For nearly four decades, Dr. Bernard has consulted with over 150 other leading companies spanning six continents. He has been involved in more than 300 product launches involving more than 60 countries. Over 15,000 professionals have participated in his firm’s Competitive Simulations (“business war games”), Transcender System Training Workshops, Transcender System Seminars, and speaking engagements. As a Senior Fellow at Wharton School, Dr. Bernard taught marketing to MBA students for 14 years.
- CEO Story: Stan finished his medical degree with MBA in healthcare management. But Dr. Stan preferred strategy over surgery. For over 20 years he built his firm with a mission to help clients to win.
- Business Service: Offers the transcender system that enables companies and professionals to play a game only they can win.
- Secret Sauce: The only firm in the world that offers the transcender system.
- CEO Hack: Winning mindset. Create the agenda, communicate the agenda, and the champion agenda – the execution.
- CEO Nugget: Book; Brands don’t win – a user’s manual to building your winning go-to-market strategy.
- CEO Defined: Helping clients win. Winning is optimizing your performance.
Website: brandsdontwin.com
LinkedIn: stanbernardmdmba
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Transcription
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00:13 – Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:40 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Stan Bernard of Bernard Associates, LLC. Dr. Stan, it's great to have you on the show.
00:49 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Thanks, Gresh. I appreciate it. A pleasure to be here.
00:51 – Gresham Harkless
Yes, the pleasure is ours. You're doing so many awesome things. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Stan. So Dr. Stan is an MBA and a doctor and is an internationally recognized award-winning global competition consultant, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. He is the president of Bernard Associates LLC and the creator of the Transcender system. And for nearly 4 decades, Dr. Stan has consulted with over 150 other leading companies spanning 6 continents.
He's been involved in more than 300 product launches involving more than 60 countries. Over 15, 000 professionals have participated in his firm's competition simulations slash business war games, and Transcender Systems Training Workshops, Transcender Systems Seminars, and Speaking Engagements. As a senior fellow at Wharton School, Dr. Bernard taught marketing to MBA students for over 14 years. Dr. Stan, you're doing so many awesome things. You're a wealth of knowledge as well, Sue, it sounds like. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:51 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely.
01:52 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome, well, let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. Here is a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
02:00 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Yeah, I had somewhat of a circuitous route. I actually was planning to be a practicing surgeon in medical school. I decided that I actually preferred strategy over surgery. I finished up and became a licensed general practitioner, but I went back to Wharton to get my MBA in marketing healthcare management. Worked for Bristol Myers Squibb, a brand company for a number of years.
Also worked for AT Kearney as a principal and consulting practice. And then started my firm Bernard Associates over 20 years ago. We're all about helping clients win. We do that through our proprietary transcender system, which is considered the most powerful winning system for companies and their products. So that's my background, a little different background than perhaps some other business people.
02:43 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense, but I think it speaks almost to how sometimes we forget about the journey of definitely a business, but definitely the journey of life and how so many times it doesn't always go in a straight line. Often I say the plate of success is a lot more like a plate of spaghetti than that straight path that we sometimes envision and see in the movies and all the books.
03:04 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely. Absolutely. I often talk about, you say, you know, the idea is to find a way to win, right? And ultimately I found for me a way to win on behalf of my clients. So it was again, a long journey, but enjoyed the journey and quite frankly needed to go through all those steps to ultimately develop the transcender system that I offer to my clients.
03:27 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love that and again Like a lot of times when we go down the quote-unquote wrong path, we sometimes say, hey, I didn't make it to where I want to be. But a lot of times we get to develop certain things that will lead us to where we ultimately are and we're better and better equipped to be able to kind of handle that. And of course, as you said so well, to be able to win, which we all love to do. I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about how you help your clients win, and take us through how you serve your clients and what that exactly looks like.
03:54 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
What I focus on is the training center system. I, when I first got into business, I was working at Bristol-Miner Squibb and I had, you know, some of my colleagues tell me that basically we were going to basically compete with branding and we're going to have the advertising agency handle most of our strategy. And I said, wait, wait, why don't we handle the strategy? We're the product managers, we're the marketing team. And specifically, why are we focusing only on branding as a way to win? And I got the deer in the headlights look, right? Like what do you mean? That's the only way to compete. And that was my aha moment.
