The Talent Forge: Shaping Workforce Behaviors with Jay Johnson

Never Outmatched: How Military Thinking Transforms Corporate Culture with Lee Pepper

• Jay Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 57

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What happens when military wisdom meets modern marketing challenges? In this eye-opening conversation with Lee Pepper, former Army officer turned marketing strategist, we explore the surprising intersection of battlefield tactics and business success.

Lee's remarkable journey from military service through Ross Perot's presidential campaign to behavioral health marketing leadership provides the backdrop for a masterclass in strategic thinking. At the heart of our discussion is the transformative power of motivational interviewing—a technique that shifted Lee's admissions teams from simply selling services to genuinely connecting with people in crisis.

Whether you're in marketing, HR, leadership, or transitioning from military to civilian work, this conversation offers invaluable insights on the power of strategic thinking before tactical execution. 

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we are shaping future workforce behaviors. My guest today is Lee Pepper, and we have a really interesting story on deck for you audience. So welcome to the show, lee.

Lee Pepper:

Great. Thank you so much, Jay, for hosting me this morning.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah and Lee, why don't we start with getting a little background from you to help kind of set the narrative for what our discussion is going to look like today?

Lee Pepper:

Sure, well, I started out my career sort of my career when I enlisted in the Army when I was a sophomore in college and then I parlayed that into officer candidate school and eventually was commissioned as an armor officer.

Lee Pepper:

And then, as I finished up my education at the University of Tennessee, I had to put a plug in for the volunteers. This was back in 1992. I had the chance to volunteer on Ross Perot's presidential campaign and then that led into a full-time gig. So I was one of Ross's youngest campaign staffers and worked with him on his 96 presidential campaign, eventually Perot Systems, where I moved into more IT and that's how I transitioned from a political science background to an information science background. And then that led me into digital marketing. And then that's what led me to writing my book Never Outmatched, where I kind of encapsulate all these different military strategies that I employed in my corporate marketing career. And for a lot of people it like blows their mind to think about how does military strategy and marketing work? But I think that there's a lot of good metaphors and analogies that I share in my book that'll be, you know, really fascinating to people who maybe aren't as familiar with growing up in a military family or serving in the military.

Jay Johnson:

I love it and thank you for your service, lee. As I mentioned, I really appreciate that, coming from a family with a number of veterans. But you know the audience might be going okay, well, why are we bringing a marketing person into this, into this equation? But the reality is is marketing is all about shifting behaviors and shifting perspectives, shifting ideas. So let's kind of start with that. When we think about marketing, oftentimes we think about external marketing, you know, trying to get people to come and buy our products or anything else. But I would venture to say that you've probably got a lot of experience in the internal side of marketing as well. How are we creating a message or how are we managing a message internally to create the conditions for behavioral change? Can you speak to that at all?

Lee Pepper:

Sure, jay, I think one of the things that I'm most well known for, especially in the behavioral health community, is my work with admission centers.

Lee Pepper:

And the way that I started working with admission centers in behavioral health context is that you know you've got thousands of phone calls that are coming in for people that are seeking help, you know, for drug or alcohol treatment or maybe a mental health, you know condition, and sometimes it's really easy to look at those situations where it's just transactional, where people are just making the phone call and you're going to book the appointment or you're going to book the assessment.

Lee Pepper:

But really the centers that do it well are transformational and they're using not just sales techniques but they're using motivational interviewing, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to motivate that change. And a lot of times when you're on the phone it can be very, very difficult if you're not highly trained and highly skilled. And then you know one thing that you and I were talking about off camera is that you know you've really got to care and feed for that team, because they're the ones that are really dealing with a lot of these crises and they just keep coming, and so that's one of the things that I think I was well known for at my work at foundations and at the Meadows was making sure that the marketing can create all these opportunities and it can capture demand. But then what is happening on the ground with the folks that are actually taking those inbound? You know, marketing leads.

