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I’m delighted to welcome Dr. Joseph Michelli to the Creating Superfans podcast! He’s an organizational consultant, the author of nine bestselling business books, and an internationally renowned customer experience speaker and expert.
You’ll hear us chat about the customer experience master’s degree program he designed for Campbellsville University, the micro and macro changes that significantly improve customer experience within organizations, and Joseph’s experiences working alongside brands like Starbucks, Mercedes-Benz, and the Ritz Carlton. Tune in for insights on empowering teams, creating brand loyalty, and leveraging CX as a powerful business differentiator.
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Transcription
Brittany Hodak [00:00:00]:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Creating Superfans podcast. Here’s the deal. If your customers aren’t telling their friends how awesome you are, you’re in trouble. But don’t worry. By the end of this episode, you’ll have some brand new tips for turning more of your customers into super fans. This week, I’m delighted to welcome doctor Joseph Michelli to the podcast. He’s an organizational consultant, the author of 9 best selling business books, and an internationally renowned customer experience speaker and expert. Today, we’ll chat about the customer experience master’s degree program he designed for Campbellsville University, the micro and macro changes that significantly improve customer experience within organizations, and Joseph’s experiences working alongside brands, including Starbucks, Mercedes, and the Ritz Carlton.
Brittany Hodak [00:00:45]:
Let’s dive in. Joseph, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Joseph Michelli [00:00:51]:
There was no choice. I’m a super fan of yours. I had to accept the invitation. So
Brittany Hodak [00:00:54]:
thank you. That that is sort of the strategy. I’m like, how can I make people feel like they wanna be on the show? I’ve often Writing
Joseph Michelli [00:01:00]:
great books kinda gets them started. I can tell you.
Brittany Hodak [00:01:02]:
So thank you so much. Something about that. You’ve you’ve written several fantastic books.
Joseph Michelli [00:01:07]:
I’ve written a a couple. Yeah. Yeah.
Brittany Hodak [00:01:09]:
Well, I’m so excited to have you on the show. There are a lot of things that I wanna talk to you about today, but one of the things that I wanna start with is something that I think is so incredibly cool. You have helped establish a brand new master’s program that’s all about customer experience. You’re doing it with Campbellsville University. I wanna talk a little bit about how that came to be and why it’s so impactful. Because as somebody who has often said, everybody needs to learn about CX before they get into the workplace and then have really great options for continuing education, I know how important this has been market. So let’s talk a little bit about how this came to be and why it’s so important.
Joseph Michelli [00:01:44]:
It starts with a failure on my part, namely that I didn’t take an opportunity when Jean Bliss, a good friend of mine, asked me to help her cocreate what turned out to be the Customer Experience Professional Association, which does testing and certified skill sets and core competencies of people who call themselves CX practitioners. So when I missed out on that opportunity, I’ve been looking for other ways over the course of my career to get back to the next generation. And I I had the good fortune of just getting asked to do a certification course for Campbellsville University. Met the president, Joe Hopkins. We had conversations to think bigger than just a certification course, and I suggested that formal training for for people who are trying to transition into this field could very much be helpful, and they did the heavy lifting in getting the certifications. I’ve been helping develop the curriculum. We’ve worked with CXPA to make sure the curriculum is based on the core competency. So it’s been a wonderful journey, and we’re just getting started on it.
Joseph Michelli [00:02:34]:
And, you know, I’ll pass it on to somebody else after I get it launched.
Brittany Hodak [00:02:38]:
So as you were putting it together and you were thinking about how the discipline of CX has changed over the years, how did you put something that you knew was right for right now but also preparing people for the future because this is a field where technology is so important.
Joseph Michelli [00:02:54]:
Well, Britney, it’s so exciting to see young faces, and I think of you as that really dynamic leader in the space. I’ve been in this for so long that we did not call it c CX at all. We talked about customer service. We didn’t have a concept for it. But when I was working with Starbucks, probably in 2008 or so, it was really clear to me that we’re trying to create an experience, that 3rd place experience between work and home where people could come and enjoy an affordable luxury item in a in a comfortable setting. So we were really thinking about the experience economy. Joe Pine, who’s a good friend of mine, has spent, you know, a lot of time in his work to help us understand what experiential economies look like versus service economies. So the point, I I guess, I’m saying is that through my vision, it’s been such a long run.
