WonderTour

Hello and welcome back once again to Lead Wisely by WonderTour podcast.

We are this week once again talking about the Mandalorian Disney Plus Star Wars TV series.

This episode 128, we're going to talk about season two, episode seven, The Believer.

In this episode, hero Din Djar and the Mandalorian has collected a group of heroes around
him.

And their higher level goals are trying to get back to rescue the child, the baby Yoda
character that everybody loves.

And so they, he's been captured by the Imperials and they need to go find out where he's
being held.

So the framing of this episode is that they have to take an ex-prisoner named Mayfeld
along with them because he knows something about Imperial codes and they're going to break

into this mining facility and plug into a terminal and look up the location.

So

That's the challenge for this episode.

But starting right off, though, with one of our tough questions about leadership, what we
see at the beginning of this episode is that already, we're in middle of the second season

here, and our hero has collected sort of a motley crew of impressive individuals who are
really bad at following rules.

And as we talked about in our own last episode,

one of the leadership superpowers, one of the things that Mandalorian is good at is that
despite this powerful framing of this is the way, these are the processes, these are the

rules, he's actually really good at looking at his principles and zooming out and deciding
when the rules are not the correct thing to follow.

And of course it's Star Wars, right?

So the rebels are always the good guys.

And so following rules is generally not the right path in this environment.

But in this episode, we've got...

Fennec Shand, who's sort of a bounty hunter assassin character.

We've got Cara Dune, who is a former drop trooper of some sort.

We've got the Mandalorian himself, And then we have Boba Fett, who is, of course, famous
from the original series.

And none of these people are exactly...

still plugged into the organizations they started in, all these people are sort of
outliers.

They're all highly skilled.

They're all a little fractious and hard to manage.

They're like a, a pretty rough team to try to keep pointed in one direction.

And none of them are particularly good at following rules.

So my question is, why are they following him?

How do you put yourself in a position of leading without authority, especially of leading
extraordinary principled individuals without authority?

Why would they follow him?

Why are they there?

So Drew, what do you think about this?

How do you lead without authority?

How do you put yourself together with a dream team when they don't work for you and you're
not paying them and you don't have any authority over

Hmm.

That's great.

And that's something that I fortunately had a good amount of experience with over the
course of my career so far.

How do you lead people towards these crazy audacious goals?

And you don't necessarily have control of those resources.

You're not managing these people.

You don't have direct authority.

And honestly, this is basically always the case.

That's the thing I want to frame here is this isn't like a specific situation where like,
this time it's like, no, it doesn't matter if you're, if you're a VP of a certain line of

business or something like that, you still have to work with people on the support
functions.

You still have to get the support of the people above you.

You still have so many other people that you have to influence, but you don't have power
over necessarily.

So you always have to lead without authority and developing that skill is

critical for leadership, right?

So we look at the example of how does Din do this.

And I want to contrast this with, if you'll recall, I think it's like episode five of
season one.

It's the first episode that we see Mayfield, the Bill Burr character, right?

He was introduced in season one and they had this bounty hunter kind of mercenary get
together to perform a task and it kind of goes wrong and everybody's not.

Yeah.

fiasco.

It is right.

And you can tell at that point that they're not bought into a shared mission.

They don't have any shared purpose.

There's no shared meaning between them.

They're all just trying to accomplish this transactional thing.

And so I want to contrast this with what we're seeing here where Din has through his
character, through following the way, right?

He is living out his process.

Every day he wakes up and he puts on the mask.

Every day he wakes up and he figures out how he's going to take care of the Foundling
Grogu.

You know, he figures out how he's going to continue to serve his Mandalorian sect.

He figures out how he's going to continue to do that while being a bounty hunter,
basically, and continuing to follow that code.

So it's awesome to see how he wakes up and does that, but he does it with integrity,
right?

He's consistent.

He's nothing, if not consistent with people, and he's always building towards a bigger
mission.

He's establishing empathy and he's having compassion on people.

We see this.

in his dealings with Cara Dune in season one, right?

Why does she build up trust with them?

We see this with Boba Fett when we get Boba Fett introduced in season two and in the Boba
Fett series, he's consistently understanding people.

He's understanding what they value and he's trying to find shared meaning between what
they value and what he values.

