Host(Teodore Danchev): Hi friends I'm Teo and I'm honored to be conducting this master class. Today we will focus on Leadership. We are guests in this wonderful office of M3 Communications, Inc. and our speaker is Maxim Behar. Author, journalist, PR leader, business leader I can think of many things to say about you but I think most people know you. Hello, how are you?

Maxim Behar: Good afternoon Tesla and non-Tesla fans. I'm very happy to be with you and I think Theo and I have some interesting things to tell you.

Host: As the first question I've always wanted to ask you, you've met an extraordinary number of leaders around the world, internationally. What do they all have in common? What qualities do they have?

Maxim: The most important quality I think is quick decision making. Especially right now near the end of 2023, it's extremely important to be able to make quick decisions and to take responsibility for them. Many years ago, I wrote a little book that first came out on Facebook called "111 Rules." The first rule was that every leader, no matter his title, should be able to take quick decisions, be accountable for them, and stand behind them when needed. Apart from anything else a leader must have a bit of charisma. A big question mark is what charisma means and how it is perceived by different people. However, ultimately it is the ability to persuade someone. You don't have to be a big hunk, you don't have to be flamboyantly dressed, you don't have to have any super extravagant ideas. But you just must convince the people that you are managing, leading, and guiding in your thoughts and that is inherent in leadership. Nowadays it's very important to make a distinction between management and leadership. Between manager and leader. And it's a very simple difference. And it's just in a prefix. While the leader directs, the manager manages. When someone understands this difference things become much simpler. A leader must look at least 5 to 10 years ahead nowadays. Even being able to look 6 months ahead is enough because things are very dynamic and change very fast. The manager must manage every day from 9 to 5 or 9 to 6. Nowadays managers work 20 hours daily. Management and running a company means that the problems of the company are on your mind whether you're having a glass of wine in the evening or a shower in the morning. You think about your colleagues, projects, employees, customers, turnover, and everything else. But that's what makes our lives super interesting. The fact that there are leaders, the fact that there are managers, the fact that there is freedom, the fact that there is a market whatsoever. In Bulgaria it is maybe a little bit distorted, maybe a little bit grey, maybe not yet polished, maybe not working so well. But we have a market. There is competition, there is free relations, there is media, there is social media, my favorite topic. That's why I think leaders are the most important people nowadays.

Host: Yeah, I agree. Sometimes maybe the role of manager and leader is not so easily separable. For example, I've read articles that when Elon Musk opens a factory in Texas, he puts his desk in the middle of the hall where all the machines are. However, there is leadership. These nuances are not always 100% clear and separable.

Maxim: You're getting into my business here. It's more marketing than it is management. Because Elon Musk sometimes sleeps in his factories and puts his bed there it is not only him, of course. At the scale of the business, he has it is more of a PR strategy he takes on to show that he's part of that business. But there are hundreds of managers around him making the day-to-day decisions. But it's nice sometimes to have a guy sleep in the factory. If I ran an industrial business, I would certainly sleep in the factory at least once a month. Getting up early in the morning, seeing the workers come to work. This is very important. In our business which I have in my office here in Sofia, it doesn't make sense to sleep, but very often I stay until 12:00, 1:00. And the most important thing is not even staying in the office. Our company is almost 30 years old, and the most important thing is that in all these 30 years when I’ve come to work in the morning and I’ve driven my little electric car I feel the same desire, excitement, ambition, pleasure. I know who I'm going to see, I know who our directors are, my colleagues, I know what I'm going to say, what I'm going to talk about. How you go to work is much more important than how you come back.

Host: The feeling.

Maxim: Well yeah, it's the ambition and the thought of always being innovative. Again, nowadays business is scarily dynamic. Both the communications and industrial businesses are very competitive. I'm convinced that social media has largely contributed to that because it's given some 4 billion people in the world the opportunity to voice their opinions, to tell their ideas, and to be together with their innovations on social media. But they also gave people the opportunity to show what they are capable of. This has changed the market tremendously, to be up-to-date, to be competitive in this market you must think 24/7 and always know what to do. Here I want to tell you about my favorite formula that I came up with 20 years ago. The more time passes the more I see that it works. It's the formula of the three S's that has governed our entire business all these years. And those three S's are Speed, Simplicity, Self Confidence.

