EP208: From Control to Collaboration: Shifting Leadership Mindsets with Chris Dyer

Hey, thanks for having me, Brad.

So I've been a serial entrepreneur my whole life and had businesses and I'm now at that stage in my life where I've sold those businesses, most of them, and, you know, I have some other little fun things going, but, you know, did my time running a big company and having thousands of employees and sort of just. stumbled upon this little accidental thing of like, if your culture is great and your people are really happy, it's amazing how much better work is and how much, how more often we reach our goals and my frustrations were less and all of that. And so along the way, people started asking me to come and speak and to train and write books. And so I became an accidental speaker and accidental trainer and an accidental author because none of those things were ever on my. to-do list. It was always go start businesses, run businesses. But I kind of found a message that really seems to resonate with people and I love to go out there and share with them.

So if I use, you know, my, my biggest company, my biggest success is sort of a good example. For the first like seven, eight years, I ran the company as best as, you know, I think most people do. They take their experiences. teachers, parents, coaches, you know, things like that. And you come up with some bizarre version of what leadership is to you. And you try to go out there and lead and manage. And I did okay. It was fine. But then a big recession hit in 2008. And I was turning to all my people saying, hey, I need ideas. We got to figure out how to save the business. And they all turned around and look right back at me and said, cool, what's the idea? We'll go do it. And I realized I had screwed up the culture, that we were not a culture of where people came up with ideas or where people understood enough about the business that they could really make worthwhile suggestions and feel invested into the company. They were just, well, if Chris says to go do it, we'll go do it the best we can. But they were essentially following orders. They were doing what they were told. And that was not the right culture for us to continue to grow and continue to get better. And so when I fixed that, I went on a big journey to figure out what that meant and what was really the solution. It was amazing what happened, right? So the ending of the story, if you want to go to the back of the book and know how it ends, the ending is 14 times best places to work, five times fastest growing company with Inc. Magazine. I mean, we just took off. And went crazy, not because we sold something better, not because we were any better than our competitors, not because our customer services. We just literally, all I did was spend my time trying to figure out how to make the culture better, how to make people's jobs better, how to remove friction and get rid of things that didn't work and remove frustrations and just make things run better for them as people. And then they did a way more amazing job at sales and marketing and customer service and all that. And I literally stopped worrying about any of that stuff. And that was my entire like job for seven or eight years was like being in everyone's business, trying to like make sales a little bit better, marketing a little bit better. I was constantly in all these meetings with people. And then the opposite was, I'm never going to do that anymore. All I'm going to do is ask you how I can help you, you know, make decisions faster, get you information that you need. Right. And, and, Essentially, it's like making better roads, right? And I stopped driving the car. I just focused on making better roads for everybody, making better situations for them. And that was the key, right? That was the big aha moment.

Yeah. And so I take the perspective that you as the leader, the business owner, or maybe, maybe you're just the leader of your team. I mean, it doesn't have to be so grand. It can just be like, Hey, I'm the manager of these five people. It's the same thing. It's, I need to set the direction. This is where we're going. These are our goals. This is what we're trying to do. People like us do things like this. People like us do not do things like that. We're setting very clear boundaries, goals, and direction. Then it's allow them to try to figure out how to get to that destination, whatever their part is. So let's just say, hey, our team, we want to go and make, I don't know,1,000 sales phone calls. That's our goal is to make 1,000 sales phone calls every single month. Cool. How do I help you do that? Do you need better equipment? Do you need a better software? Do you need an auto dialer? Do you need like, how do I help you reach that goal? Right? I'm not telling you how to reach that goal. I'm not telling you how to make those calls or when to make those calls or where to make those calls. I'm saying, how do I help you be, get to do that thing? And you ultimately have some autonomy and control over like the when, the when, the how, like all that kind of stuff. And I get out of that business of, because I had salespeople who were like, listen, I make my calls from 6 a. m. to 11 a. m. And like, I get them done. And then after lunch, I do all of my reports and proposals and meetings and like, blah, blah, blah. Like they had a very clear idea about what worked for them. And I got out of that business. I just got into like, well, how do I get you the tools you need? Right. So it's not necessarily them telling you what to do. It's more or less of them, you partnering with them and figuring out how to help them be the most successful version of themselves. Because one size fits one. Every person's unique. Every company's unique. Every team's unique. And what's going to work for them, however granular or macro you want to go out into that, it's only going to work. for that group of people or that person, that one way for that period of time, for as long as it's that thing until it changes and you have to find that new, what is that new thing and how does that work? We can't take, well, Google and Apple do it this way. Therefore, that's how we should do it. That's stupid, right? We can take, you know, we can take some inspiration from people, but we have to figure out what really works for us.