And sometimes that shared meaning is just there, right?

Sometimes you just to throw a different example out, sometimes you get into the sales call
and you're the salesperson.

And it just so happens that the person that you're selling to on the other side has some
shared example.

I always go to the Arrested Development, know, fake example of Sugarfoot where Michael
pretends that he shares Sugarfoot with this old guy who he's trying to sell something to.

And it ends up falling on its face.

But it's like that shared experience is valuable.

So that's that's one thing that we can do is find the existing shared experiences.

by really serving and listening to others.

The other thing we can do is by living and being the light of the way, basically, which is
what he is, right?

He is the radiance of the way in the world.

has the shiny armor and he sticks out in a fight and people just gravitate towards him.

He's the magnet for the magnanimous leader in this universe.

And when you operate that way, yes, it's really hard.

Yes, you're going to fail.

Din fails too, but it slowly pulls people in and slowly people start to just 1 % of the
time say, maybe there's something to this way.

Maybe I'm never going to wear the Mandalorian mask, but maybe there's something to the way
that Din conducts himself that I should try to do as well.

Yeah, no, that's really great.

there's something magnetic about, you know, Din as a leader and we've all seen those, like
the people that you see in your organization is just like, wow, I don't know.

You know, I don't, I don't work for that person, but like I, I'm feeling what they're
selling, right?

I see that they're trying to accomplish things that I want to have accomplished in the
world.

And I want to see how I can get aligned with that.

And I think there's a couple elements to what he does with these different characters and
even in this episode, right?

we see shared experiences where they've been through things together, where they have
similar problems, right?

We see personal exchanges, right?

Where he's given somebody grace when they didn't necessarily deserve it, Fennec Shand and
he had a chance to murder each other and then they didn't, right?

They decided to, that they had more in common than they thought, There is...

Appeal to principle there is what I'm trying to do is to save this orphan from the, from
the Imperial Nazi like characters, that's, that's pretty easy to get on board with, right?

and the, another flavor of that is sort of this shared opposition, like, we all, we all
agree that this thing in the world is bad.

And so we're going to fight it together.

Right.

Those are all ways that you can bind people to you, even if, even if you're not paying
them, even if you're not able to tell them what to do.

Right.

And we see all those sort of factors in play.

But for me, the crux of it, I think that is just that he is compelling in his personal
actions.

And as we talk about, his character is intact, right?

He is very consistent in his actions.

even when he's double crossing, he's been double crossed by the male failed character and
puts him in jail in a previous episode.

And this time he's like, okay, well, anyway, you have useful skills and I have this
important thing that I want to accomplish.

So I'm going to arrange to...

break a bunch of rules to get you out of jail and like, okay, what, you know, I just need
you to help me do this good thing in the world.

And I'm going to put myself at great personal risk over and over again.

I'm going to, you're going to watch me breaking my own.

Brittle artificial rules in service of this not brittle, not artificial, very genuine high
level goal.

You're just going to watch me doing that over and over again at close range.

And the people that are exposed to that, you know, many of them are susceptible to like.

Wow, I'd like to be more like that.

I'd to be more involved in that.

I'd like to help that happen in the world.

I'd like to not be the kind of person who just like, lets bad things happen.

you get the dream team pulled together, even though they're kind of a band of misfits.

That is what the dream team always is.

The dream team is always, in my experience, a band of misfits.

It is a band of people who were searching for purpose or were searching for others that
had shared purpose with them.

And when you can finally get these people aligned, you are no longer afraid of the Empire,
right?

You can go in and you know that what you're doing, even if worst case scenario, you get
shot down, you know, in if when they go in with Den and Mayfield, like you're continuing

on.

the purpose and the mission.

And that's what it's about.

like finding those people and aligning with them, I love that that's kind of the first
takeaway is if you don't have authority in a situation, which again, we're saying you

rarely ever have enough authority to just get things done on that alone.

The solution is obvious.

Like you have to go empathize with people, have compassion for them, join their stories.

That's how Din is able to do this.

And then like you said, be magnanimous.

Like that's, you know, your character, your radiance.

Your glory that comes off of you as an individual is crucial in others buying into the
situation.

It doesn't mean we have to be perfect.