So, Speed is the speed of deciding, the speed of knowing what you want to do, and even the speed of responding to an email. In 1999, I introduced six values in our company and the fourth value was the 5-minute rule. Since 1999, each of our workers has been required to respond to an email within 5 minutes of seeing it. It may not be 5, it may be 25, it may be 5 hours, it's a bit of a metaphor. However, nowadays immediate answer to an email, even if it’s "I saw it. I'll get back to you next week." is super important.

Speed of decision is also very important indeed. Because sometimes managers, especially of big companies, are very worried about the big responsibility that they have and that they might make a mistake. But so, what? Better to be wrong than to let a decision languish, as that can be very counterproductive to the business.

Simplicity - the second "S" is also super important. Keeping things simple, knowing what you want to accomplish today, what decisions you need to make today. Because we get up in the morning we go on social media and we are bombarded with information, with news. At the same time, we must do some other things during the day - see clients and colleagues, and discuss projects. And oftentimes our heads become such a mess that we often can't prioritize things. And that's why when I get up in the morning, I make coffee and with it, I always read an article that was written yesterday about the Public Relations business. When I get up in the morning in America, which is the home of our business, the day is over. And then I get in the shower, and I put my priorities in order during the shower, because when you're alone in the shower you feel free, nobody is in your way, there's no TV, there's no morning blocks, nobody is writing to you on Messenger. And when you simplify things and you say today, I have to do one, two, three things and if I do them the day has been OK, but then if I can do something else it will be great.

The third "S" Self Confidence. I don't know anybody who has succeeded if they don't have self-confidence. You cannot be sure that you’re going to do everything you have planned for the day. You may not succeed and it's not the end of the world, you learn your lessons. As the Dalai Lama says, ”If you lose don't lose the lessons". You may not succeed, but the fact that you will learn a lesson is also something that can contribute to your self-esteem. And those three S’s sit with me every day and my colleagues know them. I think it's a formula that works well in this hyper-dynamic life.

Host: Very dynamic, lots of information everywhere. Like you said we get up, we pick up the phone and I think at that point some of the creativity is over as we consume information, different opinions. I like to stay in silence when I first wake up, by myself, and focus on my goals for the day to match my principal goals of where I want to get to. Only then do I allow phones, computers, emails, and all kinds of information. Once upon a time, it was easy - you turn on the TV and you can collect information. Now I can do this even on my watch.

Maxim: You know it's easier for me now. Because you say at the time it was easy. 30 years ago, by that logic, it was even easier. There was only one TV, there were no cables, no satellites. Now I find it easier because I can choose my information, as there is freedom of information. Fortunately, in Bulgaria, it cannot be silenced. And even in those countries where there is not so much freedom it cannot be silenced. There is no going back anymore. All the bridges for a country to be a closed system and not allow information from the outside and you don't know who is doing what, you don't listen to some music or read some news have been burned. I don't think that's possible in the modern world. The huge flow of information motivates me personally to be even more innovative, and even more creative, but you must know how to swim in this ocean of information. At the same time, know how to deal with fake news. Fake news is one of the things that can prevent a lot of people from navigating life well or succeeding or using information the way it should be used. I have friends who tell me that they don't want to hear about Facebook or Instagram because all they do there is lie and brag. But that's the stuff we work with, that's our life right now. We can't say we're not going on social media because someone might lie. You know 120 years ago when Henry Ford introduced the first automobile, then called the "gasoline buggy." When he presented it to journalists, he said, "This is the car, I put petrol in it, start the engine, and off it goes". Then many journalists wrote that this had no future. How and where are we going to get this petrol all the time and fill it up? What if a tire blows, what if the engine breaks down, what if you hit this thing? Our future is in the carts and the horses. Yeah, but today we don't drive carts and horses, we drive electric cars. It's the same with social media. When Facebook started gaining momentum almost 20 years ago and started becoming a provider of information and different opinions some people said that there is hate there, and there was fake news. You must pick your news, you must check your news, but at the same time, it's a hugely powerful platform for knowledge. We all learn an awful lot of interesting things, even in the hate, even from the lies we still learn, and we know what not to do. For me personally in business, management helps me so much that every day I improve my skills to get better at social media.