Jay Johnson:

And that's. It's such a good insight too, because when we think about when we think about the level of stress that they may be feeling when they are taking those and I'm going to go back to motivational interviewing because I think that's such a powerful technique but, you know, when we think about the people who are on those front lines of whether it's healthcare and actually one of my business partners is in the law enforcement world and works with 911 operators you know the stress levels and the cortisol levels that end up hitting all of those people that are essentially managing external emotions and managing external challenges and issues that can be pretty devastating. So, from your experience, how did you create the conditions to care for that team internally while still, at the same time, making the conditions of bringing people into the space?

Lee Pepper:

Yeah, it was kind of interesting. This is going back to 2009, 2010. I was the CIO at Foundations Recovery Network and we owned a series of inpatient and outpatient centers around the country, and part of my role, you know, as CIO was I was in charge of all the digital marketing, because back then digital marketing was in the realm of the CTO or the CIO. So as things were progressing, you know, our board said well, listen, lee, you might as well be the CMO too. I mean, all of our leads were coming in, and part of that was also managing the admissions center.

Lee Pepper:

And one of the first things I did, as I was kind of jumping into the admissions center, is I realized that no matter what I did on the marketing side, no matter what channel I changed, you know, no matter what volume I changed, I could not make our conversion worse or better.

Lee Pepper:

And that's where I realized we're really not in command or not in control. And as I started digging in, I realized we were not training, we were not caring and feeding, you know, for that team and there was a lot of burnout, there's a lot of turnover, and so I was able to partner with a company here in Nashville that came in and started providing us like training and it wasn't just sales training, right, it was really this idea that if you're if you are talking, you're selling. If you're listening, you're caring. And that was a fundamental shift in how we approached our admissions team, because a lot of times when you're on the phone, you feel like you've got to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And really, when it comes to health care, behavioral health care the most important thing you can do and the same thing in a therapeutic environment is to listen, is to shut up and listen, because your patients, the people on the phone, they'll tell you everything you need to know without you having to talk so much.

Jay Johnson:

So true.

Jay Johnson:

One of my early clients was the University of Michigan Health Systems and the patient-centered care area, and one of the things that I had a huge lesson for a number of the physicians and nurses was we all heard you have two ears and one mouth, listen accordingly.

Jay Johnson:

And what I would tell them was actually you have two eyes, two ears and one mouth and you should listen according to that, because they're going to communicate to you via body language. And this is obviously, you know, back in 2005, six, seven in that range, so pre COVID, less telehealth and everything else like that that's available now. But, you know, a lot of times it's that listening that creates the conditions for trust. It's the listening that creates the conditions for connection and, yeah, when we feel connected, we feel much more open. What was the experience? How were you able to essentially support Because I think that this has applications not just for inpatient, outpatient, not just for anywhere else, but, like even in the spaces of customer service, even in the spaces of, you know, post-consumer, post-consumer appreciation or satisfaction of a product how can we train our teams to listen more effectively?

Lee Pepper:

I think one of the key things, jay, is that in a lot of corporate environments, one of the first thing that gets cut when there's financial stress, or maybe the census is not where it needs to be or you're having some quarterly numbers issues the first thing that companies tend to want to cut are training, and that's one of the things that we realized very early on that, no matter what was going on, we were not going to cut our training. We were still going to have regular coaching and that was not going to go away. And I think that was critical, because now your team understands how important it is and they also understand that you care about them. And I think it bled over into some of my other corporate adventures. You know where we could see like, yeah, we do need to send some of our staff to some conferences. We do need to make sure they've got, in some cases, a mentor or a coach here that we're paying for to help them along the way.

Lee Pepper:

And I think that investment you get so much more out of it. You know when you can invest in your staff because it really helps with retention, and a lot of times people don't realize how effective marketing can be in solving a company's retention problem, and I mentioned that in my book. I have a chapter called Citizen Soldier, citizen Farmer, and it's a lost art and it's something that ancient societies realize and even going into our fight for independence back a couple hundred years ago with our Minutemen.

Jay Johnson:

a lot of companies failed to really take a coach who has survived recession in 2008, who has survived COVID? You're absolutely spot on. It's the first thing that gets cut and it's often much to the detriment of morale, to retention, to engagement. So leaders and HR that is listening do not cut your training budgets if you want to have effective functional teams prepared to do what they need to do to make your business successful. So I resonate with that. I am thankful that you said it. You know I want to dig into. I want to dig into you know your experience in behavioral marketing. Can we maybe define behavioral, you know behavioral based marketing as a concept for the audience? Because I think that sometimes, when we think of you know, and there's a lot of terms that are thrown out there now neuromarketing, digital marketing, social marketing, et cetera when you say behavioral marketing, what is it that we're looking at?

