Hey, everybody. It is Suzy, your host here on the Crafted Journey podcast, inviting and convening with really cool people who have had really cool careers, which is, I think, something we should all aspire to. So really excited to introduce you to someone who has made a crafted career journey in art form. So we're gonna let him introduce himself, walk through some of the fun and impactful bits and pieces, and then hear what's next and maybe a fun fact or two. So over to you, my guest, Ron J Stefanski. Hi everyone, I'm Ron Stefanski and I'm the host of my own podcast DisruptEd, where we talk about what's going on in this five gs wired workforce augmented technology interconnected globally, inter dependent AI accelerated web three immersive pandemic interrupted world out there. It's crazy. And so that's the world in which we're living. And that's the world I chronicle with stories about what's going on out there. From my own point of view, Suzy, you asked me about where I came from. I grew up on the east side of Detroit in the 60s and went on to Ann Arbor and then returned to Detroit after becoming an empty nester and have lived for the last fifteen years on Detroit's Riverfront. And that's where I host my show is right on Detroit's Riverfront at the new lab facility. Fantastic. Well, so appreciate that you are native and still Detroit resident, but in some of your journey along the way. So college, tell us about your first grownup job after college. How did you decide what to study then what to do? That's a great question. So I started out as an English major and I was determined to be a lawyer. So I took a year off after my undergraduate years at University of Michigan. I majored in English lit and art history and took a year off and was looking for a job that I could save some money to go to law school because I was putting myself through school. In that year, I found a job as a publisher's rep selling textbooks to college professors. And from there, I guess I'd say I never looked back. I never looked back at going to law school. I fell in love with the job. My nickname at work was Ron God, I love my job, Stefanski. So, you know, I became Rookie of the Year and then started getting promoted in the business. And before long, I was just swept up into a business that I really loved. And so that's kind of how I started. And, you know, in the course of that journey, I also recognized the power actually of having a liberal arts major and minor. You know, a lot of times we're talking to people and we're saying, Oh, I hear a lot of young people say, Oh, I'm just an English major. I'm just a history major. You know, I didn't study business. And it breaks my heart and I want to just pull them off camera and say, Hey, you know, that's a powerful major. You just didn't take the capstone class. And they go, what do you mean? And I said, well, there's a class you should take that spends time assimilating all that you've learned over the last four years and refracting it and retelling it in the language of business so that you can say, for example, I learned how to collaborate with people, very different walks of life. I learned how to manage and respond to and evaluate critically disparate facts. I learned how to be a great communicator and a great writer. Those are all things that come from being a liberal arts major and that's nothing to shy away from. Well, and so I've got some young graduates I'm working with who are philosophy majors and they're like, Have I ruined my life? And I'm like, Dude, tell me about stoicism. No, tell me about They understand how life works and life, business, it all It's so much more than just ticking the boxes and It really is. You mentioned philosophy as an undergraduate major and I interviewed about a year and a half ago, an entrepreneur who was starting a software design company and he looked for philosophy majors. Why? Because he wanted people who could connect different things across many different disciplines. Because a lot of what's being developed, in the world of software, world of quantum computing, in the world of AI requires leaps of faith and jumps from one discipline to another. So an answer to your other larger question, which is what did I most take out of my first job? So in that publishers rep job, I was blessed by having an extraordinary boss who has been a mentor to me through my entire forty year career. Great guy, Jack Mayleben, and many people who worked for Jack refer to him as a legend. He was a sales manager, but he was more than that. He was a coach and a teacher. And he really taught us a lot about a lot of little things that ended up being big things. Back in those days, what you wore had a big impact on being taken seriously as a twenty two year old. So he made sure I wore gray horse and flannel slacks with a one and a half inch cuff. He made sure that my shirt came down to this part of my elbow right here or my wrist right here. He made sure that I had a white or blue shirt, nothing fancier than that. He even made sure of the kind of shoes I wore, you know, I mean, was very prescriptive, but I look back on that time and the other thing he taught me was, you know, to be unbridled in my enthusiasm, to not be afraid to be unplugged and enthusiastic. And so it was in that first year as a sales rep that I went on campus on Halloween dressed as a gorilla, you know, and I did, you know, I kind of expressed myself in my role and it ended up working out pretty well. I would say so. Oh my gosh. Yeah. The thing you mentioned about clothing, I still think that in our working at home world, I think people don't quite realize, yes, there's a joy to soft pants, but picking clothes give you feeling, clothes give you emotion. So again, that's another thing that I have found as a mentor. It is something that you can urge people to take pride or just have as something that's in their toolkit of ways to communicate and express themselves. Suzy, you were talking off camera with me about what I was doing last week and I was at the Clinton Global Initiative and there's a little clothing story there. So whenever I go to trade shows or conferences where I speaking, my