Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Now on to our final speaker of the evening ladies and gentlemen, now for more than three decades our final speaker of the convention has helped companies on every continent build a culture of uplifting service that delivers outstanding business results year after year after year. Making transformation his mission, he’s one of the world’s most sought after educators, consultants, business thought leaders and motivational customer service keynote speakers on the topic of achieving superior service. 

He is the author of the new york times bestseller Uplifting Service and 14 other books on service business and inspiration, He has been featured in the wall street journal the new york times the US and USA Today. In 2018, Global Gurus named him the number one customer service guru in the world!

After more than 30 years of uplifting service, tonight he is asking you a bigger question.

Are you ready to devote yourself to uplifting humanity?

Ladies and gentlemen, Ron Kaufman!

Ron: Hello hello hello hello! Are you

seeing my screen clearly and are you

seeing me clearly and hearing me?

Interviewer:  Absolutely.

Ron: Yes, okay well, thank you, thank you so much to every single person who’s presented over the past five days, to everyone who’s been here for any one of the sessions and for all of you who are here for this closing final session tonight. 

I’ve been in so many of the different sessions, even listening in the breakouts, showing up before things started and a couple of themes keep coming through.

Number one- Authenticity

Be real. Tell the truth. Let us know what’s really going on.

We appreciate it. All of us are doing that now-honesty

The other one is Vulnerability

So, um, you know if it hurts, be honest with it, we have camaraderie with each other, we’re a community with each other…you can even say we’re a family with each other.

So, given that the topic that I was asked to close our conference with, about generative historical responsibility I thought I’d, you know, treat it like family and go back in a little bit of history and be honest with you I’m an incredibly fortunate guy…I got introduced to the sport of ultimate frisbee when it first came out and the number one rule of the game is called the spirit of the game.

There are no referee, the people who are on the field are the ones responsible for the quality of play and yes that is me jumping up into

the air but no I don’t think I caught it.

Now, I liked to play but I liked even more to be the organizer. Is that any surprise…

So, I was the guy at the rose bowl with the world frisbee championships, not out there being one of the champions.

I’m the guy with the microphone in the clipboard who knew the names of every single person on the field. Every sport. Every dog’s name. Every spin. Every throw. Every catch. Every move…and my job was to bring it to the audience, where everybody could enjoy it.

Then I started to do that around the world and I had the privilege of actually traveling to other countries and bringing the language of frisbee and the rules of frisbee and organizing festivals for frisbee and of course, you know you got to find some way to pay for the airline tickets so I made a business out of it and called it Disc Covering The World and sold frisbee by

mail order.

But, that part of the commercial side was really just to enable the fun side,

what I loved doing was getting groups of people together, just like we do as professional speakers, and then being able to do things like One. Two Three. Throw! …and put it all up in the air.

Now, you know I grew up in america but it

just wasn’t you know big enough, it wasn’t diverse enough, it wasn’t wild

enough, so I got out on the road and started taking frisbee to the Soviet Union (when there was one), to the great wall of China, into the schools of these crazy places..you know we really brought play as a language and we brought the rules of the game and today millions of people all over the world play that game, just like millions and millions of people around the world are seeing professional speaking as a potential opportunity for their

future.

We know that’s a good thing and that’s why on the 50th anniversary of the sport they put me in the Ultimate Frisbee Hall Of Fame as one of the Johnny Appleseeds who took the good word out to the world. 

 

Along comes 1990,  I’m 34 years old and Singapore has a problem- The low-cost manufacturing is going to China and the low-cost back-end operations are going to India. 

Singapore is going to have to come up the value chain so they reach out to Singapore Airlines and they get the credibility and the icon from them for service and the government pours in a lot of money and they want to create a National Service Quality Training Center and I got the privilege of being the guy with the microphone and the socks aren’t bad

either.

Now, we were really really fortunate because Singapore Airlines already knew how to be outstanding in service within the airline industry.

They were the only company in the country that had that great reputation

for service because they were one of the only companies in the country that was competing internationally from day one so they had to play at a higher scale. 

Today, given what’s going on in the professional speaking

industry all of us have got to play at a higher level than any of us have challenged ourselves to play before and what better place to be, for the past five days, than right here at the convention learning all the secrets and all the tips and having people expose how I do it and being as generous as we are to each other that’s what this place is about.