Joseph Michelli [00:03:38]:
The fact that we have a profession at all is really exciting. And to have a label and to do research now, having more research that funds, our understanding, they’re just practitioners who are, you know, using technologies, like empathy mapping or ecosystem mapping or other things like that. It’s all evolving. And I think it’s important because so many people get pulled from other parts of an organization to take on these responsibilities without formal training and they’re doing a lot of on the job training. So if we can expect expedite that, give them some really curated content and and create a a degree that I think matches up with you know, this is part of a business school curriculum. So it’s matching up with IT so that we’re learning about how AI impacts customer experience. All of that seems to fit together, I think, for the future.
Brittany Hodak [00:04:24]:
Well, it’s so exciting that you’ve put it together. Hopefully, other schools will take note and begin offering similar programs because I think it’s so imperative for people to know this is even a path. Right? I think a lot of people I know I like, I when I was in graduate school, I I had no idea that CX was a path. I would have loved to have known that and been taking some of these classes way back then.
Joseph Michelli [00:04:44]:
So my degree was in clinical psychology at the University of Southern California. I got out. I was working as a clinical psychologist working in a hospital system, got pulled into organizational development, worked in OD, but then had a merger of Catholic health care system and the 7th day Adventist health care system and tried to help navigate these culture clashes and and tried to keep a focus on the patient in the midst of all of this crazy chaos that was going on. And so I think for me, it was an outgrowth of that and some work I’ve done with Johnny Yopion with the Pike Place Fish Market, but I wasn’t you know, I didn’t set out to be a customer experience professional in any stretch of the imagination because it wasn’t even a concept.
Brittany Hodak [00:05:23]:
So you have a lot of experience working with huge organizations, many of them in the medical field. And one of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with is sort of zooming in and zooming out, like the macro and the micro. And I know you’ve been at that intersection so many times. I would love for you to share some examples of seemingly little things, things that somebody could even be dismissive of in a meeting of, well, that doesn’t matter or that’s not gonna move the needle, that you’ve seen when delivered consistently with precision have made an enormous difference.
Joseph Michelli [00:05:54]:
Oh, it’s a incredible question, and and I think I love your word intersection. You use it, I know, a lot in your book, and it’s an important concept to look for these confluence points, these meeting points. And I think when it comes to the little things that make a difference, it really is setting a tone for what do we want the organization to do. So a little thing like taking the time to define what we want every customer to feel every single time, no excuses. It’s a little thing. Like, most organizations set their mission and their vision and their values. Values are often the representation of what we value and how that should guide our behavior, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we understand what those behaviors are going to produce by way of experiences for a customer. So just taking a little extra time and looking at your values and then flipping them around and saying, okay.
Joseph Michelli [00:06:42]:
This is what we value, and this is how we should behave. And if we do so, how will the customer feel? Ultimately, how do we want the customer to feel? And these values should translate into that. So if you have a value around integrity, you want your customer to feel trusting, right, that they trust you. So this is the ability to take that little bit of time and think through the lens of if we did these things, what would it feel like for customers and how do we ensure that particularly at high value moments along a customer journey, we’re doing everything operationally to execute. So they walk out of the website experience, the telephone call, the chatbot interaction, or our face to face interaction with an increased probability of feeling that.
Brittany Hodak [00:07:26]:
I love that. And I think so many opportunities come up from great employees who care and do something, but then it never gets operationalized, either because they don’t think it’s that special to tell their boss or they’re afraid to tell someone that they’re doing something or just a lot of people don’t know because they’re so busy doing a great job. I was working with the health care system last year, and we had cross departmental representation in the room. And one of the nurses said, I thought it was so special when I had surgery that the nurses cut all of the little bandages into heart shapes. So then after I was discharged and I went home and I was changing the the dressing, I thought, oh, that was so sweet that my coworkers did this for me. And I said, why why don’t we do this for for everyone? And she talked to the nurses, and they said, well, we do do this for everyone. Every we do this for every patient. And then she was telling another nurse, she said, I’ve never heard of this.