Personally, I did not have the problem of to change my mindset. I realized that I had to do it and it was going to be so important for the future of the company. Now. Maybe you do as a leader, maybe you are going to struggle and you need some help and support and finding mentors, finding outside help, finding a business coach, whatever that may be. I do that. Some of that work for people now in trying to be that person. But for me personally, like I knew shift had to happen. My struggle was with my people because they had been conditioned by me and they had been programmed and they had done it so many times where. they would just come to me for the answer. And it was easier to just walk in my office and tell me what was going on and to give me what they thought and then ask me to make the decision or ask me to give them the answer. And so what I had to do was train myself to not give them the answer. Even if I knew what the answer was, even if I knew I could shorten the pain, I had for like two years. It was, well, what do you think we should do? And they would tell me. And unless they said something that was going to harm someone or get us into a lawsuit or something really terrible, it was, well, go try it and let me know what happens. I continue to encourage them to go back, to think about it themselves. How would they handle the situation? Go try it. Let me know how it works. Now, if they keep stumbling three or four times, then I would get more involved and I would be more. maybe a bit more directive. But 99% of the time, they generally got it right. Either that first time or the second time, the second iteration of that. And so they learned what to do on their own. They learned, you know, what was the right response. And they also had that sort of like, you know, building up a muscle. You know, if you never did any bicep curls, I mean, your biceps are going to be pretty crappy. You know, I'm suddenly asking someone to go and lift up all this stuff. In any time to practice and build that muscle of making decisions and realizing what's going to work and getting confident with it.

The only interesting is we ended up not having to fire or remove anybody. However, we did have people self-select out. Gotcha. So when we started doing these changes and we became more transparent and we started being more intentional about goals and we started measuring things a lot better, right? So it was very obvious about who was doing well and who wasn't doing well. We started, you know, really adding in all these great, like I had these seven pillars of amazing culture. And so we started doing all seven things. Some people were like, oh. everyone's going to know that I've been pretending to work and I don't really work very hard. And, you know, and so they, they went and found another job before we got rid of them because we were creating that culture. And so for some people, I should say for most people, it was a huge step up for them. It was like, thank you. They were so happy. They wanted that. And for those very few low performers, it was, they're just going to dip out and disappear.

We want to make sure that we are being fair to people. based on who they are and what they're capable of. I'm not a fan of treating everyone exactly the same. Equal doesn't work because what you are able to do is different than what somebody else is able to do. And there's lots of different reasons for that. There could be physical differences. There could be mental differences. There could be issues that people have. It could also be like work in your home environments. People are single parents and they have three kids. how much time they can actually work is different than somebody who's single and has all this extra time to like be burning the midnight oil and all of that. So I always looked at people as individuals, again, one size fits one, and try to come up with goals and standards that made sense for them around inside of what made sense for our company and then graded them or judged them against that standard. Not, well, I, you know, you, I'm going to judge you and you're a totally different person than this other salesperson, let's say. And then, well, you're not doing as good as Dave. Well, Dave lives alone. He's 21 and he's doing all this stuff. And then you're 37. You've got three kids. You're a single parent. You're driving two hours. It took into work and back. You have a totally different factors, right? So that's why treating you fairly is always the standard that I tried to use.

So I think typically it shouldn't be an issue. Now, there are types of work and jobs where maybe you might have alignment around politics and religion and things like that. But I think for most companies, it's not. I mean, I had thousands of employees. I guarantee that most of them did not. We did not see totally eye to eye. We all didn't vote the same. We all didn't like think the same stuff. But instead we need to think about creating what are our core values? What are the things that company do? And are you aligned with that? Right. And, and so we're trying to do this thing at this company and these are our values. We, we think these are the important things. It doesn't matter if you pray to the same, you know, entity or you voted the same way or not. Are we all aligned on these things? And if we are, then we can exist and work well together and respect one another. Because ultimately, we end up having like 90% shared values,95% sometimes shared values. If you really look at it, the amount of polarization that's out there, and we're getting into politics, I think is somewhat baked in. to headlines and creating you know us versus them and all of that but like anytime i've sat down with anybody who voted very differently than me that thinks and believes very differently than me we end up having most of the things in common right right we we generally can get along about most things and so does it really matter about that inside of work i don't think so um obviously if you're companies specifically providing services to a particular ideology or a particular religion, yeah, that might matter. But I mean, let's just say you're an HVAC repair person. Like, does it matter? You know, are you going to screen out your clients if they didn't vote the same way you did? Like whether or not you're going to go do the service? I mean, of course not. Right. So we want to find where we commonality on shared values, but then also really be celebrating. This is one of my pillars. What makes that person unique? Because they may be really certain people who have, let's say a certain subset of beliefs and ideas. They may be really great with certain clients and other ones might be great with other clients. And that's going to ultimately help us reach our goals.

