There is a story of Michael Phelps in which a sports journalist was asking him why he just seemed to be staring off in space before this race.
The reporter asked, “Are you rehearsing how you are going to finish?”
Phelps said, “No. I’m rehearsing every single stroke.”
High performers know the importance of this “staring off in space” practice. They know it’s this obsession to develop a crystal clear vision of what could be that keeps them going and growing.
Before COVID shook our world to the core, I had the opportunity to talk with Baylor alum and maybe the world’s expert on developing and pursuing that kind of crystal clear vision. Michael Hyatt started his career at Word Publishing in Waco. He continuted his publishing career at Thomas Nelson, culminating is his 2004-2011 tenure as CEO. In 2012, he founded Michael Hyatt & Co., a leadership development company helping successful, but overwhelmed leaders get the focus they need to win at work and succeed at life. Michael Hyatt & Co. has been featured in the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for three years in a row and was named on of Inc’s 2020 “Best Places to Work.”
Now, in a world so desperate for certainty, clarity, and candor, Michael’s experience and advice speak more importantly than ever. Because the world needs vision-driven leaders more than ever.
This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity. For the full version, visit baylorline.com/michaelhyatt.
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Jonathon Platt: I had a lot of fun trying to find stories of you on campus and find stories of you back at Word Publishing. It was really cool to chat with some folks and go back in time to when you were just another student on campus.
Michael Hyatt: Well, you know, I started at Word when I was a student and there were so many Baylor students and people that were working at Word. Of course, Jarrell McCracken (the founder of Word Publishing), that’s where he started. Too bad he’s still not around because he was a legend.
JP: Well, I want to talk about Word. But I want to start back at the beginning. The cliché question of when you were a small town boy in Nebraska, why did you decide to choose Baylor?
MH: Well, first of all, my family moved to Waco when I was in the ninth grade from Nebraska. So I went to Waco that last year of junior high or middle school — I think we called it junior high back then, and then high school, Richfield High, which no longer exists. I think it became part of Waco High. So I just felt like it was local. I had heard great things about it.
I intended to be a music major, and it had a huge reputation for that. Plus to be honest, I became a Christian when I was 18 and so some of the people that I was involved with were people who were from Baylor. I just was more drawn by the people than anything. At the time, I was a Southern Baptist and Baylor was Southern Baptist at that time.
JP: What did you hope to get out of Baylor when you first decided to come here? I know you said that you’d just become a Christian and the people were a really good part of it, but you wanted to be a music major. Did you have higher goals other than just being a music major and getting into the music industry?
MH: Yeah, I actually switched to philosophy with the intention of going to seminary. So I wanted to go to Southwestern Seminary and I intended to go into the ministry. In fact, while I was at Baylor, I had a part-time gig, a weekend gig, at Hilltop Lakes Church in College-Station. Just outside of College-Station. It was a retirement community. So Gail and I would drive down there. I think it was about 80 miles. We’d drive down there on a Saturday afternoon and come back on a Sunday night. It was crazy, man. I mean, I was so busy. Then I had a part-time job during the week at Word. I just fell in love with the publishing business and I thought, “This is my home. This is what I want to do.” So I started in sales at Word and then went into marketing and then editorial.
JP: Who were some other influences at your time as a student at Baylor? Do you remember any cool professors you had?
MH: Yeah. I’m trying to think of his name in the philosophy department. I don’t think he’s there any longer. It’s Dr. Baird. Dr. Kilgore was the chairman. He was a trip. Quick story about him. So I took a course in ancient Greek philosophy. So I walk into the class. This guy is just a little bit, I don’t know, aloof. So he pulls open this text of Plato and he says, “I would prefer that you read this in Greek. But if you must, you can read it in English.” We’re all looking at each other like, “Is he serious?” Another professor that was a big influence on me, and I had six courses with him, was Dr. Richard Cutter, who was a Greek professor.
JP: Yeah, he wrote the textbook.
MH: He did. Yeah. Still got a copy somewhere.
JP: He’s no longer teaching and they no longer use that textbook, but my first day of Greek, I went up to the professor afterwards and I said, “How come you don’t use Dr. Cutter’s book anymore?” The professor said, “Well, he’s no longer here to tell us to use it.”
MH: He was such a character, man. It’s funny because this is bringing back so many memories, But one of the things he would always say to us was, “Better to remain quiet and be thought wise than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
JP: The era of Baylor you attended was really this time when a lot of people look back to as the “best” Baylor, the “golden age” of Baylor. Everybody thinks their years at Baylor are the golden age of Baylor, but when you were there in the mid-’70s, where was the vision at Baylor?
MH: Certainly I would have absorbed it as a student by osmosis. I think it was because all the collective inputs. It was everything from my chapel experience to, at that time, the Baptist Student Union to my on-campus experience with the Navigators to the other students that I was enrolled with. Yeah. I don’t know that there was anything specific except that I do remember feeling optimistic about the future and glad to be a part of that community and privileged, certainly, to be a part of that community.
JP: Stay on this topic of vision, your latest book, The Vision Driven Leader — did it come about because this is where you spend most of your time now as CEO of Michael Hyatt & Co.?