By no means are we saying that, but it does mean that doing things in a consistent way,
which is aligned with your values, which are providing value to other people, that's

something that people will want to be on board with.

They just want to be a part of your project.

They want to be listed as an advisor, as a sponsor, as a supporter of whatever it is
you're doing.

and they will one way or the other, they'll reflect your values back at you, right?

If you get in close contact with somebody and you demonstrate that the way that you work
is that you will use them for what they're good for and take advantage of them and drop

them in the moment that they're not useful, right?

Then they will a hundred percent take that lesson to heart, right?

They're like, all right, this is how I interact with this person.

Right.

And if you interact with them on the basis of like, I'm sincerely committed to this and I
am, you know, I'm going to, you know, at the point.

At my own personal expense, I'll make sure that you are at least taken care of, but really
I've got this higher level goal that I always refer back to.

Like not everybody will buy into that, but they will understand where you're coming from.

And the people that are of the character you want, the people that are aligned with you
will, will, will find you.

They'll stick around.

Yeah, you reverse the polarity, right?

You create a pole instead of a push.

Everybody's pushing the rock up the hill.

And that is a lot of times what it feels like, but where you can, the power to create that
pole.

And a lot of times that pole comes from who you are.

It comes from how you interact with others.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, I want to, I want to extend this conversation into maybe reflect back to our
contrasting between leadership and management after the intro.

hi, I'm Brian Notwell.

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Excellent.

All right.

So leadership and management.

We talk about this a lot, but I want to just touch on it in our framing here at Wunder
Tour.

Management is the discipline of taking a known process and a known set of problems and
executing it skillfully.

Like guiding a team to do the thing that we know how to do without messing it up too
badly.

Right?

And this is common and this is very important.

We're not trying to disparage management at all.

Like this is, you know,

When you get an organization that is tuned well to accomplish something in the world and
you can continue to turn that crank and continue accomplishing that thing in the world and

producing value, then great, you should do that.

And you should drive the errors to zero and you should make, you know, you should make the
thing run as smoothly as possible.

You should, you know, engage people in being good at their individual jobs.

When we say leadership in this context, we talk about...

The state of the world is not satisfactory.

There's a problem that we're trying to solve.

There is a mission that we need to accomplish that we don't know how to do.

That the path to achieving it is not clear.

In that situation where maybe it's not clear exactly what we're trying to do or how we're
going to get it done, where we need to break some rules, we need to make some new rules,

we need to discover some new knowledge, we need to take on some risk, that's when you need
leadership.

That's when you need a person who is comfortable outside of this is the way.

Right.

It was comfortable taking the framework of this is a way and extending it to new purposes.

and so there are, we talk about, there are leadership superpowers like compassion and map
making.

talk about a lot about character, about integrity of behavior and alignment of mission.

Like we use a lot of these words, but the, the fundamental thing is that like, what are we
trying to accomplish in the world?

And if that's not a thing that the world is naturally primed to produce, then that's when
you need a leader.

And that's, need a person who can articulate what you're trying to do is, and who can run
really hard at it.

that doing that with character, doing that with integrity, doing that with clear alignment
will naturally drag people, other people along in your wake.

Right.

And we, know, and not saying this, asserting that we are fabulous leaders, but that we
have been privileged to work with them and observe them and to try to, you know, copy your

shadow or duplicate some of the successes we've gotten to be involved in.

But exactly as you were saying at the beginning, Drew, it's kind of amazing when you start
just making that noise of like, Hey, here's a problem and not just a problem, but a

principle, like a good thing that we could have that we don't yet have today that our
process isn't producing.

And I'm committed to getting there.

And I'm just like going to say it out loud.

I'm just going to shout it from the rooftops and like, Hey, does anybody else see this?

Anybody else want to be in on this?

Like anybody else can help me figure this out.

It's amazing.

The people that are dissatisfied come out of the woodwork.

The people that are,

don't feel that their full potential has been expressed.

The people that feel like the rules are fine, but not getting all the things done that
they could potentially want to get done.

They just show up and they start coming to meetings and they start calling you and they
start sending you their ideas and they start propelling little pieces of it forward on

their own.

It's kind of magical.

It's kind of amazing.

Yeah, you move from a push mechanism to a pull mechanism, right?

