Building a mission-driven career (Jerel Bonner)

[01:42] Paul: Today I'm talking to Gerald Bonner, who is the co-founder of Corralling Chaos. He also wrote a book called Sharpening China's Talent. When he spent 14 years advising multinational companies in China. He works as a consultant and a coach, and we're going to dive into his story today. Welcome to the podcast, Gerald.

[02:05] Jerel Bonner: Uh, thanks for having me, Paul. It's nice to have a chat with somebody on my old stomping turf of Taiwan/China.

[02:13] Paul: Fantastic. Um, so I'd love to start with broad. So I'd love to start with early in your life. What were some of the biggest influences to you growing up?

[02:27] Jerel Bonner: So my, my son, the biggest influences was not to be, not to go to school. I started working when I was 18 in the garment industry, and then I went to tech school and got an associate's degree in electronic engineering. I worked for IBM and I just was bouncing around. I spent 6 years at IBM, hated being a factory robot, I called myself, because like 150, 200, 300 people every day, we just walked into that factory, we were programmed when to go to lunch, when to go home. I really hated it. Then I can't remember what year, but I'm a big music fan and I used to work with bands, managing bands and mixing sound in clubs.

I remember reading an article about bands, and this statement came out to me from this article in this music magazine, and I'll read it to you. It says, "A successful life means living your life as lively, as rewarding as you can without allowing peer group pressure or social mores to influence your life unless you so choose." But it has to be by your choice. Millions of people spend their lives trying to do this. Few succeed. Some people do it, if not in their daily lives, then in other forms. And so that influenced me to be like, yes, I'm going to have a successful life and I'm going to make it as rewarding as I want.

And I don't care about the social mores. And I'm going to make sure that I do things by my choices. And I can tell you, I came across that statement somewhere around '83, '84. And it's, it's the one of the first lines in my mission statement.

[04:09] Paul: Wow. It was that, so the IBM days?

[04:12] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, that was still the IBM days. Yeah.

[04:14] Paul: And maybe bring us back to IBM a little. I, I'm sure a lot of people have heard about some of the myths of the blue uniform, but what was that office culture like?

[04:25] Jerel Bonner: Oh, so I definitely did not fit into that factory culture because they had just opened up a factory in in Charlotte, North Carolina, and they were hiring all the computer certificate techs coming out of school. It was like, you know, you go in, you build the boxes, and you, you meet the quality numbers, you run them through the tests, and then you send them down the line. And, you know, if you had to make 10 banking machines, you, you know, you worked on 10 banking machines. If you had to make 50 computer printers, you made 50 little bank teller computer printers. If you had to make 5 ATMs a day, you wired 5 ATMs. And it was really, it wasn't any fun because, you know, they were who they were and, you know, they were getting ready to go into the time where what we used to call it the acre, the acre age, age of acre.

The inside joke was, why is IBM falling apart? Because it had one acre too many. So I mean, it was, It was a productive place, but it was the last days of IBM as IBM because then they started breaking down all the great things that they offered the employees.

[05:37] Paul: Right. They struggled for quite a period and then they have re-transformed in a way, but I think, I imagine at least, company that size, they still have a lot of that culture.

[05:49] Jerel Bonner: Yeah. Well, I mean, the new CEO, Ginni, she's trying to re- brand it, and they're betting on AI. But, you know, some of the local stories around here is that they bought Red Hat so that they can build up their portfolio of new technology and new offerings and more profitable units so they can sell themselves. So who knows if that's really going to happen. I think so. That'd be crazy if it does.

[06:16] Paul: So you stumbled upon that quote. What emerged out of that quote? Was it just that quote? Were there other life experiences that kind of shaped a shift away from IBM?

[06:27] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, so after realizing I didn't like being IBM, that's when I started to work with the bands and I went back to school and picked up fundamentals of selling and small business management. And out of that, the next biggest influence in my life actually came in '96 when I read The Seven Habits of Successful People by Stephen Covey. And that's when I really locked down, started to write my mission statement and to determine who I am. And my mission statement is a living, breathing document. It has a whole bunch of stuff called the rules of life, and it has my mission highlights and everything like that. So I was working at Bank of America, and we had— this guy and I, we had a couple conversations, and, you know, we learned that if you stop learning, that's it.