Singapore Airlines was extraordinarily generous; they lent their entire reputation for service to this National Service Training Company including to a 34 year old guy who actually didn’t know much about service, but I knew how to get adults to enjoy learning. 

Where did I get that from? Frisbee.

I got to work with Changi Airport when they were just getting started and creating all the values and doing the training and working with the immigration officers and the customs officers. It was fantastic. 

Changi Airport. Number one airport in the world. 

Singapore Airlines, one of the top rated airlines in the world.

Singapore, the country, one of the top in the world and boy did I tell the world that story. That was my passport and I was traveling and traveling more than 100 flights every year. I’m kind of living the life of a professional speaker in the old world, going from stage to stage, to hotel lobby to lounge to air flight.

In that era,  it was flip charts and I want you to look at what I was teaching back then, like up here in one area you’ve got a transaction, call that a speech, or you’ve got a repeating relationship, okay, that’s a steady client.

But, what does it mean when you actually move into a powerful partnership with somebody else?  Then, you’re creating the future together.

So, when we talk about generating historic responsibility we’re not just

talking about the past we’re talking about from the past creating a new future, and that’s why I’m taking the time to anchor my past to show you where our future is going.

Now, the level of partnership that I had with this magnificent country allowed me to literally be like an ambassador, an unofficial ambassador explaining the country to people around the world answering questions-What’s going on with the politics, how do you guys get along with each other, with so many different ethnicities and religions and cultural backgrounds, so it was kind of natural at a certain point that I should actually deepen the partnership further and become a citizen of singapore.

Then, the career kept deepening. I started writing- Thought leadership, intellectual property,  publishing, coming out with the first book, the second book, the third book, and what do you do after the book?

Anybody here remember dvds…like actually taking your video and putting it on to some medium that, then you hope wouldn’t crack and didn’t get a  scratch we don’t have to worry about that anymore and by the way for that green screen to work back then you needed 50,000 watts of light, beaming on the screen behind you, today you can do it with your kitchen light!

I go out there and then take all of that IP, that train the trainer driven business model. (Remember that because it’s going to blow up in a few moments)

Then, of course going out on stage and whenever I could getting with the audience because look it may be books now it was frisbee before but the spirit is the same, same spirit, same guy moving from history into the future 

Then you guys did something funny,I mean, you gave me a Hall of Fame award and said oh lifetime achievement. I’m not going off into the distance I’m right here.

So what happens next well before I tell you what’s happening next I need to tell you something about how I am, who I am, where I am right now if you see me being successful it’s not just because of me, I’ve got the most extraordinary, incredible, amazing woman by my side.

Many of you have met her, it’s my wife, her name is Jen, we’re a mom-and-pop shop, we’re running this thing together. In fact she’s sitting right over there running one of the backup computers right now.

But, when I look at asia professional speakers and I think about what we’ve become since this association was founded less than two decades ago with hundreds of members and hundreds of people coming to the convention every year, the thing I’m most proud of is not an award.

It’s us. It’s you. It’s this community. The commitment and the passion and the authentic willingness that we have to help each other and many of you know that i’ve reached out to you saying can you explain to me.How you do that or why do you do it this way or that way and I know many of you have reached out to me and you’re welcome to keep reaching out to me.

So there I am doing more than a hundred flights every year and I looked over at Jen and I said honey we need a break, I mean I need a break, let’s take a real vacation. My wife and I don’t take a lot of real vacations we’d sneak a couple days here take a little scuba diving time over there but we decided to do the real thing, we booked for the two-week luxury cruise through the magellan straits, from Argentina up the coast of chile, pulling in a Valparaíso.

We were going to go out and experience things like we’d never seen before and certainly we’re going to get in singapore and you’re not going to find it in an airport lounge and you know what we were not suffering and struggling because that ship behind Jen is a french ship and it only carried 200 passengers and we had the freaking owner’s suite it was incredible, ze wine was fantastic, the captain became a personal friend and zen ze shit hit the fan!

We were on that ship as it was going up the coast of Chile when the corona virus started spreading around the world and the last place you wanted to be was on a cruise ship!