The magnetism kind of reverses instead of at first it's, and we're talking about this in
the practical application.

At first it's you pushing everything.

And then eventually like things just start coming to you or people just start doing things
on their own without even consulting you towards the overall goal.

And that's when you know, like the movement is starting to take off and it's more than
each of us, which is exactly what it's supposed to be.

Right.

And so let's bring it back to this episode and kind of working our way up to the mountain
top here.

And so let's bring it back to this episode and kind of working our way up to the mountain
top here.

So we're in the situation where they've got this heist going on where two of them are
trying to sneak into the base and the others are going to have some support roles.

And this sort of naturally happens.

Like Din doesn't like, you know, they don't have like a big map and a big plan that they
write down and he doesn't assign tasks to people and they're not communicating very

clearly.

It's like, okay, you two are going to go roughly do this part of the job.

Go figure it out.

You're going to do this other part of the job.

Go figure it out.

I'm going to do this part of the job, even though it's going to cause me to break some of
my own rules.

I got to take my helmet off.

the stupid uniform and go drive the truck with this guy that I don't trust, right?

know, Din Djarin himself, the mandalorian himself kind of takes on some risks and breaks
some own rules because the mission's important to him, right?

And so he's already seeing the team is empowered.

He's already seeing that the team is able to just go independently, you know, be
individual contributors and be aligned with the mission, like, because he's gotten to that

point.

But now they're kind of to the crux of the mission, the dangerous hard part of it.

And our hero is in the truck with the Mayfald character who has been shanghaied into this
out of prison and is a known sort of double-crossing bandit, Imperial sharpshooter, like

not a guy, very high character so far as we've seen him.

And as things do in these stories, right?

Things don't go perfectly well.

It's reasonably successful.

get into the base.

they're set up for what they want to accomplish, but they keep having to break their own
rules.

They keep having to improvise and it's basically not going very well.

So Drew, what's our, what's our mountain top scene for this episode?

All right, so our mountaintop is kind of the obvious mountaintop in season two, episode
seven here.

This is an awesome episode.

They're breaking into the Imperial base and when they get in there, they have this
approach that they're going to go steal some information out of the computer terminal and

they're going to have Mayfeld go and do it because he can log in and look like an Imperial
and Din's going to go in as backup with him.

But when he gets in there, he runs across Mayfeld runs across a former Imperial officer
that was over him.

named Valen Hess and so his immediate response is he wants to back out and save his own
hide.

He's like, I don't think I can go in there.

Like that's going to be taking on too big of a risk.

even before

recognize me, I'm gonna get in trouble, I don't wanna do this.

Yeah, and even before this, while they're on the way in, in this armored truck, they're
having a conversation between Din and Mayfield.

And Mayfield basically tries to tell Din that, yeah, yeah, I get it.

You have in different words, but you have your way.

I have my way.

They're basically the same thing.

he's like, everybody's just in the end, they're going to have to do what's best for
themselves.

he's basically giving him a hard time over having such a principled approach to
everything.

And so that's the setup job for us finding ourselves here where, of course, we have the
Bill Burr character not following his or following exactly what he said he was going to

do, which is save his own hide.

Dan does the script flip in this situation.

He's like, well, then I'm going to go in and I'm going to do it.

He's like, well, you're not going to be able to do it because you have to take your helmet
off in order to access the terminal.

And Dan's like, well, that's what I'm going to do then.

And so he goes in.

And he does it right.

He accesses the terminal and he's there.

He gets the information back, but then he's getting questioned by this Imperial officer,
Valin Hess.

As he's getting questioned by him, Din doesn't have a good response when he gets asked
what his trooper number is and who he's with and stuff.

so Mayfeld comes in, takes the personal risk, enters the conversation and he saves Din.

He provides like the backstory that he needs to cover him.

They get invited over because apparently they did a good job dropping off this transport
and so they're sitting at the table talking.

And then what happens, Valin Hess is this, you know, pompous Imperial guy.

And so he's talking about how, yeah, we had to sacrifice five or 10,000 people, but you
know, it was all in purpose of the system and you know,

glorious, yeah, we murdered all those people, but it glorious because they should be
honored to be sacrificed on the altar of the greater good, yeah, of order, right?