It's the kiss of death. So at that point, I started learning. And then, you know, I gradually kept changing my mission statement. And, you know, the start of my mission statement now is to be a Mensch by continuing to educate myself about life from any resource. And once I have learning intelligence, I can then build my emotional intelligence and a whole various other sets of intelligences so that I can live my life as I choose and have my soul print and share my Soul Print with my friends and loved ones. And one of the key things of the intelligence is that I think a lot of things excluding your podcast talks about is the money part.

Most of the educational systems, STEM, STEAM, they all talk about these sciences and technology and engineering and arts. They don't talk about financial intelligence, and until people learn financial intelligence, they will always be under the thumb of the big corporations. And that's something I share in my TED Talk.

[08:20] Paul: Yeah, that's fascinating. So I think the financial intelligence has been something that's been interesting for me because I think if you're defaulting to a full-time job, you kind of just accept you're going to make a certain amount of money and then you design life around it. And I think in my self-employment journey, that's really flipped for me. Have you gone through— did you go through that in the '80s as well?

[08:46] Jerel Bonner: Oh sure, because I was getting laid off. So I quit IBM, went back into, you know, and then I quit a couple of companies and after having small part-time jobs. So I'm like the first job hopper. I mean, before I started a company in China, I was like changing jobs every 2 years.

[09:04] Paul: If you look at the data, It actually shows today's generation is moving jobs less than if you look at the previous generation for the same ages. I think it's probably hidden too because a lot of people were working in jobs that you did a lot more short-term, and today people are working in more, I guess, career office-type jobs. But, um, still pretty interesting finding that out, right?

[09:27] Jerel Bonner: Well, so I— my insight to that is that's because they have the student loans and there's no way they're going to buy a house if they can't pay off Oh, so yeah, they, they, they're like, oh my god, I mean, when I graduated school, you know, we didn't have $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 school student loans. We had maybe a $3,000 student loan. So, you know, that's a, that's a big shift. So that's where that comes from.

[09:51] Paul: I'd love to go back for a second before we move forward. Where did you get the idea to come up with a mission statement? I don't think— I mean, I Even still, this isn't a common thing, but where did you get that idea from that you might sit down and kind of map out what matters to you?

[10:09] Jerel Bonner: The Stephen Covey book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I mean, he strictly talks about creating a mission statement. I think it's Habit 2, begin with the end in mind. So you start with your mission statement and he says, what do you want on your epitaph and tombstone? and then work your life back to that. So that's where I got that idea.

It started off pretty simple with, you know, what do I want to be and my personal principle statement, which is the quote from the Rock and Roll magazine. And then I heard a story on NPR where some guy had passed and he had 3 rules of life. And so the 3 rules of life were: learn to laugh, have a good time, hurt as few people as possible. I was like, that's too cool. I got to put that on my mission statement. I love it.

Right. And that those, you know, there's now 20 rules of life that I've collected. Some are my own, some, and then some have come from books that I've continued to read about, you know, being a lifelong learner, listening to people talk. I'll give you a really cool quote from Cyndi Lauper that's on my mission statement. Okay. It's Her quote that I heard on NPR was, and then is, it's a life's practice to walk joyfully through life.

That's just like amazing, right? I mean, you know, and most people don't realize that it's the, you know, and I've heard you say this on other podcasts, it's the journey. And I always believe that my life, I'm writing every chapter of my life and I take full responsibility for my choices. So I never complain that somebody else did something to me. So I don't have that victim mentality, right?

[11:54] Paul: Yeah, I love that too. I think there's perhaps something else there, which is just that I think oftentimes we think we can think our way to change. And what I've discovered is you kind of just have to take a step and, uh, I get, I don't remember exactly what Loper said, but kind of just walk the walk before you can talk the talk. Which is not a way a lot of people think about change.

