Name: Garrett Smith

Title: Chief Technology Officer

Organisation: Concentric Industries

With my unprecedented fleet of stewardshipTECH that includes 22 patented techniques offered in an EFCOM (Engineer+Finance+Construct+Operate+Maintain) business construct, I and my renascent company, Concentric Industries. “Represent the Future of Energy, Food, Air & Water for the Whole World.”™️

Thank you to the 2,000 leaders who’ve generously done the 7 Questions on Leadership!

We’ve gone through the interviews and asked the best of the best to come back and answer 7 MORE Questions on Leadership.

I hope Garrett's answers will encourage you in your leadership journey. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Jonno White

1. As a leader, how do you build trust with employees, customers and other stakeholders?

Establish a formidable and worthy Purpose, a “WHY” as Simon Sinek eloquently advocates, and demonstrate staying power in fidelity to it. “How” and “What” to do will emerge and be refined, but it’s a Cause for the Greater Good that moves people. At Concentric Industries, we remain focused on using our unique tools to annihilate the world’s gravest and borderless challenges: hunger & dehydration, pollution & poverty. When I stand up to cynics by loving them enough to bless them in spite of their doubt, that shows commitment to a Higher Calling. That’s the kind of Leadership I follow.

2. What do 'VISION' and 'MISSION' mean to you? And what does it actually look like to use them in real-world business?

VISION is having the courage “2S.E.E.”™️ to see the Bigger Picture. At Concentric, I ask every day, “Is what we stand for opening or closing doors for people to experience totalPROSPERITY™️ in all of its Essential Facets: Economical + Ecological + Social + Spiritual.”

MISSION is having the moxie to keep all your sights on the Vision, the Cause. For me, it means having the willpower to fight through barriers like ignorance (bad science), fear (lies), and prejudice (clinging to failure) with Enlightenment (Natural Resource Stewardship), Hope (Truth), and CommonWealth (the All Gain Sum™️).

We “get” to do this because we put in the work to discover the right answers to the right questions.

3. How can a leader empower the people they're leading?

By championing their strengths and letting their weaknesses go.

In my first basketball coaching experience, one player was a very poor shooter despite being a good athlete.

In an early season practice the rest of the team was making sport of his bricks. I challenged the boys, “We are only as strong as our weakest link. Encouragement is this team’s ONLY language!”

I later took the one boy aside and told him that he was one of the league’s top defenders and that I was counting on him.

Remembering how he actually scored the go-ahead basket that sealed our undefeated season and League Championship is a memory I will hold with me forever.

4. Who are some of the coaches or mentors in your life who have had a positive influence on your leadership? Can you please tell a meaningful story about one of them?

An Australian woman that I respect a great deal recently entered my life by way of a simple but powerful axiom that instantly resonated: “Sit at the Warriors’ Table. The Conversation is Different.”

When I talked to her about it, it was as if a lifetime of apologetics went out the window. Of course, my worldview fixed on radical solutions to widespread problems requires different ways of thinking AND doing!

I’ve always been a sort of iconoclast and naturally take a unique approach to challenges that enables me to identify previously unseen resolutions.

But in that relationship, I have been inspired to even lift the ideal higher still and celebrate being on the battlefield for Great Good. The heartbreaks and the overcomings, they mean I’m Alive.

5. Leadership is often more about what you DON'T do. How do you maintain focus in your role?

Every new day, I have a working list of the top 3 things I want to accomplish or meet a milestone on. I keep that list at the forefront of my mind by filtering everything I do through those 2-4 prime targets. Of course, leaders must be flexible, but that daily aim alignment increases my opportunity to accomplish what matters most.

6. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Everyone plans differently. How do you plan for the week, month and years ahead in your role?

Concentric is a giant global vision. In planning its rebirth from sabotage, I decided to Go Bigger, not smaller.

Everyone knows that Energy, Food, Air and Water are ubiquitous. Yet there is a real void on earth for a single entity to take stewardship on a global level as their industrial initiative.

As I assessed my unprecedented fleet of polymathic patents, it became vividly clear to me that Concentric’s call is to fill that vacuum.

And that’s exactly what our dynamic growth feels like more and more every new day, like we’re getting drawn into an inevitable vortex simply because we “showed up”.

Of course, there’s much to be done, and so it’s “all hands on deck”. And that’s part of the joy: we “get” to do this.

The repeatability and duplicatability of my scientific processes is a testimony to their elegance. But as in completing an IRONMAN®️ TriAthlon, Efficiency is Essential to why the Concentric paradigm is the best of its kind in human history.

In the same way, we opted to put this unrivaled toolkit into the Blockchain slipstream because of its unprecedented Efficiency in monetary capitalization. Balance-Sheet lenders fixated on single-project risk analytics are completely missing the point of the exponential capabilities of raising Big Money once and done.

People who fabricate fear and loathing over having a globally connected network of carbon-copy plants and field offices are barking up the wrong tree. That Continental diversification is the scalable Elegance of the entire Plan.

For Concentric, as it has been restructured, to scale into the trillions is actually even less complicated than having thirty thousand similar McDonald’s across the world. Because people ALREADY use Energy, Food, Air, and Water every day, what do you think the odds are that they’ll choose Concentric when we make those things faster, cleaner, better, and cheaper than anyone ever has?

7. What advice would you give to a young leader who is struggling to delegate effectively?

This sounds counterintuitive, but remember the Warriors’ Table?

Despite natural human tendency, delegate what you’re good at. Because those things you can oversee at a glance from a distance and see if they’re being done properly.

It’s the stuff you don’t know that can burn you if you unwittingly defer it to another person who might be reinventing the wheel, too.

I know thermodynamics like the back of my hand. I do energy and mass balances in my head anymore. And I love optimizing the efficiency. Big Deal! I can write computer programs to do the calculations, and I can peg a craftsman in the first 20 seconds of a conversation.

But bankers and financiers and all of the accounting hyjinx? Whoa?!?! I lived through the ENRON fraud and now all the ex-GE Capital spinsters who wrecked a great thing act oblivious to the fiscal treachery that reveals depths of venality, apathy and ineptitude that John Perkins never imagined.

That’s why I studied what Parag Khanna said about geopolitical economics in order to define my playing field.

That’s why I chose to read Vitalik Buterin’s PROOF OF STAKE in order to find out what ETHEREUM is really all about.

See, saying “Oh, I’m not good at that” is a saying that cannot be found in any good book. Winners research and learn. They “get good” at what their Vision says they need to get out in front of.

Practice that and you will have vistas that aren’t breathtaking, they’re Breath-Giving. Oh, and the conversation is different, too.