Lori: Hello and welcome to Fine Is a 4-Letter Word. guest today is Tony Crescenzo. Welcome to the show, Tony.

Tony: Thank you, it's great to be here.

Lori: I am eager to talk to you. I reached out to you when we were talking about this a few minutes ago. I reached out to you because you're leading a fast growing company and I am intrigued by what you have to say about leadership and how you lead. So before we get into it, as part of the lead up into that, I wanna ask you, what were the values and beliefs that you were raised with that contributed to you becoming who you've become?

Tony: You know, that's a, that's actually a great question. I don't know that I ever stopped being raised. So even now, so I think they, they certainly evolve over time. I grew up, I grew up in an interesting era. I lived, I grew up in the neighborhood that Rocky ran in when Rocky was made. So early sixties to late sixties in South Philadelphia.

My dad was a mechanic, my grandfather was a mechanic, my cousins are mechanics, my uncles are mechanics. My grandfather retired relatively young and bought a farm. So I spent my time at as a most of my weekends in my father's garage on Saturday and on Sunday at my grandfather's farm. So my family were very blue collar, but they were business people.

My grandfather interestingly enough, in 1929, in September of 1929, he asked my grandmother for some money to buy a car. And she said, no, you spend your own money, use your business money to buy a car. I'm not going to use our money. And he went to the bank and he emptied his business account, $6,500. I remember the number. And two weeks later, the stock market crashed.

So instead of buying a car, he bought an entire city block in Philadelphia. And he used to say, if you can't pay cash, you can't afford it. So that's why he retired early. I grew up in a family where hard work was extremely valued. Independence was valued. Discipline. In the farm, you're up at five every morning. My grandfather went to bed at nine, got up at five every morning, really is, that's kind of a fun killer in high school, but when you're younger, it's actually pretty interesting.

With that, family was very, very important to me. had to imagine being in a large Italian family back at that time. Every Sunday, there's 35, 40 people for dinner. So, you know, the values that I learned as a youngster were really around family, loyalty, discipline, and hard work.

Lori: Yeah. Okay. And then you joined the Marines.

Tony: And then I joined the Marines and then I learned some really interesting values. Right. I tell people even to this day, every, every important thing I ever learned about leadership, I learned in the Marine Corps and the entire rest of my career has been a validation exercise for that. But it was, those were not easy lessons, particularly in my time in the Corps.

Lori: What inspired you to go that route as opposed to becoming a mechanic straight out of high school?

Tony: Well, a couple of things really. One, when I was 13, by the way, we didn't have this conversation before we started, I'm imagining direct language is okay, if that's appropriate. So when I was 12 or 13 years old, my father pulled me aside and he said, I had skipped a grade when I was very young. My father pulled me aside and said, Anthony, it's a good thing you're smart because if you had to make a living with your hands, you'd fucking starve. So go to college and you can't work here.

Lori: Yes, absolutely. 100%.

Tony: That's number one. When I was relatively young, my parents divorced. My mother remarried a naval officer and we moved out of South Philly and all over the world, actually. But I'm not a fan of the Navy. when we lived in Hawaii for four years in the 70s during the Vietnam War, and I was we were visited by a friend of my stepfather's, gentleman by the name of Stephen Pless.

Marine Captain, who was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. And my stepfather tells this great story where they're sitting in the wardroom watching a John Wayne movie. This guy's like 5'7", 140 pounds, soaking wet, smoking a cigar. The alarm goes off and he's a helicopter pilot. He's got to go pick up a platoon of Marines. There three helicopters went to go pick them up off the coast of North Vietnam. They couldn't, obviously there was a larger forest. They couldn't go into the water. There were sharks and sea snakes.

Two of the helicopters, one got shot down, the other one had to return because it was badly damaged. And here he is hovering over the beach, shooting his guns with Marines crawling underneath to get onto that helicopter. And by the so much weight, so much overweight, so many people on this, on this Huey helicopter that by the time he got to the aircraft carrier, he had just about slam it onto the deck. And if you've ever been in the military, you know that it's easier to shoot down a helicopter with a bow and arrow or a big pen.

You're not even allowed to lean back against the sides because the only thing with armor is the engine. So he gets off the helicopter and he goes in for his debrief and everybody's asking him questions and he can't hear anything and he takes off his helmet and out falls an AK round onto the table. Four hundred and something rounds in that helicopter and he wound up completing the mission and he was on his way back, I didn't know, to receive the Medal of Honor.

