WonderTour

Let's start with a big question about leadership from the movie Die Hard.

Brian, talk to me about Hans Gruber and why Hans Gruber is actually a really good leader.

This is gonna be so much fun.

We're doing our leaders series where we're examining leadership lessons from the other
angle of maybe people who finally don't succeed typically in our movies.

And yeah, and I would love to assert that Hans Gruber is possibly the most skilled and
competent leader in all of movie villaindom.

And that's partly why he's such a great character.

Like that's why everybody loves him so much, right?

So in the original Die Hard movie, is...

Aged quite thoroughly now, but it's still quite entertaining.

Hans rolls in at the head of a team that has a very clear and incredibly detailed plan
with a lot of nuance to it.

He's assembled this really cool team.

There's a variety of skill sets on the team.

They're rolling in with a very clear long -term mission that they're not telling everybody
about.

And then some subterfuge and obfuscation and some distractions that they are telling
everybody about.

And they're super focused and everybody seems committed to the plan.

And it's...

It's fun to watch him for most of this movie be hyper competent and then it's fun to watch
him sort of descend into reactivity mode.

But I would argue that based on the level of planning and skill that this, you know, that
Hans displays, he basically deserves to win.

But I would argue that based on the level of planning and skill that this, you know, that
Hans displays, he basically deserves to win.

Like the only reason that he doesn't succeed at the thing that he's trying to do is that
he comes up against somebody who does increasingly ridiculous superhuman things.

in the context of a completely ridiculous superhuman movie, of course.

yeah, Hans deserves to win.

He should have walked out of there and be sitting on the beach, earning 20 % somewhere
right now.

I think it's interesting to think about Hans from the team perspective.

And I know we'll talk about this a little bit, but he is a type of leader who builds a
organization around him of people who are more competent than him, which is something that

we rarely see because it takes somebody who has some level of humility to do that and who
also has a level of trust in the mission in the process, especially if you're going to be

somebody like Hans who has very low morals and is willing to.

do just about anything in order to accomplish the mission.

It's like when you're a Sith Lord, for example.

Like if you, if the morals are so low that you're willing to do whatever it takes to
accomplish the mission, then it's kind of risky to have people who are more competent than

you around you because I mean, assumedly, if you need to be sacrificed in order to
accomplish the mission, they're going to do that.

you around you because I mean, assumedly, if you need to be sacrificed in order to
accomplish the mission, they're going to do that.

You know, they'll just take your share and divide it up evenly.

Yes.

Yeah, so I love that you brought Darth Vader in here, because we did our, you know, our
last couple episodes on Vader as a villain.

And as a, as a middle manager, as a character, Vader is kind of the anti -Hans Gruber,
right?

Vader is all about himself.

He's all about his own power.

He's all about his own motives.

He's all about protecting his secret knowledge.

And he's, and he displays very little engagement with the stormtroopers.

He's just kind of going off and doing his thing.

Whereas what we see is, you know, Hans has clearly built this

team of diverse skills that are better than him at specific things.

He's got a technical person and he's got a very American seeming front man and he's got
people that can do explosives and he's got people that are hyper violent.

So he's kind of, he's got this diverse team around him and he's not intimidated by having
specialists that are outside of his area.

And he's made the incredibly detailed plan, which also we never see Darth Vader doing.

He's looking over the hill.

He's thinking about the contingencies.

He's two steps ahead of everybody else for nearly the entire movie.

But also, he's not afraid to get his hands dirty.

He'll go down on the trenches with a team.

He'll go check on the explosives.

He does a lot of on the fly prioritizing, adapting to things that change.

He's calm, but he has a sense of urgency.

Like, he's actually pretty compelling.

He is, he is.

You can see in another world, if he doesn't have that fatal flaw in his morality and he
gets aligned with a mission that's honorable, maybe somehow Hans Gruber becomes the type

You can see in another world, if he doesn't have that fatal flaw in his morality and he
gets aligned with a mission that's honorable, maybe somehow Hans Gruber becomes the type

of leader who can, I don't know, be on the other side of history.

Right.

Or maybe if he just doesn't run into a John McClane on particularly bad day.

or at least he could he could get rich and accomplish his own mission

Yes, yes, like I said, I feel like he deserves to win, so.

All right, Brian, well, let's hit the intro here.

Hi, I'm Brian Nutwell.

And we are on a journey to learn how to lead wisely by becoming better leaders, touring
fantastic worlds and inspiring lore by going on this wonder tour.