[12:19] Jerel Bonner: That's true. And one of the skills that I've developed that I don't really talk about too much, but other people have noticed it in me, and they have said to me, what I do really, what I do really well is I always know— I never worry about where's the— I know what the end goal is, and I don't worry about all the steps in between. I just worry about what do I have to do next by when. So I might have a project that has 3 months to go. And I might not have all the clear steps, but I know what I need to do for the next step. And then once that's done, I need— I know what I need to do for the next step.

[12:53] Paul: You ended up leaving IBM, moving around to a couple other corporate jobs. You were the original job hopper. Where were you at that time? And what was— what was energizing you?

[13:08] Jerel Bonner: Well, I mean, so learning was always energizing. And so I ended up in the '90s working for the University of North Carolina as a computer consultant. And as I say in my TED Talk, Al Gore might have invented the internet, but me and my friends built it. So we were literally the geeks, you know, running cable to computers, installing Novell software, teaching people how to use Netscape when it first came out in '94. And that was fun and that was exciting. I think like I heard in some of your other podcasts, you kind of get stuck into that rut where you're like, "Well, this is all I know, so I really don't want to get out of this.

I need to stay in here because this is my bread and butter." But after a while, I got really bored at working at the state because it's a government institution and there's not a lot of opportunity. The pay ranges and salary increases are voted in by the state legislature, so they don't have a whole lot of respect. Respect the people and their employees as far as compensation, and they're not leading edge. So I just decided to take a jump and go into the corporate world at the height of the dot-com bust, right before the dot-com bust. I got back into the public sector in October of '99, and by March of 2000, everything started falling apart. However, Looking at the upside, I learned a lot through a merger, an M&A situation.

I got to do international presentations to global audiences about, about the technology, and I got to see the world. And I was like, that's really something I've always was having in my back pocket of how can I see the world, how can I travel around the world, that would just make— how can I live abroad? And while I was in, in Argentina I met a rock blues guitarist who was doing a bunch of shows in Argentina. So I went to the club, saw his show, he invited me out to go hang out with the band on the weekend at a college. So I went, and while I was on my way home from that college gig with the band, I was talking to the Australian drummer. And I said to him, "Dude, you only play drums with this guy for the next 3 weeks.

What do you do before you play drums for him and after you play drums for him?" drums for him. He goes, I teach English. I'm like, you teach English? He's like, yeah. I'm like, well, how do you stay here? He goes, well, I just go across the border every 90 days and get another tourist visa for 90 days, and I live with my girlfriend.

I'm like, well, what about students? He goes, the Argentines just come up to me and say, can I teach them English? And I say, 50 pesos an hour. And they say yes, I teach them. I'm like, so you have no materials, you have no sponsor, and you just hang out? He goes, yeah.

And I'm like, That's too easy. I can do that. And so I ended up losing my job with this international company during the dot-com bust and meltdown. And people said to me, Gerald, what are you going to do? I said, I'm going to Argentina to teach English. And they were like, we sent you down there to sell equipment.

I'm like, well, now you fired me. So I'm going down there to teach English. But then the Argentinian economy crashed. And so I was talking to my international business developer who, uh, for Asia, who had said to me, Gerald, China just got into the World Trade Organization. China's got the 2008 Olympics. They need English teachers.

Go to China. And so I got my ESL certification from Duke, got another part-time— got another job in between getting my ESL certification, and got laid off from that job. And when they laid me off, they said to me, Gerald, we have to let you go. And I just looked these senior managers in the eye and said, "Look, no problem." I said, "I've been laid off many a times." I said, "You got people that are in that office that have never been laid off before." I said, "I'm going to China. I've got my money. I know I've got my ESL certification 75% complete.

This is no big deal. Take care of those kids because I'm out of this country." That's amazing.

[17:08] Paul: So it seems like you're leaving school and your career interests and arc of your early jobs really aligned with every major crash to get you laid off at like every point of your career.

[17:24] Jerel Bonner: You know, you're absolutely right. I went through the— I was laid off in '91 during the economic crisis. Well, '91, it wasn't an economic crisis, but I was laid off in '91. And then, of course, there were some really bad managers that I worked for that fired me. And then, I got reinstated and it still didn't work out because you really You realize you're working for losers that don't really care about you.

