Discipline Beats Vision, #author Dane Hudson

 Five-time CEO Dane Hudson says small and medium-sized businesses need more than vision to scale: they need discipline that starts with the leader.

You’ve built something remarkable. Your vision attracted investors, your product gained traction and your team is growing. But now you’re hitting an invisible wall, and the skills that got you here won’t take you to the next level. To break through, you need more structure in how you lead, not more struggle in how you work. Discipline Beats Vision delivers the practical, discipline-first tools that separate founders who scale from those who stall.

Author Dane Hudson distils 25+ years of CEO experience and founder mentoring into Monday-ready frameworks, templates and scripts you can implement immediately. His practical handbook is full of real-world strategies for founders and leaders who are navigating the messy reality of scaling from 100 to 1,000+ people.

To connect with Dane ....
https://impactfulleadership.com/discipline-beats-vision/
https://impactfulleadership.com/about-us/
https://danehudson.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dane-hudson 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

It's good morning, Dane Hudson. Dane, welcome to Yellow Shelf.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for inviting me on, Joe.

SPEAKER_01 0:10

Oh, it's my pleasure. Uh you have a new book out. It's just out. It's available now. Congratulations. And I love the title because it's really clear and confident. Discipline Beats Vision. Dane, tell us all about the book.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

So it's um it's basically a handbook and it's built on my career. So I was a 25-year CEO, and then the last six years I've coached and mentored and trained over a thousand leaders. And they love the content. And um, and so it was very natural for me to create this book. And it's a it's literally a handbook. So literally, I love that uh Newton's uh third law of motion. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. So within the book, I talk about leadership behaviors that are gonna elicit a certain response from your team. And a lot of people don't know how to do that. And um and so the book is really clear about doing do this and you'll get this response. And by the way, make a plan to do something different on Monday. So that's what it's all about.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Jane, one of the quotes, and I'm gonna read this because I don't want to get it wrong, is vision starts or uh resets a business, but discipline is what actually grows it. And I really, really love that. Um because I and anyone who knows me long enough and has watched, you know, I come from a corporate background, the HR function. So I know leaders, you know, can be for different seasons, you know, whether it's the startup, the vision. But you know, if you're if you're a emerging leader or a leader right now, you need to know your business and how to be that leader at that point in time, which is really, I guess, you know, what your book's about.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Yeah, so I've I've I've had the pleasure again of being like yourself being in large corporate space for a long, long time. And now 95% of my clients are from the the venture capital private equity space. And so I've got clients that have a team of three. Um, I've got clients that have a team of 3,000. And exactly as you're saying, where they are, where the business is actually requires different leadership skills for them. And some of them can grow and develop. And I I can train anyone to be a good leader. It's then up to them whether they become a great leader. And so the leadership behaviors and what you do, a lot of a lot of it is very similar, whether you've got three people or three thousand. It's just easy when there's three people because you look in the mirror and you see yourself. All your team are engineers, techies, they're passionate. When you suddenly get to 20, 50, 100, actually it's a very diverse group of people, and you've got to learn how to lead those people as the company grows. And sometimes some leaders don't grow, and you need someone else.

