good morning. coming up on "your business," helping to cultivate a culture of feedback. and new companies cashing in on the legal cannabis trend. let's work smart. that's all coming up next on "your business." >> "your business" is sponsored by american express open. helping you get business done.

hi, everyone. i'm jj ramberg and welcome to "your business," the show dedicated to help your growing business. it doesn't matter if you are a manager or employee, just about everyone has read the yearly performance review. that's why we got so excited by a new management philosophy called radical by kim scott that completely changes the way we give and when we give these. and this can have a big effect on the culture of the company and ultimately the bottom line. it's a moment seared in kim scott's memory. she was an up and coming silicon valley executive working at google. she had just finished a killer perception for the co-founder when her boss, cheryl samberg, pulled her aside for a chat. >> i thought, oh, boy. maybe i didn't nail it like i

thought i did. and cheryl started the conversation by telling me about the things that had gone well in the meeting, but, of course, all i wanted to hear was what i had done wrong. and eventually she said, you said umm a lot in there, were you aware of it? then i breathe a sigh of relief. because if that's all i did wrong, who really cared. and i made a brushed off gesture. she stopped, looked right at me, and i can see when you do that thing with your hand that i'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you. when you say umm every third word it makes you sound stupid. now she has my attention. >> she suggested she see a speech coach and said google would pay for it. >> and it really got me to thinking, what was it about cheryl that made it so seemingly easy for her to tell me, but also why had nobody told me for 15 years? it was like i was walking through my whole career with a hunk of spinach between my teeth

and nobody had the courtesy to tell me it was there. >> this helped inspire a management style kim called radical candor. in that moment, she combined leadership, humanity and directness. it was guidance, mixing craze and criticism to help kim be better at her job and a better boss to the team she was leading. >> very often people treat their bosses like tyrants to be toppled. they treat their peers like enemy combatants and pawns on a chess board. that's kind of what happens when you're just professional and not seeing the people you work with as fellow human beings. being professional can be dangerous because it leads to apathy. so at the very least you want to give a damn about the people you work with. >> kim created a two by two grid to explain the philosophy she explored in her board radical candor, be a kick ass boss without losing your humanity. to be a great leader, you need

to blend two critical things, caring personally and challenging directly. >> a really important part of radical candor is being willing to take your whole self to work. being more than professional, you have to bring your whole self to work. >> how do you know the balance between what some say is professional and some may say being personal at work? where do you start the balance? >> the balance always gets measured at the other person of the year. so you don't want to be creepily personal, but you do want to take a moment to just care about the other person as a human being. so that is kind of the care personally dimension. >> and then there's the other side of the equation. challenge directly. >> unfortunately, the beetles got it wrong. love is not all you need. you also need the other dimension, you also need the challenge dimension of radical candor. colin powell said leadership is

often being being able to pi ss people off. and if you are told, you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all. and now all of a sudden you become a boss and it is your job to say it. so figuring out how to be willing to say the thing that might be willing to upset the other person because you do care about them is the essence of radical candor. >> if you miss the mark, you go into obnoxious regression, manipulative insincerity and empathy. >> what happens when you care too much or when you don't care at all? >> the bottom quadrant is what i call obnoxious aggression. we are all occasionally jerks, unfortunately, where we're so focused on criticizing something or fixing a problem that we forget to take a second to show that we care about the person we're talking to. that's obnoxious aggression.

>> what are the other three? >> when you fail on all these, i call it manipulative insincerity. that's passive aggressive behavior. it's also sort of the self-protective quadrant. i'm really busy, i'm really mad, i just don't have time to deal with this, i'm going to shut my door and do my own work. >> and it may work in the short-term. >> it's not going to work in the long run. and you yourself will be miserable if you hang out too long in ma nip lave insincerity or obnoxious aggression. >> and what is it called when you care too much? >> when you care so much that you're reluctant and unwilling to challenge -- i call that ruinous empathy. that's the biggest mistake. 85% of the time, that's the mistake we make. at work and also frankly at home. it's being so concerned about

the other person's feelings that we're unwilling to tell them something they could fix easily if we just told them that it was a problem. >> the goal of this philosophy is to balance all of these elements and deliver praising criticism through the prism of radical candor. to see kim's ideas in action, we decided to visit everdome. a company built on helping you organize your life. ceo chris amele adapted the radical candor framework and his team learned how to put it in action. with a workshop to teach them how to give and receive radically candid feedback. >> i care deeply about people. that's the easier access for me. but the being direct part doesn't come naturally to people. so you need to create the conditions and make it okay. >> i need to understand the urgency to clarify the project. i appreciate you letting me know because i had no idea. >> set the expectation and bring it into the open to make sure