Now, interesting enough, he was kind of a cool guy. I really looked up to him. He was not very tall, not very big, but you just knew with the way he carried himself that he had seen a few things. So he got his medal. He got offered transition training to do anything he wanted in the Marine Corps, and he decided he wanted to fly jets. And the flight school for the Marine Corps and the Navy is in Pensacola, Florida, and there's a drawbridge as you go down going onto the base, goes over a little canal.

And he was a motorcycle guy and he decided he really enjoyed jumping that bridge when it opened. And one day he went to jump the bridge and he didn't make it. He literally died. But on the way down, every witness swears that heard him yell, ooh rah. So I thought, boy, know, if I'm gonna do something interesting, I'd like to do something like that. Plus it spites my parents, which is never a good reason to join the Marine Corps. Don't get me wrong.

Lori: Isn't that the big reason that many of them do?

Tony: People join the Army because you get an education when you're done. They join the Navy to see the world. They join the Air Force because the living conditions are great. People join the Marine Corps because they want to be John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima. Except if you've ever seen Sands of Iwo Jima, John Wayne dies in the end. So I took a wrong turn on the way to a Charles Carrault lecture in college, wound up with a Marine recruiter, and the next thing I knew I was a Marine.

Lori: What an awesome story. The whole thing. I love it. Thank you. Yeah. And so you spent eight years in the Marines and then what was the process? Like, how did you decide I'm finished here now and I want to go do the next thing?

Tony: Well, it kind of finished for me. Imagine, if you will. Do you know what the motto of the Marine Corps is?

Lori: The few, the proud, the Marines. yes, Semper Fi, right, okay.

Tony: Semper Fidelis, always faithful. We never leave our dead or wounded on the battlefield. It's the one thing that makes Marines tough is that if you get in a fight with one Marine, you're getting a fight with all Marines. Unfortunately for me, I had a relatively negative experience during my time in the Marine Corps. So I was assigned at one point in my career to work for what you know is NCIS. Back then it was called NIS.

Everybody thinks that the NCIS agents are like the guys on TV, but they're actually kind of like the FBI agents who wash out of the FBI Academy and then they send them over to NIS. I was assigned to work undercover with them for almost three years. And it was started out as a fraud, the computer fraud investigation back in the days, long time ago before, you know, anybody was really before computing was everywhere.

My portable computer fit in a Jeep. That's how big it was. That's why they called it portable. So I spent about eight months investigating this reserve unit in Trenton, New Jersey, where I was the most junior Marine. I was the lowest ranking Marine in the unit. And I was ostensibly working for a man who was creating people in their manpower management system generating paychecks, making ID cards, and going to the bank in Trenton to cash the checks.

And so after about eight months, he and I walked into the bank with all the tellers were 40 year old NIS agents. And I thought, great, I did my job, I'm done. I wanna go back to the fleet. And that's when I was told I was now assigned to a drug investigation, which took another two years. And in those two years, the way I would describe…

My life is particularly to young guys today, folks who've been in Iraq, Afghanistan, doing that kind of work, Fallujah, is imagine you're in a 12-man squad and you're going to go clear a house. And then the lieutenant walks up and he tells you to take off your helmet and then take off your body armor, take off your sappy plates and put your rifle down. And now grab a pistol and stick it under your shirt. Now go in alone.

That was two and a half years of walking into rooms I didn't know if I would walk out of. And eventually, all of the people that I was investigating were court-martialed and convicted. However, there was some sort of snafu. I was there undercover as a payroll clerk. And so, instead of moving me while I was the sole witness against all these folks, two of the four other witnesses were killed.

Instead of moving me, they made me stay in this reserve center 25 yards away from these 10 people who knew that I was the only witness against them in a general court martial. I had written letters to my congressman, letters to the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, and nothing. I got no reply. And as part of the defense's strategy, I think they were trying to find ways to impeach my testimony. The Marine Corps is a very small organization, 185,000 people. Everybody knows everybody.

Well, these guys had friends. They were all relieved because they were being court-martialed and their friends were now my bosses, including the guy that stole all the money. He was still my actual boss. And so, you know, I had done everything a Marine can do short of defying orders and I was still forced to stay there. So at one point I took some leave and the day before I was supposed to come back, I got a phone call from our new First Sergeant who told me that I was what you would know as AWOL, in the Marine Corps they call it UA, and they wound up charging me with about 18 or 19 different things to impeach my testimony, including being 20 minutes late to work.