You had a high level and there are no particular order, but transparency, positivity, so positive leadership. Uniqueness, measurement, listening, recognition, and knowing how to deal with mistakes.

Yeah. And this is usually the first question is, you know, which one is the most important? And the simple answer is if you're listening to this. or you're watching this podcast and you're like, oh, I said one of those words and you kind of flinched and you're like, yeah, that's not our company. That's not, we're not very good at that. Well, that's the one that's the most important for you to go tackle. However, I will say that where most companies end up starting when they want to go do this work is around transparency. Because if we don't understand, if our employees don't understand as much information as possible. about the business and about what we do and why we do it and what we sell and where we sell it and who our clients are and like how we spend the money and why we spend the money this way. And like, if they don't understand as much as possible, they cannot give you great ideas. They cannot be much help to your business if they are totally in the dark about what we're doing and why we're doing it that way. And that was the huge aha moment for me. I started sharing our the summary of our P &L every single month with our employees. Every single one got a copy of that P &L. And we talked about it in our company-wide meeting once a month. And we talked about where we were seeing revenue change and maybe new clients. And what were we seeing from trends? Where were we spending money? Where were things more expensive? We weren't giving them the detail of the report. So they didn't know what everybody made. We weren't giving them... you know, stuff that maybe would be inappropriate. But then each department, we were giving them their detailed report. So like ops, like here's all of the things we spent that was ops marketing. Here's all of the vendors. And we had people would go in and audit that and look at that. In one year, we were 35% more profitable.

Once we started doing that. 35%. Because they were like, hey, did you know we could combine these two vendors and get a better price? hey, I have my cousin and he has like, we can get Blue Shield, like we can get a way better rate on our medical for our employees than what you're getting now. Like I can pull that. People just are coming out of the woodworks with all this like crazy, wonderful stuff, ways for us to save money. And then they also were like, hey, I noticed that these kinds of clients, we seem to be really profitable with those. And these ones were not so profitable. Like, let's go get more of those kinds of clients. But they started understanding it wasn't just about getting any kind of business in the door. Certain business was better for us than other kinds of business. And so that just in a year, just that exercise alone made a drastic difference. We started talking about why people left and why we hired somebody and being really open and honest about it. Hey, Sally left us. She wasn't happy. She went to our competitor. These are the things I think we could have done better. This is how I think we could have supported Sally better. And we're going to look to do these things better for everybody going forward. Like we were really, we didn't like pretend, you know, that at that meeting the next month, Sally, Sally, who, you know, what do you mean? You know, I've seen companies like almost pretend like someone didn't, doesn't exist anymore because they left. And like, and then everyone's filling in the gaps with like, well, why did Sally leave? And what's going on? And was there a problem? Hey, this is what, sometimes you can't tell them everything. Sometimes there's medical or legal constraints or things like that. But like, if we could share, we talked about it. You know, we started sharing our goals with each other. So what are, what are our company goals? But then like departments started sharing their goals with each other. And then like, we started having employees share their goals with everyone on their team. That was huge. That was groundbreaking. because what we realized was that they were just sharing their goals with their manager. So they knew what their goal was, their manager knew what their goal was, but nobody else knew what you, that person was being judged against and what was good or bad. And so why did Tom get that promotion? I don't understand. Tom seems like an idiot, but if I know Tom's goals were like X, Y, and Z and Tom blew them out of the water and be like, well, then I understand why he got promoted. Like. He may act like an idiot in the lunchroom, but like he's performing like he's you can see it. There's that transparency. Right. Also, if I hit I'm going to hit my goal, it's September and I'm like, there's no way I'm not hitting my goal. I'm doing great. But you're on my team, Brad. I see you're struggling and I know you're probably not going to meet your goal. I might start stepping in to help you. I might be able to help coach you or give you some suggestions or do things to help you as your teammate. Because ultimately the goal is for the team to reach their goals and the company to reach their goals. It doesn't matter if I reach my goal and you don't reach your goal, then like the company is going to be worse off. And so we started seeing they started helping each other without us ever even asking them to, because they knew what each other were trying to accomplish. And so they could step in, or I know you were going through a divorce or like your kid was sick or like some, I might. Hey, I'm going to step in and help you because I know how close you are to reaching your goal. That's going to be huge for your family. And I have a little bit extra bandwidth. Like I can do that stuff. That's the kind of thing that transparency just creates such magic for companies.