that people feel comfortable giving feedback. but it's definitely been a journey for me, it's a journey for everyone here at evernote as well. facebook recently announced its new algorithm is getting a huge makeover and that means big changes to business as usual. keenan beasly is the marketer director of blackbaox and is hee to tell us what you need to know to stay on top of the facebook game. thank you for coming and doing this for us. before we get into what you need to do, tell us what is changing. >> so essentially facebook has made a switch on prioritizing personal content. so they really want to see things that are building connections between people. so they are focusing on what you see from your family and friends. but that is a big shift because we have been seeing our news feeds dominated by xwleed and news outlets. so it's a huge switch in the

marketplace. >> if i'm a company and getting a lot of my traffic from ads i'm buying on facebook, how is that going to affect me? >> what is going to happen now is there's less ad inventory. the cost of the ads will go up. so that will be a huge shift on the financial impact on a business owner. >> right. so if you're getting a positive roi on the ads now, perhaps you won't in the future. >> correct. it could slide down it. will be key just to focus on making sure you have relevant content going out in the marketplace. so i would encourage every business owner to double down on creating high-quality con up tent. >> this is content that people are getting naturally from me versus paid ads. >> correct. >> talk to me about the difference between those two things, where i should be focusing. >> there are two things every business owner needs to look at. you have your organic reach, which is really the ads that you are, or the content you're po posting on your page that users see naturally.

you spend time building up a large following base and posting content for them. >> is that getting pushed down as well? >> that will get pushed down as well. >> they are getting hit on both sides. so ads will be more expensive because less ad inventory. and the organic content falls below friends and family content. >> correct. yep. >> so what should i do? i'm a company who has relied so much on facebook to get the word out. where do i put my money now and my effort? right? the effort on the organic side and the money on the outside. >> so i think on the ad side there's no change in facebook business manager. you have to look at really the cost of ads. and that is something you just need to watch financially running your business. because as you have less inventory, you really need to think about, how do i improve my roi or maintain the roi i had before. the big thing there is making sure you are really targeting and reaching the correct audience and giving them something quite cheerful. because you want to move beyond

the pace. you want to use pay as a stimlouse for creating for algorithm for your content. on the organic piece, you need to make sure that you have the best quality content that is going to engage with your audience. and i think what facebook is really doing is shifting things to the video. so the big the is thing is video content. >> if i have video con innocent my organic reach, that will come higher. >> it does, slightly higher in the algorithm. >> what about influencers? there's been so much talk about influencer marketing. so instead of you liking the my page to say jj's coffee, if i got an influencer to like it and that influencer is your friend, that content will still come high, right? >> influencers have an advantage in the marketplace.

with the new shift that mark zuckerberg rolled out, their power is higher. they are seen as friends, not businesses. they are personalities that have engaged with an audience. so it is smart for businesses to leverage the influence they have over their consumer base. so i would expect to see a lot more brands focusing on the right inflow to reach the audiences needed for their business. >> interesting. if you play the influencer, the influencer needs to disclose that. and does that content then fallower down? >> we have not seen that yet. social is quite new in the advertising space, so the regulation is not as strong as we see in tv or in some older blogs. >> and then phillip, the whole thing about algorithms and seeing this on google and facebook, they are trying to get content to people that people want. so it all comes down to, do you have good content that people want? >> absolutely. >> thank you so much. i really appreciate you coming and explaining all this to us.

>> absolutely. appreciate it. thank you. despite a threat from the federal government to crackdown on pot businesses, more states are legalizing miles per hour. vermont just legalized recreational use on the heels of colorado's decision to do so. this h we have more. >> reporter: ease is a weed delivery start-up in one of the hundreds of new pot businesses hoping california moves from medical to recreational pot will pay off. >> simply download the app and then you're able to shop and delivery drive will arrive on average in 20 to 30 minutes. what did you do before working at ease? >> i was an operations adviser for ups. >> ups? >> yeah. >> christian, i noticed talking across the street there's a ups delivery truck. there's two of them right there. do you see a day when there's