As soon as people said the only way to compete in business is with branding, which is of course creating a brand and then differentiating the brand based on different product features, and benefits, often using lots of promotions, advertising, sales reps, etc. So right away I'm like, you know, I'm a big sports fan. And so I know in sports that Nick Saban has a system for winning, right? He has the process. Belichick in the NFL has a system for winning called Do Your Job. John Wooden had a system for winning, right? The building blocks of success, etc. Etc.
So, my thought was when I came into the business world, well, let's, you know, figure out what game we're going to play, and not necessarily play the exact same game everybody else is playing, which is branding. So it's an easy way to think about this, but what we offer is the Transcender system that enables companies and professionals to play a game only they can win. So it's all about creating a game that only my clients can win.
It's been enormously successful. The system is used by leading companies from Apple, Amazon, and Google to Uber, Seedlip, and small companies like Seedlip, Glossier, Sweetgreen, and on and on and on. So the companies that use this approach of playing their own game, win the game. It's totally different than the traditional model, which is what virtually every company plays with few exceptions, which is the branding traditional branding game.
06:09 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I appreciate you so much for breaking that down. And of course, being able to be in true entrepreneurial form, seeing an opportunity, seeing a gap in the market, and being able to kind of fulfill that. But I'm a big sports guy as well too. So, you know, you always want to understand why is Bill Belichick winning. Why is Nick Saban? Why are all these people always winning?
And I love how you brought that down to some of the practical things that we forget about in life and especially in business is that there's a system in place. And you don't, and I often say, you know, if you run your own race, you can't lose. But a lot of times we have no idea what our race is. We don't do that work. We don't have that system set up so that we can win. So I love that you created that system to basically have us win because we're winning at the race that only we can run as well as we can run it.
06:53 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Right, absolutely. In fact, the same way that Belichick has his do-your-job system, which of course has led to the most Super Bowls of any winning coach, and Sabin, his process, his system, these are winning systems. The branding system that virtually every company on the planet uses is not designed to be a winning system. It's designed to be really at this point a competitive system. Are you slightly better than your competitors? Is your product slightly differentiated on certain benefits and features? Well, that's the old model. In fact, it's 3, 000 years old. Ancient Greeks used that in their markets in Athens, right? And as that last look, the Parthenon was in ruins, but still. The idea is if you play your own game, you win your own game.
This is why you have a Starbucks on one side of the highway on the way to work, directly opposite on the other side of the highway on the way home from work. It's why you have Starbucks in transportation hubs, corporate centers, malls, etc. It's also why their stores are much bigger because Starbucks does not want you to grab a cup of coffee like Dunkin Donuts. They want you to grab a chair, hang out, and enjoy our free wi-fi, our hospital baristas, and our clean bathrooms. This is the place to hang out. Once he did that, over the next 20 years, Starbucks went from adding one store per year to adding 1, 350 stores per year. Wow. That's almost 4 stores per day. They totally changed the game. And that's what the Transcendor is all about.
It's about changing the game, changing the narrative or what I call the campaign agenda, like politicians. To play your game, They became the biggest coffee chain in the world with 31, 000 stores 3 times the size of Dunkin Donuts. Interestingly, in the United States, Dunkin Donuts actually spends twice as much on advertising promotions as Starbucks. Starbucks actually makes 3 times more sales in terms of coffee. They change the game from coffee to the coffee shop. So that is an example of a transcendent company that many people assume wins with branding, but in fact, branding plays a supportive role. It's not a lead role. Yeah.
09:10 – Gresham Harkless
I appreciate you breaking that down and giving that example. So you might've already touched on this and I think I have a guess of what this might be. I wanted to ask you for what I like to call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself, the organization, or a combination of both, but what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?
09:23 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
It's very simple. It's the transgender system. That is we are the only firm in the world that offers the Transcender system. Every single one of our competitors, whether they're advertising agencies, consulting firms, marketing firms, branding companies, you name it, every single one of our competitors in the world plays the same game. They all offer the branding approach. We're the only ones that offer the Transcender system. So I am walking the talk, okay? I basically found a way for us to compete where only we can win. And it's been incredibly successful.