you know it's um this is part of the uh genius of scrum and agile and i talk about this in my book under the measurement pillar that they're big thing is that you don't, if you're going to go build something, you're going to go make something or do a project, you end up failing if like you only, let's just say it's a sales project and you only have salespeople on that project. They always saw a better result if they had like someone from sales and someone from marketing and someone from ops and someone from customer service and like having these different types of people. To your point, they have different experiences, they come with different perspectives, they have different ideas. It's easier for them to catch blind spots. Because maybe like a bunch of salespeople will be like, well, we just need to send more emails. And marketing is like, yeah, you can't just send more emails. And let me tell you why. We can send better emails. We can get some more targeted emails. But salespeople have been like, well, how do we send 100,000 emails a day? Cool, do that. And your domain is going to be broken. And you're not going to send emails to anybody. So having those different perspectives to understand how do we actually get to a better place is really, really important. But that comes around shared goals. Right. Doing projects together, being transparent and then having a really good measurement around that. What's working? Did it work? And if it didn't work, well, OK, why? Mistakes. How do we figure out how to correct that? How do we fix that? How do we get better for the next time? You know, and work together to kind of create that. And sometimes we're doing that every single day with our teams or our senior teams on just growing and making the business better. And sometimes it's like. well, we need a whole new product or we need a whole new division or we need a whole new sales channel, or maybe we're going to expand our business to a whole new market. And it's a big, giant thing. And we're better off getting the right people with lots of different perspectives in there to help us reach that goal.

In my book, I sort of have the, in three sections. The first section is what do you have to do not to suck? Like what's the bare minimum? I love it. Right. And then. The second part is like, if you want to be great, here's the seven pillars and how do you have a great culture? And then the third part is, if you've identified anything you need to change, how do you actually do the change management? How do you actually get people to change? Because that can be hard. So the bare minimum is, do you have goals? Do you have you decided your core values? Do you have them written down on a wall? Like, do people know them? Do people know why you do your business? Like, what's your purpose? And I don't, the purpose of your company is not to make money. That is a really necessary and very important outcome, but it is not why. Again, if we use like HVAC as an example, I mean, yeah, you want to go and fix, you know, air conditioning and make money and all that. But like, ultimately your purpose could be to provide great comfort for our clients. It could be something like that, something a little bit more elevated. That is ultimately what we're trying to do. Because if you figure that out and you talk about your values and you set your goals, then people can start to make decisions and help you create better situations around that. So if we understand that what we're trying to do is help make our clients more comfortable, let's say in that example, then it's not just about fixing their air conditioning. It's also about how do we interact with them? How do we communicate with them? How quickly do we get back with them? There's all of these other little sub things that turn into really important questions around that entire process for that client that's going to make them want to call us back again and refer other business to us and all of that. So that's the bare minimum. You've got to come up with that and you've got to make sure that your people understand it. You make sure you're talking about it all the time, like at least once a month on an all staff, like, hey, these are our values. Hey, John did this thing and he really represented our value of. transparency or our value of community or whatever that thing is, continuing to talk about, recognize and reinforce, this is the stuff we care about. And it's not like we talked about it once and put it on in the lunchroom and then no one ever remembers that it's there. Like it has to be a part of that repeating ethos over and over and over again. And that's just to be the bare minimum. That's just to not suck. Right. And then if you want to do better, then there's like all these other things you can do to be great. If you want to be, you know, an industry leader or have, you know, super profitable company or whatever. I will say a super easy exercise that I could give everybody. And as a giveaway, if you text 33777 and you put my name, Chris, I will send you 25 starter questions. I'll give you a head start on this little exercise and I'm going to give you. And it's start surveying your people one question every week. I think you should ditch the annual survey. I don't like them. I think it's dumb. It's asking too many questions at one time and then it's really hard to like make changes and all of that. I'm more of a, how do we make small incremental changes over time? Very, you know, every week, identifying issue, make a change, figure out how to make the company better and then go find the next little small problem to keep fixing instead of. you know, we're going to go do this big giant thing. We heard all this stuff. I'm going to go buy this big giant software. And then like, doesn't really help the average employee. So ask them like, what resource do you wish you had? Who in the company is killing it right now? What in your work is draining you? What clients driving you nuts? What do you, if you had a magic wand, how would you change our business? Like you start asking them these questions and you, the answers you get back are like, Oh my gosh. And some people like, They don't have anything. That's okay. But you're, you're asking on a consistent basis. So you're showing them that you're listening. You go back to them and told them, tell them, this is what I heard. And if it's appropriate, this is what I'm going to do about it. You know, you all told me that, you know, maybe it's like something, some sort of tool they don't have. Okay. We only have three shovels and you all need like. If we just bought seven more shovels, everyone could have their own shovel and like that would just solve a huge headache. And that sounds silly, but like sometimes that's the simple thing we discover when I go and work with a company and like there's a lack of a tool or a lack of a resource that's driving them nuts because they all, they're all having to share and like beg, borrow, steal. And if they just had a few more shovels or a few more computers or another monitor or whatever it is, like their life would be so much better. And they wouldn't be going home and complaining to their family about how much they hate their day because they're just missing this one little resource or tool.