Brittany Hodak [00:08:22]:
What are you talking about? And just that one sort of micro example of something that made such an impact on her. And when she started asking other patients who had said it, And then the CEO said, okay. We’ve gotta figure out a way for everyone to find out about this, for us to, you know, make it easy to implement and and to make it part of the SOP. And when they started talking to some of the the nurses who had originated that, they said part of the reason we didn’t say anything is because we didn’t wanna get in trouble for cutting the the. Like, we were taking a square and cutting it into a heart shape, and this was, you know, on the back of coming out of COVID. And and there’s such a focus on not wasting PPE and supplies and being cost conscious and all of that. And so I that example has really stuck with me of this is a great idea that is being done in a silo that could be impacting some people, but many other people don’t know about. And I think in organizations of all sizes across the world, there are 100, perhaps, definitely dozens of examples of things like that happening.
Brittany Hodak [00:09:21]:
So I’m curious in your work with organizations, what are some tips that you’ve been able to to provide or some guidance that you’ve been able to give to capture those moments of employees who have an idea, who are going above and beyond, and then figuring out, is this something that we should be deploying more widely? And if so, how do we do that in an effective way?
Joseph Michelli [00:09:41]:
Well, it it really requires leaders to be willing to listen to people and not blame ideas that don’t succeed as anything more than an opportunity that someone was willing to share. So there is a culture, I think, where people are afraid to pop their heads out. But But I’ll give you three quick examples and really quick. One is Dina Campion, Starbucks early days, Promenade in Santa Monica, the 3rd market for for Starbucks. She would bring a blender home every you know, she would use her blender at home and bring coffee and try to create this blended frozen beverage. She would put, you know, emulsifiers in it, whatever, and and she’d actually try it in the store. This violated a lot of health codes in California at the time, but it turned out to be the epigenesis of the frappuccino blended beverage that is representative of more than 60% of the sales of Starbucks today. So, clearly, somebody said yes to exploration probably in ways that were not necessarily best at the time, but it speaks to a culture early on of entrepreneurial let’s explore.
Joseph Michelli [00:10:40]:
The next example I would give you is more mature organizations like Mercedes Benz who working with, Henry Henricamp, who is the the chief of customer experience for a long time. We developed the customer champions program, and we would challenge champions people in dealerships without titles officially as leaders but responsible for being catalysts to CX growth in their organizations. We challenged them to come up with ways to create positive customer experiences. And we’d spotlight what they created, and then we’d standardize processes. So whether it’s something as simple as a a hang on your your rearview mirror that says, hey. It was a pleasure to vacuum your car and wash it today. My name is John, which then drove up customer experience scores on the JD Power on cleanliness at at arrival when people would pick up their vehicles just because we made service tangible by virtue of this little hang, right, this little piece of paper. And that was just an idea from somebody in a particular market who was challenged to come up with ideas as a customer experience champion.
Joseph Michelli [00:11:45]:
It then becomes standardized across it. And then the final thing I’ll say really quickly is that organization like the Ritz Carlton doesn’t wanna standardize most of those things. They just wanna storytell the wow stories because their thought is rather than you doing it the same way that I do it, which then becomes a service expectation everywhere you go, I want you to understand what wow looks like when somebody does it so that you can say, oh, I see what they did there. I wanna do that and then something. I wanna put my own spin on that wow story. So I think there are lots of ways of getting there, but in every one of them, it’s a willingness to say yes. And how do we make this make sense either within, you know, guidelines, or how do we make this sense as a standard policy, or how do we make it make sense so that you can make it even better?
