IAM1579 – Innovator and Author Shares About Resiliency to Community Leaders and Healthcare Advocates

Howard Brown is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, two-time stage IV cancer patient/survivor, international bridge-builder, and mentor. He shares the keys to leading a resilient life that drives successful business innovators, community leaders, and healthcare advocates. Howard shares the values of survivorship for cancer and life, mentorship as leadership, and entrepreneurship of all kinds (trademark Babson College).

• CEO Story: Howard went to school for entrepreneurship where the trajectory of his life changed. Found his lane and optimized his time to learn. Then he went on to a big training program and joined the big training company NCR and built his foundation. Then jumped into the startup game. Howard is a tech guy, innovative, making an idea and monetizing it.
• Business Service: Healthcare. Mentoring.
• Secret Sauce: Having that resilience to shine brightly, looking at things in a different way. Sharing hope because there's a lot of darkness in the world.
• CEO Hack: Cutting out negativity, helps you move forward. Find your happy place – find a place where you are stress-free.
• CEO Nugget: Lead with kindness, and you will earn people’s respect.
• CEO Defined: Leader of people and making sure they buy in on that vision. Go make it happen.

Website: www.shiningbrightly.com

Amazon Authors Page: howardbrown-shiningbrightly

Amazon Book Page: BuyShiningBrightly

LinkedIn: howardsbrown

Facebook: howard.brown.36

Check out one of our favorite CEO Hack’s Audible. Get your free audiobook and check out more of our favorite CEO Hacks HERE

Transcription

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

 Please Note: Our team is using the AI CEO Hacks: Exemplary AI and Otter.ai to support our podcast transcription. While we know it's improving there may be some inaccuracies, we are updating and improving them. Please contact us if you notice any issues, you can also test out Exemplary AI here.

00:27 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow, 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.

00:54 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Howard Brown of ShiningBrightly.com Howard, it's great to have you on the show.

01:03 – Howard Brown

Awesome, Gresh. So glad to be here on this lovely fall day.

01:07 – Gresham Harkless

Yes. Excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing in your book and so many phenomenal stories and impacts that you've been able to have. So before we jump into that, I want to read a little bit more about Howard so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Howard is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, two-time stage four cancer patient, survivor, international bridge builder, and mentor. He shares the keys to leading a resilient life that drives successful business innovators, community leaders, and healthcare advocates.

Howard shares the values of survivorship for cancer in life and mentorship as leadership and entrepreneurship of all kinds. Howard is the author of Shining Brightly, a memoir of resilience and hope by a two-time cancer survivor, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and interfaith peacemaker. Howard, again, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

[restrict paid=”true”]

01:57 – Howard Brown

I am, and I'm just Howard. I'm here to motivate, educate, and inspire.

02:02 – Gresham Harkless

Oh, let's make it happen then, Howard. I absolutely love it. So I guess I know I touched on a little bit when I read your bio. I know we talked a little bit offline, but I wanted to rewind the clock here a little more on how you got started with all the awesome things you're working on.

02:13 – Howard Brown

So as far as my career or.

02:15 – Gresham Harkless

The book career and what led you to the book, because I know the book is part of it's part of your memoir. Correct?

02:21 – Howard Brown

It is my whole life. So, yeah, I. Absolutely. I grew up outside of Boston and just public schools and have a twin sister. That's important a little bit later. But really, the thing that changed the trajectory of my life was Babson College. Babson College is the number one school for entrepreneurship. Babson. Edu. I really hit my lane there. I was going to live in a large school. I transferred in and I made and optimized my time at Babson to learn.

At that time, in the late 80s, you came out of Babson, and you joined a big training program at one of the big computer companies. I joined NCR Corporation. Then you kind of built your foundation. Once AT&T bought NCR, I jumped into the startup game. I'm a technology startup guy. I want to be able to innovate and make an idea, monetize it, and basically bring it out to the markets.

03:16 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I definitely appreciate you sharing that and especially hearing about that journey. I know that we talked a little bit offline, like, how impactful Babson has been for you, and I love how sometimes people get those opportunities and sometimes they have them, but they don't take advantage of them. Sounds like you've been able to do that.

03:34 – Howard Brown

Absolutely. So entrepreneurship takes many flavors, shapes, and kinds, and you just. You have to be able to understand how your business works, how it basically markets, and how the engineering talks to customer service, and talks to sales. It's a team sport. Building a company is a team sport and that's what I learned most.

03:54 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I imagine that going through the journey of the startup world as well, too, probably taught me a lot about the nuances, the different aspects of running a business, growing a business, and making sure that comes to fruition, I guess you could say.

04:09 – Howard Brown

It takes determination. It takes a dream. It takes passion, but it also takes mentorship. It takes some lucky breaks if you're raising money for a Ross startup. You got to put your life on the line and you got to be able to sell others to write checks in your favor, and that's not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot of fortitude.