So as we’re going up to try to get off this close the border we had to turn around and go back through the magellan straits come up the other side Argentina closed the border, then uruguay closed the border

and finally Brazil let us get off ze ship and this was the last picture as we left a three-week quarantine on board a ship.

Now, fortunately nobody got sick but here were Jen and I and we’re stepping off of what at least felt safe even though it was kind of chaotic because the whole world was falling apart and that picture was taken of my wife Jen the first time she stepped off the ship and into the car to go to the airport to fly back to Singapore and if you think she looked a little bit freaked out that’s what I looked like.

You know, let me be candid, authentic, vulnerable, honest with you. We had a team that wasn’t as big as Adam Khoo’s, but we had to knock it down by two-thirds. We had airline clients, we had retail clients, we had

hotel clients using our Train The Trainer model which requires in-person delivery.

Now, fortunately we also have technology clients and banking

clients so the whole business wasn’t going to disappear but talk about having to do that from a boat?!

Then we land in Singapore and we’re immediately put in jail… well no, it was quarantine and that was an era when singapore was quarantining anybody who came in from overseas into a hotel room for two weeks and it was luck of the draw some people were at the Rasa Sentosa Shangri-La some were at Marina Bay Sands and Jen and Ron were in the holiday inn express at Park Clarke Quay.

In this room, like if you want to know where Jen is she’s that little orange thing right up there in the corner like literally a prisoner looking out and it was only because an aps member came to the hotel stood in the parking lot and started waving to us you should have seen jen jumping up and down a person a person somebody outside we couldn’t even open the window!

There were six steps of space inside this room and the two of us were there together for two full weeks and thank you to the members of APS who knew we were there who sent us red wine, you sent us beer, you said at home cooked food,  thank you oh community family!

After a few days it gets a little old and we started looking, you know, sort of a little bit ragged and raggled but then realized something we were literally in a cocoon. We’d gone from a three-week quarantine on the boat to a quick couple of flights and now we’re in another even smaller two-week quarantine and this whole idea about the caterpillar and the cocoon becoming a butterfly it felt really real.

So I decided to do some research like what actually happens to the caterpillar when it’s inside and comes out as a butterfly and you may not know this but I want you to learn about it releases a protein that literally dissolves the entire caterpillar into a soup it’s like this rich gooey soup and out of that soup there are a few key ingredients that then become an eye

or become an antenna or become a wing or become a leg and the next thing you get this metamorphosis.

Now, there’s an article that you can read about this and jenna’s going to put this link in the chat right now so after the convention tonight grab that link while we’re still here and pop it open and read it later on and you’re going to find the article in Scientific America that explains what the heck happens to a caterpillar?!

(Because,for a lot of us, it’s happening to us right now.)

Our past is melting down our history. But the future’s calling and it’s possible. So, I said okay our Train The Trainer business model , that’s not going to work anymore, in person deliveries that’s not happening very much anymore, we’re online but not that much, oh my goodness I gotta go way back in history!

So, I went digging through my papers. You know what I found on my kindergarten report card. Mrs. Fuller comments in kindergarten… and

I looked at the comments I showed them to Jen, she started laughing.

“I thoroughly enjoy him because I never know what to expect”

Well I don’t know what to expect either but I know that the spirit of the game

is something, that is one of those core elements that’s been there in me from the beginning, it’ll be there until the day I die, getting other people involved it’s not about me it’s about what I can do to introduce something enjoyable and uplifting to somebody else and I’ve always known that there’s something else going on like that beautiful session that we just finished together, that there’s something going on inside that you can carry through into your outside and i’ve known that from the past and i’ll carry that into the future too but there are some things from the past that i will not carry into the future because they just kind of go away as much as you might want to keep them… that’s life.

So our business did really well you know we got to the point where we were published in Harvard Business Review and we had e-books that were going out around the world and this was our website and said you know unbelievable! Unleashing the power of your team!..and your team can do it!

 Yes, you’re right I was named Global Guru in 2018,19, 20.

In 2020 this year our program was named the number one program for customer service development but I always knew in my heart that something wasn’t quite right.

Actually the cocoon of 2020 and this meltdown of the caterpillar is welcome… because what we’ve been teaching for several years, a lot of years is that you use unbelievable service to make you happier customers so that you had make more money, so you can achieve a sustainable competitive advantage!