[17:50] Paul: Do you look at all these experiences as almost helping you gain more resilience?

[17:59] Jerel Bonner: No, absolutely. That's spot-on analysis, Paul. I can tell you that one of my books that a friend of mine said I needed to read was Antifragile by the guy who wrote The Black Swan.

[18:14] Paul: Yeah, Nassim Taleb. That's a great book.

[18:17] Jerel Bonner: Yes, right.

[18:18] Paul: I love that.

[18:19] Jerel Bonner: It was a hard book to read. It's a hard book to read, but it was very good. And it was— and that I felt like, yes, he had written that book about me. And, you know, when he said, you know, you got to learn how to, you know, maneuver through the ups and downs of the employment market, I'm like, I can do that. And I actually— to show you how my mission statement changes after reading that book I changed the title of my mission statement to "Learning and Doing Makes Me Antifragile to Live Life with Courage." Yeah, I love that.

[18:51] Paul: Perhaps you can tell us, for people that haven't read it, what antifragile means, or I'm happy to jump in. I've read it and written about it a little.

[19:02] Jerel Bonner: Okay, so I'd like to hear your side of it because I know how I explain it and it's kind of tough.

[19:08] Paul: So, so I think the concept is pretty much fragility is some— everybody knows fragility, right? It's a glass vase and if you push it, it's going to shatter into a million pieces. But the concept of antifragile is basically saying by being robust to small kind of pains or ups and downs, you actually make the system stronger. So if you look at it at an individual's level, getting laid off several times but in a way that's not going to ruin your life, or dealing with 100 failures in a way that's not going to completely destroy your financial health, it's actually just going to make you stronger in the long term.

[19:54] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, very well said. So I would agree 100% with that. So, and that's what I am. I mean, And that applies to my dating life, when I'm in relationships, the way I deal with relationships, whether they're positive or negative, whether they're work people or social people. I just look at it like, okay, you either take me for who I am or you walk away from me. I'm okay with that.

And one of my favorite quotes that I saw on LinkedIn a couple of years ago was, when you are comfortable with who you are, not everybody's going to like you and you won't care. And that's where I live. That's the space I am. And just to kind of bring it back to, you know, the work part and the future work. For the last 5 years, I've been telling people I do what I like to do with people I like to be with for the compensation we mutually agree on. And if we mutually agree on the compensation, I don't complain that they don't pay me enough.

I just do the work because I agreed to it. Because it's got those 3 components. And there's times I've worked with people and, you know, I'll start to sense that things are not working right, and I'll go to them, I'll say, you know why this isn't working out? And they're like, why? I'm like, because, um, I don't think we, we didn't mutually agree on the compensation. Or, you know what, I don't like working with you because you keep jerking me around.

And I don't say it that directly, but that's what I sense. And I go, and, and one of my, um, uh I was going through a Vistage training program to be a Vistage chair and the guy that was training us, he made a statement that I really try to live on and it's really, really hard to do. The statement was, "You are what you tolerate." I try not to tolerate too much really serious stuff that breaks that aura of doing what I love to do with the people I like to do it for mutual compensation.

[21:48] Paul: I like that framework. It's definitely something I've enjoyed about being self-employed is that even if a project isn't great in the short term, it typically ends, and it helps me recalibrate of where to focus, uh, with the next project, or even just decide not to take a project for a while.

[22:07] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, exactly right. You know what you'll tolerate next, right? You know what you won't put up with. And again, back to that financial intelligence— because of my financial intelligence, I know that in any given day, I'm not going to blow through the success, the financial success I have at the level I have. And so I'm, I just, I'm just not going to go poor tomorrow. And, you know, I'll share with you this: I've, I've only had one or two jobs where I was paid over $50,000 a year.

And remember, if those jobs didn't last six— more than two years, that's not a whole lot of time. But the amount of wealth that I've accumulated— and by no means am I a millionaire But when I tell people what I got, they're like, "Wait a minute, but you don't make any money." I'm like, "Yeah, but I know how to invest." Wow.