04:30 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. So I know some of those tales. We talked a lot about your book, and you have a chapter on Silicon Valley and all of those things. Could you take us through a little bit more on what you write about in your book and how you've learned so much from there?

04:45 – Howard Brown

Sure, sure. So in Silicon Valley in the 90s, we're still in dial-up modem here. All right. We're still in landlines. Cell phones were getting a little more popular. The flip phone's Internet bandwidth is 28, eight modems. Then growing from there. We didn't have 3G, 4G, 5G networks. So bandwidth was a constraint at that time. We were Learning it was web 10 mobile phones were coming a little later. I said we're living in the Sony walk mandate. So you are under different constraints.

Today we're digital. We just think it all magically happens on a cloud and bang, you're in business and have a website up two seconds later. That's not how it all worked. But still, the pace is fast. Who matters? Who matters in Silicon Valley? That network is really important because you need to leverage that network to get to certain partnerships, raise funds, and be able to go to market correctly. So all those life skills I learned at Babson came into play. You have to be able to prepare to actually be disappointed and be told no and pick yourself up.

We all get knocked down for various reasons. We'll get into my health situation and all that. I got knocked down more than most. But getting knocked down in business, you got to be able to put a band-aid on it and get up to fight another day. That takes real, real resilience and great learning. That's life learning. Some of that is not schoolbook learning. That's real-life learning.

06:14 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. A lot of times that's where the true learning happens. I think they say the thing about life is you, you get the, I guess the test first, and then you get the lesson later. A lot of times you're not necessarily able to prepare for that like you can in school.

06:31 – Howard Brown

Yeah, really cool experiences. I mean, I met Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn before LinkedIn was LinkedIn, met the Google guys and they didn't even have the best search engine in 1996, and that was a couple with Digital Equipment Corporation. But they were smart and they leveraged things that they didn't have and they brought priority placement to the market. There were so many search engines, and look who won the war. They did.

There were many social networks before Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook won that war. But it's just truly amazing. I was living In a pretty heady time. It was just fast-moving, Almost too fast-moving. We were sprinting and life was a marathon. Business needs to be a marathon to profitability and community service and we were sprinting for sure.

07:20 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. That kind of, I guess, impacted some of your health and some of the things that happened, Is that correct?

07:27 – Howard Brown

It did. So, as you mentioned in my bio, I got struck down by stage four cancer twice in my life. I am blessed, lucky, and grateful to be alive once. When I was 23, coming out of school and starting my first job with NCR Corporation, I had about a year or two in, I got promoted and I noticed a little bump on my cheek. Long story short, I got diagnosed with stage 4T cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and was told that I didn't have a very good chance of making it. I was failing all my chemotherapies and I'm cutting the story way down. You have to buy the book because the deets are in there.

But my twin sister gave me her bone marrow lottery ticket. Miracle number one, her bone marrow saved my life. I had tons of chemo and tons of full body radiation, and I survived a death sentence, really. I came out of that and I moved to California to basically rebuild, repair, get some sunshine, some waves, and the West Coast. That's where I basically built Humpty Dumpty version 1.0 all over again. I had to build my confidence again, my emotional strength, my physical strength, my financial situation, and my relationships. That makes you resilient, that makes you mentally tough. I embraced all of that.

08:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I almost feel like that's part of your secret sauce. Having those experiences and being able to shine brightly and to be able to see that is I'm a big believer. It sounds like you might be too, that life, a lot of times, things that happen, sometimes it's the perspective that you have after things happen, and sometimes even when you're going through it and to have that resilience to shine brightly as you said so. Well, sometimes it's just being able to maybe look at things in a different way or understand. Like, as I like to say, things don't happen to me, they happen something for me.

09:11 – Howard Brown

My last chapter is called Sharing Hope, and we can share a hug. Now outside of COVID, you can share love, you can share a coffee, but sharing hope is what we need because there's There's a lot of things in darkness out there, in the world war in Ukraine, shootings at schools. Maybe it's Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Depends on how you feel about that, but I don't. It doesn't. Doesn't bother me.

But we have to share hope because hope is that fuel that carries us forward. It's carried me forward in life, in business, and in family. That's what I want. People to take a hold of that fuel and grab just a little bit of that light and move hope forward and we're going to be okay.

09:51 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Kind of reminds me of the quote, be the change you hope to see in the world. I think when you start to harness that and to be able to kind of embody that in so many different ways, then again, it really allows you to shine brightly. As we've been talking about so much. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit. You might have already touched on this, but I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you that has made you more effective and efficient?

10:16 – Howard Brown

This is really important because what I learned, okay, is that I cut out the negativity, and it made me actually more productive. So I didn't dwell. As we're human. We get angry, we have emotions. But through the whole cancer stuff, I really tried to cut out as much negativity, and I'm carrying that forward. That actually helps my productivity because I'm not using my brain on stuff that's wasted. I'll pass that on, is that if you can limit or eliminate some negativity from your day, you'll have a better day, and you'll get more done. That's my CEO hack.