Lee Pepper:

Well, my expertise has been over the last 15 or 20 years has been in capturing demand. It's different than creating demand. It's different than creating demand, and so what I have focused on is capturing demand for people that are in crisis or in need of behavioral health treatment. So that would be alcohol and drug rehab, you know, either outpatient, inpatient, or it may be a mental health condition. They may have everything from, you know, bipolar, you know, to borderline personality disorder, even down to things like, you know, adhd, and then some of the process, addictions.

Lee Pepper:

And I think the key is that we're not selling widgets, and so that's the difference in behavioral health marketing versus other types of traditional marketing.

Lee Pepper:

And also we're not branding Most people that are looking for health care services.

Lee Pepper:

They're not so dependent on the brand because they're just not as aware, like you know, when you're thinking about Coca Cola or Target or Nike, you know they have a lot of need to make sure their brand is front and center, but a lot of times in behavioral health and in healthcare in general, it's driven by a crisis, and so a lot of what we try to do in behavioral health marketing is make sure that we are creating the kind of content that is authoritative and that is connecting with an audience, and a lot of it is very long tail.

Lee Pepper:

These are people that have some very specific needs and you may only see five or 10 patients a year that have those specific sets of criteria, and so it can create some challenges for a company and how they develop. You know assets and content to kind of reach that long tail. But that's something that I write about in my book called we use this military strategy called force multiplication and it was a way that we could create a lot of content on a lot of different platforms. That could be very niche-y but it would really speak to that very specific client.

Jay Johnson:

You know, and I think it's so important that we actually know who that client is or what it is that we're looking for, and I hear that very loud and clear. And what you're saying is you had exactly sort of the either buyer persona or the avatar of exactly who you're looking for within that space, creating the conditions of capturing them, as opposed to manufacturing or manifesting, because that's not something we would want to do. In behavioral health, marketing is manifest. You know some kind of crisis or some kind of a situation. So, when you're thinking about when you're thinking and this is where I wanted to get into the motivational interviewing. This was actually a concept that was introduced to me by a colleague and we went through an entire process of motivational and can you help us define that? What does it look like and why do you see it as an essential tool as part of this process of training your people to do that motivational interview?

Lee Pepper:

Yeah, I think it was really super critical for us when I was at Foundations in the Meadows, in that we needed to make sure that the folks that were taking our inbound leads and we were generating thousands of phone calls, live chats and email forms a month so it was a lot of volume and what we needed to make sure they understood is that we did not expect that every single one of those was going to convert to an admission to one of our programs, because that was going to create this selling culture that we did not want to, you know, be a part of.

Lee Pepper:

What we, what we trained them on with motivational interviewing was that they needed to have the conversation and listen Right, and the idea is getting them to make a decision, and it's okay if the decision is no and it's okay if the decision is to go somewhere else.

Lee Pepper:

In fact, if they weren't a good fit for our program, we wanted to refer them out and, of course, it was okay if the decision was yes. But once we allowed them to have success in a lot of different ways, that really changed the dynamic that we were dealing with, because when you're getting thousands of phone calls and only two or three percent can actually come into your center because of a whole myriad of reasons it could be insurance, it could be scheduling, it could be location that really creates a real negative gray cloud over your whole operation when you feel like every hundred phone calls you can only help two or three people. So by using motivational interviewing techniques, we were able to now start to arm our team and they could feel good that they were able to help somebody make a decision. And it's okay if the decision is no, it's not for me right now, that's okay.

Jay Johnson:

At least they made a decision and I think that that was something that really helped propel our internal so let's watch I love that and you know, because it is it is really really hard, especially if you are the person. Well, if you're the organization and you're saying, for every thousand, we're getting two to three out of that, that is a lot of people that are being, you know, that are making a decision to not get help from you or anything else. And I know from our behavioral data in the health care space and we've got something like six or 7,000 assessments, you know 78% or 72% of a lot of those individual healthcare workers show a strong drive to bond, which is a neurocognitive oxytocin, et cetera, which is much, much higher in their desire to help connect, affiliate, et cetera. So when it seems or it feels like rejection, that can be absolutely devastating to somebody. So I think that it's really really important.