We connect leadership concepts to story contexts because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast .com or by searching Lead Wisely on YouTube.

So yeah, think we let's let's so let's look at what Hans does particularly well, right?

So one of things that strikes me is watching this movie again for the hundredth time, but
recently, right, is that in a strange way, he's an extremely good judge of character.

He sizes people up very quickly.

He's clearly picked sort of broadly competent and committed people to work on his team.

But as he encounters other people in the course of the movie, he's

He very quickly decides how to take advantage of them, right?

He talks to the CEO or whatever is the president of the company, Takagi, and recognizes
that he's not going to cooperate.

So he just takes him out.

He talks to Holly, John's wife, and recognizes that she's very competent and uses her as a
voice to the team.

He talks to Ellis, the kind of smarmy lawyer that everybody hates, and immediately
assesses that he's completely incompetent and takes advantage of him, but then takes him

out.

And he handles the police and the FBI similar.

Like, so he's got a good sense of like, how to navigate the people that he encounters and
like what the best way is to manage them to achieve his games aim.

So what do you, how do you get to that point?

Like, what do you think he's, you know, is that an innate skillset or is that something
you can cultivate?

Like, what do you think he's, you know, is that an innate skillset or is that something
you can cultivate?

That's a good question because we all look at those leaders and think, well, that's the
type of leader that I'd like to be.

That's a good question because we all look at those leaders and think, well, that's the
type of leader that I'd like to be.

Regardless of my personality and my experiences, I would like to be the type of leader who
can operate at the edges.

Now, the challenge is we all have our own baggage and experiences and everything else that
keep us from being able to do that.

Some of us are more detail oriented, which...

makes it seem like we need to be involved in every nook and cranny of the plan and that we
need to micromanage to make sure that others are successful.

Others of us like to just operate at the highest of levels in the vision and the strategy.

And when we're operating up there, just, we don't need to understand anything about the
specialists.

We just have to trust that they can complete their processes.

And what we see is in order to be able to pull together these competencies, you have to be
able to do some of each.

To me, the only way that I find to be able to do that is you have to just cultivate strong
relationships with people who are more skilled than you.

And it can be within your team, within your organization, or outside your team or
organization.

I don't know what it is about me, but I want to get fast feedback on anything I do.

And I want to get it from the smartest person who knows the most about the things that I'm
trying to test, build, present.

tell a story, whatever it is, right?

I want that feedback early on.

And so I have to surround myself with people who are better than me at almost everything.

Otherwise, who is going to give me that feedback to let us know, hey, is the new strategy
that we came up with actually a good strategy or is it just good for where we're at

currently?

Is it just good given where we're coming from the previous strategy we had?

You only have that if you have somebody who knows

the technical side of whatever it is you're trying to build or do, who understands the
financial side of what you're doing, who understands the relational side of what you're

doing, who understands how to develop an organization and how to develop leaders and skill
sets.

doing, who understands how to develop an organization and how to develop leaders and skill
sets.

That's awesome.

No, you said a couple of things in there that I really like.

The idea of surrounding yourself with competence intentionally, I think works at a couple
of levels, right?

It works on the team level of like, I want to have people that are very good at individual
things so that the team has a broadly diverse skill set and can attack more complex

problems.

But also I want to...

socially or professionally surround myself with people that maybe don't have a reporting
responsibility or aren't directly on my team or aren't even in my area, but who have an

approach to the world or a skillset or a viewpoint that I respect that can sort of provide
context for me.

It's just, like you said, it's a way of making our brains bigger, right?

Like, I don't have to understand everything if I have good mentors, if I have good
advisors, if I have good reference points.

But to me, both of those things go back to the ego.

Right.

Go back to what we've talked about in the past of like, if you think that you're Luke
Skywalker and you're the hero and you're going to solve all the problems, if you think

that you're John McClane, then you may or may not be asking for help.

But if you think that your job is to be the mentor and to help others and to learn from
others and sort of, you know, help push things forward.

If it's not about you being personally awesome, but it's about understanding the world,
then you can sort of let go of that, you know.

the intimidation or the resentment or the one -upmanship that goes with like, I have to
invest in all the things.

Yeah, think Hans does a good job of that.

Like you said in the intro, he has these people who each have their own unique skill set.

The one guy is much better technically than he is.

And he trusts that guy.

He's not like second guessing.