I have worked with companies ranging from top 100 Fortune companies all the way down to startups and everything in between. I've worked across the world, everywhere from the Middle East to Asia, Europe, South America, of course, the US and Canada. I've worked across technologies, services, and products. And what I see is that companies that use this system, basically have what I call the transcendent takeoff. They suddenly have dramatic increases in sales, profitability, market share, etc. Very similar to Starbucks. I mean, Starbucks had that transcendent takeoff, you know, from 1 store per year to 1, 350 stores.
I have worked with larger companies that literally gain billions and billions in sales once they start using this approach. It actually makes a lot of sense. Why would you want to play the exact same game everybody else is playing? I mean, you're basically playing brand checkers and everybody knows the game, right? It's very simple, but in checkers, you don't feel like you're winning because you, everybody's playing the same game, it's hard to win. So what I do is encourage people to break out of the brand jail, shake off the brand cuffs, and stop being brand-washed. Use the transgender system that many of the leading companies in the world use to rise above their competitors and play a game only they can win.
11:29 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I appreciate you sharing that, you know, so much and being able to kind of understand the difference between the evolutionary and the revolutionary mindset and that winning mindset and the revolutionary product. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit. You might have already session on this and I wanted to ask you about what I call a CEO hack. So it's a little bit more of an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that can make you more effective and efficient or potentially your clients as well.
Do you think your hat could actually be getting in that winning mindset and what that looks like and how that manifests that and how that's not just something you, you know, you do one day, it's become something that you as ingrained? It sounds like a part of your culture, your environment, your blood, everything you breathe is starting to be getting that winning mindset. Do you think that's part of your hack?
12:11 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely. And you see this with the best sports teams as well. Right. They know they're going to win. They know they're going to win because they trust the system. Right. And in case of saving the process, Moneyball, etc. They know they're gonna win. So what I do is by working with clients, I introduce them to the system and they go through the 3 steps. The 3 steps of the TransCenter system are to create the agenda, your game, and communicate the agenda with the campaign platform very much like a politician. One overarching communications page that goes to everybody, not separate brand messages to different target audiences.
And third is to champion the agenda with execution. So basically, by taking them through the system, they understand, oh, I now see how we can win. And it gets people really excited. I really, when I do my seminars, I see, I look around, I can see the aha moment. People are like, I get it. I don't have to play the same game everybody's playing. And it's such a difficult game to play. And I'm constantly reacting to my competitors because they're spending more money on advertising, promotions, or whatever, or they came out with a slightly better product, et cetera.
No, now we basically play the game we wanna play. And so it gives them confidence because they have a system for winning. And ultimately, not only do you win, but in many cases, you dominate Starbucks, Apple, Google, Peloton, and all these companies. They are transgender companies that are not just owning their markets. They're dominating their markets. The book title is Brands Don't Win. It's not that Brands Don't Matter. You still want to have branding elements, but now they're in a supportive role. You can use branding, you can use advertising, but it's leading with your agenda and playing your game.
14:04 – Gresham Harkless
I absolutely love that. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO or open up different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Dr. Stan, what does being a CEO mean to you?
14:16 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Helping clients win. To me, that's what being a CEO is about, you know, helping my case clients win and certainly in bigger companies, helping your employees and all your other stakeholders win. And Winning to me is not necessarily just being slightly better than a competitor. Winning to me is optimizing your performance. So to me, to be a successful CEO means you help your stakeholders, starting with your clients, and your customers, you help them win, right? Whatever it is, whether it's a Tesla car, an Amazon iPhone, or a dishwashing detergent that's non-toxic, clean, pre-clean.
14:56 – Gresham Harkless
I love that. Thank you so much for giving that example. And then I love the phrase that you use to optimize your performance. Truly appreciate that. Dr. San, I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people get a hold of you, get a copy of the book, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
15:18 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely. So I recommend that your listeners go to brandsdontwin.com, brandsdontwin.com, that website. There you can take a quiz. Are you a traditionalist or a transgender? You can get information about the book. You can purchase the book. And I guess in summary, I'd say if you just want to compete, then brand, you'll have plenty of competition. But if you want to win, then transcend. Use the transgender system to rise above your competitors and play a game only you can win.
