Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Scott Cesen, SVP Business Development at GenomOncology

Scott shares his unique career journey that started at Accenture and includes roles in various sectors such as SaaS, genomics, and a startup firm.

Scott shared many great insights including:

• the personal and professional hardships he faced
• discuss the foundational skills learned at Accenture
• the challenges of being a road warrior, the pivot to smaller agencies, and his experience with fractional roles

Building Careers and Teams: Insights from Scott Cesen

[00:00:04] Ron Laneve: Hello and welcome episode 40 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent podcast. I’m your host Ron Laneve. Each week, we share the career stories of tech experts and marketing mavens, operational gurus and sales leaders to illustrate how they have navigated the nonlinear career path.

[00:00:23] Ron Laneve: I’ve known today’s guest since college, and we’ve worked together a few times over the years. While his background is rooted in business consulting and digital transformation, he’s also worked in SaaS, Genomics, and was a partner in a startup firm.

[00:00:36] Ron Laneve: I couldn’t think of a better way to end this journey Scott Cesen, SVP of Business Development at GenomOncology.

[00:00:46] Ron Laneve: Scott. Thanks a lot for being here.

[00:00:48] Scott Cesen: Yeah, Ron. Very excited to do it. Thanks for having me.

[00:00:50] Ron Laneve: Can you walk us through your career starting with Accenture? You and I know a lot of people have worked at Accenture. That has set a lot of people up for their careers.

[00:00:59] Ron Laneve: So in your case, how has that prepared you for future roles and future career decisions?

[00:01:04] Scott Cesen: when I started it was the last official start class before it became Accenture So that’s a little fun fact that I share with people who have that history as well. But starting at Accenture was a very good option, in terms of really setting up the foundation of really learning the skills that it took to be successful in business.

[00:01:21] Scott Cesen: I think lots of us at that time had dreams of walking mahogany row and working in these big companies and really having an impact. Going to Accenture definitely exposed some of those things and built a lot of foundational skills. Going to work with many of the fortune 100 companies, and just getting assimilated into that type of professional lifestyle and exposure early on, was pretty invaluable.

[00:01:44] Scott Cesen: When we started, you still had to show up in a suit. So the first probably six months of my career, especially when you’re in the Accenture offices, you wear, what the client’s wearing. showing up in the office, we were wearing suits every day and they had rules like, Hey, you can take your jacket off when you’re in your seat, but when you’re walking around, you put your jacket back on and things like that.

[00:02:01] Scott Cesen: You already feel like, Hey, , this is the big leagues or I’ve gotten called up, this is a serious situation. and we’re no longer playing business. We’re actually have to deliver value for our clients. Just that from an atmosphere perspective help set things up.

[00:02:14] Scott Cesen: Then you obviously get into the actual skill building of it, which is clearly a hundred times more important. But you really learn things like operating in a team. Folks who are familiar with Accenture, understand that that is a massive company, hundreds of thousands of employees. Projects that I were on ranged from probably 100 or 150 up to 700 plus Accenture people on the client and on the client site. They’re massive projects and you’re getting used to having very strict deadlines, working long hours, very much working in a team. is really why I enjoyed my time at Accenture. As I look back throughout my career, I’m really a team guy at heart. That’s one of the things that motivates me or really gives me passion out of whatever I’m doing is really the success of the team, and just the dynamic of the team and really being a team builder. Those are the types of foundational skills that I think that you get at Accenture.

[00:03:05] Scott Cesen: You learn to lean on people, you’re really having to, communicate and choreograph these very, complex projects. There’s always deadlines and, you’re always challenged to work late or hit deadlines. Those foundational skills you take with you in every stop in your career after that, where you just also have a respect for the clients. You have a respect for the level of professionalism and the people who are above you, in the hierarchy at a company like that. You’re just trying to work towards becoming one of those folks down the road, and hopefully you’ve established yourself as a team player such that you can have that level of success.