No, you should be able to cut those locks faster, which is what you sometimes get with
leaders.

No, that's a really good point.

that's a good interaction where he's like, okay, so I brought you here to do this special
thing.

You can do the special thing.

you know, and the deal's like, yes, it's going to take me this long to do this and this
long to do the other part.

And then this is the part that I can't do that I need help with.

It's like, okay, as a leader, I'm going to go work on that.

Like I got a plan for the part that I didn't, you know, that you aren't reasonably able to
do.

Right.

And so that...

This whole plan, like the whole thing of what they're trying to accomplish, which turns
out to be just a heist, like they're just trying to steal an extremely large amount of

money, right?

He's the leader who's in the position of looking over the hill, right?

Like I see down the road, these are the things that need to happen in the order to get us
to the place that we want to be.

And here's the roadblocks we've got to overcome.

And I've got a plan to attack each one of those.

And I'm going to bring in the right people or arrange the circumstances so that those
individual components can happen in the right order.

Like that's actually, that's really powerful.

And that's not, like you say, when, when we come from a point of being a specialist, when
we come from a point of being hyper competent at a specific thing, that's not necessarily

what we're naturally good at, but it is achievable.

If you are, if you dedicate yourself to like, I don't have to be good at all the things,
but I do have to be good at zooming out and looking over the hill and understanding

context, like get your experts involved, get your advisors involved.

Do the homework, do your studies, read your magazines, whatever it is.

That's achievable.

We aren't all gonna be Oppenheimer from one of our previous episodes where he was both the
visionary and maybe individually better at physics than everybody else in the Los Alamos

lab.

That's maybe not a thing you can aspire to be is to be the smartest person in the room who
also has the biggest picture.

That's a little crazy.

But the idea that you can...

Use your technical base or your whatever existing competence you have, and then start to
zoom out and use the, and be the one that provides context and to be the one that does

some planning and to be the one that does the research like any of us could do.

think that's good, Brian.

I think we'll flush that out even a little bit more as we get going here into our
mountaintop and practical applications.

So why don't we kick this over to our mountaintop?

Can you set us up here for this scene?

Right.

So in the movie context, they're trying to break into this incredibly secure vault that
has multiple layers of locks and they have a password to get through one thing and then

they have a bunch of mechanical things that they have to get through.

But the problem is they're in this giant building and this thing has got an
electromagnetic lock, which sounded really cool in 1984, whenever this movie came out.

And you can't possibly do anything about it because it's powered by the city
infrastructure to the whole building.

And you can't possibly do anything about it because it's powered by the city
infrastructure to the whole building.

And so the specialist is unable to deal with that problem.

You can get them to the point of that of that wicked, but then you can't get them through
that.

And so like, what are we going to do?

This is going to take a miracle to solve this problem.

So what we see in the movie is that this is a foreseeable problem.

It's a difficult thing, but it's a foreseeable problem.

And they describe the solution in the setup of the problem.

Like, well, we can't do anything about it because the power is connected to the city grid.

So what we find out in the course of the movie was that despite the fact that they are
just there for a heist,

Hans has been messaging to the outside world the whole time that they're terrorists, that
they want their revolutionary brothers in arms freed, and that they're punishing the

company for its sins, and they've got all these political aspirations.

And so what that does is it brings in the FBI.

And the FBI has a standard terrorism playbook, part of which is to cut the power to the
supply of wherever they're hanging out so that they're sitting in the dark and they're

scared.

So, you know, he's seeing far enough over the hill that he's like, OK, you know, I've got
your miracle right here.

I've got the FBI.

That's good because it connects back to what you keep saying here.

She's definitely going to be one of our key takeaways.

The job of the leader is to see over the hill and to see over the hill sometimes requires
diligence and just effort being put in to like research and endeavor.

It takes that right.

But it also takes collaboration because no one person can see over the hill.

And this is definitely applicable as we look at business and technology.

Nobody has enough information to just be able to figure out where the roadmap should go,
whether it's a product roadmap and how are we going to develop out this solution that

we're working on or whether it is like an overall business strategy or even just your
life.

If you just look at me individually, like where do I want to go in life?

I am not by myself suitable and where I need to be three years, five years, 10 years from
now because I have not yet lived.

that part of life.

I would be much better off, and nor do I have all the information about where the world,
the external environment is going.

I'd be much better off to seek counsel from others to be able to, as you put it, see over
the hill.

Right.