15:49 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Make that even easier. We'll have the links and information in the show notes. So truly appreciate you, Dr. Stan, and all the awesome work that you're doing. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
15:58 – Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Thanks, Gresh. Appreciate it. Take care.
16:00 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:13 - Intro
Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:40 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Stan Bernard of Bernard Associates, LLC. Dr. Stan, it's great to have you on the show.
00:49 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Thanks, Gresh. I appreciate it. A pleasure to be here.
00:51 - Gresham Harkless
Yes, the pleasure is ours. You're doing so many awesome things. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Stan. So Dr. Stan is an MBA and a doctor and is an internationally recognized award-winning global competition consultant, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. He is the president of Bernard Associates LLC and the creator of the Transcender system. And for nearly 4 decades, Dr. Stan has consulted with over 150 other leading companies spanning 6 continents.
He's been involved in more than 300 product launches involving more than 60 countries. Over 15, 000 professionals have participated in his firm's competition simulations slash business war games, and Transcender Systems Training Workshops, Transcender Systems Seminars, and Speaking Engagements. As a senior fellow at Wharton School, Dr. Bernard taught marketing to MBA students for over 14 years. Dr. Stan, you're doing so many awesome things. You're a wealth of knowledge as well, Sue, it sounds like. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:51 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely.
01:52 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome, well, let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. Here is a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
02:00 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Yeah, I had somewhat of a circuitous route. I actually was planning to be a practicing surgeon in medical school. I decided that I actually preferred strategy over surgery. I finished up and became a licensed general practitioner, but I went back to Wharton to get my MBA in marketing healthcare management. Worked for Bristol Myers Squibb, a brand company for a number of years.
Also worked for AT Kearney as a principal and consulting practice. And then started my firm Bernard Associates over 20 years ago. We're all about helping clients win. We do that through our proprietary transcender system, which is considered the most powerful winning system for companies and their products. So that's my background, a little different background than perhaps some other business people.
02:43 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah, that makes so much sense, but I think it speaks almost to how sometimes we forget about the journey of definitely a business, but definitely the journey of life and how so many times it doesn't always go in a straight line. Often I say the plate of success is a lot more like a plate of spaghetti than that straight path that we sometimes envision and see in the movies and all the books.
03:04 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely. Absolutely. I often talk about, you say, you know, the idea is to find a way to win, right? And ultimately I found for me a way to win on behalf of my clients. So it was again, a long journey, but enjoyed the journey and quite frankly needed to go through all those steps to ultimately develop the transcender system that I offer to my clients.
03:27 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I absolutely love that and again Like a lot of times when we go down the quote-unquote wrong path, we sometimes say, hey, I didn't make it to where I want to be. But a lot of times we get to develop certain things that will lead us to where we ultimately are and we're better and better equipped to be able to kind of handle that. And of course, as you said so well, to be able to win, which we all love to do. I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about how you help your clients win, and take us through how you serve your clients and what that exactly looks like.
03:54 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
What I focus on is the training center system. I, when I first got into business, I was working at Bristol-Miner Squibb and I had, you know, some of my colleagues tell me that basically we were going to basically compete with branding and we're going to have the advertising agency handle most of our strategy. And I said, wait, wait, why don't we handle the strategy? We're the product managers, we're the marketing team. And specifically, why are we focusing only on branding as a way to win? And I got the deer in the headlights look, right? Like what do you mean? That's the only way to compete. And that was my aha moment.
As soon as people said the only way to compete in business is with branding, which is of course creating a brand and then differentiating the brand based on different product features, and benefits, often using lots of promotions, advertising, sales reps, etc. So right away I'm like, you know, I'm a big sports fan. And so I know in sports that Nick Saban has a system for winning, right? He has the process. Belichick in the NFL has a system for winning called Do Your Job. John Wooden had a system for winning, right? The building blocks of success, etc. Etc.