[22:57] Paul: So I think that's going to be shocking for some people, especially some of the listeners in the corporate world. I mean, I talk to people, some of my friends in New York, and they're making like gobs of money and they can't even imagine taking a 20% pay cut. But what have been some of the ways you've designed your life to actually just decrease your spending?

[23:22] Jerel Bonner: Well, one, I'm very fortunate to have people that care about me, give me opportunities to live in places that help me manage my costs, especially since I came back from China after 14 years. So I really appreciate those people that are like, "You can live here until you get your business going." And I pay rent and I pay utilities. So that's one of the things. My favorite quote that I live by that came out in 1926 was that I found astonishing about Americans. It said, "People spend money they don't have to buy things they don't need to impress people they don't like." And I am not that person. I live under my budget.

I manage my costs. I watch everything I do. I optimize my investments. I have— I've learned how to create an investment strategy that matches my personality and my risk tolerance, and I take bets in the market that usually pay off big. So I had one company that I invested in, an American company I invested in while I was in China, 72% return on investment for 12 years. 72% every year.

[24:37] Paul: Have you made other choices to either choose to work independently such that you could actually work less and focus on other things in your life?

[24:47] Jerel Bonner: Well, so the move to China was all about living in China to experience, to live abroad. I mean, I always wanted to live abroad. I learned that I could teach English, so I got on a plane and started teaching English. It was like, okay, so now that I— and because I had good financial strategies, I was able to always have enough money in the bank account. Like, I could go— I literally went like a year and a half in China without making any money. And people like, how are you paying your bills?

I'm like, saved up, you know, the money I saved up from, from those big business, those big projects I had. And they're like, right, wait a minute. So you get it, right? You know, because you're in Taiwan, you know it's cheap to live there. So, you know, I just was like For the listeners, imagine having a $25,000 project that goes 8 weeks and having that money last 2 years. How many people really can do that, right?

[25:48] Paul: Talk to me about China. Where did you go? What were the first 6 months like? What were some of your experiences? Taiwan is probably not as strong culturally as China, but still pretty intense. What were some of the lessons from arriving there?

[26:08] Jerel Bonner: Okay, so when I arrived in China, I was first— I was teaching English for like one of these English language schools that, you know, had you working 25 hours a week. And I was okay with that because I was ready to get to work, and I was really excited about applying my ESL skills to the best level I could. Within 6 months of being on the ground in China, I got my first corporate consulting gig to Volvo. So I was hanging out, you know, Paul would understand this, and for the listeners, imagine you go every week to the expat bar where all the expats are hanging out, the Western music is playing, and you're meeting people, you're meeting businessmen, they're trying to let down their hair after a long week in China doing business. And I met this guy who had helped open up a Volvo plant in China who worked for Volvo.

And after, you know, 2 months of conversations, they hired me to coach the deputy general manager, and they hired me to do business English training to the, um, to the senior staff. And boom, I was making like extra cash. I was making extra money on the side of my English job, and that extra— and I was just banking that extra money, right? So that was the first 6 months, and I was learning Chinese. So I don't know about your Mandarin skills, but I can understand 80% of what I talk about in China. So, you know, and it was any weekend that I can get, take out a small trip, a small weekend trip to go around somewhere in the province that I was living in.

I went to Confucius's hometown. I climbed this mountain that's one of the 5 famous mountains in China. I went to Shanghai. So, you know, quickly I was out and about to see the country the first year I was there.

[27:53] Paul: And what kept you in China? I mean, 14 years is a long time.

[27:57] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, so, so I left during the dot-com bust, which I left in the summer of 2003, July 2003. And 5 years later, you know, so, so the English thing went well. I was making money, having fun. Fun. Then I got the corporate training job where I opened up a satellite office for a company out of Shanghai. And so that was really good because that's, that's what taught me how to deal with HR people and senior executives and how to market them and how to understand the, the people development space.