And as we're talking about this, it kind of occurs to me that we talked a little bit
about, you know, judging character and understanding other people's sort of motivations

and sizing up, you surround yourself with competent people, then you'll recognize
competence when you see it.

But I think the other thing that Hans is displaying, which is, you know, not entirely, not
entirely reasonable for us to do all the time, but he's very good at understanding

motivations, not just at a personal level, but at an organizational level.

Like he understands how the police are going to behave.

understands that the FBI are going to behave.

He understands how the hostages are going to behave.

Like he's trying to sort of manage his way through like understanding these not just
relationships, but the intrinsic motivations and how can you leverage those to get in the

direction that he wants to go.

He understands these, you know, like intrinsic motivations that these different groups
have or these different organizations have and how we can leverage those to get where he

wants to go.

And so the, having the FBI cut the power for him and solve his problem when they think
they're solving their problem is a classic, like, you know, Dale Carnegie, you know, seven

habits of effective leaders negotiation synergy thing, but it's pretty funny to watch on.

That is good.

yeah, like you said, you can't do that all the time.

There's not always going to be the opportunity where you're like, well, we really need
this wall knocked down, but we don't have the right, like specialized resources to knock

this wall down.

But what if the people who are in charge of holding the wall up, knock the wall down for
us?

And that is, and that is very effective in change management.

That's exactly what you need to do sometimes.

It's like sometimes there is a upholder of the current way of doing things.

And that person is very staunchly defendant of the way we do things today.

And you come in and you're like, okay, I'm not going to be able to just straight up
convince you that there's a better way.

It's not a person who, and again, this isn't a knock on them.

It's just not a person who values logic as the highest form of being convinced of
something.

And so instead.

might just not have the same motivations you do, right?

They might not value the goal that you're going after.

so instead, is there another way?

Is there a way we can convince this person for a different reason that, like you said, is
their own motivation that they should knock the wall down and then now we just have a way

we could just drive right in with the new ideas and plant them.

So this is the whole, this is the whole inception movie, right?

This is the making somebody else think it's their idea, which is a basic negotiating
technique.

He's also got a little bit of the Huckleberry Finn, like, you know, you you really want to
the fence for me situation going on here.

So yes, you got to respect that.

And like I said, at that level with that level of drama, of course, maybe not, isn't,
isn't a practical win that you're going to get a lot of time, but the idea that you're

playing other people's motivations so that they align with yours, you know,

even in this case somewhat cynically, but the idea that you would be sensitive to what
other people want and be able to take advantage of that insight, those are attributes that

would make someone a skillful leader.

And I think the last thing we need to say here, of course, is that we spent a lot of time
in the last 113 episodes developing this context of the magnanimous leader.

And of course, Hans Gruber is not that.

Right?

We have the basic problem that he is deeply immoral and he's perfectly happy to, you know,
lie, cheat, steal and murder on his way to getting his goals.

But the aspirational part of it, the fun thing about studying him, right, is that he's got
this big picture, he's broken it down to individual chunks, and he's sort of figured out

how to solve the individual problems.

Like we have to get into the building and we have to lock down the building and then we
have to get hostages and then we have to...

you know, get into the vault and then we have to figure out a way to get out without
everybody knowing that we've gotten away with all the money.

Like, so he's trying to solve these individual problems at a modular level without maybe
being the specialist that can solve all of them himself.

And that's a, that is a thing that you can aspire.

Definitely and we'll talk in the next episode a little bit about how that falls apart the
Perfect execution of the plan when it starts to fail then what do you do?

But for now, let's talk about the practical application of this episode We've started to
get in on this a little bit but for practical application How is Hans Gruber a good

leader?

Hans Gruber is a good leader because he's able to see the big picture and he's able to
break it into actionable components That's what you're

telling us right Brian and then he does not need to execute each of those actionable
components for himself.

He is able to leverage others who are better even at executing.

He's able to leverage teams not just individuals to execute on those individual
components.

The natural state of a diverse team with diverse skill sets and viewpoints is that they're
going to be working on misaligned tasks.

They're just going to go off and do things that they see.

So the role of the leader, your job, if you're in charge of this diverse team that you've
built, is to make sure that they're all bought into a high level mission and to make sure

that they understand the connection between the building blocks so that they are confident
that if they go do their thing, that the other pieces will fall into place.

not the natural state of the world.

Like that's a thing that takes quite a bit of energy to manage, but nobody else can do
that except the person in leadership role.