And I went through a court martial myself, and at the end of my court martial, I got a phone call from the monitor, which is sort of your personnel manager in the Marine Corps, who said, hey, I got this letter from you, Congressman, we'll send you anywhere you wanna go. And I said, send me to the closest place in my home of record, I'm getting out.

People had been shooting at me for way too long. The Marine Corps left me here. It was a pretty terrible experience. I was transferred to a unit in Garden City, New York, and I spent the next eight months in a room with no windows as a clerk. I had lost all my security clearances. I'd been convicted of court martial. Nobody wanted to talk to me. And eight months to the day later, the commandant of the Marine Corps walks in with his aid to camp with a commendation, a copy of the letter of apology that he wrote to my mother and $20 because they overturned my court martial.

So I got sort of returned back to service in the Marine Corps. But at that point, there were enough people who didn't like me anymore, given what I had done and testified to that I actually had to relearn. I had to learn how to be a computer programmer while I was doing all this. I was working, I was undercover counterintelligence marine.

So I got recruited to go to a company in Wall Street as a programmer for like five times what a sergeant in the Marine Corps makes. And so I left. That was my impetus for getting out of the Marine Corps. And that was something that I thought was over. But we tell you that for most of my life, I carried that around, not knowing. I'm on wife number two.

Both of my wives would tell you years and years of PTSD, waking them up three or four times a week, screaming, yelling in my sleep. My current wife, five years ago told me that she said, Tony, you have been in more fights than all the men I've ever dated in my life combined.

And I would say to her, I never started a fight in my life. And she'd say, no, no, you don't start them. You get them all pissed off and then they swing at you and you knock them out and then go, I had no choice. I was one of those people who goes from zero to fuck you in 10 seconds. The guy you don't want to get in the car with because if you cut them off, it's on.

Lori: Yeah. What did she mean? Real fights or fights when you were in your sleep?

Tony: Real fights. You know, one of the interesting things about Marines is we don't have HR. My first job out of the Marine Corps, and I didn't even realize it, so I leave the Marine Corps, I go to work for this great company, and I'm building pill bottle quality control systems at a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey in a 300-yard-long building with a group of other people and one of those people is your typical Jersey guys, know, drives a BMW, no socks with a suit, he's smarter than everybody else and he was kind of an asshole to everybody. In the Marine Corps, when we have interpersonal problems, we don't go to HR.

We step behind the building, we have a little bit of fun, then we go have a beer. I've never really thought about it. And so he said something that was inappropriate, one time too many. And I said to him, look, if you talk to me like that again, I'm going to knock you out. And he did.

So I chased him out of the building, 300 yards through the office. Out into the parking lot where he got in his BMW and peeled away, and this is before cell phones, so I thought, this is the time where I become a UPS driver. That's my new career, because this is not going to work out. 20 minutes later, my boss called and said, come up to the office, and off I went. I walked in, and he had this really funny smile on his face. And I thought, something's off. And he said, tell me what happened. And I told him.

He said, listen, I know you just got out of the military and Marines are a little different than everybody else. And I know you won't hurt the guy. I said, no, if I'd have caught him, I'd have beat the shit out of him. He said, well, be that as it may, I just fired him. He is kind of an asshole. So go back to work and try not to kill anybody. And I thought, what, what just happened? Turned out my boss was a 31 mission Air Force Vietnam veteran who had flown 31 missions in Vietnam. But for him, I would not be on this podcast talking to you. I'd probably be unloading truck from UPS are back in my dad's garage.

Lori: Yeah, it sounds like you have had a succession of like, what's the word? Like higher power interventions or I don't know if intervention is the right word, but opportunities, like things have happened for you that don't, there's that defy explanation.

Tony: More than once. I have a lifetime of that. Yeah.

Lori: Yeah, I'm already hearing several of them. So yeah, so it's really interesting to me. So now, how did you get from that place to being a leader of a company? And.

Tony: So I worked for three of the craziest people you'd ever want to meet in that company. They had founded a company that became GE Information Systems. And I think they're in their 80s and they're still doing it. But they were inspirational. They were great leaders. They were absolutely crazy in every way you can imagine. But they really knew how to manage people. And they taught me a lot. at one point, I got a phone call from an old friend who had left. Their headquarters was in New York City, in the Trade Center, actually.