And I did that job for 2.5 years. So now it's 5 years, and all of a sudden 2003 plus 5 is 2008. And bam, you know, everything fell apart. So I was like, I guess I can't go home again. So I just rode it out. And again, because I had, I had money, it's like, okay, I have money, I can, you know, find ways to make, make money, and I don't need to go back home and be a 48-year-old guy trying to figure out how to get a job in the worst economic crisis of my lifetime.

So I just stayed, and next thing I know, when I opened up my own consulting company called Sharpening Axes, and I started doing more management consulting and to a couple of companies and I got one client. It was Celanese and they ended up using me as a consultant coach for 2.5 years out of 3. And they were paying me really good money which I was just putting into the bank.

[29:25] Paul: And this period in China was a pretty dramatic boom. You talked about them being entered into the World Trade Organization which I know really kicks started a lot of investment and growth there. But what were some of the shifts and changes you saw just from the companies you were working with or even just the growth of the cities?

[29:47] Jerel Bonner: So from a picture of the growth of the cities, you really saw the build-out of the metro systems. I mean, Shanghai's got 18 lines now. So you asked earlier, I lived in a city called Shandong Jinan. So Shandong is the province and Jinan was the city. So I lived there for 3 years. Then I went to Nanjing in Jiangsu Province.

I saw them build out 3 subway lines and then I went to Shanghai. So the last 4 years I was in Shanghai, you know, there was an article that I saw on LinkedIn where it said China builds 4 Manhattans a year. And I would go, yeah, that's about right. 'Cause you'd just be driving on the train and we saw the build-out of the high-speed rails, we saw the build-out of the airport system, we saw the people. I'll tell you something on the learning side, Toastmasters went crazy in China. It went from 100 people to 5,000 people from 2006 to 2014.

I mean, Toastmasters clubs were popping up all over the place because they were like, Free English teaching, practicing presentation skills, learning leadership skills. They were like— you want to talk about one thing that exploded in China? Toastmasters just went nuts because they were just like, this is too cheap and what I learn and the skills I develop. And I saw all these young Chinese kids with good English skills and enthusiasm and motivation just go I'm not doing that anymore. I could be a public speaker. I could be a public trainer.

I can be a great, um, translator because I have the skills to speak in front of audiences and I'm not afraid anymore. And they just like— they were just starting their own consulting practices left and right. And their parents were like, no, you can't do that, that's not stable. And they're like, I— yeah, I can do this and I'm getting a lot of recognition and I'm speaking in front of 300 people and winning contests. So that was a really, really big big boom.

[31:50] Paul: What has been the business culture like, especially for some of the big companies in China?

[31:56] Jerel Bonner: Their culture is pretty much, let's not get in trouble with the law, let's treat the people the way the law says we got to treat them, let's try to be fair, let's try to be reasonable, but let's make sure we make our money and we don't miss— well, now it's over, right? Because the golden days of China are gone, you know, the days of 12 and 14% growth are gone. If you want to believe the government numbers at 6.5%, 6%, it's okay. They're just happy to— can we make our profit? If we don't make the China boat, we're really going to have a problem. They treated the people nice.

The expat leaders would come in, try to make a little implant an imprint on the culture and then they would leave. I'll tell you a really funny story about how the Chinese see the expats. So I went and talked to this big French glass company and we were talking to the HR manager and we said, so how do you guys make the leadership decisions and how do you make strategy decisions on learning and development? And they said, well, we do what we want and we don't really, we're not concerned with the general manager. I said, why are you not concerned? And they say, well, they filter in every 3 years.

So the first 6 to 8 months the new general manager comes in, they're trying to get their feet on the ground, they're trying to figure out the traffic, they're trying to figure out the food, they're trying to make the trailing spouse happy, they're trying to get the kids into school. So the first 6 months is all about getting stable, learning the work environment. Then they have like a 2-year window or an 18-month window to make their impression on the plant, to hit some numbers, develop some policies and practices that make the factory look better, that give it a bump and a kick so that that general manager can say, look what I did in China. Because the last 6 months, there's, how am I getting out of here? What's my next job coming home?

[33:55] Paul: Right?

[33:56] Jerel Bonner: So the Chinese are like, this is just the 3— this person is just here for 3 years.