And oftentimes we find that either ourselves or others aren't doing that in a leadership
role.

And that's when you see misalignment in the organization.

There's misalignment for many, many reasons, but one of the most common ones is the leader
is trying to do too much or the leader is not communicating well enough to each of the

individuals who have the actual capacity and capability to do the things to be able to
execute on it.

I've seen that a million different times where the leader is extremely competent, maybe a
Darth Vader type, right?

Who can go in and solve the problem and get things done.

But then all they do is spend their time managing all the exceptions because they're not
properly communicating and managing the change that they're trying to implement.

And so they're constantly getting pushback at every single angle, like, or they're getting
not even just pushback, but sometimes from their own teams, they're getting opposition

within the teams because the teams

don't clearly understand what their role is and what other people's roles are.

So I feel like that's one thing we can take away here.

Right.

Yeah.

And especially with people that come from technical background or from a specialist
background, the failure mode is you turn into a firefighter, you turn into a super

specialist, and you just want to keep chasing reactively individual problems.

And so, yeah, we don't see that here.

We see Hans Gruber's really good at not getting dragged into specialist tasks.

He's willing to get his hands dirty.

He's willing to go do individual tasks where he needs to help out and show the team that
he's in.

But he's not dragged into that.

He's very focused on like, anyway, our big goal is still this.

So we still need to get this done.

Like just lock this off, get this out of the way so we can go work on our problem.

So that's, you know, he's good at that.

But the other failure mode of leaders can be being too, too zoomed out, like, and not
understand where individual pieces of the plan aren't working.

Right?

So, okay, great.

I've got a perfect plan.

I understand how the blocks fall fit together.

If block three, the specialist in that role.

isn't getting it done or doesn't understand how it's fitting or is causing trouble or
whatever.

If you just assume that everything is fine because your plan is perfect, that's also not
okay.

That also doesn't get you the job.

That's what we're going to talk about in the next episode is what happens when the plan
falls apart.

What happens when your opponent is able to get ahead of you and be more proactive than you
are.

And this is a natural ebb and flow of competition, whether it's competition in business,
whether it's just opposing values or views, opposing ways of leadership.

There's always going to be this natural ebb and flow.

And that will cut off for today will be what we'll talk about in the next episode.

It was fun to examine all of the leadership traits that Hans Gruber does exhibit in this
movie because like I said, he does things well enough that you almost feel like he should

have gotten away with it.

But of course he doesn't.

And so in our next episode, we'll talk about like, why doesn't Hans win?

Like what is that failure?

So what are our key takeaways?

So we talked about the leader's job is to be the one that looks over the hill and to
identify the plan in its large modular blocks and figure out how the relationships between

those blocks work and to keep everybody focused on those elements because nobody else can
do that.

And then having done that, bring the right specialists in, get the team together so that
you have the right pieces in place, whether they're on your team or whether you're

leveraging other organizations to do the things that need to be done.

Right?

So kind of have the, understand how to get all the individual challenges through and then
be very hands -on in sort of trying to manage the exceptions as they happen, but not like

I personally have to solve all the problems, but like, let's just make sure everybody's
staying focused on the big picture.

Like those are things that think we, that we can say he does really well, including the,

Experience to judge motivation, judge competence, judge your interactions with people,
judge your interactions with other organizations as to like what's going to go well.

Yeah, he's able to read the situation really well.

We didn't talk about how to do that necessarily, but he's also able to read character.

And we kind of talked about that.

We talked about how that's a really tough thing to learn and you just grow it over time.

And some people innately can do it better than others, but really the best way to be able
to pick up on what other people are doing and learn from them is just to surround yourself

with super competent people.

Right, you get two benefits from that.

You get the, have competent people to advise me and help me, but you also get the, just
start to understand what that looks like.

Right, so I'm more familiar with what the modes look like of somebody that is confident
and knows what they're doing and what wisdom sounds like.

And the more you surround yourself with them, when you get something that isn't quite
right, you're more sensitive.

Good stuff, Brian.

Alright, this was fun.

Alright, I'm looking forward to episode two.

Why doesn't Hans Gruber get to win?

He should be sitting on a beach earning 20%.

I'm still kind of mad about that.

Alright, looking forward to that.

We hope you guys had fun with us this week and you'll come back and join us for that one
next week.

In the meantime, just remember, as always, as Hans learns, character is destiny.