Again, the Imperials love talking about order, this is Star Wars, so the rebels are always
the good guys, and the people that are enforcing the process are always the bad guys, but

yeah.

And then we have Mayfield who can't take it anymore.

You can see his face is changing.

It's like, and eventually he just pulls out his blaster and shoots Val and Hess.

You're like, okay, okay.

I get it.

And the bunch of course blows up the whole plan and now they got to move to plan B and get
out of there as fast as possible.

They got to shoot more people as a result of it.

So not quite the optimal way to approach the situation, Brian, but

What we want to talk about here is just expanding on what we talked about in our big
question to start off this episode, leadership by example, right?

Being magnanimous creates this poll, even when you're dealing with this former Imperial
sharpshooter who has very low morals and kind of just does what he has to to get by.

Even with him, we see that Din makes an impact.

And it's not like suddenly he becomes like Din and he dons the helmet and he's like, I
want to become a Mandalorian.

He just makes one decision and then he kind of halfway steps it back by shooting the guy.

But still, we see something in that.

Well, shooting bad guys is considered morally acceptable in the Star Wars universe, so
we'll gloss over that for the moment.

But yeah, what I love about this is that the Mayfeld character was carrying this intrinsic
conflict around with him the whole time, right?

He was in it for himself because he was dissatisfied with the state of the world.

He's like, well, that's just like bad things just happened and I had bad things happen to
me in my past and so I'm just going to take care of myself.

And we've seen that in his actions and it turns out that his backstory is

He was an Imperial and he was involved in a situation where the Imperials did something
reprehensible.

And so now he doesn't believe in that organization either.

So he just goes to, he logically derives like, well, there shouldn't be any rules.

I shouldn't follow anybody else because nobody can be trusted.

They're just out for themselves.

But proximity with the Mandalorian, proximity with a leader who is, you know,
self-sacrificing and magnanimous and aligned to a higher purpose and willing to risk

himself to make somebody else's life better.

like just shows him a different way of thinking about the world.

And so he's like, well, I could do that too.

Like there's no world in which outside of this mission Mayfeld's gonna like go find a way
to cripple the Imperial war effort, right?

There's no reason that there's no way he would ever put himself at risk to go do that,
even though he intrinsically wants to, even though he doesn't like them and you know, and

doesn't want them to succeed.

There's no way he's gonna take any effort to making that piece of the world better.

until he's put in the position of observing at close range what it looks like.

Right.

And then he's like, yeah.

pretty common trend that by association with these great characters, others are also able
to do something like by just macro, macro, right?

Darth Vader by association with Obi-Wan and with Luke, just by nearness to those guys is
able to in episode six, make that final decision to overthrow the emperor.

And this is why we see, self-sacrifice as one of our other leadership superpowers, right?

Is that we see this story all the time, right?

And of course, this is a story.

This is Star Wars.

This is an episode with laser blasts and, ships blowing up and, all those things, right?

So it's ridiculous and it's artificial.

But the reason we keep telling ourselves these stories, the reason that self-sacrifice
shows up in our stories of magnanimous leaders, the reason that,

the character that flips from being disillusioned to being principled is such a trope is
because it's a real thing.

Like I have seen this.

I have been on activities where you just give a little bit of a pressure relief valve.

You give people an opportunity to step outside of the process into what do you really
think we should be doing?

How would you really like to contribute to this company?

What would you really like to work on?

And you uncover this incredible wealth of energy.

You incredibly, this incredible wealth of dissatisfaction that can be channeled into
making something new.

And I've seen it happen.

I've seen people be like, you mean I could do something other than turn the crank.

Like I could do this other amazing thing.

And it's, it's really hard to manage that energy, but it's there.

So many people are just waiting for a leader to give them permission to be more than what
their job title says that they can do.

Right.

And if you can do that, then you can get like then all the make the grouchy, slightly
double crossing, untrustworthy, sarcastic Mayfeld's world.

Right.

Like a lot of them are just sort of waiting for somebody to give them permission to to
flip, right.

Given permission to be like, like I could just go do that.

you just went and did that, didn't you?

Holy crap.

the rules are there to make sure we don't screw up.

But the rules are not there for the principle.

Din has this moment in this scene where he's like, the rule is I don't ever take my helmet
off.

The principle is I have to go save this person's life.