Jay Johnson:

Let's walk through this, because motivational interviewing is something that I would say could be utilized by leadership, can be utilized by HR, it can be utilized by those trainers and coaches out there to get a better understanding of what it is. So can you help us walk, walk us through the process. What does motivational interviewing look like? How would you maybe talk through it in a tactical sense of hey, if you want to do effective motivational interviewing, here's where to start. This is what it looks like, and we'll kind of iterate along the way.

Lee Pepper:

Sure, and there's you know and listen. You know I am not a certified MI, you know coach, so I would recommend that your listeners. You know there are a lot of great resources out there online. But I would say, like, from a very tactical perspective, I'll use the example of human resources because I think that a lot of times human resources are kind of left on their island, and that's where we were able to really partner with human resources from a marketing standpoint right, and we were able to create kind of a culture that not only helped human resources with their retention problem, but we also started creating content that was helping them drive.

Lee Pepper:

You know, instead of just posting a resume on Indeed, like we were actually creating content and events that HR could point to when they were on the phone recruiting, trying to find providers that were coming in.

Lee Pepper:

And then they started taking advantage. They were coming into our call center, they were coming into our call center, they were coming into our marketing meetings and they started picking up on how we use motivational interviewing and I think they started adopting some of these type of strategies when they were interviewing folks for potential hires. And I think it creates a situation again where, just like in marketing, sometimes we can talk too much, I think, sometimes from the HR teams, their recruiters, sometimes they can talk too much and it's more important for them to use MI and, just like you mentioned earlier, you've got two ears and two eyes and one mouth, you know. Do it in that order. It's the same thing when it comes to HR and recruiting, and a lot of times they just hadn't heard that kind of speak before, and so now we're taking kind of something that is well-versed in therapeutic world. We've applied it to marketing. Now we're also connecting that over into human resources and I think it was, you know, very successful.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, well, and and it makes a lot of sense too because, again, when you are, if you're in a sales position, yes, there are some of those that are really driven to acquire and they have that like strong element of smile and dial pick up the phone. I don't care how many people churn and burn, you know, as long as the percentages are coming in, but that is not a sales style that I mean. I've heard so many people go. I'm not a salesperson and you know the motivational interviewing aspect, for me at least, has really been a powerful way to look at sort of relationship building, empathetic sales. And you know, one of the ways of doing that is really getting that deeper response from the potential customer, really getting that deeper response from the potential customer, client, et cetera, and sometimes that's through open-ended questions or some kind of reflective listening and all of those different things If you were to think about, if you were to think about, say, example of walking through, you know we get somebody who's in a crisis and and, and this is this is, I think, where this is where I think the application really does kind of hit some of the corporate side.

Jay Johnson:

We are constantly inundated with miniature crises or anything else. Leaders are often in this space of oh my gosh, I'm in a crisis. Let's get this training on communication to come out, and I think this is where motivational interviewing can really become powerful. So let's say that you know I'm calling in and I'm having whatever crisis I'm having. Maybe it's a crisis of health, maybe it's a crisis of whatever. What is your kind of like? How would you look at taking that first step? What are you going to work? How are you going to work with me, lee?

Lee Pepper:

Yeah, I think the very first thing that we do and you know, and I have like an online admissions training course a lot of behavioral health companies subscribe to, and and it's the idea of I use this metaphor Are you at the drive through window or are you sitting down at a restaurant breaking bread with the person on the phone, and it's, it's. It's a good mental model to think about, because a lot of times we get stuck at the drive-thru window and we're just reading off the menu, we're just repeating the order back, and good motivational interviewing is actually sitting down and breaking bread with that person versus just serving them up whatever's on the menu, right? And so one of the first things we do is, no matter what they say, no matter what the call is about, the very first thing you have to say is OK, can you just tell me a little bit about what prompted your call today? Or tell me what's going on and when you can have that mental shift where you don't feel like you have to just answer back or repeat back that now you're the and that's the whole concept of motivational interviewing. You're interviewing right.