[00:03:38] Ron Laneve: Before you go on, I got to ask you and I have a friend that 30 years later loves to talk about his, experience writing COBOL and ABAP did you, did you have to learn how to program to while you were there?

[00:03:48] Scott Cesen: Yeah, that was definitely not my strong suit though. So I’ll just say that my time as a developer, was short lived and I would not list that as a skill on any resume going forward.

[00:03:59] Ron Laneve: Hence why you’ve evolved into the client services and business development person you are today.

[00:04:04] Ron Laneve: Accenture set you up like a lot of people that we know very early on. How did things progress after that? What was going on at the time when you, when you made the different career moves you’ve made.

[00:04:13] Scott Cesen: In terms of Accenture. I really fell into that class of what you would call a road warrior. For the first five years of my career, I was really on the road, every week. Four days a week, you’re living in corporate apartments or living in corporate hotels. That can just get a little old. There’s only so many planes and, and travel days and meals out that you want to do over a period of time. That becomes a personal aspect of it. From a purely professional aspect of it the the project at times were so large that it is difficult to make a connection to the level of impact that you’re making as an individual. At times you can definitely feel like you can get caught up in a wave of a number of people and not feel like you’re, able to stand out or able to make the contribution that you want

[00:04:54] Scott Cesen: Just feeling like, do you have a team that supports you? Or are you just more of a piece of a machine are things that weigh on you or that you end up struggling with in finding your place? I was looking for something smaller.

[00:05:05] Scott Cesen: Getting out of those multiple hundred person teams, even though you work in a smaller team in your day to day it’s hard to connect, some of the work that was being done to the bigger picture. You feel like you’ve learned a set of skills and you really want to drive impact and felt like that you could do that potentially somewhere else.

[00:05:21] Ron Laneve: What happened after Accenture, what’d you do next?

[00:05:23] Scott Cesen: After Accenture, I had the opportunity to look at a couple of smaller agencies, and that’s what I was really interested in. There were a couple in the Cleveland area that were doing seemingly really well at the time. They had a lot of alumni from Accenture, so there were safe landing places in terms of network and understanding what the work looked like. it felt a little more local, could stay closer to home.

[00:05:43] Scott Cesen: We’re still working with some really cool brands, and we’re growing companies. After five years at Accenture, you have a set of skills that are applicable and you’re like, Hey, I want to bring this to the middle market or smaller end of the large market and really have an impact and be able to do that.

[00:05:57] Scott Cesen: I joined a firm, that, that at the time was called Xteric. One of the other firms in the area was called Brulant. Brulant acquired Xteric after about a year and a half that I was at Xteric.

[00:06:08] Scott Cesen: When I started at Xteric, I think I was, , roughly employee 25 or 26. When I left, Rosetta, or Publicis, it was close to 1600. There was a lot of growth that took place during that time. we got to do a lot of interesting things, rode that e commerce wave. We did a lot of WebSphere commerce, met a lot of great people along the way. Again, a number of great teammates, a number of super impressive people both professionally and personally

[00:06:37] Ron Laneve: I am going to take a minute and just talk about my SaaS experience or that particular stop in my career As a personal note to that story, when I moved to that SaaS company, I was going through things in my personal life. My father had just been diagnosed with cancer. It was a priority again for me to be at home. Honestly, what I was evaluating at that time was going back to Accenture, and had gone well down that process.

[00:07:01] Scott Cesen: Had offer letters was in negotiation for onboarding back at Accenture and that opportunity at the SaaS company just popped up and I wanted to explore because again, it was important to me to be close to home, to be close to my family and in particular my father at that time.

[00:07:16] Scott Cesen: That role probably was not the best role fit for me or that company was what was still very much in startup mode. I probably had a lot more questions that I should have asked and really probed what that opportunity and role in company, and had a better understanding of the situation I was going to enter looked like. So that ended up basically being a year long failure in my career if I’m being honest about it. I don’t feel like I had great role fit. I don’t feel like the role was necessarily defined. There was a lot of, opportunity to define that, but I was entering a new space in terms of the technologies and things that they were offering, in terms of some of the products and service lines. That ended up not being a great fit and looking back on it was just not necessarily the correct career decision at the time. I don’t have any regrets about the decision in terms of just life in general, because again, it was very important for me to be close to home at that time.