signature outfit was a bow tie. You know, I always wore a bow tie. And so it was about ten years ago, I've had the privilege of meeting with the president on three different occasions, President Clinton. And the first time I met him, I was wrapped up in the idea of what I was going to wear, right? Because I knew about it three months in advance. And so it happened to turn out that over the fourth of July weekend, I'd gone to a Macy's sale and they had bow ties on sale and I bought an American flag bow tie. And so when I was going through my mortar room, thought, Oh, this is perfect for the president, right? And so I brought the bow tie along, tied it up, made sure it's perfect. And I was standing in line and President Clinton came up and gave me his typical handshake is where he kind of draws you in. He not only shakes your hand, but he kind of pulls you close. And he talked to me for a minute about my commitment to action, which is the reason I was there. And then he literally went up to me and he pulled at my tie and he's like, did you tie this tie? This is a great tie. And I said, yes, did. He said, you know, a number of people over the years have told me that I would look good in a bow tie. You're obviously a bow tie guy. Do you think that's true? I said, Oh, absolutely, Mr. President, you would look great in a bow tie. He said, You know, the problem is, it's not the bow tie. You gotta be kind of fussy about fixing it and working it. You know, don't you have to spend a lot of time doing that? I said, you know, it's not that hard. He goes, I'm not so sure. And I just so happened to have a photo on my iPhone that could help illustrate my point to him. So I pulled my iPhone out and I said, mister president, I'm gonna show you that it's not that hard to learn how to tie a bow tie. If you look at this picture, last week, I was teaching Jeff Bush how to tie a bow tie. Now if he can tie one, so can you. And he started cracking up and he wasn't laughing like, Oh, that's funny. He was laughing like peeing your pants laughing. Mean, just burst out laughing. And it wasn't until about a half hour later where I reconnected with my colleague who was with me and I told him the story and then I realized, Oh my gosh, I cracked up the president of the United States. So I think that clothes can make the man, especially when you have a story behind them, I guess. Awesome. Well, so we've heard lots of bits and pieces, the beginning, we know where you are now. If you could call out a few things in your journey, whether crafted or, you know, again, a blessing from I don't know where, what would you call out? I would call out the advice to follow your passion and your purpose. And I would call out the discipline that my mentor, Frank Britt taught me about. He was the CEO of Penn Foster, an education company and then he went on to be the chief transformation officer for Starbucks. And Frank told me, you know, be, it's not enough that you're passionate. It's enough that you are disciplined about that passion in driving it towards some outcome or some impact. And so he had his one percent role that if at any given interval of time, you could be one percent better. You weren't really competing with colleagues. You weren't really competing with the company. You weren't really competing with family members or anyone else. You're really competing against yourself. But if you could drive yourself to be one percent better over a period of time, you're going to enjoy the results as much as you're going to have an impact. And I thought that was really advice that I've kept to and I've adhered to. And I think it served me well, because my career has been across several different industries over time, but they've always, one interesting job has always led to another interesting job. And I've been blessed in that respect. Amen. Amen. Well, you've really touched on one of the key points we find in this show is people will invest in you. People will teach you. So you've called out Frank, you called out, is it Mike from your first job? The legend. Is there anybody else that really made an impact on you? Yeah, I think the person who's made the biggest impact on my career is actually my grandma Vicky. Regrettably, was, well, I'll start with who she was. She was, for those listeners who know about All in the Family with Archie Bunker, she was Edith Bunker with a Polish accent. She was an immigrant from Poland. She had a sixth grade education. She bought all of her clothes at the Salvation Army or at local garage sales. She learned how to press parts and assemble an automobile without ever having learned to drive one. And she was just like Edith Bunker, funny, down to earth, the wisdom of the ages packed into that sixth grade education. And, regrettably, just before I became a dad, she was killed in the city of Detroit. And what I came to learn about that is that, her perpetrator was a fourteen year old dropout. And that actually propelled a major shift in my profession because I was in the educational publishing world as a textbook person. And I started thinking, you know, I need to do something that honors her legacy that helps me to redefine purpose in my life. I mean, I was cut adrift by that whole trauma. And as I fought my way back, I recognized that technology was changing the way our educational publishing world was operating. And then I started thinking, wait a minute, we're taking this technology and we're turning it into advanced placement courses for white students in the suburbs, we should be looking at technology and how it can help people like this kid who killed my grandmother, who was a high school dropout. And so I worked with Doctor. Howard Liebman and we licensed his creation, which was an online accredited high school program, not a GED, but an actual diploma program for adult dropouts. And that gave me a lot of purpose because every time we graduated someone, I knew they were exponentially less likely to commit crime or do something horrible because by getting that basic credential, they were restoring their hope in themselves and they were restoring their hope in a pathway that they could pursue that would