And the only way I can do it is take my stupid helmet off and go look at this terminal,
right?

Like, okay, that's not a hard call.

If you got rule versus principle and you know which one you value, then you know what to
do.

And so we see that that, and that is contagious, right?

You know, you don't, you're not, he's not messaging.

You know, you don't, you're not, he's not messaging.

We should just always break the rules.

He's not messaging, we should just always do the thing that people tell us to do.

He's messaging, I'm very clear about my principles.

I'm staying aligned with my principles and sometimes the rules didn't take those into
account and we should update.

And you can too.

And that's the magnanimous leader aspect of it is, and you can too.

And I always say, and teach others to do likewise.

It is not to tell them to do exactly what you're doing in exactly that context, because
they have their own context, but instead to be developed in such a way where they learn

their own version of the leadership superpower that you have learned, if that's the right
thing for them to learn at the time.

And that's what Din does, right?

He's teaching the leadership superpower of integrity.

He's teaching, like you said, the superpower of purpose and vision.

that bill burr just doesn't have.

He doesn't, right?

He doesn't, like you said, he has dissatisfaction, but he doesn't have it aligned to a
mission.

And I think Brian, we've teased that we're to talk a little bit about practically, how do
you do this?

What are some examples where we do this?

Because I've had people who have been the din to my Mayfeld in my life.

Absolutely.

And then I've been able to be the din to other people's Mayfeld.

So looking at an example of how do we influence others?

Right?

Especially when we don't have authority, like we talked about at the beginning of the
episode, it's really critical to build a movement, You have to build this shared meaning

across people and these relationships across the nodes of a network, right?

That's how influence exists.

That's where influence basically resides is across the nodes of this network.

And so I'll just give an example from my life, right?

We had a mission, long ago at this point.

You

to build a data-driven organization, to build a company where people highly value data.

have strong individual capabilities to leverage data to be able to create unique solutions
that drive value to customers.

We have good data architectures that are cohesive and future-proofed.

We have self-service and empowerment so that anybody who wants to should have access to
the data that they need to be able to make their life and their job better.

And through this,

You know, we believe that the many are more powerful than the one that they're going to be
able to drive this.

And it started with just one, right?

It started with just one, you know, I, I, luckily I had mentors just kind of sitting there
helping me to navigate this, but they weren't data people.

They didn't really know how to navigate.

And then you build the two and then you build the six and then you build the 12 and you
just create the shared meaning and vision with people.

And I think most people don't believe that you can.

That's the limiting belief here.

Most people don't believe they're capable of being core to a movement.

They don't believe that whatever their mission is, is worthy of creating that network and
that movement.

And so I don't necessarily want to go into exactly how you build a network here because
it's different given the situation, but there's common trends, right?

And we talked about it a little bit with Dinh.

You're sowing into relationships that you don't necessarily know you're going to reap very
soon.

Mm-hmm.

people struggle with it.

If I have a position, then I can reap the rewards.

If I get promoted to a level where I have authority, then I can very clearly exact a
change within that scope of my control.

The network doesn't work like that.

It's not a clear input-output approach where I put my time in here and then I take it back
out over here, and then I can use it to buy whatever I want.

Yeah.

if you want to be a change agent in the organization, if you want to see something happen,
the first step, probably the only step that is common across all of them, right.

Is the scary one is that you have to be willing to go public.

You have to be willing to say out loud.

I am dissatisfied with this thing and I have an idea of what better it looks like.

And here's my idea.

Right.

And that's.

And that's a scary thing, right?

Your boss may or may not be supportive.

Your colleagues may or may not think you should be spending time on that.

People on other teams may or may not value it.

Like it might not work.

Like it's not, it's not guaranteed to succeed, but you will definitely not form a network
of like-minded people.

If you don't start with, this is my principle.

This is the thing that I suggest we could do, or here's the thing that I'm dissatisfied
about that I suggest we should work on.

if you start with that.

very respectfully from a point of principle, like, you know, I'm not, like this is so
stupid and you guys are all idiots and we should change.

like, I observed that we are not getting done this thing that we want to get done.

this is, we have this problem that we should all solve.

Like if you can get that out there in a way that is motivational, that is aspirational,
that is exciting, like, this is really cool.