Lee Pepper:

You're not necessarily answering questions. You're not talking about the deal of the day. You're not talking about the features and functions you know of whatever your product is. Now, you're understanding and you know if you look at a lot of the stuff that's online with the sell me this pen, you know and you know I think there was a famous, you know, I think Wolf of Wall Street. They had it, but the sell me this pen a lot of people that are training in therapy. They will practice that, because the best way to answer that is to start asking the person well, what do you use a pen for? What colors do you prefer? All these? It's question, question, question, question.

Lee Pepper:

And then all of a sudden, now you actually have what they're looking for and then you can make a decision. Right, do I have the service or the product that fits with what their needs are? Versus going through this checklist mentality, which is very poor, and I find that in HR too. You know, whenever I'm interviewing a candidate that somebody from human resources sent to me, like I can tell if it's just a checklist thing. Versus are they? Do they really know our culture? Right, you know what is motivating them to leave their company? You know, if it is, are they just leaving for money? Okay, that may not be as interesting to me, but if they're leaving because they want to come to us as an employer of choice or looking for some interesting training like that's more something that we can chat about.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, well, and it's. It is funny that you bring up the the sell me this pen, sort of Jordan Bell for a Wall Street approach, and there's a lot of different. There's a lot of different sales methodologies out there and one that's and I forget the name of it, it's any PQ or something like that, which is supposed to be more of the more of the neural approach or neuro linguistic programming type approach and connective approach. So how adaptive when we find ourselves, and because one of the things that happens with motivational interviewing is it can be, it can be really laborious.

Jay Johnson:

I mean it can take longer, it can be more um, it can be more emotional. Uh, and there are some people that maybe are less likely to, uh, be driven towards that style. How are you able to shift their behaviors when you know maybe somebody started that interviewing process and either wasn't a great fit or didn't quite get it? What was the experience on that, lee?

Lee Pepper:

Yeah, for us, for us in the behavioral health spaces, it's a little bit more, it's a little easier because you know we're looking at data. So I we will know quickly if somebody gets admitted to one of our programs, and a lot of our programs are 50, 60, 70 beds, and so when you get somebody admitted, if they are not a good fit for the milieu, for that client base that they're going to be doing group therapy with, you hear about it very quickly and then you start to. Then you can go back and listen to the phone calls, you can look at the notes that were taken and you can quickly realize that you know what we didn to the phone calls. You can look at the notes that were taken and you can quickly realize that you know what. We didn't really practice good motivational interviewing because we didn't get to the heart of the matter, and so, whereas some people will feel like, well, I don't really want to be on the phone for 30 or 40 minutes like that, just can I just close them in a couple of minutes, but what will end up happening is you end up doing more work, right? Because now you've got to go back and do all this after action stuff and you may have created an issue within the milieu, and so we were very upfront with that and I think people started seeing that it may seem like it's more of a challenge upfront, but it's actually a better quality and then it ends up being a better situation for the person on the phone and the person that admits, because a lot of our companies, you know now we struggle with people that can quickly get on these online platforms and leave reviews and guess what?

Lee Pepper:

People are 10 times more likely to leave a negative review than a positive review. So if you're not doing the work up front, spending the extra time up front, really connecting with what's driving them to want to come to your program or to buy your product, you're more likely to have somebody that is not a good fit. And then, guess what, they're 10 times more likely to want to leave a negative review. And then you're running around going wait, why did I get all these negative reviews? Well, it probably all starts from the very beginning, and I think this is the same way in HR. A lot of my HR clients will talk about Glassdoor. And how do we solve Glassdoor? Well, you solve it in the beginning, right when they're knocking at the door, not once they're already in the door.

Jay Johnson:

You know it's funny you say that because oftentimes I'll be having conversations with some leaders and managers and when they have some kind of like problem set of behaviors going on in the organization, I say, okay, well, you know you to really kind of turn that lens inside. Yes, you either hired the wrong person or you didn't adequately onboard, train, communicate, instill the vision, give them a sense of purpose, et cetera. And I've had some conversations where it was just like huh yeah.