drive them toward meaningful, self sustaining life supporting work. And I think that's the lesson for my grandmother is that, you know, be proud of working, be proud of the ability to work, be proud of whatever work you're doing. My grandmother was proud of the fact that she built cars, you know, and she took a lot of pride in that work. And I think that's probably one of the most powerful lessons that lasted, has lasted my entire career is to find dignity in whatever work you're needed for. Ron, thank you. And thank you, Vicki. Amazing. So that brings you to Disrupt Ed, if I'm not mistaken. This is you finding and shining a light on all the possibilities. Well, you know, with Disrupt Ed, I was on a podcast for e learning and we were talking and whatever I seemed to do, and I got animated and I got loquacious and I started throwing adjectival superlatives across the screen and whatever I did actually got a lot of views. That particular podcast on someone else's show went viral. And so the producers of that show MarketScale approached me and said, you should do your own podcast. And I thought I was at that point approaching sixty and I thought, me doing a podcast, are you kidding me? And I was like, no, no, no, you would be great. And so I went back to The Well and I came up with this idea of Disrupt Ed and it was to connect the dots between this hyper disrupted world in which we're living and talking to people about their stories disrupting the world even further. And what I learned from talking to people who are the disruptors, they're seemingly ordinary humans, but in point of fact, they're doing extraordinary things. And one of the things they're doing is they're helping the rest of us to navigate this hyper advancing world. We've never seen, Susie, I'd venture a bet that you would agree with this, but I don't think we've ever seen a change on a scale or on a pace that we've seen over the last ten years with AI, with quantum computing, with globalization, with the pandemic, all these things were factors in a massive shift in how everything is done across industries. And I think I hit a nerve center with that topic because I've never been at a loss of getting great guests on the show and it's fueled a small consulting practice and community of practitioners underneath it and a part of it, and who are now twenty six thousand people strong a year and a half later. And I think among those people, you know, are a lot of disruptors. There are a lot of people who are trying to make sense of the world out there. And the more you meet them, the more I can say in these very anxious times, the more reassured you are that the world is still a good place populated by a majority of really good souls out there. So true and so, so good. Well, listen, we've taken your time, we've learned. I'm gonna ask you one last, if you would, and I did give you a heads up, is there any little fun fact that maybe not a lot of people know about you that they would like to? Oh, that's a good question. I guess I'll share a number of fun facts. I'm a sailing and boating obsess. As you can see in my office, I have all these sailboats. They're all boats I've been on or have wanted to be on. So I've been a lifelong boater from the age of six when my dad first restored a wooden crutch craft to this day. So if I can be on the water near the water, I'm in good shape. So that's the first thing. So my wife is waiting for me to come forward with a plan to buy my next boat because I sold my last boat during COVID and she thought, Oh gosh, that was fun, but I'm glad that's over with only to hear me say, We need another vote. So that's a little fun fact, especially if you want to stay happily married, which I do since I'm coming up on my thirty ninth wedding anniversary. So it's a fun fact just to see how I navigate getting her to agree on some level that we do need a vote in my future. So that's one fun fact. And then secondly, I think I'm always amazed. You know, people comment a lot that I meet interesting people and I've met a lot of famous people in my life, people like Elton John and Margaret Thatcher, the Clintons, you know, the Bushes, a whole lot of people through a variety of different jobs. And what I've learned from all of them is essentially the same thing. The only thing that stops us, the mere mortals in that sphere where there are super achievers, the only thing that separates us is our ability to move past our failures. I was around Hillary Clinton during the time that Monica Lewinsky was on the front page and her ability to move forward and to move past that and to simply pivot at least publicly was extraordinary. I would dare say most people in that circumstance go into a fetal position, they become paralyzed. So I would say that's the fun fact that you learn from famous people is there's not much separating us. But the one thing that does is the ability to embrace what's failed that we've been part of and shake it off and move forward. That's all they ever do, and that's how they keep going. Well, Ron, I had a feeling we're gonna learn a lot, be entertained, and all of the above, and then some inspired. So thank you for your time today. Good luck to you with the amazing things that you're doing. I'll be watching, will be watching, And thank you for being on The Crafted Journey today. Well, I love what you're doing with The Crafted Journey. I think there's so many people that are trying to craft their own story, their own body of work, their own portfolio of skills. And I think this is a great platform to explore that and to hear how other people do it because we all learn from each other. And the podcast has become the form at which a lot of people are learning new things. In an age of misinformation, talking to people authentically like we've been able to do on your show, I think that's a huge opportunity, to help each other. And so I really appreciate what you're doing and I wish you great success and we'll have to have you on Disrupt Ed at some point. All the fun we have. Well, everybody, thank you for watching. Again, cheers and thanks to Ron, and we will catch you all next time on The Graphic Journey. Take care.