Brittany Hodak [00:12:26]:
Well and I love in every single one of those examples that you shared. Underlying and underpinning what made that happen was a trust in employees to say, this is a safe environment for you to try new things, for you to innovate, for you to suggest an idea and not get laughed at, for you to trust that you know how to best wow this client. I’m sure this is something that you’ve thought a lot about, not just in your work, but also as you are designing the the master’s program. What is a missed opportunity that people training their employees aren’t doing correctly that then sets them up to not have somebody who becomes the service superstar later on?
Joseph Michelli [00:13:05]:
I think the the biggest thing is to help people realize that we’re not in business to create profits. We’re in business, as Drucker said, to create customers, and that means that every one of us is in the human customer creation business, which relies on us helping customers have perceptions of us that make us want make them wanna come to us and make them wanna send their friends. Right? So every person who walks in the door, whether you think they’re in accounting and they don’t you know, they’re not central to sales or marketing, Every single person in your organization has a role in creating a customer and helping people say, you have this great opportunity. You’re here today. You touch people’s lives. Maybe you’re twice removed from the customer, but when you touch the life of that coworker and you enable them, you give them powerful respect and enthusiasm and urgency of response, that enables them to soar like an eagle in the eyes of the customer. Right? And I think we fail to emphasize the responsibilities we have one to another and ultimately out to the customer, and we let people get by with really terrible attitudes toward other human beings in the workplace. And we aren’t willing to have those, as Brene Brown would talk about, courageous leadership conversations that are needed to say, no.
Joseph Michelli [00:14:22]:
You can do better. That’s not acceptable. You can do better. You can treat this coworker better. You can treat this customer better. The customer wasn’t right, but they deserved your respect.
Brittany Hodak [00:14:32]:
How much of that deterioration do you think is because of what feels like a deterioration across the board in the civility and humanity that we have, especially with people who maybe have a different viewpoint than us, because it does feel like there has been a shift over the past couple of decades. And I would imagine, you know, everything is connected. All of those factors outside of the workplace are seeping into performance inside the workplace as well.
Joseph Michelli [00:14:59]:
Yeah. I think civil discourse has just deteriorated. I mean, we just label people. We identify them as either us or them. And once we made that determination, then our our approach and response to them can change. All that’s true is a societal backdrop. I think it’s a harder time to be a leader because that’s in inherent in what you’re dealing with, but it’s all the more important to be a leader. You know? Yeah.
Joseph Michelli [00:15:22]:
I mean, people if you’ve got someone in your employee and they are not engaging civil discourse or they’re not treating people with civility, it’s our job to challenge them to do so and call out their higher angels. And if they fail to do so, then I think it’s our responsibility to encourage them to go to some other place that will tolerate that kind of behavior. And there’ll be a whole bunch of customers who will love that. Like, there’ll be a whole bunch of customers who wanna go there just because however that organization rolls. But the most human beings underneath it, I think, want to make the world a better place. They want to feel that they matter. And if we’re the part of an organization that challenges our people to ensure that that happens every single day, I think we’re gonna have a long term competitive advantage despite the headwinds.
Brittany Hodak [00:16:08]:
Absolutely. And I think any leader listening to this, you should never be afraid to have a higher standard in your organization than you feel like might exist outside your organization. As long as you are very transparent about that, as long as, it has is clearly communicated to everybody from the get that this is the way we do things here, then I think everybody should ask themselves what are the standards and what are the way that we do things here because it’s no longer okay to just make it implied.
Joseph Michelli [00:16:35]:
I hate to interrupt, but I I don’t even go with an extra step. Right? Like, if you look at the Ritz Carlton, they hold that standard to their guests as well. The the concept of ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen means that the people that the ladies and gentlemen of the Ritz Carlton serve must also be ladies gentlemen. So if you disrespect a lady or gentleman of the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company, they have the full authority. The manager general managers frequently will say, if you can’t comport your behavior to that of a gentleman or lady, mister or miss guest, you need to go to the 4 seasons. I’ll pay for your first night there. I will gladly get you out of our building at the risk of lifetime value of you because the the cost of that is that you burn an employee who then goes out and mistreats the next guest because they were so disrespected. That next guest lifetime value is on the line, and you’d rather have that next guest than the one who was mistreating your lady or gentleman in the first place.