[00:08:14] Scott Cesen: Knock on wood my father’s still alive to this day. But I cherish the time to be around when he was going through treatment and just making sure that I was available if needed, for anything that they have, rather than being in some far off town and having to hop on a plane or make emergency plans of something wasn’t going well.

[00:08:31] Scott Cesen: Again, a great learning lesson of really making sure that you’re going into something with clarity, in terms of expectations for your role. What does success look like? What is the the team dynamic? Like, there’s a number of things from that experience that I think you put in your tool chest to use at a later time in terms of learning.

[00:08:51] Scott Cesen: That’s definitely, an area where my line was nonlinear.

[00:08:55] Ron Laneve: I’m glad you talked about that. Clarity is great. Going in eyes open and doing your research, sure. But the fact that you can be vulnerable and admit that it maybe wasn’t the most successful experience but you’ll learn a lot from it. I’m sure it really helped mold a lot of the decisions you made going forward after that.

[00:09:12] Scott Cesen: If I do a pullback and look at my career over the 25 ish years that I’ve been in the working world, I think one of the things you learn is it really is all about people in many ways. There are going to be skills that you develop and subject matter expertise that you develop. There are definitely ways that you operate in terms of your role and provide a ton of value as an individual contributor.

[00:09:37] Scott Cesen: But understanding the people that you’re working with and the values that they have and what’s important to them and how do they treat clients and customers are part of the equation because you really over time blur the lines between what work life looks like and what personal life looks like. And realize that you really only have one set of core values as an individual and that goes with you everywhere you go. If you believe in those things, Those are the things that you take with you and that’s how you operate and that’s how you treat people and that’s how you just carry yourself from a professional perspective. And I think that’s part of what makes me a valuable teammate.

[00:10:13] Ron Laneve: So first curveball, would you say your core values whether they’re personal or in the professional world have evolved and changed over time based upon each stop that you’ve made along the way?

[00:10:23] Scott Cesen: For sure it’s an evolution and for sure it’s a refinement. I think a lot of that is a maturation process. Even if you think back to my Accenture experience, you’re fresh out of college and at that point in time there definitely was like a lot of work 12 hours a day, go hang out for two or three hours at night with your team and. Get up and do it again. and , that changes very quickly over the course of a career where that’s just not part of most people’s plan. You just mature and you learn and you pick up experiences. And again you learn from both successes and failures and you understand how you have to conduct yourself and how you need to operate professionally.

[00:11:02] Scott Cesen: From a core values perspective. No, I think I I’m pretty much the same person that I was raised, by my parents to be, but I’ve definitely refined that and matured that. Maybe the biggest evolution is just realizing for myself that I’ll always be a work in progress that will never change. Once you realize that, there’s always going to be someone in the room who’s smarter, wealthier, more ambitious, more whatever. You can try and be all those things. But if you continue to level up who you’re around you’re not going to be the top of the heap in every room you step in. Continue to raise the level of the water by finding bigger and better and contributing to what bigger and better looks like at every stop of the way.

[00:11:42] Ron Laneve: Well, I think that quote and that attitude is directly related to your, affinity to teams and working on teams and being part of teams, which has been a huge component to your success.

[00:11:54] Scott Cesen: Coming out of that SaaS experience really for the first time in my career to that point had felt like just a little bit disconnected. That experience didn’t go well and I started to question like Hey is this is this still for me? Is this still what I want to do? working in this space. Are there other things that I want to explore what I potentially want to go back to school? Start to have lots of those thoughts and just figure out if there’s a pivot point, or what does that look like?

[00:12:20] Scott Cesen: And it just so happened that people were just figuring out that it was their time to start departing, and looking for their next chapter. I rejoined with two people from our past history at Brulant Rosetta, that we had had longstanding relationships with, and we decided that we wanted to give a go at starting a professional services firm. Really the thesis of that firm was going to be at that juncture fractional model.