I a call from a friend who had come to DC to work down here, didn't like it and said, hey, listen, I'm going to go back to, he was going to go work for Nomura Securities. Would you like to come down here and take this job? It's kind of an interesting job. And it was a very small management consulting and training practice based around a company that at the time was the fourth largest software company in the world. And so it sounded interesting. I went down, they offered me a whole lot of money and the company I was working for had just gotten sold.

You know, I had kind of a free hand and I came down and I spent so much time taking business away from that fourth largest software company that I irritated them to the point where they wanted to hire me. And instead of working for the guy who wanted to hire me, I wound up working for the federal subsidiary for the best boss I've ever had. I learned so much from the people that I've worked for, who was my absolute and complete total opposite.

I was a young, skinny, fast talking, former Marine, he was a big introverted, slow talking Southern Baptist from Texas and the best boss I've ever had in my life. Still a great friend of mine. I spent three years in that business and we grew substantially. It was an international company, headquarters in Germany. So I spent the next three years in Hong Kong, France, Italy and the UK turning around failing businesses.

The Germans used to call me Dirty Tony because they like Clint Eastwood and they thought I was like Dirty Harry because I go to places and fire a lot of people. And after three years, I wanted them to invest in a company that I had found and they didn't want to so I quit and I became the chief operating officer of a very high-end first-generation data analytics company doing a lot of work with law enforcement around money laundering. I spent a year there and that's where I learned the difference between the total market and the available market.

Because when you're selling something that's very expensive that only a few people can buy, you probably aren't going to sell a lot of it. And then I started a company with an old friend from the software company. I got some venture money. We sold it in nine months and made what I thought was a lot of money back then. And then I became a venture, sort of a drop in CEO for the venture fund. So I've run at this point now, eight businesses.

Two, I founded the rest of run a spin-off of a large public company. I've run startups, commercial, international, and I spent several years as a management consultant with two of my very good friends where I did strategy work for all of the beltway companies, all the large systems integrators working primarily in the C-suite.

And in 2008, 2009, I was working for a company who didn't like their CEO and so they decided to offer me the job and I wound up spending 10 years there and now I'm here. I'm now at IntelligentWave. Most of my career has been in startups, turnarounds and either venture or private equity backed firms. But almost always, the way I describe what I do when people ask if I'm at a cocktail party is that I'm a very expensive janitor.

Lori: Hmm. Yeah, and then they have to ask you what that means.

Tony: Well, I'm the guy you hire for underperforming businesses or businesses that are going through stage of growth issues. They're small, they want to be large. That's kind of my milieu, I guess you could say. Pretty much. Yeah.

Lori: What are the lessons, the leadership lessons that you've learned through all of these experiences that you now use to support and I guess support is the best word, your team?

Tony: Well, you know, it's funny. I learned this in the Marine Corps, but they teach it at the Naval Academy. There's a book called Leaders Compass. And I actually require all of the executives that work in my company to write, have a written leadership philosophy. And I have one.

Which is basically, it is the sum total of 31 years in the military and in the boardroom that does two things. It tells people how to work with me and it also holds me accountable. And what it does is it really, it's sort of a primer on how are you successful in an organization that Tony runs?

And it starts with, well, first and foremost, I believe everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves. We all do, and that's what Marines are. Marines all know that they will be immortal because the Marine Corps is immortal. And when you can create that kind of an environment for people, it changes the way that they see their work, it changes the way that they see their life.

And so for me, first part is, what does a leader really do? I mean, what does a CEO do? And it can be a CEO or it can be somebody who only leads one person. But, you know, I've asked 57 other CEOs to tell me what a CEO does and I got 56 different answers. But my definition of a leader is a leader is someone who envisioned a future that does not yet exist and gets everyone so excited about that future that they not only make it real, they make it their own.

Nobody wants to do my plan. They want to be part of it. People want to create. If you want them to bring their best to the table, you've got to let them express that. So leaders set the example, they lead by example, and they're responsible for all that their team does or fails to do. And one of the things that I love about the Marine Corps is when you go to combat, or if you're in the field and you're there for 30 days without a shower and they bring hot food, guess who eats first?

The privates, and then the corporals, and then the sergeants, and then the lieutenants, and then the captains. You know who eats last? Generals. And by the time the generals get in line, there's usually coffee and donuts left. That's about it. Generals eat last. And I learned that lesson so completely in the Marine Corps that I talk about that even today. I have a couple of retired generals on my board. One is the general who fought the largest battle since Vietnam, the Battle of Fallujah.