going to be a delivery truck of that size driving around the state of? >> definitely. >> in san francisco, scott peabody operated a cannabis business from her house. >> this is a crushed cannabis that has been simmering in here for four hours already. >> the amount you use just depends on how high you want to get? >> yep. >> in california where we have innovation and focus on food, i think we'll see tons of cannabis-related cuisine. >> if you want to incorporate it into your daily life, there's a more healthy option. >> are we going to see java juice with cannabis in it some day? >> i would love that. >> many entrepreneurs hope semiing green means making it, too. >> we think about the intellectual property and how to protect it, well, today we have the story of two businesses on the west coast accused of

violating another company's ip, even though they had no decision to do so. they each received a letter threatening extensive designation. here's a video on how they almost lost everything. catching the waves here is so popular that the locals call their town surf city. >> you look around town and see surf city barbershop, surf city cafe, surf city everywhere. >> reporter: bruce nolan is the third generation of nolans on the wharf serving visitors here more than 50 years. >> we just moved some letters around and said, this looks pretty good. let's throw usa in on the bottom. >> reporter: soon after it went on sale, however, that shirt caught the attention of a rival surfing community 400 miles to the south.

and bruce's mother and co-owner ginger nolan got a very upsetting notice. >> she came to us with a letter she received from lawyers representing the huntington beach conventional visitors bureau. she was not aware of the trademark surf usa. as the santa cruz visitors bureau, christina glenn helps local businesses. >> we sat down with her in the conference room and read the letter. it was a cease and desist letter asking her to cease selling t-shirts emblazend with the logo. >> we demand that on or before september 24, 2006, you must agree to be showing or any other

marks. immediately that means we're going to sue you. >> reporter: harold is a partner at singularity rrp in silicon valley. and he's a santa cruz resident and devoted surfer. >> i was outraged someone claimed rights to something like this. >> reporter: trademarks like coca-cola or exxon are used to identify a brand. they can be registered with the government and protected by law. >> bruce innocently thought a gray t-shirt would be surf city usa. someone else claims to have trademark rights in this. my mom freaked out because she was worried she would lose her house and pool. >> so was i a little bit. >> the cost of fighting back often isn't worth it. but when ted offered his legal services for free, that allowed

the nolans to fight back. the result? they got a compromise agreement. >> we just moved the word usa up a half inch and plugged in tomorrowal below it. so now the original says this. >> my reaction when i got the letter was, this is not real. >> i was kind of like, oh, yeah, it's got to be a joke. >> michelle received a letter. >> here's a letter from kye. >> we request that you ultimately discontinue under the federally protected mark the olympics. >> we came up with that name since we were in the olympic mill. >> in the northwest son. companies out there in the

midd middle. >> we were baffled for sure. initially we figured there was a way around it. >> and i had called my attorney and was like, you know -- he was like, they can seize your profits from prior years. and your assets. and i was like, okay, well, that's out of the question then. and i was like, well, we'll fight it. and then my attorney informed me that no one has ever been successful. people with a lot more money have tried to buy it so the chances are too slim. >> at this point the brother and sister team had to decide if they wanted to challenge the u.s. olympic team and risk even greater losses or back down to accept the high cost of changing their name. >> we're looking around $65,000 to around $75,000 just in that. >> reporter: that's just the start of what it cost to change their name to olympia

provisions. >> i hate to think about it. >> reporter: then there's the costs associated with changing the website. >> you don't have the history on the brain name. it dprops you down in ranking. >> that definitely takes a hit in sales. >> i really thought i was doing it the right way. we had a llc and then to come to find out we don't. i consider myself a fairly intelligent person and i missed this. we have a very exciting announcement. we are offering five people the chance to come on the program and give an elevator pitch in front of two buyers from hsn. they will judge the pitches and invite who will be able to present their project live monday night at "american dreams."

w include a short summary about your product and why you think it's a good fit for hsn. we look forward to seeing those pitches. still to come, how to find and hire a ceo who will take your company to the next level. and our brain trust tackles the tricky issue of staying on brand. thank you so much. thank you! so we're a go? yes! we got a yes! what does that mean for purchasing? purchase. let's do this. got it. book the flights! hai! si! si! ya! ya! ya! what does that mean for us? we can get stuff. what's it mean for shipping? ship the goods. you're a go! you got the green light. that means go! oh, yeah. start saying yes to your company's best ideas. we're gonna hit our launch date! (scream) thank you! goodbye! we help all types of businesses with money, tools and know-how to get business done. american express open.