[00:12:44] Scott Cesen: We were just identifying the role of chief digital officer, chief marketing officer. That mid tier C suite was something that the middle market really didn’t have those dedicated roles. They were looking at all those things, but didn’t necessarily have those roles fully checked off in their org chart and weren’t in a position to pay the level of compensation, either to bring in those roles at their companies or hire the larger consulting firms. Even the mid tier consulting firms were probably out of their reach.

[00:13:14] Scott Cesen: We were dabbling with more of the fractional role. We thought we had that checked off across the three of us as a team. We had a very strong operator, a strong business developer, and then we all had chops in terms of Being tactical operators in terms of digital marketing and e commerce. We spun that company up and it had limited success. We were definitely gaining clients. I don’t think we had the right framework to really grow and scale a business. We rode this teeter totter of delivery and sales and delivery and sales, and it was not enough time across the three of us that was dedicated to filling a pipeline, building a pipeline versus delivering work.

[00:13:55] Scott Cesen: Ultimately that became something that as a collective we decided this is having limited success or probably the growth prospects are there. But not in the period of time that’s going to be quick enough to really meet the needs of folks families at that time. At the time I was single and really was able to operate effectively as an independent contractor, which I continue to do after we set that aside from a being a real operating company. Where they just had family needs and kids in college and kids in high school and things like that and just wanted to have a little bit more consistency and ability to forecast what was coming in month over month.

[00:14:33] Ron Laneve: So you guys were way ahead of your time. I remember that time period and I just never thought about it as fractional, where today, fractional is all the rage. You guys are probably just selling a concept that people couldn’t wrap their head around yet. That’s really interesting.

[00:14:47] Scott Cesen: It had a good foundation of which we were really starting with road mapping. That was something that had a lot of momentum at the time. That was maybe the early stages of what you would say looks like digital transformation today. We were looking at different areas of the business or different problems or challenges that businesses were having. Trying to make a road map and then just executing against the road map. It was working, it probably just really needed additional legs filling that pipeline from closing business.

[00:15:14] Scott Cesen: We didn’t scale effectively at that time. This is one of those things that you look back and learn from like Holy cow could we have really used something like EOS at the time? Something like that to be our true North and keep us on task. We also then fell to the tyranny of the urgent. Delivery over sales, dividing and conquering, and it really just came down to bandwidth over prioritization to grow and scale that business. Another great learning experience, limited success. But definitely many lessons there to apply later on.

[00:15:42] Ron Laneve: So a lot of lessons learned from InReg. Appreciate you sharing that. Next stop was Robots and Pencils. Can you talk about how that happened and how that role evolved over time?

[00:15:54] Scott Cesen: As InReg became less of a formal thing, I continued to carry on clients that we had won there, where there was still work to be done. I operated as a solopreneur at that point, or independent contractor who was carrying on that name and had individual contracts. I did that for the next two years. That was in many ways satisfying and great because I really had control over my schedule. I could throttle the hours I was spending between work and pursuing other passions at the time. I just looked back over getting to the two year mark and just felt like I wasn’t moving forward professionally. I was absolutely paying my bills. I was having a great time.

[00:16:34] Scott Cesen: candidly, I was playing a lot of golf. You just have a look back and say, I’m not really moving my life forward and you’re stagnating. I really decided that I wanted to get in and explore some things.

[00:16:43] Scott Cesen: I had reached out to someone that was a contact from our past was going through an interview process.

[00:16:47] Scott Cesen: I got hired on at Robots and Pencils in an account director role and was just working accounts. Quickly made a relationship with my boss both the founder and the president at the time and was moved into the lead of client services role and continued to grow that.