And he is someone that I think everyone would aspire to be as a leader because every decision he makes is filtered through just the lenses of mission and people. And so in my leadership philosophy, when I give this to, I give it to customers. I give it to partners, I give it to our employees. And it says things like every decision I make is filtered through two lenses. What's in the best interest of our customer? And as a defense contractor, it's really about the mission and what's in the best interest of our employees.

If we don't have customers, we don't have in place, but those two lenses are the things that I make decisions from. And it will, it allows people to hold me accountable because if I make a decision and it's not through those lenses, you get to challenge it. And you probably heard this before. People will tell you culture trumps strategy. And it does because you're trying to build a culture of thinkers and doers, not a culture of obeyers that's not what the world is about.

I'm the last of the baby boomers. I hate all the other boomers because they got all the cool stuff and I'm like the youngest one so I get blamed for all the things they did. But I can tell you why boomers hate millennials because millennials have the life that most boomers wanted. If you were a boomer, you graduated from college, you had to stay in a job for five years or nobody would hire you. Now if you stay in a job for five years, they want to know what's wrong with you.

So there's a real disconnect there, I think, because allowing people to be the fullest expressions of themselves, that's what this life is about. We're not here to make money, we're here to become. And so when you can help people become, and one of the things in my leadership philosophy is, hey, listen, in this economy, in this era, no one retires from a company, no one does.

Lori: I completely agree.

Tony: We basically borrow people from the communities where we live and work. They're basically borrowed from these different communities. And we know that they're going to go back. So the question isn't, what do we do with them? The question is, do we put them back in those communities better or worse than we found them? Can we create for them an experience that they want to create for others? That's how we move it forward.

Lori: I love that philosophy. That's, that's, you know, a lot of the people I talk to and bring on my show have similar philosophies, but I think the world at large, the business world at large is not that way. Does not see things that way.

Tony: It's a brutally Darwinian hellscape of people just trying to get their thumb over the other guy, for the most part. But in really successful companies, you never find that. You might find personal success in a situation like that for you, where it's a zero-sum game and everything I get, you don't get. But in my experience, and it's 31 years now in the C-suite, relationships are not transactional.

I've had employees call me with job offers and ask me to give them advice about their job offer. And more often than not, I'm going to tell them, go take that job because it's not something that I could do for you. And four years later, they're back at another company that I'm running. I probably have 18 people in this 400 person business I run today who've worked with me in at least two other companies because they like the culture and they know that the relationship is not transactional, that you will follow that mantra of best interest of the customer, best interest of employees.

Lori: Yeah, wow, that is, it's so impactful. What happens, I have two questions in my head at the same time. What happens when people make mistakes in your organization?

Tony: You're either winning or learning. Right? Look, our motto is fail fast, fail cheap. If you're not making mistakes, I will tell you that I have said this directly to employees in the last week. If you're not making mistakes, you're no fucking good to me. That's how we learn. If I took every mistake I made and it killed me, I mean, I'm here in spite of myself, not because of myself, but those mistakes teach you more than you can ever imagine.

Of the eight companies that I've run, I've had one that was a smoky mushroom cloud of a ruin where people were suing each other and it turned out one of the investors was the head of the Palestinian Islamic Shi'a. And this is right after 9-11. Best experience of my life. Best learning experience of my life. Do know the 70-20-10 rule of learning? 70% of our learning comes through experience. 20 % through the experience of others and 10 % from books.

So as a leader, if you can contrive to give people that experience, you're giving them the kind of learning that they can't get anyplace else. And experience, unfortunately, is what you get when you don't get what you want.

Lori: Right, right, exactly. Do your, does your team, are you vulnerable with your team?

Tony: That is, you know, it's a great question. I just took them to an offsite where we're experimenting with, I read your background, you're a meditator. I didn't know what meditation was up until three years ago, never heard of it. And because I miss Googled directions to the CIA, to their headquarters in Langley, I wound up finding a place where I learned how to meditate and it changed my life completely in a week.

I went from that guy, that angry guy, to a completely different person in five days. And it was so impactful for me that we just spun off a business to address that issue for people.

Lori: See, this is another example of the universe or higher power or whatever you want to call it stepping in for you and redirecting you.