Joseph Michelli [00:17:23]:
Sorry to interrupt, but I’m No.
Brittany Hodak [00:17:24]:
That you’re absolutely right. And you don’t you never wanna lose a good employee over a bad customer, which is something that I’m sure is happening all over, the world, quite frankly, but in in organizations that don’t have that in check. So I wanna ask you something, Joseph, and because I know you’ve done so much for Starbucks over the years, and I thought it was really interesting when they you know, it’s been a little bit of CEO roulette. And the this latest iteration came in and said, we’ve gotten away from the things that made us special. And so much of what he was talking about in his note was directly CX and saying, you know, we we we’ve made things too complicated. We’ve taken away the personalization. It’s not a great experience anymore in the stores because we’re focusing on mobile and drive through and all of the things that he said we’ve gotta get back to. And I think watching as an outside observer, we see this happen so often where a company is sort of crushing it and then takes their eye off the ball and things start to slip or falter or other things become a focus.
Brittany Hodak [00:18:20]:
And I would just love your thoughts on either specifically or or more generally, if you’d prefer to speak more generally, why this tends to happen, like, why so many c level executives allow the ball to be dropped, and then the recovery cost of getting back to where things were before? Because it seems like the the thing that is always at the center when when we see, you know, it it it may be trailing before it’s, you know, 3 or 4 quarters of of, decline and stock prices down and stores are closing. You can almost always trace it back and say, here’s where we stopped putting the customer at the center of every decision we made and everything we did. So I would love your thoughts on all of that because it’s so fascinating and something we see happening again and again and again.
Joseph Michelli [00:19:04]:
Well, first off, I’m releasing a newsletter in a couple of weeks, and I’ve already written it. And it sounds like I just stole all your material really quite frankly. So please, newsletter readers know I did write it in advance, and I just happen to think very similarly to Britney. I at a fundamental level, I spoke yesterday, to Howard Behar. So Howard Behar is one of the h two o. So h two o were really the founders of Starbucks. Howard Schultz, Howard Bihar, and Warren Smith. And Warren has long since passed.
Joseph Michelli [00:19:29]:
Howard Bihar is 80 now. And he and I had a conversation the other day just about the the current CEO and current state of Starbucks. So, yeah, I think here’s here’s a couple of things. 1st, Starbucks has a very complex problem. They started as an experiential brand, and they became a transactional brand. They did it out of volume. They did it because they generate lots of profits for shareholders by being able to to maximize transactions. Now there’s no doubt in the world that this is a quick service restaurant brand.
Joseph Michelli [00:19:56]:
Everything needs to be quick. People wanna use the mobile technology. So really, we’re champion by Starbucks in large measure from mobile pay to be able to order, be able to pick up, not have to stand in line at a cafe. There’s so much good about that. The problem is that when you get right down to it, Starbucks don’t know much about the product. They are just pulling machines, pushing buttons, and handing off drinks. So the this has changed the environment. I think the training that’s involved in helping somebody say, yes.
Joseph Michelli [00:20:23]:
Make it fast. But if you have a chance in a moment, in a day to make it uplifting for a person, here are the ways you do that. I think that that training has gone by the wayside. But how does that training link to short term profits? It really doesn’t. So it gets lost in the process, and more money goes into the technologies needed to expedite and geolocate where you are so that we can time the drink and, manage the queue. So I I think these are hard, hard decisions, and I’m so glad I’m not a consultant to Starbucks today. I mean that in a very loving way because I think these decisions are painfully hard. You know, I think mister Nichols is gonna do a great job because he’s got a lot of experience during his Chipotle days.
Joseph Michelli [00:20:59]:
But but in all matter of fact, this is a challenging, challenging time for for restaurants and for figuring out how much technology and where the people need to be and how many people and how much training and where your budgets go. So it’s really hard. In the early days, it was easy because we were trying to differentiate from, you know, the coffee you got at a at a convenience store or a diner with a higher quality coffee in an environment where people could come for community, where people wanted community with less technology and less screens. So it’s, you know, it’s a whole different time, and I think you just have to find the balance. You have to have people available when people wanna opt human, and you have to have a lot of technology when people wanna self serve, which is what they prefer to do in most instances.