Lee Pepper:

All right. That's how we opened this conversation. That's how, when I, as part of being the CMO, all of a sudden took responsibility for our call center, no matter what I was doing on the channel, I couldn't affect the conversion rate. So I knew that we did not have a good methodology right to make it more predictable, and so we were able to sense that right off the bat now I'm going to shift and kind of take this question.

Jay Johnson:

So I had mentioned to you that I studied health communication and one of the big frames and this was gosh, this was back in the mid 2000s was narrative medicine, and I remember having some conversations with different healthcare facilities, the entire concept of like storytelling essentially as part of the health approach, and there were some really interesting studies of doctors and it's very strongly related to motivational interviewing, you know, instead of a doctor who rushes in, says Lee, what hurts your elbow? Ok, take two of these and call me in the morning. It was more of well, how are you feeling? And and literally just getting into these questions and opening it up. So the difference between narrative medicine was 45 minute visit with the physician versus a standard visit, which was four and a half minutes. Um, but the patient outcomes on the narrative side of things were just exceptionally better.

Jay Johnson:

The big pushback, and this was constant. How do I have time for this? I can't see these patients for 45 minutes. I don't have time to spend interviewing and getting to the bottom of the stories. I need to lightning quick, get a diagnosis. This is not just true in healthcare too, because this is very, very true for leaders and this is true for HR. It's like give me the answer. I need the answer right now and I don't have time to go around and ask questions and get stories and do interviews with my teams, my leaders. Just give me the data, let's move forward. How did you shift that mindset of saying, hey, you know, because what you just said was absolutely spot on. I agree, the time that we spend up front saves us time in the future. How did you get them to shift the mindset?

Lee Pepper:

Yeah, you have to connect the business to which action you want. You have to connect the revenue, and so that was one of the things that I was able to show, because now, all of a sudden, we can see, yeah, maybe we need to hire a couple extra staff now to take all the volume of calls. You know, and what ended up happening with foundations was we actually had a reduction in our call center staff and because they were being more effective, and so we were able to dial down some of the volume of calls. So now, all of a sudden, you know what we can cut television calls because they're not, as they weren't, as good as folks that were maybe searching on the Internet or people that were connecting us through our business development relationship. So we were able to reduce some of the volume because now we were giving the team time instead of what ends up happening a lot of times in businesses it's just throw more, more, more, even though you have a leaky funnel and they just want to keep filling it.

Lee Pepper:

At the top. We were able to document, and the key was that we documented it right and that we were measuring it. It wasn't just a dream, like we actually made it a math problem versus something subjective. You know, we made it objective and I think that that's where a lot of businesses they struggle, because they think they don't have the data. And so, if you will and that's what I talk about in the book is that you got to have the strategy first and you figure out the tactics.

Lee Pepper:

A lot of times in business we're jumping tactic to tactic to tactic. We think, oh, these platforms you know they've become so easy in marketing I'll just turn up TikTok or I'll start doing reels, and those are all can be very effective tactics, but they're going to miss if you don't have the strategy. And it's the same thing with some of the software that we want to implement. All of a sudden it's in a very humid, you know, jungle environment. It did not perform well, and the reason it didn't perform well? Because we didn't train the soldiers back then to clean the weapon appropriately and we did not ship cleaning kits with the weapon and so they were constantly jamming. And so it's what that that? I use that as an example of what we do today.

Lee Pepper:

We will go and we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll implement Salesforce or we'll implement PeopleSoft, and then we work Powerful, tools Powerful tools, powerful tools, but we never train people effectively, we don't hire administrators to support it and we typically then just kind of put that on top of a poor process and we wonder why it's not working. We spent all this money, it's not working, and so a lot of times that you know we don't understand that connection to the business.

Jay Johnson:

Well, and I think that has so much application in so many different aspects of business. Because if you're in the talent development space, hey, we just spent $100,000 on this new learning management system and all these trainings and we get less than 7% of our population that's actually using them. Okay, well, what's the issue? Have you trained them on how to do it? Have you encouraged them, showed them the value, showed them what the return on investment of them spending their time there? And the reality is is we don't, and it's usually coming back to well, who has time for that? Or we think it's intuitive.