Tony: And well, I'm not even well, I don't know if you've had CEOs on here, right? You ever have somebody who says, hey, I walk in a room, somebody asks a question, I open my mouth and 20 minutes later, everybody's looking at me like, where did you get that answer? And I would always say, well, I've actually I have partners who would say to me at the end of a meeting like that, hey, I know that you know that I know that you know, you didn't know what you were going to say when you opened your mouth. And yet whatever came out was great.

And as a joke, I would say, well, I'm not that smart, I'm just channeling some smart guy. Little did I know how right I was, in a lot of ways.

Lori: Where did you end up? I'm so curious that you learned meditation in five days.

Tony: So, I had a meeting at a particular government agency. I Googled that agency name and up came a declassified 1983 Defense Intelligence Agency report on a program that the agency was investigating. It was written by a lieutenant colonel and I've read thousands of military documents in my career and this I'd never seen anything like before. It started with, in order for me to explain if this works, first we have to talk about what is reality.

And it was basically a 25 page document on what is reality and how is the universe constructed. But in 1983, they're discussing weight particle duality, quantum entanglement, the shape of the universe, things that you could not possibly know or measure. I'm reading this in 2022, where the Nobel Prize for physics was in quantum entanglement. So I thought, boy, that's really cool. And I said to my wife, this is pretty neat. I wonder if that place is still around. And it was, and it was in Virginia.

So I said, I'm going to sign up and go. And not knowing what I was getting into, not knowing a thing about it, there is technology we can use now to entrain brain waves, to put you into states that it might take a Tibetan monk 30 years to achieve. And once I saw how powerful that was for me personally dealing with, I didn't even know I had PTSD. I just didn't. But my wife is the one who said, my God, you just changed so significantly.

That I started out basically wanting to do this for veterans and the organization that was hosting this didn't want that. They felt there was liability if they brought people with PTSD. So we did it on our own. I hired someone from that institute and put together a whole program. And now we're doing this commercially and for the government. We're keeping war fighters combat effective on three hours sleep.

We have a way to reduce and treat PTSD without therapy, without talk therapy that's neurological, not psychological. I was just at Columbia University two months ago giving a talk at this to some of the top researchers in neuroscience. We're actually delivering a paper July 5th at the University of Arizona's Consciousness Conference. It's an academic paper we wrote on how this affects your neurology and how it allows you to bypass narrative making.

Most people, when they go to a therapist, they need to talk about trauma and a lot of people don't want to talk about trauma or they can't talk about trauma. So the ability to bypass talk and do it basically physiologically and neurologically and quickly is amazing. My daughter is a therapist. She was up in New York City and she's using this now with her clients.

So for me, was such a game changer that actually our employees in the company do it. And you asked me a question that I even forgot what it was now. So if you repeat it, I'll come back and ask and try to answer.

Lori: Well, now I'm not, I asked you about being vulnerable with your team, but this is, you went in a way better direction.

Tony: So yeah, vulnerable is a big thing, right? It's hard. I would tell you for most of my adult life, wives, girlfriends, friends, I would always say, I don't do vulnerable. Marines don't do vulnerable. We recently tested this technology and one of the unintended circumstances of brainwave entrainment is that if you entrain people together as a group, they literally get on the same frequency.

You start on a Saturday and by Thursday, you love everybody in that room, even if they irritated the hell out of you on Saturday. So we have built a program for companies to build coherent teams, right? Everybody thinks the C-suite is this homogenous group of like-minded people and they all live in the same neighborhoods, went to the same colleges and universities, their kids play together. And every Thursday night, CEO's house for margaritas. When it's, in reality, it's a bunch of borderline sociopathic elbow throwing assholes who don't really like each other very much.

And I won't say that my leadership team is like that, but we have our challenges. So we envisioned a program where we would teach team coherence behaviors and intersperse that with brainwave entrainment to get everybody on the same frequency. And they all hated me for it. They didn't want to go. But in the course of that, we did an assessment called the DISC assessment, which kind of talks about, if you're familiar with it, it's a psychometric test of Stephen Covey.

And it's funny, one of my… not as advanced executives read his and it said, you can be perceived as arrogant. And everybody thinks that the guy's arrogant and he reads it in front of a room full of people and says, but that's not me. And everybody starts laughing and like read the room, buddy. And of course I opened mine and it says, you can be, I tend to listen a lot before I talk, especially in a leadership context.