Brittany Hodak [00:21:40]:
Well and it feels like in a lot of ways, we’re kind in this, like, messy middle right now of for all the problems technology solves, it also creates a lot. And many businesses are serving customers across so many different generations right now that while you have some customers on the younger side, like, I get so frustrated when I can’t place a mobile order or do something in a couple of clicks or have it be super easy, but then I know that the customer next to me might only be paying in cash and have no idea how to even download an app and would never wanna do something without speaking face to face. And so I think there are so many decisions that are having to be made and then reevaluated almost, like, every day, it seems, as things change to meet all of these diverse customer desires at the right point.
Joseph Michelli [00:22:24]:
And I think this is where and some of your work in Superfans is just amazing because, really, you have to have your pulse on your customer. You have to really understand their story, I think, in your view. And their story varies depending upon the segment. And being able to do awesome segmentation of your customers, understand their psychographics and their demographics, build your your operational models in various scenarios depending upon what percentage of the people come from various segments is the way you function in business today. And people who don’t have those core competencies, I think, are really struggling. You know, they they have a one size fits all from a prior generation, or they have all tech digital experience, which is lovely for a future generation until it doesn’t work and until I need a person. And even in your generation, very few people have full digital experiences, long term relationships with brands. They normally have to have some detour into a human interaction.
Joseph Michelli [00:23:15]:
And when that happens, you just need to make sure you have the right people and you know when those high value moments are. So it’s a it’s a messy, messy middle, and great brands are gonna win because it is complex. And if you use your analytics well, you will have an advantage over those others as long as you also position people. Right? Like, an analytics model that only fuels more chatbots without ever having a way to get a hold of a human is likely not to win the day in the end, at least based on my experience.
Brittany Hodak [00:23:43]:
Oh, absolutely not. And I also one of my pet peeves is brands relying on chatbots before they’re ready for prime time because they’re trying to use customers as the r and d of we know it’s not great yet, but just think of all the the great learnings we’ll have if we’ll we’ll make the next 6 months worth of customers struggle and have to help us get to the point where we ultimately wanna go. Right? Like, don’t make your customers train your technology.
Joseph Michelli [00:24:09]:
In the old days, Eric Scowton would say we never put a trainee badge on somebody because if you know, as soon as you do, you’re basically telling the customer you’re gonna get lesser service. And and if we’re gonna put somebody out there who’s not ready and warrants that badge, then we you shouldn’t be paying the same amount of money for the service you’re about to get. So, you know, if you have to put trainee on anything, you probably aren’t ready for prime time.
Brittany Hodak [00:24:31]:
I love that analogy, and and it’s right because customers don’t care. Right? Like, I don’t care if you’ve been with the brand for an hour or 17 years. Like, I just want you to solve my problem. I just want you to help me.
Joseph Michelli [00:24:42]:
But look at brands that have gotten so good at doing this. Like, you know, we’re sorry we can’t deliver the speed of service because of x, y, or z. Please forgive us the high cost of goods and blank, blah, blank. I mean, figure it out. Right? Don’t make me, the customer, be responsible. Even the tipping phenomena, you know, like, the there’s so much that goes into that nowadays where it’s like, I expect you as the customer to carry the load on pricing. Just charge me what is fair. If you can’t come up with a competitive market you know, competitive price, you’re gonna be moved out of the market.
Joseph Michelli [00:25:11]:
But all these extra surcharges, hidden charges, it’s just bad profit, and it’s customers, I think, are seeing through this more and more and pushing back.
Brittany Hodak [00:25:20]:
Yeah. Like, I don’t want the local sandwich shop to be Ticketmaster. Yep. Just charge me what it’s worth. And I I’m so glad that you brought this up because this is this is something that I I’ve written about a couple of times and done a couple of hot take videos. But I believe, in general, tipping is a terrible customer experience, and that is coming from somebody who is a very good tipper and is always happy to tip for for excellent service. But now it’s like, who do I tip, and how much should I tip? And, should I really be, you know, tipping you 20% for a takeout order that I’m, you know, walking into the restaurant and grabbing off of a of a bar? Like, I I don’t know. And so I think tipping is a terrible customer experience.