[34:00] Paul: So they were okay with it.

[34:02] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, they were like, we'll run the business and we'll just, we know what to give them so they look good and so that they don't really give us a hard time.

[34:10] Paul: When did you start thinking about maybe I'll come back to the US? Because I know you've recently come back, but when did you start thinking about, okay, maybe the time in China is time to shift somewhere else again?

[34:22] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, so, so it was in 2015, I was offered a job with LinkedIn China. And just a long story short, I was doing LinkedIn training, LinkedIn selling, LinkedIn recruiting strategies to senior executives and HR teams. I was doing workshops. I met the senior executive of China, LinkedIn China, the number 2 guy, and within 2 months he offered me a job and he created a job for me. And I said to people, this is it. It's a 3-year contract.

When I finish this 3-year contract, I'm going home because it'll be 17 years. Well, because Beijing— ready to talk about the craziness— Beijing turned around and said, this guy can't work in Beijing because he doesn't have a bachelor's degree. And LinkedIn turned around and said, wait a minute, he's been here 13 years. And they said, we don't care what he does in Nanjing. He's not going to work in Beijing. We don't care what the Nanjing government has said.

We don't care that he's got a business in that and he's been here 13 years and speaks Chinese. He can't work in Beijing because he doesn't have a bachelor's.

[35:33] Paul: And was that a result of them just trying to find a reason to deny you the job and give it to somebody else that might be local, or—

[35:42] Jerel Bonner: I have no idea, but right, I would It took 10 months to get on that job. Then I got in and the dynamics of the office, of course, changed. Now it was a bigger team and there were new different players on board. When I went to the team and said, "Hey, I'm here to help you sell," they were like, "We don't need you. You don't speak Chinese good enough." I looked at my boss and I'm like, "What's the onboarding strategy?" He was worried about his quarterly numbers, so he didn't really care about me. And 7 months later, I was let go because they were like, "You're not performing." I'm like, "Well, yeah, nobody wants to talk to me." Right?

And so after that job, after I left LinkedIn, I said, "That's it." I said to people, I said, "I'm leaving after LinkedIn." I didn't realize the 3-year contract had lasted 7 months. I said, "I'm out of here." And I just packed it up and left.

[36:36] Paul: I mean, a lot's changed in those 14 years. What, what were some of your reflections on your time in China?

[36:42] Jerel Bonner: So basically, you know, the first thing I'm looking at is I'm an expat, um, that has no college, that has no 4-year degree, and is now 60 years old. And I know nobody's going to hire me, and I refuse— okay, so for your listeners, I refuse to use the application tracking system and reply to 600, 1,000 jobs for me to pop out somewhere to some company that's finally gonna go, maybe this guy is gonna get it. You know, 'cause my resume and what I can do and what I learned, you know, people are just not going to like go, hmm, this, you know, that AI system is not gonna kick out a 60-year-old guy with no bachelor's degree. So I don't waste my time. Right? So I came back and I said, I got to find people that want to start a company that can leverage my skill set.

And I met a bunch of people and we started talking. And after 4 months of talking, one person, his name is Ted Benson, who's my managing partner, he and I created Corral and Chaos. And, you know, we put together the marketing plan and we put together the mission statement and we said, this is what we're going to offer the market. And it was my insights that have helped him and me, and my insights about how to take a company public— not public, but how to take a company to market, how to set up a mission statement, how to create the marketing material, how to create the branding, how to create the image. All that stuff has really helped us because he's— because at the end of the day, I'm always sharing with Ted, my partner, hey, we got to write papers. We got to do videos, we got to get on podcasts, and I'm showing him that this is the one podcast I'm doing today of two.

Okay, so this afternoon I'm doing another podcast for a local company. So we're constantly out there networking, we're constantly out there talking to clients about our vision and what we want to do and why it's important that they keep employees longer than 2 years or 3 years. We're out there. So having been down that road and having done it in China, I'm very comfortable at doing it in the United States because I know what it takes. I know how to differentiate our company and our brand. Nobody tells us our company name is too weird to understand.