[00:17:02] Scott Cesen: Ran two business units. I was running the financial services business unit and running the consumer products or in retail business unit lots of good things there. Learned a lot about business in terms of Understanding more of the financials of running those firms. And we’re at scale.Maybe the most impactful leadership that I had worked with from someone really believing in me, someone really advocating for me, someone seeing the value that I brought to the table and, and very much helped deliver that. Over time, the relationship that we had felt way more like teammates than it was peers. Definitely felt more on level footing and definitely felt way more appreciated for what I was contributing to the business.

[00:17:41] Scott Cesen: What are the takeaways there? Having people advocate for you and believe in you I think is really When you see the best version of yourself professionally. You always have to believe in yourself, but having someone support and validate that unlocks potential that I think you’ve, you’ve always been trying to tap into, or it helps you realize potential that you’d been trying to tap into.

[00:18:04] Ron Laneve: Now you’re in genomics in the oncology space. What a change that is. I understand GenomOncology functions like a services company in some, some regards. I like to call it a solutions company. So it’s not really a product firm. It’s not really a services firm. The subject matter is completely new and different. Let’s talk about that. The ramp up to learn that subject the impact that you’re having on that company and that the impact that company’s having on the market. Tell us what you’ve learned so far in a couple of years.

[00:18:32] Scott Cesen: GenomOncology is a very exciting opportunity.

[00:18:35] Scott Cesen: I’m very grateful and feel very blessed to be able to work there. Definitely the largest change, or the largest leap in terms of nature of the work in my career. Being someone who has a professional services background like myself, you learn very quickly to be adaptable, to immerse yourself, to jump in and try and learn a new business as quickly as possible. I don’t know that I could really ever articulate how or what the strategies are to do that, but it is a skill that’s developed over time to be able to quickly understand what are the problems? What are the opportunities that the market faces in that space? And what are you really dealing with?

[00:19:13] Scott Cesen: That being said, this was a whole different animal for me. In college, I don’t think I took a science class. I don’t have a genomics or science or biology or any of those related relevant backgrounds.

[00:19:24] Scott Cesen: I was bringing a very particular set of skills and those were the professional services side of things. I felt like I could get it and I could understand quickly. They were also looking to do a pivot, at that point from what I would call as a more traditional sales and business development staff to something that felt way more like the client partner model that we had grown accustomed to.

[00:19:43] Scott Cesen: I felt like that would help me contribute and add value while I was going through the learning process. I don’t know that I really could have anticipated how steep that learning curve is. That world in general is fairly nascent. So it’s still emerging from an overall perspective where you can come up to speed and you can learn things. I’m not going to catch up to the 10 year industry vets or 20 year industry vets, but there’s still enough that’s emergent in that space where I feel like I could contribute in, in some areas very quickly.

[00:20:13] Scott Cesen: But other than that, yeah, in many ways you feel like you’re going back to college. You’re reading everything you can. You’re scanning all these articles. You’re finding out what you can glean from social media and, earnings reports and all kinds of other stuff. You’re definitely thrown at the deep end. I would give a lot of credit to the team at GenomOncology for The level of onboarding program that they had.

[00:20:34] Scott Cesen: The first day in, there was a person who worked at GenomOncology named Matt Hiznay he gave me a presentation and the first slide basically said, what is cancer? I mean, that was the level we were starting at.

[00:20:44] Scott Cesen: It was like the first five minutes of the movie Jurassic park where they’re walking you through and saying, Hey, this is the dino DNA and they have that cool little video that shows how they extract it from the fossil and then it becomes this dinosaur in the park and that’s what I felt like.

[00:20:58] Scott Cesen: Coming To work every day with that lifelong learner type mentality, work in progress, mentality never feeling like you fully arrived and having that type of attitude, I think is something that that helps you contribute, quickly.

[00:21:11] Ron Laneve: Scott, can you describe the business model of GenomOncology?

[00:21:16] Scott Cesen: We’re a software solutions provider in the biotech space. we’re basically providing, decision support and data, which enables various folks throughout the medical ecosystem to help make decisions impacting cancer care.

[00:21:29] Scott Cesen: So we have a solution that is driven towards pathologists and helps them take the output of some genomic testing and then looking at potential therapies or clinical trials for patients and that’s produced in a report. The pathologist is obviously not making that treatment decision, that’s the oncologist job.