Host: Any new technology as you said needs time and adaptation. People say, "Why do I need that?" You must train them with this technology to tell them what it can be used for and how. At some point, in time we adapt and ask how did we live without it. There's a video of an interview with Bill Gates where he's asked, "What do we use this computer for?" He explains"You can watch a football game anytime, listen to it.” Yeah but don't we do it on the radio too, there is no future of the internet". Very interesting points of view. You also mentioned decision-making and risk. How do you balance the two? Quick decision-making versus the risk of a wrong decision. You said better to decide quickly than risk not deciding at all or waiting forever to make the right decision.

Maxim: Decision-making is a function of experience. You must have enough experience; you must have been through a lot to be able to make a decision that is right or close to right. If you make a mistake, you should know immediately that you have made a mistake. I don't tend to believe what people say about learning from our mistakes. That's why I tell my colleagues in my company that we should learn from our successes. When we achieve something serious or something good we should analyze how we achieved it, see how to achieve it even better, where we went wrong, or if in the process of achieving it somewhere, we made a mistake. But not to learn from the mistakes. If one learns from one's successes, for example, we climb peaks and that's a must in business, I don't want to look at the bottom, I want to see the next peak. And if you have that attitude, that vision, that desire. If you experience even a tiny bit of pleasure on that climb, you should look forward to the next peak.

That's part of the decision-making process. For example, in my company I don't divide people into directors and deputy directors, of course, there are different positions and job titles, however, for me, it's the people who have experience that are the most important. Decision-making is a direct function of the experience that each manager should have.

Host: Something I observe in a lot of companies is that the best experts are being promoted to lead small groups of people. One time it turned out that this was not the best decision because some qualities are missing in these people. Do you have any such observations? How can we find employees who have the potential to be leaders and leaders?

Maxim: In all these 30 years I have done thousands of interviews for colleagues who want to work in our company, and I always have only one requirement. First, I never ask two questions - “Where did you graduate from?” and “Where are you from?” Both answers can cause embarrassment to the candidate. Some may be from a small village, be worried about not being from Sofia, or they may be a medical graduate applying to work in Public Relations. I would accept such a person gladly I have such people. Because I can make a PR expert out of a doctor, but I can't make a doctor out of a PR expert. I have only one condition for the candidates who work in our company, and it is very simple. It's the gleam in the eye. And when I interview a colleague, I don't read CVs, I usually look the candidates in the eye. I want to see if t I can find ambition to succeed, to work in this profession, to be good, and to become a professional. And if I do, of course we immediately accept those candidates with open arms to work for us. After that, we keep a close eye on them, both I and my colleagues from the management team. There is no condition that someone must work for 15 years or 5 years and then grow. Here in this room, there is  such a case. 10 years ago I walked into this room quite by chance and saw a girl standing all alone and waiting. I went in to get something. I came out and asked my colleagues who this girl was, and they said she was applying for an internship. I told them to appoint her immediately. This girl was the director of one of our important departments after 3 years. So, it was a mixture of intuition, experience and seeing ambition in someone's eyes. When you have colleagues who can develop very quickly, no matter how long they've been with the company, I think they should be promoted and given chances. In general, everyone should be given chances in everything. That's part of the free world, part of good competition. Especially now that the world is public, going back to social media, when you give one person a chance and they put themselves out there the whole world will see it. There's nothing hidden covered up anymore. This is one of the biggest advantages of the modern world that I'm in love with, and it's called transparency. This transparency makes the world far more ethical than it used to be. I wrote the first business ethics standard in this country 22 years ago and traveled to all 28 counties to present it. Back then, many people asked me what business ethics was. I had a simple formula that still applies today - Make our profits transparently. We are in business to make profits. We must pay salaries; we have a living wage. We must improve our businesses, invest, do interesting things. However, if we make those profits transparently then the guarantee that a business or a company is ethical is very high. Things done under the table are absurd. That's why I like this world because it's transparent. That’s the most serious feature of modern society that distinguishes it from societies before social media.

Host: Transparency in communication, maybe briefly addressing communication within companies. I've often seen it less communication between people. What is your opinion?

