������ý

Chapter 1: Why You Should Start Before You Feel Ready Dr. Kevin Gazzara (0:00) Just do it. You want to certainly do a degree of planning. What I find is people wait too long, and then once they get started, they go, “I should have done something different,” and “I should have known that two years ago.” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (0:14) What I would have known, if I did what we used to call Intel rapid prototyping, is you get an idea, you get it 80% baked, you do not worry about that additional 20% that is going to take you another couple of years to advance upon. And you just do it. Chapter 2: Meet Dr. Kevin Gazzara: Leadership, Teaching, and Impact Host (0:41) Hello and welcome to the Degrees of Success podcast. I am your host, Keith Chandler. Host (0:50) Today I am thrilled to introduce Dr. Kevin Gazzara, a ������ý alumnus and 2025 Luminary recognized in the category of entrepreneurship. We will talk more about that later. Kevin’s career spans more than 30 years in organizational development, leadership, and teaching. Host (1:03) And after nearly two decades at Intel, he co-founded Magna Leadership Solutions, a firm dedicated to helping organizations build strong leadership cultures through practical, action-based learning. He is also an educator, author, and a passionate advocate for developing future leaders. Host (1:18) Kevin, it is great to have you here on Degrees of Success. Welcome. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (1:23) Thanks so much for sharing me with the alumni. It is exciting for me to get this opportunity. Host (1:28) Why engineering? Why did you pursue that particular path? Why did you think it was right for you? Chapter 3: How Early Curiosity Led to an Engineering Career Dr. Kevin Gazzara (1:33) It comes from my childhood. As a kid, I was always taking stuff apart. In fact, my dad used to kid with me. My dad was in World War II. He was an aircraft mechanic. He worked on cars. He liked to build stuff, and I kind of saw that. It was really attractive to me. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (1:53) I liked to take stuff apart, and my parents were incredibly good about it. Whether I was taking radios or televisions or washing machines or bicycles apart and putting them back together, there were always extra pieces left over. And they always encouraged me to continue to do that. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (2:16) I was always inquisitive. I was always reasonably good with my hands. I really liked to get my hands greasy and dirty. That was fun for me. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (2:21) Fortunately, one of my neighbors, who was my dad’s best friend, was an engineer. He saw some talent in me and said, “You would do well because of how you think and how you look at things, and your inquisitive nature.” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (2:45) I was just about good enough in math and science to squeak through engineering school. It was not that I wanted to sit down and do equations all the time, but it was important for me to understand why and how the things I was doing came about. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (3:08) That is what led me to engineering. And although I thought I may not be smart enough to graduate from engineering school, my dad’s philosophy was always to do something a little bit harder than you think you are capable of doing. If you are successful, that is fantastic. If you are not, then you truly know your limitations. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (3:31) So I squeaked by my undergraduate work and then went on to do my master’s and doctoral work. Host (3:41) With that in mind, and also your passion for teaching, you have served as faculty across many institutions around the country, including ������ý. What is your motivation to keep teaching and keep being a faculty member? Is it also wanting to continue learning? Do you learn through the process of teaching as well? What keeps you in the classroom? Chapter 4: The Real Reason Teaching Creates Long-Term Impact Dr. Kevin Gazzara (4:05) I love to try to make a difference for individuals, to get that light to go on. I was fortunate enough when I was at Intel that one of my staff members, who was teaching at the ������ý in the early 1990s, kept bugging me. I was a product manager, running a team at Intel doing the design of video chips, and she kept saying I really needed to come teach because it was something she enjoyed so much. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (4:44) I had a young family. We had just moved from the Philadelphia area to Arizona, to Chandler, because Intel transferred us, so life was pretty busy. But at some point there was a little bit of a break, and I said, “Okay, I will go and apply and see if they take me.” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (5:00) ������ý said they could use my background and expertise, and I started teaching. I found out that I really loved doing it. I was teaching management and leadership programs at Intel at the time, so I had some practice being on stage. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (5:25) I found it very rewarding. I was not doing it for financial gain. I was really doing it because I could see the difference. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (5:33) I will share a really interesting story from the last two weeks. One of my students from an MBA class at ������ý called me out of the blue. I had not talked to him in over 20 years. He follows me on LinkedIn and said, “Dr. Gazzara, I wanted to call you. I just took a senior management position. I have been using a lot of the tools you taught me in our MBA class many years ago, and I think they would be beneficial here. Would you be willing to come and help us as well?” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (6:14) I said, “Of course, I would like to do that.” Once again, I am trying to leave a legacy, and through teaching, that is a good way to do it. Host (6:25) That is wonderful. You mentioned some of your work at Intel and your tenure there. What are some of the highlights you take away from your experience in the corporate world, and how and why did you make that transition into starting your own business? Chapter 5: Leaving Intel: The Risk and Reality of Starting a Business Dr. Kevin Gazzara (6:42) I started with Intel in 1989. I was there for 18 years and left in 2007. I had lots of different positions. I came in as a customer marketing engineer, then transitioned to being a product manager. Then I was an operations manager, and then I was a general manager for a small division. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (7:05) Something interesting happened. Intel has something they call a sabbatical, so every seven years you got two months off, completely disconnected electronically—phones, laptops, everything—and you went off to rejuvenate yourself. You also did a lot of traveling and things you were not able to do when you were working full-time. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (7:30) When you come back, that is usually a good time to do something different. I had always been on the technical side, managing chip design, marketing, product marketing, and customer marketing. But when you are at Intel and reach a certain level, there was an expectation that you taught their internal classes, 40 hours for the year. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (7:56) I was teaching their management leadership programs as well. The gentleman who was running Intel University for the world said, “Hey, our guy from Arizona just moved up to Oregon. I need somebody to manage Intel University for Arizona. Would you be interested?” He said, “Would you be interested to come over from engineering to HR, come over to the dark side?” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (8:19) I said, “Yeah, that would be interesting.” So I started managing Intel University for Arizona and then ultimately for the U.S. That led me into managing their management leadership development programs for the world. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (8:43) We used to have what we called MTP, Managing Through People, a first-line five-day off-site training. We used to do 2,500 managers a year in 10 different countries. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (8:58) When I left Intel in 2007, from that program alone we had just finished training our 40,000th manager. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (9:06) To go back to your original question, what led me to make that transition from the corporate world into entrepreneurship and starting my own company is that I had a 10-year plan. I wanted to retire at 50. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (9:21) I call it retirement. My wife will not call it retirement, but I wanted to go do my next phase of life. I had a great mentor and a great coach at Intel. We worked together and stayed in touch regularly, probably every other month or so, and I had a great financial advisor. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (9:45) I had a really good support system, and we had a plan for getting my finances, education, training, and experience all in line so I could go at 50 and give back. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (10:01) I was very fortunate, but I recognized that a lot of my friends were working with organizations that did not have $10 million budgets for management leadership. I thought, if I can take some of the knowledge I have gained and really help small to medium-sized organizations, that would be my contribution. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (10:18) In 2007, my financial advisor called and said, “Anytime you want to punch out, you can go do that and not really have to worry about anything financially. And if you are successful, that will be a bonus. And if you are not, at least you will be making a difference.” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (10:38) I took two of my colleagues with me, and in June of 2007 the three of us said, “We are done.” We handed in our resignation letters on Friday, and then Monday we had a company. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (10:52) It is a little scary. You have to believe in yourself and your ideas. You have to have what we call a sustainable competitive advantage, something you are giving that is different than everybody else. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (11:00) Fortunately, what we had was that we were nerd engineers who were able to talk human speak from a leadership perspective, but also sit down and talk the bits and bites with engineers. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (11:31) For many organizations, there are lots of great leadership and management organizations out there, but there are not a lot of people who can say, “I used to manage the relationship.” Having that ability to sit down with someone you are trying to develop as a better leader is incredibly valuable. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (12:04) You can become a great professor or a great teacher, but if you do not have those years of experience to pull from, it is very difficult to place yourself in their shoes. Host (12:07) Can you describe your approaches and your techniques, and what you do to work with organizations to help them be more efficient, and why you enjoy doing that work? Chapter 6: Flow State Explained: How to Unlock Focus and Creativity Dr. Kevin Gazzara (12:15) Let me start with a life-changing event for everyone: in 1996, the same year I started teaching at ������ý, one of my good friends at Intel gave me a book called Flow by Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. If anyone has not read Flow, it is a must-read. It is in my top five books of all time. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (12:47) In a very short version, flow was renamed in the 90s as being in the zone. People understand that better than “Are you in flow?” They understand being in the zone. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (13:02) What Dr. Csikszentmihalyi found was that when you have the correct balance between challenge and skill, you can get in the zone. There are eight different factors that contribute to it. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (13:19) The biggest one to recognize whether you are in flow or not is if your sense of time is severely distorted. You look up at the clock and it is midnight, and you swear it is 9:00. That is what flow feels like. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (13:33) The interesting thing about flow is that it is not necessarily the place that guarantees productivity. It is the place where creativity happens. It is where you become so involved in what you are working on that everything else is blocked out. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (13:57) Once I learned that, I looked at my work and the things I was doing, and as I was taking on or considering new projects, I always plotted them. Where is this with regard to challenge and skill? Dr. Kevin Gazzara (14:05) If your skill is super high and the challenge is low, like “I have done this a million times,” that generally leads you into boredom. If the challenge is way too high and you have no skill or very low skill, that leads you into anxiety. A little anxiety is okay. Massive anxiety basically makes you shut down. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (14:35) Once I learned that and started using that with my staff, I really bought into it. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (14:49) Up to the point where in 1998 or 1999, I really wanted to do additional research on this, and that is when I decided to go into the doctoral program at the ������ý. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (15:11) I was very fortunate. I was in the first group of people to go through the doctoral program. There were 10 of us. Nine graduated. The 10th person was still doing his research. He was such a perfectionist that he kept redoing his dissertation. I think he went through three dissertations and finally said enough. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (15:44) He ultimately just said, “I am not going to do a fourth one.” The surprising thing is that he was by far the smartest guy in the class. We are still great friends today, and the cohort stayed very close. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (16:00) He used to teach speed reading. He could get a book in the morning and by noon have it read and memorized. He had a photographic memory. He was an incredible guy, but at the same time he was a perfectionist. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (16:26) What I would say is that flow led me into this position where I wanted to do more work. I did my dissertation on the relationship of task types and task balance on motivation, engagement, and flow. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (16:49) I wanted to see if my technique could create that one element that would create flow. I went to my chair and said, “Here is what I would like to do, and I want to do a quantitative model. Would you approve it?” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (17:15) He said if I was going to do a quantitative model, I would need to find an assessment that measured this. I searched and there was no assessment. He said I would have to develop my own assessment, and that would take too long. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (17:31) He said I had to decide whether I wanted to graduate or do my dissertation. I could pick one, but I could not have both. I said I did not want to pick a different topic. I really wanted to do this because I had a passion for it. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (17:47) I wrote to a very prestigious professor and said, “Here is my proposal. I want to try to extend the work you have done. Would you be an advisor for me to help develop an assessment for this?” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (18:02) I did not hear back for a couple of weeks, and I thought I was going to have to pick a different topic. Then I got a surprising email and he said, “This is really interesting. Yes, I will work with you to do that.” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (18:17) He and I developed an assessment tool that ultimately became known as the Task Quotient, or TQ. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (18:22) They have been distributing it for 20 years now. We validated it. From the time we started to the time I finished, we did everything in six months, and I graduated right on time just to prove to my chair that it was possible to do something he thought was impossible. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (18:50) It was truly a gift to work with someone who helped expand on the research of someone I admired so much. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (18:54) I had sent a note to my chair at the time and said, “Well, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi is going to work with me.” He said, “How do you know that?” I said, “I have an email.” He said, “Send me the email,” because he just did not quite believe it. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (19:17) Once I sent him the email, I said, “Well, if he can, he is going to work with you.” And then I could do it. That is my message to everyone: you never know. All someone can say is no. If you present it in the proper way, you may get the answer you are hoping for. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (19:42) It was not that I just wanted help from him. I really wanted to expand the work he had done, and he had never seen this approach before. He was good enough to give me his time. Host (19:47) Breaking the actual task down into what people enjoy—what was your reasoning for wanting to do that, and how has that succeeded in helping organizations be more successful at creating a more comprehensive work environment where employees want to stay and engage? Chapter 7: The Task Quotient: Why Job Fit Drives Motivation and Retention Dr. Kevin Gazzara (20:08) First of all, thanks for being a podcaster that did the homework. It is rare that I get a podcaster who has done the research, so I applaud you for that and thank you for that. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (20:20) It was really an extension of my doctoral work at ������ý, where I created this assessment tool. What we recognized was that there are three types of tasks that everyone does. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (20:35) There are routine tasks, which are highly predictable and have to be done in the moment. Email is a good example of routine tasks. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (20:43) There are troubleshooting tasks, or problem-solving tasks, that are unpredictable and still have to be done in the moment. A computer not working, or something not syncing, for example. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (21:00) And then there is project work, which is highly predictable but does not have to be done in the moment. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (21:09) So you have routine, troubleshooting, and project work. My hypothesis was that each one of us has one of 496 different mixtures of task preferences. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (21:27) If I can find your ideal task mixture and place you in that, I can raise your level of job satisfaction and motivation. Another doctoral student expanded it into empowerment. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (21:57) As we applied it to the call center, we found that there are different levels. Level one is mostly routine tasks. It is all scripted. The computer is not working. Is the on button pushed? Is the mouse plugged in? Those kinds of things over and over again. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (22:27) Level two is more troubleshooting, where the scripting is not working and you have to come up with something new. Level three is more project-based, looking at bigger systems and bigger picture problems. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (22:41) What they were doing was hiring people for first line and then hoping they would gradually earn their way into level two and three. The problem is that very few people have more than about a 56% tolerance for routine work. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (23:04) When I place you in a situation where you are doing 100% routine work and no troubleshooting or project work, you become disillusioned. That is why you get massive turnover. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (23:19) They also were not using any assessment. They were putting people into roles where they had, for example, a 7% tolerance for routine work and then making them do 100% routine work all day. You can imagine how motivating or demotivating that is. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (23:35) So we said, once you get the employee with the skill set, give them the Task Quotient assessment and figure out which group they should be in. Maybe you cannot give them 50% routine and 50% troubleshooting or project work, but you can give them a little of each. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (24:20) Let’s bring the three levels together. Let’s give a little project work, whether it is teaming or giving it to the first-line person while troubleshooting. When they are moving to the next level, maybe they stay on the line and work through it together. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (24:52) That way, instead of having 100% of that eight-hour day or ten-hour day be routine, maybe it is 80% or 70%. Let’s see how that handles turnover. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (25:01) And guess what? The turnover at that point in time was about 32%. By doing this within 90 days, it dropped to about 15%. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (25:17) We could not get rid of all of it, but we cut it in half. They were hiring dozens of people at a time. It was a big call center, about 400 people. If you want to see where you are wasting a lot of money, it is with rehire and retrain, because you never get that person up to speed. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (25:39) That is how we have used it, and it has worked really well. It is pretty easy to do. Host (25:43) What do you do whenever you need to get into your personal flow? Chapter 8: How to Enter Flow: Time Blocking, Mindfulness, and Daily Habits Dr. Kevin Gazzara (25:54) The thing we found is that you really need that mixture of tasks. So I do time blocking. I know I can do about 30 minutes of routine work, about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes of problem solving, and about two hours of project work. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (26:18) What I used to do in college was lock myself in the dorm room for Friday and just write the paper or do the analysis or build the project and do project work for eight hours. That did not work. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (26:42) After about two hours, you want to get up and walk around, get something to drink or eat, or talk to somebody. That tells you that you have to do a different task type. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (26:56) Our tendency is to run from project to project to project, but not to change task types. So at the end of the day you still feel like it was a push. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (27:14) To get into flow, figure out what your task mixture is. Anyone can contact me and I will tell them how to do that. I will be glad to share that with the alumni. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (27:28) Once you know that, block your calendar. I like to put breaks in between the time blocks. I will go for a quick walk, exercise, listen to music, or sit down at the drums and bang away just so I can get that creative piece out and refresh my brain. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (27:53) For the last four and a half years, I have been certified to teach positive intelligence, which is an extension of emotional intelligence. As part of that, one of the foundations is doing mindfulness activities. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (28:09) Meditation or mindfulness is really taking a break. The break can be as short as 30 seconds. It does not have to be long. You can take breaths or do some tactile work. You are essentially flushing out all that mind chatter. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (28:29) There are lots and lots of ways to do it. It can be done with sound, with music, in silence, or through breathing. Having those very short touchpoints throughout the day to allow yourself to refresh is so important. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (28:46) The very first thing I do in the morning is usually go out for a walk. I put on what they call PQ rep, which is a mindfulness activity. It is really to clear your brain and not think about all the things you should be doing. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (29:09) What I found over the years is that is where my best ideas come from. Once all that noise is flushed out, usually even before the 12 minutes is done, it is like, “Oh, that is how you solve that problem.” Dr. Kevin Gazzara (29:32) I would love to say I am in flow all the time, but that is not the case. I recognize when I am not, and then I know I need to do something different. Host (29:42) That is great advice. Dr. Kevin Gazzara, faculty, teacher, mentor, business owner, entrepreneur, thank you so much for joining Degrees of Success podcast today. Great time talking with you. Dr. Kevin Gazzara (29:53) All right, Pete, thank you so much for sharing me. Chapter 9: Final Advice on Growth, Leadership, and Taking Action Host (29:55) Excellent. That brings us to the end of this episode of Degrees of Success. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and comment. Thank you for joining us, and we will see you next time.