Everybody loves our company name. Everybody loves our logo. So we're already off to a good start with a good name and a good logo. So So that's how the reflection has been.

[39:16] Paul: What kind of companies are you looking to work with in the US?

[39:20] Jerel Bonner: Yeah, so our bottom measurable target on the bullseye is they have to be about 30 to 40 people minimum in staff headcount. They don't have an HR team. They have about $8 million on the books. Or revenue, they have an enlightened leader, or they have some pain that they need to get rid of and they want to keep their people longer than 3 years. So, you know, it could be— and Ted's got a very high pedigree of working in great biotech. He's got 25 years of biotech experience, so he— and this is a biotech-rich environment, so we're really We're in that space as well.

And so we're trying to help companies understand that, okay, you got a good product, you got a good— you're making— you're getting funding, whether it's seed funding or raising capital through VCs, and you want to keep the people you've got and you want to keep them longer. How can we help you develop? Like, we want to say to them, it's not— if you want to have a great culture and you want to have a strong employer value proposition to to attract people that want to work for your purpose? That's really important. If you don't get people to align with purpose, forget it. You talk about that in some of your other podcasts.

How do you get— how do you promote your purpose to the market to attract people that want to stay with you 5, 6 years, 7 years? How do you get them to grow and how do you get them to deliver exceptional results? So that's what we're about.

[40:57] Paul: I think sometimes that can be a hard screen, right? I think I try to do the same and I actually find it hard to find tons of leaders that in action at least are putting their people in their number 1 or 2 priorities. Are you finding more companies that are excited about this recently?

[41:17] Jerel Bonner: Absolutely not. No.

[41:18] Paul: I was hoping you'd say something else because I mean, I read Reinventing Organizations. I think it's an amazing book by Frederic Laloux. And he talks about people in these new models and the things that are working. And his big caveat at the end is you need an evolutionary leader, somebody that really wants to think about things in a different context. And he's like, without this, I'm not sure if you can actually make any of these changes. And I was like, man, that's pretty brutal.

[41:51] Jerel Bonner: And they're not out there because they're trying to make payroll. They're trying to, you know, their investors to stay ahead of the game. They're trying to keep the government off their— they're trying to keep FDA regulations from blowing up in their face. You know, they're trying not to kill people during clinical trials. You know, they're trying to make their numbers, and to sit back and go, "We should be thinking about our people," is— I mean, they— it all comes down to what you said earlier. They have the talk, they don't have the walk.

We were talking to a potential client. This guy really likes us. And we said to him, which— who on your management team above you is going to carry the torch and, and model this behavior? And he looked at us and said, nobody. He goes, they don't have the bandwidth to put this on their radar.

[42:40] Paul: Where do you want to send people if they want to learn more about Corral and Chaos or to connect with you?

[42:46] Jerel Bonner: So they can look for me on LinkedIn, Gerald Bonner, and they'll, they'll see some Chinese characters on there. So, uh, and it says Gerald Bonner, knowledge— a knowledge broker, because I come up with knowledge and most people are like, how do you know all this stuff? You know, we're just like, well, we just know it, you know. Um, and, um, so, um, yeah, so we, um, we, uh, have that, um, stuff.

Uh, they can look up corrallingchaos.com, and when they go to corrallingchaos.com, the page they want to go to for individuals that, for your audience, they want to go to Master Learning Agility, because that's where we have our white papers, that's where we have our books that we've read, and so it takes you to my Goodreads page, it takes you to my business partner's list of his books that he's been reading, and with your approval, Paul, I'd love to put a link on our most favorite websites to your podcast because I think freelancers definitely need to be listening to what you guys have been sharing. Your 10 Myths About Work was an awesome podcast. Your podcast with Stephen was really wonderful and I'd like to send people there from the Mastering Learning Agility so they can stay ahead. I'd really like to make that offer to you.

[44:07] Paul: It was a pleasure talking with you today, Gerald.

[44:10] Jerel Bonner: Thank you for having me. It's always fun to help people realize that they're in control of their lives. And if they don't define it, then what they have not defined is what they will get.