[00:21:46] Scott Cesen: But they are producing the report that would get handed off for usage further down the road in a treatment plan. We have a number of tools that are. more oncologist facing that’s helping them identify patients again, where they have are eligible for clinical trials or are looking at FDA approved therapies. And then looking, pulling back and looking at that from a broader population perspective. So they might also be looking to spin up a clinical trial. They want to understand the population of eligible patients, maybe at their institution who would qualify for that trial if you’re developing a cohort, or analyzing what what patient populations you have.

[00:22:19] Scott Cesen: As you can imagine, then there are offshoots there into Pharma and drug development or drug discovery based on biomarkers. There are other things from a commercial perspective where payers might look at that in terms of a reimbursement cycle. We’re providing all kinds of harmonized data that that’s really operating in that space.

[00:22:36] Ron Laneve: Separate from climbing the learning curve of the domain knowledge around cancer and next generation sequencing, and learning how to talk to pathologists and oncologists in the space who are not digital marketers or CTOs. What’s been the most eye opening piece of data or anecdote you’ve. been exposed to about this market and what GenomOncology is doing to impact individuals who have cancer.

[00:23:05] Scott Cesen: One of the things that’s really surprising is if you look at the statistics, it’s still less than 10 percent of cancer patients who end up on a clinical trial and there are a number of reasons for that. There are adoption challenges at a doctor level of wanting to participate meaningfully in clinical trials.

[00:23:22] Scott Cesen: There could just be institutional challenges with getting, approvals or, , internal, internal review board challenges. There are finding the appropriate spot primary investigators to sponsor those trials. There’s the financial components and, and contractual components that need to be worked out between pharma and the providing institutions. There’s lots of different things that can be roadblocks along that way. So it’s not just is there something that is potentially better or more appropriate for a patient? There’s a lot of steps that need to go in, Or, or take place before some of those things can happen.

[00:23:57] Scott Cesen: From a business perspective has been eye opening in terms of some of the sales cycles and some of the consensus building and the number of stakeholders that you’re really having to sell to and win over, is much different than many of the business situations that we’ve been in in the past where you you can find a single stakeholder who owns the budget, owns the purse strings and can direct that purchase.

[00:24:17] Scott Cesen: So it is a very complex sales cycle. It totally makes sense. On the other end this is truly one of those matters where, where, , lives hang in the balance and everything needs to be right.

[00:24:27] Ron Laneve: Regarding college students or what I like to call the cohort that’s about to enter the work world and thinking of thinking about how do I get best prepared? What classes should I take? What do I make of this AI stuff? what’s the best way to approach my job? what’s your advice on, on how to think about those next steps and what are the, , the core attributes that they should be thinking about or characteristics they should be thinking about acquiring.

[00:24:51] Scott Cesen: One of the interesting things or observations I believe I have from my college experience, and maybe I’ll speak for some of my friends. In my case, I was definitely more of a passive college student in terms of, like, I understood what the curriculum that was laid out for me was, and I just progressed through that curriculum. Even in terms of approaching some of my career choices, it was like, hey, I almost felt like some of them were predestined in terms of like, that’s what this looks like and that’s what I should be striving for, but didn’t necessarily fully unpack the why.

[00:25:23] Scott Cesen: It was just like, my friends are doing that. My friends are being very successful at that. That seems like that’s a good path and just navigated that way, whereas I would love to give the generation that’s in college right now, a lot more credit than that. Maybe they just benefit from we were the early internet age, and have they’ve learned from our experience. But I think college students or the kids that I interact with most often today have a very clear direction in many cases much more clear than I feel like I had of what they wanted.

[00:25:56] Scott Cesen: I’ve even had a handful of conversations where I believe the kids were less Concerned with getting a diploma from college and they were actually there for the learning. Whereas I probably felt it was the other way around, check this box, get a diploma, you will get a job. Where I think kids now are like, I’m taking this class, this class and this class, and I need to learn these three things and whether they complete the class or not, as long as they learn those three things they’re satisfied because they’re on a path that they’ve already chosen or mapped out.