10:52 – Gresham Harkless

I love that CEO hack, and I appreciate you sharing that.

10:54 – Howard Brown

The other thing is a smaller hack, but it's big for everyone, is find your happy place. So find a place where you are stress-free. It can be yoga, cooking, or travel. For me, it is the basketball court. I feel stress-free. I play two, or three times a week, and I actually contribute that to my healing. That healed me mentally and helped me physically. If you find your happy place, go there. Go there a lot, as much as you can.

11:16 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. What would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget? So this is going to be a little bit more word of wisdom or piece of advice, it might be something you would tell your younger business self, or potentially you might tell somebody who was reading your book or potentially backing your startup days.

11:31 – Howard Brown

There are moments in leadership that you have to have all different types of qualities. But I think a really important quality is to lead with kindness. If you lead with kindness, they're not going to get any hurt. You have to be strict sometimes and you have to be demanding, but you do it with kindness. It makes all the sense in the world and you earn people's respect that way and you become the leader that you should be. So that's. That's my nugget.

11:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love that nugget. Again, I love just how it's in alignment with everything that you've done, like the cutting out, and the negativity. Sometimes there's a narrative that in order to be a leader, to be an effective leader, you have to be ruthless. You have to be this, you have to be that. But I think when you start to kind of change that narrative, just start to do it in a different way sometimes, then what's the narrative or what's considered the way that it has to be done, then it starts to create more and more opportunity for people to do the same thing as well, too. You create that culture around your organization 100%.

12:29 – Howard Brown

Thank you.

12:30 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So, Howard, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:40 – Howard Brown

So being a CEO to me is a leader of people and making sure they buy in on that vision, that vision to actually take you where you want to go. So whether it's a CEO of a nonprofit, CEO of a for-profit business, whatever you're doing as a CEO, you are a leader, okay, of men and women. They're going to follow and make sure that vision is pure and that you can get there or keep trying. That's what happens.

Sometimes the dream doesn't come true right away. Sometimes it takes time. Sometimes you have to keep climbing that mountain. But if that's your dream, get the resources, get the backing, get people to follow yo,u and do it as a team. It's a team sport. That's what it means to be. So you're a leader of teams and go bring it together and go make it happen.

13:30 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I love that. So many times I say, like, we have to remember that we're running a marathon. A lot of times when you see and have that vision and it doesn't come to fruition on day one, it doesn't mean that you have to throw in that towel. You continue to have that buying. You continue to lead. You help people to sometimes even see the forest for the tree, see where they're going, see, like, how the things that they're doing contribute to that overall vision as well, too. That's when you can definitely see some success within yourself and your organization.

13:59 – Howard Brown

Yeah, I mean, you use a sports analogy that the Golden State Warriors won 73 games at 82 one year, they didn't win the championship. They were obviously the best team, but they didn't take it to the finish line. Meanwhile, in four out of the last eight years, they took home the trophy. So again, it's. It's an experience. You have to get over those hurdles, get around those hurdles, and take two steps back from those hurdles. There are hurdles in life, and you just have to get around them, through them, over them, as best you can.

14:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. That's why I love everything that you're doing because it helps to, I think, look at those hurdles in a different way and sometimes be able to realize that there is an opportunity to get past those hurdles. When you hear somebody that's been able.

14:38- Howard Brown

To do that, for sure.

14:41 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, Howard, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now is 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 can get hold of you. Get a copy of your book and find out all the awesome things that you're working on.

14:57 – Howard Brown

Gresh. This is a great platform. I really appreciate you. I'm going to put on my shining glasses because when they shine brightly, you have to have shades. So I'm big on mentorship. I've been a mentor of a little brother, and I look to my mentors and they give you guidance. That's the extra bonus nugget that I'll throw in there. People can get a hold of me@shockingbrightly.com I'm responsive.

Anything you want to talk about in chapters in the book. I have downloads on survivorship, mentorship, and interfaith that are just dialogue guides. Also, I'm speaking lots of different places you want to contact me. About podcasts or stages. Please do signingbrightly.com and be very responsive and just share appreciation to come on and be sharing with your listeners, and your audience today. Granted.

15:46 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I definitely appreciate you. I didn't have my shades but I did put my hands up because it was shining very brightly. So I truly appreciate you Howard for all the awesome things you're doing times you took out today. Of course, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes as well too. But I say this once and I'll continue to say it again. I feel like sometimes you don't know to be able to get over hurdles as much as possible until you hear people who are able to do that.

Thank you so much for sharing. Obviously your journey, of course, talking about your book and creating that because that allows people to know that there is a way to get over those hurdles and there is resilience. They can come from that. So thank you so much my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:21 – Howard Brown

You do keep on shining.

16:22 – 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.

[/restrict]