Maxim: I've personally gone through all sorts of stages. I motivate my colleagues now to work calmly, to communicate with each other as much as possible. We work in open spaces. I have a small 2 by 2 room which is the smallest room in the whole office, and I don't really like standing in it that much, I usually stay with my colleagues. I think it makes for a good team, especially after those two nightmare Covid years when we were all staying in our houses, seeing each other on Zoom, and doing our birthdays on Zoom. I've had Christmas parties on Zoom. Those years changed us an awful lot. However, it did a great disservice to all of us who love team business. Different people became slightly alienated and said they were better off staying home in their pajamas working. Which is ok and probably in many businesses is exactly right. However, our Public Relations business requires a lot of creativity and innovation. They can't come into your house by standing between the fridge and the stove. It is a team effort and for that, I very much encourage communication between colleagues. I love doing big events. We've done an awful lot of events over the years. One time, I decided to gently retire from this business because it requires a huge amount of resources with a not-so-guaranteed profit. However, there is teamwork that is created in these events. Then the whole company worked together. Everybody helps each other. I decided that especially after these Covid years, it's good to have big events, to have more frequent get-togethers. We have an idea called M3 Power Talks and every month we invite interesting people. Before on Zoom now in person. They tell us how they succeeded or failed, and what they did. This way I try to motivate communication between my colleagues. As well as the communication between my colleagues and our customers so that we can give birth to much better ideas.

Host: How do you find the perfect balance, since your work is highly creative, between creativity and day-to-day communications, working with clients? When is there time for that creativity that is so important in your industry?

Maxim: You mentioned perfect balance. There can never be a perfect balance. We decide day to day. You know in the middle of this year’s summer I spent a few days working at McDonald's. It's been a desire of mine for many years. I wanted to see how McDonald's worked. I happened to have dinner with the country manager of McDonald’s, and I told him that I had that desire and he said he would love to. I worked a couple of 12-hour shifts and went through all the procedures. This is how I realized the importance of having set such procedures. Knowing who does what, when they do it, how they do it. A lot of my friends after seeing my social media posts from my job at McDonald's were asking me why I was doing this kind of stuff, how come I sold sandwiches at McDonald’s. However, that was priceless to me. I then wrote “10 things I learned at McDonald’s" and this had 10,000 likes on LinkedIn along with the pictures. It's very important on the one hand to have procedures in place to know what needs to be done and in what time frame. But on the other hand, it's even more important that what you do within those deadlines and those procedures has a creative and innovative element. That is why I tell you that there is no perfect balance. Everything is different or done according to the client, the requirements, the day, the project, and the setting.

If we are looking for the perfect balance, we will come to work at 9:00 and leave at 16:00 or 18:00. And we'll have that perfect balance, we'll have done our procedures. Because our business is creative we must almost have different and interesting ideas.

I'm wary of the formality of having procedures, but on the other hand, I think you must maintain ways of running the business that allow you to skip these formalities and say you have a great idea. For example, we have an Idea Fund in the company. If someone comes to me and says they have an Idea they get a different amount. That way my day gets better. It may not be a super idea and rather it is not, but the fact that somebody thinks and wants to make things better goes beyond their job description. In the same way, it often happens in our company that we discuss projects for clients like this. In this sense there is no perfect situation, there is no perfect balance, even I would say there is no balance at all, and there must be creativity which is the most important. If you must do something between 2 and 3 p.m. and you have done it, the client is satisfied. But if there's no value added, if there's no idea, if nothing is interesting why have you done it?

Host: Artificial Intelligence is also entering the market in companies I think at a rapid pace. Microsoft is launching it. Every new Windows that is sold will have it built in. We recently in Tesla owners Bulgaria also made an AI adviser by giving it all the information from the group. All the questions that have ever been asked, all the answers we've said, all the directions of the cars we've put in. What value do you think these new technologies can bring to companies? How are we going to differentiate that from our creativity?