[00:26:23] Scott Cesen: I also just think in general, college in college in general or learning in general now is going to continue to change dramatically. In some ways from a cost perspective, in some ways from a job market perspective, in some ways from what you can get from bootcamp or non traditional learning areas and tools and where you gather your information from.

[00:26:43] Scott Cesen: I just think that’s going to look wildly different in the next handful of years and is already those seeds of change have already been well planted in our making. In terms of advice for college kids, or what they’re looking at. I think some of the things that I recognize in my career that I would hope that they would find on their own is being adaptable. Understanding that life is changing very rapidly right now. Whether that’s the onset of AI, whether that’s the changes in technology, whether that’s the changes in how we learn and how we go about learning.

[00:27:13] Scott Cesen: Being a lifelong learner and having curiosity. I think those traits are more important than where you where you go to school or where you’re doing your learning from. I think you will naturally work through some of those things and gain the= intelligence and skills or the things that you need to be a contributing team member to really any team. Obviously there’s technical skills and things that that need to be developed to enter the workforce. There’s always going to be variability and how folks choose that. But I think having some of these more broader principles, and understanding being a great teammate and things like that.

[00:27:47] Scott Cesen: I have a two year old daughter now and as I think about her upbringing, I just look at so many kids now and I don’t think that there’s like enough group participation in terms of some of the activities they do. There’s a lot of focus now on individual sports. As I ask those questions I feel like a lot of peers and friends funnel those daughters into dance, into gymnastics, into tennis, into golf, into swimming. Sports that feel to me like pretty individualized. You’re part of a team, but you’re not really part of a team.

[00:28:17] Scott Cesen: When I think about great teams, I don’t think about a collection of a plus individual contributors. I think about a group of folks who have complimentary skills and how do they work together to create something for the greater good. You don’t have to have Five Michael Jordans or five LeBron James on the basketball court. You have to have one of those guys and role players around them, or everyone has to know their role, right? It’s not even fair to say you have to have one of those guys. You have to have people who know their role and know how they contribute and, or a leader who can look across the team and say, I have this talent here, this talent here, this talent here. Here’s how most effectively pair those together, and go that way. That’s why you see crazy success in books like Working Genius or all the stuff from Patrick Lencioni and all the teaming stuff there. I think makes a ton of sense because you basically have to leverage people’s talents and really amplify what they do best and navigate away from, some of their areas for improvement or weakness. To make a long tie back, maybe that’s one of the things that ultimately led to closing my chapters at Accenture where I think that there were things when you go through a 100,000 person performance review perspective. You get, you get three strengths and you get three weaknesses cause that’s the way the template looks. You don’t always feel like the team leads or your leaders are saying, you’re really good at this. I want to figure out how to 100 X you doing that.

[00:29:40] Scott Cesen: So I think in terms of personal satisfaction at work and leadership development or team development, find out what makes people perform their best and amplify the crap out of it. And what they don’t do nearly as well, figure out where that, what level that needs to get to, or how do you make that not something that takes away from the team? But steer away from it because it’s not something that they’re ever going to lean into and say, Hey, that what what was my weakness is not my greatest strength in most cases, from my experience.

[00:30:09] Ron Laneve: As you mentioned before, go find the person who’s going to support you and help you grow. Challenge you to be better and challenge you to really expand on the things that you’re really good at and recognize the things that you’re good at, as opposed to just thinking about maybe themselves or them getting to the next level.

[00:30:26] Scott Cesen: Yeah, totally agree. We participate in a lot of groups. Our circle contains a lot of our fraternity brothers. My wife is in a group called YPO. I get exposed to another small circle there. There’s a number of these small circles. I don’t feel like historically, I’ve done a good enough job to tap into those for how do you really leverage those as your, circle of influence to work through challenges or problems.

