Anton Gunn - How Better Leaders Create Better Cultures #20

Podcast
Written by Nick Halaris

This week on the Nick Halaris Show we are featuring popular keynote speaker and leadership consultant, Anton Gunn.  Through a long, diverse, and impressive career in both business and public service, Anton has become a leading voice for organizations looking to build world class cultures.  He has deep experience as a public servant—as a former State Representative in South Carolina and as a Senior Advisor to President Obama—has written several bestselling books on leadership—“The Presidential Principles” and “Just Lead”—and inspires audiences almost every week of the year as a keynote speaker.

I wanted to have Anton on the show to learn more about what he’s seeing and learning from his work with leaders and organizations around the country.  Clearly, there’s something really important happening in the labor market right now.  Not a week goes by where we don’t hear about things like workplace toxicity, quiet quitting, or declining labor force participation.  We’re even seeing big labor strikes and the beginnings of what looks like a rebirth of the organized labor movement.  Given what he does day-in and day-out, Anton is the perfect person to help us decode what’s really going-on here.  In this engaging discussion, we explore:

·  The origins of toxic workplace culture

·  Just why we’ve seen such a huge uptick in people quitting across the country

·  What leaders should do if they want to build a world class culture

·  What’s working and not working with corporate DEI initiatives

·  The 3 questions of a great leader

·  The relationship between the commitment to service and great leadership

&

·  Much, much more

As always, hope you enjoy!

 

PS.  Anton has graciously offered to share some resources with all of us.  Just go towww.antongunn.com/toolkit if you are interested in learning more about the 10 Qualities of a World Class Leader or the 9 Pivotal Points of the Just Lead Tool Kit!  

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and Youtube or on your favorite podcast platform.

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Nick Halaris

I’ve been fascinated by investing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I would read the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Barron’s, pouring over the data tables, stories and interviews with a passion and an insatiable kind of curiosity. As I grew into adulthood, I struggled to find the right outlet and channel for this passion and spent much of my twenties wandering and trying out different things. I had a very brief career as an attorney, spent some time as a strategy and leadership consultant for big multinational companies, failed in an attempt to start a hedge fund, and even ended up helping run a scrap metal recycling operation for a while.

At the age of 30 though, I took my stand. I made up my mind that no matter what I was going to be an entrepreneurial investor. As crazy as it sounds, I owe everything in my life to this one foundational decision—even my amazing wife and my beautiful kids. I don’t think I would ever have met Alicia had I not made this one choice. At that moment in time, the financial world had just been devastated by the crash in the housing market and the near systemic failure of the global banking system that followed. I’ve always had a contrarian bent to my investment thinking; so, to me the carnage in real estate looked like an opportunity.

It all started with one house in Compton California. The business plan was simple: buy a distressed foreclosed home from a bank, bring it back to life with a big renovation and sell it to a first-time homebuyer. Things progressed slowly as they tend to do with real estate. In the first years of this, I think I did 6-7 homes. But then after plugging away day-by-day, suddenly it seemed, things just came together. I found the right investors and the right loans and the right deals and in just a few short years I ended up investing in over 100 such transactions, building a portfolio of almost 2,500 multifamily units and creating a fully vertically integrated real estate company with almost 100 employees.

Fast forward to today and I’m running the second evolution of my entrepreneurial investing career and having so much fun that I have to stop and remind myself that this is all real.

http://www.nickhalaris.com
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