Brainz Magazine Exclusive Interview
Dain Dunston is a storyteller, future-finder and CEO-whisperer who has been fascinated with the concept of elevated awareness and consciousness since he was in college. Dain grew up in a family surrounded by literature, art, and music, from Prokofiev to Bebop to Blues. His mother was a reclusive painter and his father was on the fast track to becoming a CEO by the age of 45. From his earliest memories, he found himself fascinated by two fundamental philosophical questions: “Who are we?” And “Why are we here?”
Years of helping leaders build their self-awareness by learning to ask the right questions led to Dain’s most recent book, Being Essential: Seven Questions for Living and Leading with Radical Self-Awareness. Leaders may think they know what they need to do but don’t have a clue who they need to be. ‘Radical Self-Awareness’ is a game-changing mindset that unlocks a more effective, agile approach to life, love and leadership.
Dain is the founding partner of Reservoir LLC, a company designed to bring deep resources to leaders, led by a coalition of some of the most respected leadership thinkers, authors and executive coaches in the U.S. and Europe. Dain lives in Wimberley, Texas, with his wife, writer and art dealer Jean Compton, and their dogs Jackson and Maya.
What inspired you to embark on a career as an advisor and coach to leaders?
I grew up the son of a man who was on the fast track to be CEO by the age of 45. I knew I didn’t want to live that life and it never occurred to me that I would end up with a career in advising and coaching leaders. What I wanted to do was be a writer. We all have “crossroads” moments that change our life direction. By the time I was in my mid-thirties, I had published a lot of poetry and short stories, a few magazine articles, and edited a magazine on yoga and meditation.
And then one day, the phone rang and the voice on the other end introduced himself as the Chief Engineer at General Motors. It turned out that I had sent an article to a car magazine and they sent it to him. The article was on how the Chevrolet brand had lost respect and what they could do to get it back. When we talked, he said he’d been trying to articulate this for ten years and I did it in ten pages. Could I turn it into a speech for him? The following week, I was on a flight to Detroit and before I knew it I had a very successful career as a speechwriter.
In that role, I found I was cross-pollinating ideas across different organizations by being a trusted and discreet sounding board. My work grew from there as I began to coach them on their performance on stage. One day, someone came offstage and asked if we could keep working together, helping them recognize and change who they were being. I couldn’t tell them what to do, but I could ask the questions that led to discovering their authentic leadership self. It’s hard to recognize defining moments as we grow up. But maybe something inside was calling me as I watched my father struggle with the pressures of his journey up the corporate ladder.
That early experience made me a good listener with executives because I could sense their struggles. I had seen it before and I knew I could help. That work led to the creation of Reservoir, where we’ve gathered some of the best and brightest coaches and consultants to give leaders the support they need to be their best in everything they do.
Can you tell us more about your role as a founding partner of Reservoir and how your company supports leaders and organizations?
I wanted to expand what I could offer clients, beyond just my coaching. So we formed what we call the Reservoir Advisory Council which currently has 16 coaches in the U.S., Canada, Europe and South Africa. The name, Reservoir, indicates deep resources for leaders. At Reservoir, we focus on coaching for Conscious Leadership, which begins not with expertise in strategy or finance but with knowledge of oneself. You can always find strategists and financial experts. But can you find yourself? So we focus on the leader’s hearts and minds. We help leaders develop a deep sense of who they are and what they stand for. And when they understand themselves, they can help others get what they need. With our team, we have expertise from top universities like Harvard and The New School in Manhattan. With them, we can offer expertise in a variety of fields, from crisis management and communications to strategy to process excellence. We have, between us, nearly 20 books, so we really are able to offer deep resources.
Could you share some key insights or principles from your book, “Being Essential: Seven Questions for Living and Leading with Radical Self-Awareness”?
Navigating the self is the wildest sea we can cross and unless you know where you are and why you’re there, unless you know who you’re being and what you want, how can you know where you’re going? I was sitting with the new CEO of what had once been an enormous consumer products company. He had been a division president with a strong team of leaders. They had been spun off from the rest of the company and he and his team were now in the C-Suite of a Fortune 500 company. What he was struggling with, he explained, was that every time he left his office, he felt like everyone was watching him. One false step, he felt, and confidence in him and in the new company would fall.