Joseph Michelli [00:26:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. And you see it in the suggested tipping, indicators, you know, where they might start at 22%. So, you know, like, I’m a good tipper too. I if it’s gonna take something, and I get 20% out of me, and you know, at minimum. Right? So it’s just crazy when I see that in particularly in settings where since when has this not been a decent salary that tipping is involved? So anyway.
Brittany Hodak [00:26:24]:
Yeah. I know. I I I that that’s one of the things that it it it it’s interesting to see in, like, the political climate that we’re in right now, hot tipping has, like, become a campaign issue, and candidates are talking about it. And, you know, as a customer, I just think, wow. It would be so great if we could sort of make most of the tips go away. And as you said, just pay people what they deserve and charge customers what a service actually is costing.
Joseph Michelli [00:26:45]:
Yeah. And and I’m blessed to work with business leaders. I wrote a book called, Stronger Through Adversity, which was talking about how did a 140 major business leaders manage the pandemic. And it’s the Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon, or Brian Cornell, CEO of Target, interviewed for the book. And, and I intentionally stayed away from political leaders. I I did do local responders and nonprofit leaders, but I, you know, I think anytime you have your own self preservation as a part of the mix, I don’t care if you’re republican, democrat, it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s just a different kind of leadership. And so when I think about the challenges of the people that I deal with every day, it’s trying to make sure your people are taken care of and that they take care of the people that keep the lights on.
Joseph Michelli [00:27:28]:
Your career is dependent upon making others great. And, yeah, maybe there are some political leaders who do that, but I think at the core, it’s a lot about getting elected and staying in power. So I stay away from that both in my my public announcements and everything I do online, but but I think it’s important to realize tipping is a fundamental question of how do you make sure your people are taken care of with the with the pay that causes them to wanna work for you? How do you create an environment and culture that’s awesome so they wanna keep coming to work? And how do you make sure that the the customer has a competitive pricing perspective where they’re not feeling like they’re carrying some kind of burden and that you’ve shifted a burden onto them that isn’t in in part the profitability of your business?
Brittany Hodak [00:28:11]:
Yeah. Well, you have written so many incredible books over the years, and I would I’m just curious as as an author, how you kinda decide what you’re gonna focus on next, how you choose that next focus area, and if there’s anything that that’s, like, coming on the horizon. Anything that you can tell us that you’re really sort of hyper focused on now for maybe something that’s that’s coming next?
Joseph Michelli [00:28:36]:
Sure. So a couple of things. I mean, I was fortunate to get in with McGraw Hill early on. McGraw Hill stopped publishing business books last year, so that’s changed my relationship. And I had about a 17 year run with them. And just working closely with Donnie Dickerson, who is my senior editor there, we would always look for brands that were treating their people well, that were treating their customers well, and that had a global appeal. There are times we’ve chosen to do something like a Zappos book, which was more of a US centric book. But most of the time, we were looking for brands that would be recognized in the global marketplace so you can do translation.
Joseph Michelli [00:29:05]:
Right? So those are the 3 filters we typically use. If I worked for the brand, that was how I got access. So there are many brands that I work for that I’ve not written about, but, the brands that I have worked for that I had an access point, that was always the way that we go. So I have on the horizon a book about Amazon One Medical. It’ll be out in 2025. It’s gonna be distributed by Simon and Schuster. It is, really a focus. The the title of the book is all business is personal and trying to navigate that thing we were talking about Starbucks.
Joseph Michelli [00:29:35]:
Where’s the technology? Where are the people really talking about a human centric technology aided approach to business? And then in 2026, I have another book under contract about a female leader of a Fortune 5 100 financial services company. I won’t say more, but there really are no other examples unless I’ll make you have to do the research. But I was
Brittany Hodak [00:29:54]:
gonna say, I I think we knew who you’re talking about. Yeah.