SPEAKER_01 3:12

Yeah. Um, and you know, one thing I was reflecting on in the book is that you know, if you don't have if you don't have the systems in place or the structure, um the execution can be incredibly difficult as a leader. And I know I've experienced that in an organization. I've experienced it as a consultant, viewing in an organization. So leader, I mean, being a leader, you know, is a privilege, but it's also there's a lot of responsibilities and there's a lot of things to be very considerate of.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Absolutely, absolutely. I love the concept, and I talk about it in the book, shadow of the leader. Yeah. And so, shadow of the leader is your positional power. And so everything you say and do is magnified by your position. So those of us that are parents know that, that our pet our children copy us from a very young age. And so we have to do our best to be good role models. And so, same thing in the business world, you have to be a role model, and that's not easy to do when you've got crises happening every 10 minutes. And so, you know, you really got to work on a lot of things like resetting and managing yourself. But there's also a lot of things that you do that set a signal. So a simple one, Joe, is meeting discipline. Start your have an agenda, start your meeting on time, finish your meeting on time, have follow-up minutes. A lot of leaders don't do that. And if you don't do that, that actually sends a signal about the lack of discipline in the business.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Uh Dane, what do you want to tell us? I mean, you you you did tell us a bit about you and um you know your career, uh, CEO as well as a mentor. Um, tell us something. We, if we're watching for the first time, we need to know about you uh as a as a successful corporate uh leader yourself, but also tell us a bit about Dane and the writing experience.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Okay. Um so I am incredibly disciplined. I'm incredibly competitive and incredibly disciplined. So I'm one of these odd, well, we're not odd anymore, CEOs that used to get up at five o'clock in the morning and go to the gym and do all those sort of things. So I had a wonderful, I love my corporate career, but my wife would call me the king or the queen maker. And I had a wonderful reputation for growing leaders. So it's quite natural when I stepped away from the corporate world that that I would actually coach and mentor leaders, and I thought it out as part of a portfolio of things. And so I started creating pages one at a time, and I'm ex-consultant as well. So PowerPoint pages, and all of a sudden I blinked and I had 1,000 PowerPoint pages that I'd created. I told you I'm disciplined. Um, so I created this leadership framework about being a discipline leader, a change agent, and a hands-on operator, and those are the three pillars. Yeah, and then I used that to start coaching and mentoring people, and the venture capital funds and the property funds said, Dane, we need you to help us with our CEOs. And I blinked again, and within two months of leaving uh the corporate world, I had 20, 15 to 20 CEO clients I was working with, and it's been like that for six years now. My relationships are generally 18 months long, that's the average relationship. And every one of them has said, Dane, you've got to write a book. You've got to write a book. Because I've also used this to train a lot of other leaders.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

So it was actually every hard it is writing a book. It was phenomenal. I won't say it was easy, but I had the content and I knew it resonated. And it was fun. It was really fun.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Oh, that's wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with us. Because I think sometimes that's really powerful to hear about that journey as the writer, uh, and um yeah, what's behind delivering the content uh to the audience. Because I mean you ultimately just want to empower leaders, emerging leaders, to do an excellent job and deliver.

SPEAKER_00 7:25

Absolutely. And you probably know more about writing but than I do with all your interviews. But um, when I wrote the book, they said you've got to target an individual. You can't make it too generic, you've got to target an individual. So it is targeted as a at a founder CEO with about a hundred people. Yeah. But it's relevant to any aspiring leader, or I've worked with ASX, so listed CEOs as well. Um, and a lot of them have bought the book as well. So it's relevant no matter where you are on your leadership journey. Some of the concepts may be a bit um out for you today, but over time they'll come into play. So I do think anyone's gonna take uh something away from every every chapter in the book, at least I hope.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Well, um we're gonna put it out there, we're gonna encourage people uh to go and look at the book. The title alone would capture me. So I I'm a fan of the title because I think um yeah, discipline is incredibly important. Uh you know, as a leader, but uh even as a human. So yeah, it's um wonderful, wonderful uh work, Dane. I can tell how passionate you are about this. Uh, and so no wonder you've written the book. Dane, if we're curious, if we're watching anywhere in the world, I'm gonna put in the show notes how do we connect to you and to connect to the book and find out more about the book?

SPEAKER_00 8:50

So if they go to my website, um, so yeah, I've got my brand, Impactful Leadership.

unknown 8:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

So impactfulleadership.com. If they just go there, um, they'll be able to purchase the book there and they'll see a bit more information on I suppose all the services that that that I offer, coaching and and keynote, things like that, but they can buy the book and obviously connect with me also on on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01 9:12

Yeah. And Jane, are you based in Australia these days? I am, mind you.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

I am. I'm I'm I've been nomadic. I've moved country 11 times.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

I've I've worked that out from LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, I'm very nomadic. Well, the one thing I've kept consistent is the same wife for 38 years. So that's been well done.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

Discipline.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

That's that's discipline.

SPEAKER_01 9:33

I wonder if my husband can hear. Uh Dane, thank you so much. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. Would you write again? That's probably my last cheeky question.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

I do. It depends on how how well this goes because Wiley um have been a wonderful publisher supporting me. And uh, I do have at least two more books that I could write.

unknown 9:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Um, so uh let's see how this one goes and let this one get some traction, hopefully.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

And um, but yeah, I've got Yeah, wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Well, Dane, I'm gonna do my bit to support you. There's plenty in my network who are corporate and uh leaders and across the world. So yeah, go and buy the book. Dane, thanks for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 10:15

Thank you, Joe. I really enjoyed the conversation.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Cheers.