So I said to him, “The next time you get up from your desk, ask yourself two questions before you walk out the door: Who am I being? What do I want?” The language is very specific. Not who would I like to be or who should I be, but who am I being right now? Where is my head? Asking who you are being, changes who you’re being. And changing who you’re being, changes what you want. Maybe you thought you wanted to go down the hallway and yell at someone, but is that really what you want? What you really wanted was to have a problem fixed. But who were you being when you lost your temper? You were probably caught up in fear and negative feelings about yourself and your worth.
Most of the time, we have little control over our own minds. But what if we could? That’s what we mean by radical self-awareness, the ability to know our minds and the ability to change them when we need to. In Being Essential, we take a dive into what it would look and feel like if we could “change our minds” whenever we needed to. Instead of the fearful, out-of-control mind we spend so much of our time in, what if we had a mind that was always clear, that always knew where it was, that looked at the world with amused curiosity and appreciation?
Your book “Nanovation” emphasizes thinking big and acting boldly. How can leaders apply these principles to drive innovation and growth in their industries?
That book was truly a gift to me when Kevin and Jackie Freiberg asked me to co-author it with them. They are best-selling authors who I had known and admired for years and they had come across a great story to tell. It’s the story of a group of engineers in India who got tired of seeing entire families riding on motor scooters and getting killed. So they set out to see if they could build a car – a real car people would be proud to own – for the price of a scooter. They figured out how to take 70% of the cost out of almost every part of a car and still have it well-built enough to survive Indian roads.
The result was that Suzuki, who had owned the low end of the car market in India, said we don’t know how to make a car that cheap. They gave up their 50% market share and left the market. The other result is that because many of the major OEM parts makers were in on the project – like Visteon, Delco, and Bosch – the next-generation VW Passat could cost $7100 less than the previous year’s model. And the next Range Rover weighed 1,100 pounds less than the previous one. That’s a 20% weight reduction and that made the Range Rover more fun to drive and more fun to fill up at the pump.
And here’s one interesting point: that group of engineers in India is TATA Motors, who also own Jaguar Land Rover. They bought them out of bankruptcy from Ford and turned them to profitability in three years, so these are actually pretty good people to learn from. What we learned from writing the book was a whole new way of looking at innovation that we call Nanovation, which is innovation designed to simplify products to make them more effective and affordable.
The other thing we learned was this. In the new world we’re part of, a business will have only two choices: Innovate or Perish. Whatever you’re doing, whatever great idea you’re working on, someone is going to come into your industry with disruptive innovation. It doesn’t matter if they’re in India or Indiana, somebody is going to do it. Why shouldn’t it be you? Where do you start? You start at the convergence of trends. And here’s the thing: we have some major trends right in front of us now but we may not be seeing them.
Our team at Reservoir was at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, last week, specifically focused on looking for trends most people aren’t seeing. Inna Ulanova, our Chief Play Officer, came back with the insight that we are going to see 100 years of progress in the next five years. While most of us are thinking linearly, we have others around us who are thinking exponentially. And if we don’t learn how to do that, if we don’t learn to change the way we think, we will be left in the dust.
We underestimate the power of future technology and the rate at which it’s coming toward us because we imagine technology will change tomorrow at the same rate it changed yesterday. So we do our strategic planning for the future by looking back at the past and projecting that rate of change forward.
What we learned in writing Nanovation is that the future belongs to those who think differently. There’s a word I think describes the average leadership mind: Chairodynamics. Chairodynamics is the belief you can make things fly from that nice chair in your office. It’s a tempting idea but it won’t get you anywhere. You have to be out there with your eyes open, looking for the trends everyone else is missing. You have to get into the heads of your employees and your customers. You have to get into the heads of your competition. You have to find ways to innovate, new ways of adding value to the lives of others, in a way that blows the doors off business as usual. Because if you don’t, someone else will.
As a frequent speaker on leadership, culture, and coaching, what are some recurring themes or trends you observe in today’s business landscape?
