Josh learned EOS® at Magnet 360, a rare company already clear on its values
An acquisition folded it into a 20,000-person company and the work stopped being fun
A call to Justin Cox led him to EOS® Implementing and boot camp in May 2017
Eight or nine Magnetics became Implementers; nine of Josh's own clients did too
You can't manufacture that ripple, you just do the work and become who they might follow
Every year at the annuals, we try to get the photo.
It doesn't always come together, because we're spread across the room and the days move fast. But when it does, it's the best few minutes of the week: eight or nine of us, all EOS® Implementers now, all from the same company.
Magnet 360.
We look around at each other and it still feels a little insane. One company sent this many of us into this work.
I didn't set out to build that, nobody did. It just happened, one person at a time, and tracing it back is the best way I know to explain what this work actually does.
A special company
I learned EOS® at Magnet 360, around 2013.
I can't take credit for the culture there. I came in through an acquisition, and by the time I arrived the place was already running on EOS®, with Peyton as the Integrator. So I got to watch something rare from the inside: a company that had its values sorted out and actually used them to hire, fire, review, reward, and recognize.
We called ourselves the Magnetics. Our founder loved music, so the whole company leaned into a rock and roll theme, right down to the nicknames and the conference room names.
It sounds like a gimmick when I describe it, but it wasn't. It was the visible edge of something real underneath, which was a group of people who were clear on where we were going and why. I felt that clarity every day, I just didn't have a name for it yet.
When it got quiet
Then we got bought, and I found out what that clarity was worth by losing it.
Justin Cox left first, we sold the company about a year after that. I stuck around for another year to see what would happen, and what happened was quiet and total: we became part of a twenty thousand person company, and the work stopped being fun for me.
So I called Justin. He had found this thing, EOS® Implementing, and he talked about it the way you talk about something you can't quite believe you get to do. It sounded fun, and rewarding. After the year I'd just had, both of those words carried real weight, so I jumped in and went to boot camp in May of 2017.
Here's the part I didn't see coming: Justin wasn't the only one. Over the next nine years, I watched person after person from Magnet 360 make the same jump, some from the leadership team, some a level down. Eight or nine of us, from one company, are Implementers today. Peyton alone is responsible for most of that pull.
We didn't plan a pipeline, we just each found our way to the same work, because we'd all felt the same thing and wanted to go give it to other people.
The ripple keeps going
And it didn't stop at Magnet 360.
Next May will be my tenth year. In that decade, nine clients or people I've mentored have become Implementers themselves. Entrepreneurs I sat across from, who ran their businesses on the tools, who then decided they wanted to go do this for other people.
There's a phrase I reach for and can never source correctly: “leaders creating leaders creating leaders”. When someone tells me they want to become an Implementer because of the work we did together, that is the highest compliment I get. It means the impact didn't stop at their business: it reached their employees, and their families, and their vendors, and their customers, and then it turned around and found its way back to me.