I just, you know, does anybody else want to work on this thing with me?

This looks cool.

I'll, I'll do it in my free time.

I'll, we'll do meetings at the end of the day, right?

I'll, I'll think about it on the weekends.

I'll, you know, whatever.

Like, does anybody else want in on this?

You can start, right?

And then the people who are.

Subceptible to that will just show up.

Like they will just, they'll, they'll come to the meeting.

They will send you an email.

They will, you know, they will follow your project.

They will start creating artifacts.

Right.

And that's, and then you're not alone.

And then you have somebody to bounce ideas off of, and then you have, you know, you can
find out which of your ideas are terrible and who shouldn't, you know, or why they're not

going to work because you get other perspectives.

but you at least have the ability to then start sort of bouncing off of each other and
supporting each other.

And then when it comes time to engage a bunch of the different pieces of the organization,
you've got people in all the pieces of the organization and you've got levers and you've

got insights and you can maybe navigate more skillfully.

it's exciting, it has to start with the courage and the clarity of like, I don't know if
this is a good idea.

I don't know if anybody else agrees with me.

I'm going to go out and say it anyway.

I'm gonna run up the flagpole.

spend the effort, even though you might not get the reward back.

And that's the end of the story, right?

And the story's not over yet, but with that network, right, it grew to hundreds of active
members, thousands of people that are now in the community.

I'll say, I don't know how many of them are actually active there, but it has turned on so
many people and a number of them, it's changed their life, right?

They've changed their career.

They've done so many different things, but it started with.

just a belief that the system should be different, the world should be different, and we
should just start trying things and getting people together to solve it.

And now I'm in the midst of, I'm not gonna share this yet, because it's not even been
started yet, but starting another movement, starting another network.

And this time we're even more laser focused on what is the value to each individual in
this movement?

Why will they wanna be a part of it?

What will it do for them?

And then what is the value to the community?

What is the value to the overall network of the movement that we're starting?

And we're leveraging all the lessons that we've learned, we're leveraging things I'm
learning today as we talk about the Mandalorian.

So I think there's so much power in the story there and in thinking about it in this way
that it's even given me new ideas today,

Right.

Awesome.

Well, and just bring it back to our episodes, right?

To the Mandalorian is I think we have, you we see at the beginning of the, you know, of
our, of our previous episode where this is the way, right?

Follow the Mandalorian code, follow the bounty hunter code, follow the Imperial rules.

Those are, those are the rules that are in our environment.

our heroes just got some internal conflict.

He's like, this is the way it's not working for me.

This is the way it's not making the change.

It's not.

achieving the principles that it's there for, right?

And so he starts breaking the rules to achieve the principles, right?

And by the time we get to this point, season seven, know, season two, episode seven,
right?

By the time we get to this point is this is the way is evolving both for him and for all
these people that have decided to follow him, even including, you know, the Mandalorian

covert is like, this is the way the way is to support you.

And we have to go into hiding somewhere else.

And we're going to spin up, you know, there's like

There's all these people that are influenced by him doing this publicly and they're
starting to change their behavior, even including the jaded, embedded, Imperial,

mercenary, double crossing character.

Like this is the way it becomes like, oh, this is the direction.

This is the thing that we're trying to accomplish.

This is the way to actually make the world better.

So I love that that, we're seeing it scale up in this story world and we can sort of
picture ourselves.

The whole point of this here at WONDER TOUR is we can picture ourselves as like, okay,
great.

What could I do to be like that?

What if I was in that situation?

How do I be more like Din Djarin and less like the Imperial officer says, well, I don't
really care how many people got hurt.

doing the right thing.

I think you've wrapped it up perfectly here, Brian, and you've given us an episode title
and teach others to do likewise.

Awesome.

Yes.

Yes.

Leading by example.

It's a thing.

Okay.

Well, that was great.

Thank you for this really fun conversation as always, Drew.

I think that's all for this episode.

Thanks to all of you for joining us once again on our journey to become better leaders and
to lead wisely.

In our next episode, we're watching another recent TV series that we love, The Queen's
Gambit.

And we're going to be visiting the world of competitive chess.

a game where extremely simple rules can lead to staggering complexity and has some fun
analogies to our personal lives as well.

So we really hope you can join us for that one.

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