imparted to us.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Thank you. By the way, Powered by Change and The Rise of Advanced Thought are meant to be read consecutively. If anyone's listening to this and reads The Rise of Advanced Thought, then that becomes the prequel to Powered. They can be read in any order, but they sit together as a body of work and it's the whole of my 30 years in business and 50 years in life all in two books.

Bosco Anthony:

That's amazing and inspiring as well. Jonathan, thanks again for your time today.

Jonathan MacDonald:

Cheers buddy. Thanks man.

Bosco Anthony:

Thank you for listening. Remember to subscribe to Professional Builders Secrets on your favourite podcast platform and leave a review. To learn more about how the systems at the Association of Professional Builders can help you grow your building company, visit associationofprofessional builders.com. See you next time.