So, my thought was when I came into the business world, well, let's, you know, figure out what game we're going to play, and not necessarily play the exact same game everybody else is playing, which is branding. So it's an easy way to think about this, but what we offer is the Transcender system that enables companies and professionals to play a game only they can win. So it's all about creating a game that only my clients can win.
It's been enormously successful. The system is used by leading companies from Apple, Amazon, and Google to Uber, Seedlip, and small companies like Seedlip, Glossier, Sweetgreen, and on and on and on. So the companies that use this approach of playing their own game, win the game. It's totally different than the traditional model, which is what virtually every company plays with few exceptions, which is the branding traditional branding game.
06:09 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I appreciate you so much for breaking that down. And of course, being able to be in true entrepreneurial form, seeing an opportunity, seeing a gap in the market, and being able to kind of fulfill that. But I'm a big sports guy as well too. So, you know, you always want to understand why is Bill Belichick winning. Why is Nick Saban? Why are all these people always winning?
And I love how you brought that down to some of the practical things that we forget about in life and especially in business is that there's a system in place. And you don't, and I often say, you know, if you run your own race, you can't lose. But a lot of times we have no idea what our race is. We don't do that work. We don't have that system set up so that we can win. So I love that you created that system to basically have us win because we're winning at the race that only we can run as well as we can run it.
06:53 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Right, absolutely. In fact, the same way that Belichick has his do-your-job system, which of course has led to the most Super Bowls of any winning coach, and Sabin, his process, his system, these are winning systems. The branding system that virtually every company on the planet uses is not designed to be a winning system. It's designed to be really at this point a competitive system. Are you slightly better than your competitors? Is your product slightly differentiated on certain benefits and features? Well, that's the old model. In fact, it's 3, 000 years old. Ancient Greeks used that in their markets in Athens, right? And as that last look, the Parthenon was in ruins, but still. The idea is if you play your own game, you win your own game.
This is why you have a Starbucks on one side of the highway on the way to work, directly opposite on the other side of the highway on the way home from work. It's why you have Starbucks in transportation hubs, corporate centers, malls, etc. It's also why their stores are much bigger because Starbucks does not want you to grab a cup of coffee like Dunkin Donuts. They want you to grab a chair, hang out, and enjoy our free wi-fi, our hospital baristas, and our clean bathrooms. This is the place to hang out. Once he did that, over the next 20 years, Starbucks went from adding one store per year to adding 1, 350 stores per year. Wow. That's almost 4 stores per day. They totally changed the game. And that's what the Transcendor is all about.
It's about changing the game, changing the narrative or what I call the campaign agenda, like politicians. To play your game, They became the biggest coffee chain in the world with 31, 000 stores 3 times the size of Dunkin Donuts. Interestingly, in the United States, Dunkin Donuts actually spends twice as much on advertising promotions as Starbucks. Starbucks actually makes 3 times more sales in terms of coffee. They change the game from coffee to the coffee shop. So that is an example of a transcendent company that many people assume wins with branding, but in fact, branding plays a supportive role. It's not a lead role. Yeah.
09:10 - Gresham Harkless
I appreciate you breaking that down and giving that example. So you might've already touched on this and I think I have a guess of what this might be. I wanted to ask you for what I like to call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself, the organization, or a combination of both, but what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?
09:23 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
It's very simple. It's the transgender system. That is we are the only firm in the world that offers the Transcender system. Every single one of our competitors, whether they're advertising agencies, consulting firms, marketing firms, branding companies, you name it, every single one of our competitors in the world plays the same game. They all offer the branding approach. We're the only ones that offer the Transcender system. So I am walking the talk, okay? I basically found a way for us to compete where only we can win. And it's been incredibly successful.
I have worked with companies ranging from top 100 Fortune companies all the way down to startups and everything in between. I've worked across the world, everywhere from the Middle East to Asia, Europe, South America, of course, the US and Canada. I've worked across technologies, services, and products. And what I see is that companies that use this system, basically have what I call the transcendent takeoff. They suddenly have dramatic increases in sales, profitability, market share, etc. Very similar to Starbucks. I mean, Starbucks had that transcendent takeoff, you know, from 1 store per year to 1, 350 stores.