[00:30:50] Scott Cesen: We tend to go to our job to come back to socialize with our friends. They’re all these compartmentalized things. Whereas I’ve realized in the last couple of years and where I’ve really been able to tap into that is to take my greatest friends and to be most vulnerable with them about things I’m working through or challenged by and getting their advice because they’ve either been through them or at least understand enough about me to try and give me advice or context of like, hey, I know you so I think this would be a good approach for you. You should be thinking about it this way. To your point, those are the people that believe in you the most. So they’re most incented to see you succeed or navigate that situation and get from point A to point B, whether that’s a dark place to a great place, whether that’s from good to great, whatever that’s going to be. You have your circle, of folks who are really going to advocate for you and try and push you through those things.

[00:31:43] Ron Laneve: Last thing I want to, I want to cover, Scott, is I know you’re very well read. I know you’re A very, consistent consumer of, of podcasts. Can you, , drop a handful of those, on my audience here and what, what books have been most impactful to you or do you want to share, as well as, as podcasts?

[00:32:01] Scott Cesen: I’ll start with books. Cause I think really there’s, one book and then maybe one collection of books that I think have been very helpful. From an overall leadership philosophy or galvanizing, galvanizing, galvanizing. Personal philosophy is Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership.

[00:32:15] Scott Cesen: That’s a book that I read whenever that came out and it’s probably aged by now. I don’t know if it’s five or 10 years old at this juncture. but that book really hit home for me in terms of how, both the SEAL community operated and then how those things apply to business, I had always held. the military in high regard, my father and older brother were in the military. I’ve just always had a lot of respect for those guys. That book was written in a way that was super consumable. Jocko would tell a war story and then he would talk about how they , what their tactic was to be successful in that war story. The third component of that was how does that apply to business? I just thought that that format was very consumable for me and the messages he was, he was delivering and why they worked both in battle and their application to business really hit home. Commander’s intent and being, and being directive over prescriptive or keeping things simple because I on a battlefield, it’s hard to communicate. It’s very important to do things in a simple way so they don’t get garbled or in the absence of a clear path forward, you still have to move forward, but what can you do?

[00:33:13] Scott Cesen: Just take a smaller step. If you look at it from a business if you’re forging into a new area and don’t necessarily know what’s the best decision for the business or for the team. Make a smaller decision assess that data and then move forward. And over time, once you’re more aligned or you have more clarity, then you can take bigger leaps forward and it’s just easy to do.

[00:33:33] Scott Cesen: If I look at that book as a business framework, that’s been very impactful for me also to the to the point of, there are so many business books and so many new pieces of information that are coming out that it’s impossible to keep pace with that.

[00:33:46] Scott Cesen: I’ll admit freely, I’m a cheater in terms of, I have a subscription to Blinkist. If there are hot books or new topics or ones that are even a bit aged that I don’t feel like I either need a refresher on or, or haven’t read I will listen to a 15 minute Blinkist and feel like you’ve grokked 80 percent of what you need out of that book without having to invest a ton of time. I’m definitely a great book starter. I don’t know that I’m a great book finisher. So having something like Blinkist is very advantageous.

[00:34:12] Scott Cesen: The other collection of books. I referenced EOS before so if there’s any folks, Who are listening to your podcast who are not familiar with EOS? That’s Entrepreneurial operating system is the acronym. The first book was called Traction I think that’s by Gino Wickman and then there’s some ancillary books around that.

[00:34:29] Scott Cesen: Rocket Fuel, Process is another one that the collection. Those books are, are really good in terms of having a business framework, of how to operate.

[00:34:37] Ron Laneve: Thanks for your time. And, , like I said, I couldn’t imagine a better way to, to wrap up this, this series than with yourself. So thanks a lot.

[00:34:46] Scott Cesen: Yeah. Thanks Ron. I super enjoyed doing it and I’m very excited to see what, what chapters lie ahead of you as well.

[00:34:51] Ron Laneve: Appreciate it. Talk to you soon.

[00:34:53] Scott Cesen: Take care.

December 18, 2024