MH: Yeah, I think where I spend my time has shifted in the last three years in a major way. So much of my time before was just behind the curtain writing or podcasting and sending stuff out. But I didn’t have a lot of direct interactions with customers or clients because I had pretty much withdrawn from public speaking because I didn’t really like to travel. So when I first left Thomas Nelson in 2011, for the first two, two and a half years, I was speaking 60 times a year because I thought that was what I wanted to do. But then I discovered traveling is exhausting. I didn’t like being away from my family. I now have nine grandkids. I don’t remember how many I had at that time. Five daughters. All of them live in this general area of where I live in Nashville. So I didn’t like being away. So I wasn’t really having that direct interaction. Well, then we started doing our own conferences. So we did a conference for a number of years called Best Year Ever. Then we did the Free to Focus conference. But where this content really came to fruition was in my coaching practice, which started about three years ago. So we have a program called BusinessAccelerator and you can get more information at businessaccelerator.com. But we have about 500 now, 500 business owners or entrepreneurs who meet with me on a quarterly basis in Nashville. For each of these clients, we track specific metrics every year. Currently, in the first 12 months of the program, our average client grows their business by 62%. But they shave 11 hours off their average work week. So it was in the interaction with these clients and me teaching what I learned as the CEO at Thomas Nelson and my whole career there at Thomas Nelson, which I was there I think collectively a total of 17 years, and then what I learned in building a platform and starting this business from 2011. One of the things that I always came back to was it’s got to start with vision.
I kind of stumbled into it when I was the general manager of Nelson Books. Then, of course, when I started this business, I said, “I have got to get clear on what it is I’m trying to build,” and even though that’s morphed and changed a lot over the last several years, I started at least with a destination in mind. So the book came out of that work with clients who really struggled, but we saw a huge, massive growth in their businesses and them getting control of their lifestyle by getting clear on what they wanted.
JP: Can you talk about a time when you really wished that you could have sent yourself this book that you just wrote?
MH: Honestly, any time I took a new job. Whether it was when I became the marketing director at that department at Word, whether it was when I moved into the editorial department and there was no clear vision there. We were just very opportunistically driven. I think that what happens to a lot of leaders as they begin to become successful is that opportunities accelerate and multiply. Without a vision, unfortunately, a lot of things show up that are really distractions masquerading as opportunities. But if you don’t have a vision, if you’re not clear about the destination, then you have no filter by which to differentiate the opportunities from the distractions and you end up saying yes to everything. That was our undoing at Wolgemuth and Hyatt. I think for every business that fails, somewhere baked into that is a lack of clarity about vision. I think the other thing that vision does that would have helped me in a number of these different situations is attracting the right people and repelling the wrong ones.
JP: A lot of people that graduate with me that are now in those upper level, but still young professionals, they’ve got people to sell up to. What’s your advice for selling the vision up whenever you have people on both sides of you — up the ladder and down?
MH: Yeah, I think the first thing you’ve got to remember is that the most popular radio station on earth is WIIFM. What’s in it for me? You can sell anything to your boss. I don’t care if you need additional resources, if you want to create or modify the position that you have, if you want a raise, whatever it is. You can sell anything as long as you help them get what they want. How is what you’re trying to sell going to get them what they want? If you can do that, you can sell the vision. So when it comes to the vision, I think you’ve got to ask yourself, “How is my vision for this department, how is this vision for whatever department you’re running, how is that going to make the whole enterprise, help get your boss what you want?” You’ve got to know what your boss wants. Right? So some bosses want esteem with their boss. Some bosses want public acclaim. Some bosses just want more money and more profit. Whatever it is, you’ve got to figure that out. If you can sell this as helping them get what they want, it’s an easy yes.
JP: You guys have some huge goals at Michael Hyatt & Co. Some big, big initiatives. How are you all preparing now? I mean, as this book on vision goes out, how are you all preparing to make this vision happen? What are those steps you’re taking? What does the day by day vision look like?
MH: Man. Yeah, so the strategic planning process for us, which we do every year, begins with looking at the vision and fine-tuning it. Then we try to distill that vision down after we do a SWOT analysis, we distill that down into our strategic priorities over the next three years. So it’s a lot easier after you’ve done this the first time because now we’re just fine-tuning. Then we have to distill that down to a set of annual goals for this next year. In other words, to accomplish this vision, and our vision is a three to five year vision, then what do we have to do this year to get there? Then we break that down by the quarterly goals and then we break that down further in which each team member does and into weekly priorities and daily actions. So that linkage between vision and daily actions is what drives execution. There’s three essential things that have to happen in a corporation for you to be able to execute at a high level and scale exponentially. You’ve got to have vision. You’ve got to have alignment around the vision so that you can eliminate sideways energy and really focus and concentrate all your resources on this clear objective. Then once you have vision and alignment, you can drive execution. If you don’t have that, if you don’t have the vision and the alignment, then execution becomes people overwhelmed, doing a whole lot of work, a lot of sideways energy, a lot of fake work, people really busy. But it just seems like you’re treading water. You’re not really moving forward.
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Back in a normal world before COVID-19, we held the Baylor Line Foundation’s annual Hall of Fame Awards Banquet back in February. I knew I’d soon be interviewing Michael for this piece and so, as I made the rounds meeting some of the most astonishing member of the Baylor Family, I asked several if they had ever crossed paths with him. About a dozen said yes.
“What do you think defines him?” I’d ask.
It amazed me when, in their answers, every one of them used the word: Ambitious. “The most ambitious person I’ve met.” “He’s always been so ambitious.” “There are few people who have more ambition than Michael.”
I brought this up to him. Across his face he seemed to grin and wince at the same time. In my final question, I asked Michael what that meant to him and how being so driven by (and defined by) ambition met his obsession with vision.
MH: “I would say that what drives my ambition is that vision. So in other words, when I get clarity about a future that I want to create, I don’t care if it’s in my marriage or my relationship with my kids or my physical health or my business, I just… It accelerates progress toward that and it just has a tractor pull, like a magnetic pull toward that.
I never really thought about it like that since you brought it up. I’m not sure that, by the way, ambition is always a good thing either. One of the things that I’ve had to learn over the years was to temper that and not be at the mercy of my ambition, but let my ambition serve me. I mean, I could go into lots of stories there, but yeah…
I think if you were thinking of a grand theory, a unifying theory of me, I think the vision is the thing.”