I have worked with larger companies that literally gain billions and billions in sales once they start using this approach. It actually makes a lot of sense. Why would you want to play the exact same game everybody else is playing? I mean, you're basically playing brand checkers and everybody knows the game, right? It's very simple, but in checkers, you don't feel like you're winning because you, everybody's playing the same game, it's hard to win. So what I do is encourage people to break out of the brand jail, shake off the brand cuffs, and stop being brand-washed. Use the transgender system that many of the leading companies in the world use to rise above their competitors and play a game only they can win.
11:29 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I appreciate you sharing that, you know, so much and being able to kind of understand the difference between the evolutionary and the revolutionary mindset and that winning mindset and the revolutionary product. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit. You might have already session on this and I wanted to ask you about what I call a CEO hack. So it's a little bit more of an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that can make you more effective and efficient or potentially your clients as well.
Do you think your hat could actually be getting in that winning mindset and what that looks like and how that manifests that and how that's not just something you, you know, you do one day, it's become something that you as ingrained? It sounds like a part of your culture, your environment, your blood, everything you breathe is starting to be getting that winning mindset. Do you think that's part of your hack?
12:11 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely. And you see this with the best sports teams as well. Right. They know they're going to win. They know they're going to win because they trust the system. Right. And in case of saving the process, Moneyball, etc. They know they're gonna win. So what I do is by working with clients, I introduce them to the system and they go through the 3 steps. The 3 steps of the TransCenter system are to create the agenda, your game, and communicate the agenda with the campaign platform very much like a politician. One overarching communications page that goes to everybody, not separate brand messages to different target audiences.
And third is to champion the agenda with execution. So basically, by taking them through the system, they understand, oh, I now see how we can win. And it gets people really excited. I really, when I do my seminars, I see, I look around, I can see the aha moment. People are like, I get it. I don't have to play the same game everybody's playing. And it's such a difficult game to play. And I'm constantly reacting to my competitors because they're spending more money on advertising, promotions, or whatever, or they came out with a slightly better product, et cetera.
No, now we basically play the game we wanna play. And so it gives them confidence because they have a system for winning. And ultimately, not only do you win, but in many cases, you dominate Starbucks, Apple, Google, Peloton, and all these companies. They are transgender companies that are not just owning their markets. They're dominating their markets. The book title is Brands Don't Win. It's not that Brands Don't Matter. You still want to have branding elements, but now they're in a supportive role. You can use branding, you can use advertising, but it's leading with your agenda and playing your game.
14:04 - Gresham Harkless
I absolutely love that. So I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO or open up different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Dr. Stan, what does being a CEO mean to you?
14:16 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Helping clients win. To me, that's what being a CEO is about, you know, helping my case clients win and certainly in bigger companies, helping your employees and all your other stakeholders win. And Winning to me is not necessarily just being slightly better than a competitor. Winning to me is optimizing your performance. So to me, to be a successful CEO means you help your stakeholders, starting with your clients, and your customers, you help them win, right? Whatever it is, whether it's a Tesla car, an Amazon iPhone, or a dishwashing detergent that's non-toxic, clean, pre-clean.
14:56 - Gresham Harkless
I love that. Thank you so much for giving that example. And then I love the phrase that you use to optimize your performance. Truly appreciate that. Dr. San, I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people get a hold of you, get a copy of the book, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.
15:18 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Absolutely. So I recommend that your listeners go to brandsdontwin.com, brandsdontwin.com, that website. There you can take a quiz. Are you a traditionalist or a transgender? You can get information about the book. You can purchase the book. And I guess in summary, I'd say if you just want to compete, then brand, you'll have plenty of competition. But if you want to win, then transcend. Use the transgender system to rise above your competitors and play a game only you can win.
15:49 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Make that even easier. We'll have the links and information in the show notes. So truly appreciate you, Dr. Stan, and all the awesome work that you're doing. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
15:58 - Stan Bernard, MD, MBA
Thanks, Gresh. Appreciate it. Take care.
16:00 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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