Jay Johnson:

And I want to stick in that question real quick, because this is and maybe I'm asking for a friend, maybe I'm asking for myself here, lee, but you know, when you've been in a space for 20 years, 10 years, 15 years, whatever it is you've had a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge. There's logical jumps that we end up making just because it's familiar to us, and I've seen that a lot in organizations. Somebody with a lot of experience says, hey, this is really intuitive, this makes sense. I mean, I would have never thought about that, about the M16, until you shared that with me. And then it's like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, but that would have been a gap in my knowledge. How have you maybe helped some of the administrators or leaders that didn't have the experience? How have you avoided that intuition gap that comes with the experience that you have?

Lee Pepper:

Yeah, I talk about it in the book. It's what I call a cognitive bias that other departments or other team members or staff members can have, and it really shows up a lot in marketing, because everybody thinks they know marketing. You know, everybody's got a cousin or a nephew that can build a website, everybody's got somebody that works in business development. So they kind of think they know marketing and so, without having really worked in it, they start to apply well, I've got these ideas, even though they may work in HR or finance or administration, and so I write. I think one of the important things is I write about it in the book and I use these military strategies.

Lee Pepper:

Because when you then use the metaphor of the military and you see how, hey, this happened, like, like the rollout of them, 16 happened and it failed Right, and here's what we're doing it kind of matches that failure. All of a sudden people start thinking about it in a different way. It's like, oh, I see, yeah, this is, this is how this can happen. If it can happen to the US Army in a war situation, it can certainly happen to my business, business. And so that's why I am and you know, in in only, you know, less than 1% of the American population will serve in the military, and I don't say that as a judgment. It's just where we are, with an all volunteer army, and so that means that 99% of people have not heard some of these concepts and these ideas, and these ideas are thousands of years old.

Lee Pepper:

You know, when I talk about the hammer and anvil, you know this is something that was used. You know the Carthaginians, and then it was it was used most recently by by General Norman Schwarzkopf. So these, these are things that are kind of fundamental, I think, to the human condition and I think it's just a way that we, that we can. I'm hopeful that people will read this, especially young leaders, and they'll be like oh, let me use this as an example to kind of inform my teams or my leadership so they know that I'm not just stuck in tactics, like no, this is rooted in some really historic strategies.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, no, I appreciate that, Lee. So the name of the book is Never Outmatched Military Strategies to Lead, innovate and Win in the Modern Marketing Battlefield. And when is that going to be available, lee?

Lee Pepper:

So, yeah, it's available now to be in bookstores the first week in September. So coming up very quickly and I appreciate all the support. And I'll say one last thing, jay, is that there's a lot of veterans out there. The Army does a great job getting you in. They don't always do a great job getting you out, transitioning you into the business world, the corporate world. So if you've got a family member, I think somebody reading this book who's been in the service, it may give them some new language, some new ways to translate these strategies into mental models that might be more effective when they're out interviewing, because I think sometimes we struggle with how am I going to take what I learned in training or in my service to the business world? And so I hope people will see how I kind of bridge that gap and maybe give them some inspiration.

Jay Johnson:

I love that and I've actually been working with a couple of different people and supporting that transition from military into the actual working world, because it is very, very different from my understanding and again, I'm not speaking from my own experience, but from the experience of working with people who are very knowledgeable on these things. So, very cool. And, lee, if the audience wanted to get in touch with you, how would they reach out to you?

Lee Pepper:

Yeah, they can go to my website, neveroutmatchcom, and they can also, you know. Please feel free to reach out and connect with me on LinkedIn. I always check my messages and I'm always happy to have conversations and share, you know, great ideas and learnings.

Jay Johnson:

I love it. Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing your insight and your wisdom and obviously, again thank you for the service that you've provided, both you know as a veteran of our military, but also to the service that you're providing to healthcare. That's a really important space. It's something that all of us at some point in time will need to use, and the fact that you're supporting them and helping them have a more behavioral approach is really powerful. So just want to say thank you for that.

Lee Pepper:

All right, Thank you so much. Keep up the great work and one of these days I'll get back up to Michigan and I'll look you up.

Jay Johnson:

I love it so and thank you, audience, for tuning into this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we're shaping workforce behaviors.

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Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

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