That word competitive never sat well with me but I let it be I didn’t stop it it kept on going and if it weren’t for covid I wouldn’t have this moment of tremendous inflection… underneath at the core of service is not making more money, it’s not being more competitive, at the core of service is care.

We serve because we care about something.

Now, look these are two different abstractions and one of them the service side and I cracked that one I spent 30 years of my career working on that one and wrote the definition that service is taking action to create value,  and value is when you contribute to the well-being of someone, that’s the person who’s saying yes that’s valuable to me and what you did

was good service because your action created value that contributed to my well-being.

Now, well-being can be emotional- You made me feel good! 

It could be statistical, operational, financial- Thank you I got the results I

needed.

It could be relational- Yes you made me feel more connected or it could actually be about the future itself where what I value is the idea that ah! again like so many of the sessions in this convention have helped us see the future as a place of huge possibility not just pain and problems so we’ve got this connection now service is taking action to create value that

contributes to the well-being of something that somebody cares about.

What is care?

Well that abstraction i’ve been studying for the past 15 years and i’m going to start teaching about it and if i’ve spent 30 years teaching about service well I got another 30 years i’ll be teaching about care as

Well.

Care is concern. 

It’s a tension with intention, you’re not just mindful you’re paying attention because you want to help something happen and it’s intention and concern about future well-being, so if you care about your kids you don’t just care about them in this moment because as our previous speaker said this moment becomes the next moment, because the next moment becomes the next moment. Care is concern for future well-being. Service is action that contributes to that well-being. 

What is the connection between service and care?

Service is care in action.

All those years of building intellectual property around services producing architecture and models and principles and IP and courses and you know what the next 30 years will bring a whole another one.

But, I want you to see what it is that I’ve done with language…because as speakers we have the power to do things with language that can help reframe and reshape the way people see themselves and the world and the future.

For example, if you go back in history the word serve comes from latin meaning slave, like subservient, like the customer is the king yeah well what are you as the service provider and what have we said ah! you as the service provider are the creator of value.

Well, that’s the most esteemed and valuable position of all and that’s why the book was called uplifting service uplift the service the customer gets uplift your own pride in being a service provider uplift the dignity of service to one another throughout the entire world and we’ve also now reframed the meaning of care.

If you go back to the old norwegian and germanic you’ll find that care is to grieve because back in those days if you were old or you were wounded or you were sick you were gonna die baby… and so it was just a worry that’s what care meant that’s not what it means today.

We’re saying care is to encourage and to enable the future, what else are professional speakers hired for ?!

Now, we’d all like the world to be smooth sailing right?

Even when the waves come we don’t mind waves as long as they’re perfectly shaped I mean even if they’re big oh let me show you how I can perform but what happens when there’s a storm man? What happens when it’s like a perfect storm?

Like we’re facing right now geopolitical storm, financial storm, medical & biological storm …and there’s a lot of people who aren’t sure what’s going to happen to them. There’s a lot more anxiety in the world than we’ve seen before a lot more need a lot more hope a lot more fear people are afraid they’re going to end up like this… just I didn’t make it or my department didn’t make it or my small business or my family didn’t make it or i’m responsible for the whole big ship and we may not make it!

So, what does the world need to avoid this kind of thing?

We need good guidance. We need like a lighthouse of clarity that can see through this and then be able to bring people fundamental principles ways of thinking about who they are the world in which they live, the lives they live, the communities that we live in, the identities they have, the actions that they take who better to do this than people who are professional speakers!

Guys, gals…the world needs this real bad right now because the world we all inherited with this gorgeous nature will look what we’ve done to it.

Why? oh! so we can raise animals to kill them and eat them?!

By the way, that shortens your lifespan, or how about this, one we can grow so much food that some people are going to get really fat because they won’t know how to manage themselves with it oh but we don’t distribute it evenly around the planet so some people are actually going to go hungry…

Or we’re going to generate so much capitalism and consumerism

that like 90% of fashion clothing gets thrown out certainly before it’s worn

out and yet in those dumps some people are going to find their livelihoods…?

What kind of a planet is this?! 

What kind of responsibility do you and I have with the rest of our little lives to do something that contributes to the future, maybe even of those who haven’t come yet? 

We’ve got medical breakthroughs that are happening all over the place biotechnology, nanotechnology..fantastic!