Joseph Michelli [00:29:57]:
But, she’s just a remarkable, and and I’ll be doing a book about her in 2026. And and it’s you know, probably, I’m gonna try to be a third person voice to a book like Indra Nooyi’s, you know, My Life in Full, which was just a brilliant book if you haven’t read it, about what it was like to be a female leader of PepsiCo for 12 years, particularly as a Indian immigrant into the United States and just the journey that she had to make a scent of a brand like Pepsi. So, so I’m hoping to do a voice like that at the 3rd party expose on great female leaders. So, those are my books for 2025 and 2026, and those where I go from there other than some beach somewhere with an umbrella drink.
Brittany Hodak [00:30:36]:
I love that. What is a book that you wish you had written?
Joseph Michelli [00:30:40]:
Well, other than superfans, is that can I say that one, or is that, off limits? Well, you know, there’s so many books I wish I’d written. I don’t have the patience to have written them. That’s why they didn’t happen. Like, I love Will and Ariel Durant’s books on the history of civilization. I think they’re just incredible. I wish I’ve written those. Dave Andrely is a friend of mine. He writes books about people like Lincoln.
Joseph Michelli [00:31:00]:
Every time I read his work, I go, gosh. I wish I was Dave Andrely. So there’s so many books, and I think the key is let’s just keep reading them because the world needs us to not just do short sound bites. I mean, I get the value of that, but it takes some discipline to sustain focus in a book project. It takes a lot of discipline to read a book. I think that makes you slightly different than people who will only accept 13 seconds or less on TikTok.
Brittany Hodak [00:31:26]:
Amen. Joseph, what’s a brand or an experience that you are a super fan of that should be on more people’s radar but may not be yet?
Joseph Michelli [00:31:35]:
Oh, man. That may not be. I’m I’m such a slow follower. I don’t think I’m on the cutting edge of anything, really. You know, I happen to to love brands that are in the music space, so I have this really wonderful guitar that integrates technology and, it’s got a a computer inside of it that allows me to have backing tracks and all kinds of stuff. So I’m a real fan of Lava, but, you know, there’s there’s so many wonderful brands out there. And the main thing is if they’re taking care of you, that you should be a super fan of theirs if they get you and you like their brand story. At least that’s what I’ve read about in some people.
Brittany Hodak [00:32:11]:
I mean, that feels like a great call to action to everybody listening. I would like for you to think about a brand that you love, but maybe you haven’t told anybody about yet. Who in your life, either one to 1 or one to many, needs to hear about that brand because of how awesome they are? Maybe go tell the story.
Joseph Michelli [00:32:25]:
Yeah. I think Britney would be a example if you haven’t told somebody about the podcast. That that could be a good starting place.
Brittany Hodak [00:32:31]:
Well, as a totally objective outside, party to that, I cosign on that. Somebody was joking in the group.
Joseph Michelli [00:32:40]:
Your credibility was so good until you said you were outside party. I think you lost it there.
Brittany Hodak [00:32:45]:
Well, Joseph, thank you so much for coming on the show. For everybody listening right now, who’s like, wow. This guy is super smart. I can’t wait to hear more. How can people get more from you, Joseph?
Joseph Michelli [00:32:55]:
First off, you better check your perceptions. And then second, you can go to josephmiccelli dotcom. I’m mercilessly all over the Internet as my name, so you’ll find me on LinkedIn as Joseph Michelli. If you can spell it, it’s right there. You know, just hop on over, and we’ll spend some time chatting about how you can make life better for the people you serve and who they serve.
Brittany Hodak [00:33:12]:
Amazing. Joseph, thank you so much for coming on the show. You promise to come back when the new book is out?
Joseph Michelli [00:33:17]:
Absolutely, if you’ll let me.
Brittany Hodak [00:33:18]:
Alright. Well, I’ll see you then. That’s it for today’s episode. Please help me out by leaving a review for the show or sharing it with a friend. Until next time, remember, don’t settle for standard. Be super.