Maxim: That's the big theme of 2023 because Artificial Intelligence is going to change the world and it's going to change our view of media, of business, of the knowledge that we have. That's also very good news. Going back to that Henry Ford and the automobile thing where everybody said it wasn't going to happen. Going back to the critical opinions and the caution 20 years ago when there was already social media and mainly Facebook, which came into the market very strongly, there was a need for such software to bring together chat systems, photos, texts, forums, and videos. I wrote a book "The World PR Revolution" which came out first in America and many other countries around the world. I still think the basis of everything is social media. That's the big revolution. Because it enabled these 3-4 billion people to communicate with each other. If there wasn't social media there couldn't be ChatGPT or there wouldn't be this rapid spread of artificial intelligence. And it is a logical upgrade that should not be looked upon with suspicion, it should not be dismissed, quite the opposite. It should be studied very carefully because in the next one or two years we will be obsessed with artificial intelligence. However, I still think that natural intelligence is at the heart of everything. Artificial intelligence cannot do anything without natural intelligence. I sent a general email to all my colleagues two months ago saying, "Colleagues don't worry about artificial intelligence taking your job. However, the people who can handle AI, are the ones who can take your job.". So, spend 15-20 minutes every day doing different tests. I do that to see how far we can be tricked, which is the biggest risk in artificial intelligence because you can tell it to write you an article, 80% of which will be stolen from somewhere. After all, it can't compile it that cleverly. And a lot of ideas are under copyright. It can take one idea from one place, another from another place, a third or fourth, and put them together into an article. Because copyright is the biggest problem with AI and the second is ethics. The way all the information is digested can be truthful, accurate, and authoritative. What I do these days is that when I read something from ChatGPT is to verify the information from a minimum of 3 sources, two is no longer enough. I have done a lot of AI sampling which has brought me a lot of false information. I think this is an evolution. I keep thinking that for example if television was a revolution compared to the printing press and the newspaper because it gave so many people the ability to see the same thing in real time and learn about it visually. Social media has done the same thing in a very different way. Because they brought two new elements. One that is very important is interactivity. The ability to communicate, on television and radio, that's not possible in newspapers is of course. That is, social media has given a billion people the opportunity to talk to each other, to interact. Someone writes something and you tell them it's not true.

The second is that for the first time in the world, there is a media that can be measured. You know how many people have seen that picture, how many people have liked it, how many people have disliked it, how many people have shared it. That's not possible on television when there are some very approximate measurement systems. In newspapers, I would say it's even impossible. While in social media this new element is extremely important for our business. Artificial intelligence contributes to the fact that a lot of information can be gathered in a short time in a small place in no time at all. You can compile information from different sources immediately, which is good, which has risks, and for that artificial intelligence just needs to be known quite well and if possible, with natural intelligence beforehand.

Host: And so, I think that a little bit less we all need to start dealing with this subject. It's going to quickly infiltrate all spheres. To wrap this up, what advice would you give to young business leaders and entrepreneurs? What should they focus on if they are setting up a company now? What are the key qualities they need to bring? What advice would you give them?

Maxim: Never give up. It's not that complicated. I very rarely advise because every case is different, but there are some general rules. Firstly, to succeed one must have some skills, put enough effort, and focus on what they want to succeed in. But this is a multiplication action. It is skill by effort by concentration. If one of the three multipliers is zero, the result is zero. My big problem has always been with concentration, as someone who does a lot of things. The maximum effort, the maximum concentration still must be exerted. In today's life, we should not give up. We want to achieve something we must throw all our efforts into it. Let us be innovative but never give a step back. Yes, sometimes you may make a mistake, and sometimes you may fail. It doesn't matter if we keep moving forward. We can change the business, the approach, the people. The most important thing is to be happy. A happy person feels good. This is not someone who has succeeded, has a big house, and has achieved a lot. The happy person is the one who feels good. But when we talk about business you really must have skills. How come you become a doctor or a lawyer if you don't have those skills? You must have the skills; you must put in your best effort and concentrate on doing your job well. That's success. Doing your job well. Again, it's not so important to be in the papers, to be on TV. The important thing is to feel good inside, to have balance inside, harmony. Then I am sure 9 out of 10 people will succeed. If 10 don't make it right away, you should quit this business right away.

Host: You need consistency, with small steps always forward, with clear goals.

Maxim: And since we are in Bulgaria, I want to tell you that Bulgaria is a unique country. There are great people, young, intelligent, well-educated, ambitious, successful. People whose brains work on a completely different frequency. I've traveled almost all over the world, I've seen everything. And at the same time, Bulgaria is a market that still, since the fall of Communism, continues to have great niches for doing business. Bulgaria still has many niches in which if you are ambitious, if you want to succeed you can do it much easier than in any highly developed market where the niches are filled and to succeed you need much more effort. However, you must hustle and know who those underdogs are.

Host: Thank you so much for this conversation, Maxim.

Maxim: I thank you. I wish all Tesla owners and not only Tesla owners to manage their cars well and change them with every next model to be successful and happy.

 

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