I always talk less because I don't want to bias people's thinking. But one of my rules in my leadership philosophy is, hey, listen, know, nobody wins a fight. So argue all you want. And if I lose an argument, I learn something. If I win an argument, you become someone who sees the world from my side. In a fight, if you lose a fight, you just want to wait to get your chance to get the other person back. So I like argument. I don't like fighting.

But once we make a decision, expect you to execute whatever that decision is. And if you don't, I can be, let's just say rather intense. And so when I opened my DISC assessment, it said, you you can be very intimidating to people. And I looked up and I said to my team, you know what? I've struggled with this my whole life. Being the boss all the time is not as easy as it looks. And sometimes you forget that just a small negative statement can land on someone like a ton of bricks.

And so I said to them, listen, I know I struggle with this and I'm looking for your help with it. If I do this, in our next set of one-on-ones, let's have a conversation about it. You can certainly talk to me about it. And what was interesting, we brought our general counsel to that. And at our last board meeting, he actually got up in front of our board and said, you know, was made that great is that Tony actually was vulnerable in that.

So I think vulnerability matters for leaders because hey, guess what? Everybody already knows you're full of shit. And if you admit it, they want to help you. But if you don't, they just want to prove to you how full of shit you are.

Lori: And it makes them more willing to trust you. Yeah.

Tony: Absolutely, If you know, it's so funny ever My biggest problem is I can't get out of this because of the title. You walk into a room and everybody freezes up and you know, I'm just Tony I'm just some kid that grew up in South Philly. I was a Marine Staff Sergeant I wasn't I wasn't a general.

But people see you differently and I think part of that honestly is when you do, and as you said, you're a meditator, when you do find that center, people read that. You create a field and your field is what they read. It's not what you say. It's not even what you do. It's the field that they read when you come in the room. It's the energy that you bring. And so you have to be careful what energy that you're creating for people.

Lori: Yes, and I think especially as leaders, that's another part of your responsibility as a leader is to bring the right energy into every situation because like you just said, it affects the rest of the room. It affects everybody's energy, whether you're the leader or not, but especially when you're the leader because everybody's reading, like you said, everybody's reading your energy.

Tony: There are no conversations, there are only exchanges of energy.

Lori: Yes, yes. my gosh, I know we could go on for another hour and we're not going to. Yeah, but this has been such a fantastic conversation. We don't know where it's gonna go when we start, what direction it's gonna take. And I love that all of these concepts came up in the conversation. So thank you so much.

Before we go, what is the song you listen to when you need an extra boost of energy, Tony?

Tony: Summer Wind by Frank Sinatra. Would you like to know why? So I have a daughter, she's 29 now, but when she was little, she liked that song. She would sing it all the time. She would sing it when she got out of the bathtub. And she recently got married last year. And the father-daughter dance was Summer Wind. And when we got up to dance, she started singing. So I started singing.

And we did a three minute and two second duet of Summer Wind. And at the end of that song, 15 fathers came over and said, geez, I wish my daughter looked at me the way your daughter looks at you. And I thought, well, whatever I did in my life that was good or bad, this was a good one. And whenever I'm down, I just think about that song and my daughter. And that's what keeps me going. My mom took a video, so I do have it. Yeah, it was awesome.

Lori: Okay, all right. Very cool. Tony, if somebody wants to continue a conversation with you, where is the best place for them to find you?

Tony: Well, two actually, peakneuro.com, P-E-A-K-N-E-U-R-O, peakneuro. Peakneuro is the business that we spun out commercially to help people with PTSD, first responders, military. And I am at IntelligentWaves.com, which is the company that I run today. And if you send an email to tony.crescenzo at IntelligentWaves.com, I will get it.

Or to tony at peakneuro.com, I will get it. And I do answer emails.

One thing we didn't talk about is I'm very much part of the veterans community. My biggest thing is I struggled for years. My transition out of the military consisted of take off that uniform and go home. And a bad transition is the number one indication and factor in veteran suicide. So being there and just holding space is what's most important for not just veterans, but for everyone. I've people tell me PTSD is only for combat veterans and it's not. It's not everyone. Everyone has probably had some trauma in their life that they need to overcome.

Lori: Thank you for all the good work you're doing. I'm going to put links to your, for people to reach you in the show notes to make it super easy. And Tony, thank you so much for joining me today on Fine Is a 4-Letter Word.

Tony: Thank you, Lori. Great to be here and a pleasure to meet you.