But we’ve also got things going on in the world that are really deeply causing suffering and frustration and yes suicide rates go up when people feel that way and we can be the kind of people that speak or listen.

(Thank you Cohen, Professional Listener) 

So, that people feel like you know I’ll stick around, yeah because then you’ll get through it and then it turns and then it changes and then life carries on.

We’ve got better diversity more and more variety going on in the world than ever before, with all the travel and all the people moving around but that doesn’t mean we’re seeing equality that doesn’t mean that we can’t we have to don’t have to stop fighting and where do we learn the lessons for this? Oh? I know.

Let’s go ask the teacher.

Well that’s what education used to be right? …and you know what he… of course it was a he… of course it would be a white he… of course it was an older white he… wait, i’m one of those!

He was considered to be the educator and he did it in a classroom and then you know he got a little more hip and more fun clothing and we stuck computers in there and all that but I mean that kind of education didn’t interrupt the anxiety people are feeling that kind of education is not stopping the depression that people are feeling and it’s certainly not ending the isolation that people are feeling especially in a covet era like we’re all in right now.

So, to put it in the immortal words of Tom Hanks… Houston, we have a problem.

We gotta figure out how to make this.. fit into the hole made for this using nothing but this.. which means what we gotta figure out how to make humanity fit into a world where there’s billions of us and lots of religions and languages, and cultures, and nationalities, and traditions and prejudices and biases and we’ve got to figure out how to make it fit and evolve successfully using nothing but what we already got well thank goodness one of the things that we got is each other.

We. Anybody listening to this, we have a community of others who care about each other and are here to encourage each other because we believe in each other and we can take responsibility we’re not going

to be victims in this we’re going to be the ones that take everything we’ve learned in the past five days and lean forward in our careers and with our clients and communities and with our colleagues and we’re going to take responsibility.

Now, there’s three levels of this.

The first one is to take personal responsibility.

I met my wife scuba diving it’s still our favorite avocation, hope we get to go back and do it one day, but within the hobby we have a mini hobby and the mini hobby is finding and picking up trash on the reef because if there’s trash on the reef and a turtle gets caught in it the turtle might die it’s not something healthy that the fish should be eating anyway and sometimes you find some pretty wild stuff down there and nothing is more joyful than finding cool trash and pulling it up.

But, you know not just down we’ve got a daughter her name is Brighten and when she was really little we stick her in a backpack and go out there and we’d call it kitty cat hunting because we were looking for kitty cats and she could see them and when she got a little bit older she was too big to go into the backpack but she was big enough to walk with me in the park.

One day, we’re out in east coast park right here in singapore we’re walking along and I saw a soda bottle lying on the grass just off the path and I looked at it and I looked I said hold on honey I went over it wasn’t covered with ants it just looked like it had been dropped there fairly recently.

I picked it up,  carried it along with us to the next garbage can and I threw

it out and my daughter said daddy why did you do that that wasn’t yours

and I looked at her and I said honey you’re right that wasn’t mine I didn’t

throw it there but the moment i saw it it became mine to decide whether to leave it there for the next daddy and daughter to have to see or whether I would be the one to pick it up and since it wasn’t dirty and covered with ants and the garbage can was over there I went ahead and took it there.

I took the responsibility and you know what I still do this morning, I took this picture yeah that’s me with the Singapore mask that red thing on my shoulder is because i’m wearing a 20 pound weight vest walking my 10 kilometers every day but it’s the stick that i’m proud of that’s my trash picking stick and you know what I know a lot of you have had mentor walks with me and if you come for a mentor walk with me again and we can do it properly physically distance I got a stick for you too so let’s go out and clean up the park together.

I’m really happy to let you know that our daughter has turned into this incredible human being who wants to use her intelligence to help make the world a better place. She’s passionate about social justice and education for people who can’t afford to get into a traditional educational system, bless her!

Take personal responsibility. What’s that got to do with speakers, how

many of you saw Adam Khoo yesterday, when he just blew us all out of the water I mean adam’s been a friend for years but that guy rocks and he made one tiny little linguistic error during his talk and I mean after a guy does a talk like that you don’t want to go up to and go “Hey, you know there’s one…”

So I waited, I waited, waited and then I gave him a call. I said “Adam, man, thank you so much, I really appreciate that you accepted our invitation and you were just so magnificent for all of us. Do you mind if I just give you one little thing?” He goes “ Well,yeah sure”  because he’s adam right he always wants to improve continuously and I said “When you cited Steve Jobs, I just need to let you know it wasn’t at harvard that he gave the talk it was at stanford”

He said “Oh thank you!” 