this e-mail comes from sharon who says, we have a staff over 30 and deliver balloons for every occasion and decorate for both private and corporate firms. how do i hire a ceo to really bring orders to our back end and franchise? >> so sharon, listen, if you're a small business, which it sounds like you are, hiring a ceo is a huge decision that will take a huge amount of money and resources to do the job right. so here's my advice to you, i would be looking for a part-time ceo to come on in and offer you some advice. first by reaching out to an organization like score. you may want to try your small business development center to connect you to people in your area that have management or ceo experience that can come in and kind of work with you to figure out exactly what you want that ceo to do, what their roles and

tasks are and what kind of value a ceo can bring to your company. once you get comfortable with working with somebody part-time, you may decide to bring that person on full-time or you may want to look for somebody else after that. at least you'll have a much better idea of the type of person you're looking for. so start slow. it's a huge investment to take a lot of resources. and if you make the right decision, it could be a really big problem for you. now time for the brain trust where we look at the hard decisions you make in business and find out what people did to make those things happen. today we have christian ameu with a new company, that's so fabulous. a direct to order furniture company. so our audience knows, you're the founder of dwell, which you sold to wayfair. congratulations. and one of my favorite guests all time, the founder and ceo of tough mudder. we met when it was in the early

days. >> that's right. >> that's incredible. look at you. you both built brands that had obsessive customers. people are obsessed with you guys. and i want to know about a time when you could have had an easy win revenue-wise but maybe it would have gone off brand. because i know that's a hard decision to make. let's start with you. >> you get things that come from all over the place and really shiny and worthwhile. but when you dig into it, you realize it will jeopardize your brand. many times people came with me with offers to do diffusion line or other things that weren't central to the business, but would utilize the brand. when you get to it, most of the time it was in the service of the other company coming to partner with us. a lot of times we were easy

reven revenue. at the end of the day, it would have eroded the brand in, we have to not -- we have to put it through the lens to see the awe then 'tisty of the brand. is the person that i'm in this journey with, is it something they would feel is authentic and something core to what we do? >> it is tricky because that sounds good, and it has worked for both of you, but in the moment here's a revenue stream, right? and i'm going to be giving up that revenue and taking the risk that my being married to the brand is going to work in the end. >> it's incredibly tricky. i remember an event, we were like a -- tough mudder is about

trying the community. 22,000 people have tattoos on them. if that doesn't talk about branding, i don't know what does. but most of the time it will give us publicity and we can track the responses. if we didn't do it, i'm not sure we would be in business today, but it's a tough decision to make. >> what are the things people ask you when you ask yourselves. you know there is guaranteed revenue and your business is going to grow versus a smaller ride for your business. what do you ask yourself when opportunity comes? >> you're playing the chess board ten moves forward. what is the outcome of this going to be? is the short-term gain worth the

long-term? if i do this deal, what does that mean for this brand i've created? and ultimately, most of the decisions that we created up here would erode quickly and drop down to a place that is really difficult to recover from. so i think in a lot of ways, really considering every option is a long-term journey. >> how do you get yourself to believe in the things you said? >> it is trick iier. it is more than making money and doing it for the sake of it. but during the global tribe,

help us with compliment and courage. we say, is it consistent with the mission of the company? is it helping us achieve those goals? and we have a high-class problem, there are so many things we could be doing with the brand, i have to make sure of that. >> thank you for coming on. we really appreciate it. thank you. this week's "your business" selfie comes to us from mobile, alabama. she and her husband are -- pick up your smartphone and take a selfie of your business, no professional shot please, and send it to msnbc.com. or tweet it to @msnbcyourbiz. and do not forget this, the

location of your business. and use the hash tag. thank you for joining us. we love hearing from you. if you have a question or comment or anything, e-mail us at yourbusiness@msnbc.com. we put all the segments from today's show on there plus a whole lot more. and we are putting more content on the digital and social media platforms as well. we look forward to seeing you next time. until then, i'm jj ramberg. and remember, we make your business our business. so that's the idea. what do you think? i don't like it. oh. nuh uh. yeah. ahhhhh. mm-mm. oh. yeah. ah. agh. d-d-d... no. hmmm. uh... huh. yeah. uh... huh.

in business, there are a lot of ways to say no. thank you so much. thank you. so we're doing it. yes. start saying yes to your company's best ideas. we help all types of businesses with money, tools and know-how to get business done. american express open. welcome to "politics nation." late last night president trump took to twitter to shamelessly drag democrats on daca. an his precious border wall and the race to avoid another government shutdown. setting up a testy atmosphere just two days out from his first state of the union