I see people looking for meaning. Literally, trying to figure out why they are here. Is this all there is? I worked this long, went to school, studied, struggled, and now where am I? Am I doing anything that matters? What does it mean to work? What does it mean to lead? What does it mean to be me?
Those are not new questions. What’s new, maybe, is that so many people are really asking them now. That’s partly because there’s so much disruption and uncertainty. A pandemic. A couple of very frightening wars. Social change. And, at the same time, it’s partly because there is so much opportunity. New ideas, new technologies, new momentum in so many areas. What we’re seeing is a sort of double helix in people’s minds, with one strand telling them to make more money, get more respect, and rise above, and the other strand telling them to make more meaning, give more respect, and change peoples’ lives. Balancing those two strands can produce all kinds of tension, all kinds of fear. But, in balance, they can bring us into a new era of humanness. And that humanness, broader and deeper than we expect, is what we are going to need going forward.
I was talking to John Hagel III, a legendary strategist and author who opened McKinsey’s first office in Silicon Valley and he said something that hit home. He said, “I used to believe in strategy. Now I believe in psychology. In building a great company, psychology is everything.” He talked about understanding emotional intelligence in the people you serve, your team members, your clients and customers, and your community. When you do that you can transform fear into forward motion. One way we help leaders frame it is this: there are only two emotions, fear and love. Every other emotion is just a spinoff of one of those two. Love is understanding that you are respected, that you are seen. When I feel that, I want to get more of it. I want to be the kind of person you seem to see me as. I want to live into it.
One of our clients spent some time talking about it and came back with what he called the “Ambition” of the company. This overriding ambition was very simple, shining over all the KPIs and statistics: to be known as the North Star of leadership development, to think of their “product” as awakened leaders “whose job is to help the people they lead find their highest ambition through their work and through their own leadership”. Imagine if you could work for a company like that. Imagine if you could be that kind of leader.
Looking ahead, what do you see as the most pressing challenges and opportunities for leaders in the coming years?
The most pressing challenge is to change our thinking. We cannot build the future with the minds that built the past because we will just keep making the same mistakes. So we literally need to walk out of our offices and find the next crossroads, the next intersection of trends no one has seen yet, and start putting those new combinations to work.
I like what William Gibson says: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” And the people who know how to look for it are part of what will give us 100 years of progress by the end of this decade. Otto Scharmer at MIT calls it “Presencing,” by which he means “bringing into the present” and also “pre-sensing” feeling what’s coming before it arrives. People come first. They’re the ones who have ideas and needs. They’re the ones who create and use the processes and products. And right now, a lot of people are a little bit lost. In the United States, we’ve dropped so far down the list of the world’s happiest countries that it’s clear we need to change our thinking.
The positive psychologist Abraham Maslow had a quote I think of every day. He said, “The history of the world is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” The history of the world. You and me not believing we are good enough. If you want to be a leader, you have to start with yourself. Where are you selling yourself short? How can you be a more aware and effective person? How can you raise the awareness of all those around you? How can you get them engaged and excited about creating better processes and better products, building a world that works better? Does that sound too hard? Don’t sell yourself short.
Finally, if you could leave our readers with one piece of advice or insight from your vast experience, what would it be?
When I was young, I read a number of books about yogis who lived in caves seeking “enlightenment.” It seemed a hard and lonely path to me. And then, some years later, I was working with a coach who kept pushing me on what I really stood for. I would offer up statements of purpose and he would say, “Not big enough.” Finally, I thought about it, and asked myself what would be the “biggest” thing anyone could stand for? I thought about all those yogis. I thought about Takuan Soho, the Zen master in a series of Samurai movies I loved as a teenager. And what I said surprised me, “I stand for making work a path of enlightenment.” That’s still what I stand for and that’s the work at Reservoir.
So the advice I’ll share with readers is this: Think big. Think beyond normal boundaries and expectations. What if you could lead yourself and others up a path of enlightenment? You will find, and help others find, the highest ambition and deepest self-awareness. You will help them find value and worth in themselves. And then you can all go to work building the organizations that will help us change the world.