I took responsibility to tell him.

Now, what about you taking responsibility?

Ever heard a speaker say “I got a killer speech man we’re going to crush the competition just watch me hit the target i’m going to show you all my bullet points.

You ever think about what that says what that feels like?

What does it really mean?

How about saying “We’re going to stand out, we’re going to hit some high goals, we’re going to reach the top together, let me show you my key points for how we function as a team so all of us can come out as winners. You know why?  Because we are in this together.

Hello speakers!

Take personal responsibility and create shared responsibility.

Look at this you can plant one tree or maybe teach a kid…but who organizes a group of people to do that?

Who gathers together the clan? 

Who says let’s be the ones that plant the future?

Who’s the one that creates this so that future generations can enjoy it?

Because boy oh boy do we need it.

You know there are things going on in the world that should stop and we know it and so some people reach out and say let’s take this let’s be shared in our responsibility. 

Stop what’s wrong and you know what else.. start what’s right, promote it, push it, encourage it and so kudos to the people in this group who came together and said yeah let’s not just be against racism let’s promote pluralism and that’s what APS is all about!

I mean, look at what it says on our website: professionals giving back, become part of the inner circle, a warm and friendly community, learn from the best you are and can be the best and so if you’re in APS, I invite you to become even more involved in our association and finally… generate historic responsibility.

Yeah it is about the future now look every single one of us got here the same way, jumped into a body came out it was not necessarily a pleasant experience but it got you the body you got and got you into the life that you have and oh damn there’s another tragic side to this

which is where it ends.

So you’re here alive now between that and that and the question is what are you gonna do with it well let me show you what i’m gonna do so i’m invited to teach at harvard business school to the alumni of the business school itself so every single person in this room is a graduate

of Harvard business school and there I am.. man.. I’m teaching at Harvard.

I mean, come on.. this is just like you know career dream right.. and everybody’s up there looking at the slides but if you look real closely there’s one guy right there he’s not looking at the slides he’s looking at me in fact he’s studying the heck out of me because his name is Dr Fernando flores and he’s my Obi-Wan Kenobi.

This guy is the father of ontological coaching he was the finance minister of chile when he was 27 years old, he’s got a long and storied career after that he’s 79 i’m still in touch with him regularly and he’s my sensei and he came to have lunch with me the next day and he sits down he goes “RON!”

He’s got this very deep chilean accent, he leans across the table and looks at me goes like this,  “Ron, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

Oh my god, I mean here is a guy whose life has gone through one after another after another enormous transitions, consequential contributions and he’s asking me what am I going to do and I realize you know what Yay! you’re the guru 

But that’s not enough,  what are you going to do with the rest of your life so I’m going to spend the rest of my life taking service and using it as a way to bring people to the phenomenon of care and helping them see that actually what underlies care is love and oh yes, we’ll do it online as well and oh yes, I will still wear a red tie in fact i’m going to double down on it and if you look in the pocket of my jacket i’m going to start wearing a nice red pocket square as well and backing me up the whole time is the amazing woman whose name is jen who’s coming over from right over here so that she can enjoy being here for the close of this convention and this talk with all of you!

There you go and we’ve got a question for you my wife and I would like to know.. Ready?

Friends!..What are you going to do with the rest of your life?

We got a suggestion- Generate Historic Responsibility

If there’s anybody in this world who’s got the potential to actually make that happen.. it’s you.. it’s us.. it’s all of us doing this together now i’m going to stop sharing because I want to do one thing and you’re going to be the first people on the planet to see it and that is that we are not going to be shy about this.

So you’re now looking at the new corporate branding for our team to Serve. Care. Love. Thanks for the privilege of serving you as you can tell we care about you, we love you!

Interviewer: Thank you very much everybody, unmute, give your applause to the fabulous Ron Kaufman!

Love you guys brilliant just it is a truly fantastic session ladies and gentlemen and a brilliant way to round off the convention.