And it's crazy how when we hear that, we're like, well, that's not a big deal. Like we could just, we can handle that. We can do that. And yet if we don't ask. as leaders, what's that thing that's driving you nuts? I mean, I realized that like, I had employees that only had one monitor. I didn't know that they only had one monitor. I had all these people, certain group of people that just were never given a second monitor. And like, it was consistent that they were like, it's so hard to deal with all these windows on my computer. We have so many windows and I get, I feel like I get bogged down and I get lost. And it was a frustration for them. And I was like, Why are people saying this? They know they just put it on their second monitor. Oh, they don't have a second monitor. So we went and bought like those hundred people that we identified a second monitor. Immediately they were happier. It was $109 or something for a monitor. Send it to them on Amazon. Small issue. Can you imagine like those people leave because they felt frustrated in their job? How much I would have spent to replace them, retrain them and do all insane and just absolutely insane. But I had to ask them. I had to look at the data and think about it. I had to go back and talk to some people. And then when I showed up on that meeting and said, hey, we realize that 100 of you didn't have a second monitor. Like, I'm so sorry we missed that. That's on us. New monitors are on their way, right? We're fixing that problem. Now, for the other 4,400 people who are not affected by that, what did they think? They were like, oh, Chris listened. He did something about it. That's awesome that they fixed the problem. We admitted we were wrong. We screwed up. Whatever we did in our hiring process, we didn't help you in the right way. We screwed up and we're going to rectify that. So they saw that we cared and we dealt with that problem. But they also know next week when I ask the question, next time it comes up, if they have an issue, they can feel safe to bring that up because I'm going to deal with it. Listen, sometimes they ask me for stuff I couldn't deal with. They were like, I hate that we have to do this thing on this website. I'm so sorry. There is literally a law that says we have to do that. And here it is. And let me train you. Let me show you why. If you can get the law changed, I'm happy to get you out of having to do that thing. But like there was sometimes like they just didn't know there was a law. They didn't know why we were making them do this certain procedure a certain way that we were trying to not get sued for doing it the wrong way. But they didn't have that training or they didn't remember or they didn't know. And so, again, I heard you. This is what I'm going to do about it. And we kept talking. And that just created such an environment of growth. And, again, the pillar of listening where I'm hearing you. I'm intentionally going to do that. And then they would come to me on their own, right, or they'd come to their boss, their leader on their own with, hey, they didn't wait for my question. Hey, I'm having this frustration. Can you help me? Oh, yeah, we can help you. Right. So that's a really powerful way for any leader at any level. If you're managing more than like two people, you can start doing that survey right now. And there's some really complex things you can do with like, do you keep it secret or do you? I used to like sometimes for three months. Hey, everything you say, I'm never going to share with anybody else. I may repeat the sentiment, but I'm never going to show anybody anybody's. you know, specific answers. And then for three months, I would say, whatever you answer, I'm literally sharing with the whole company. I'm taking all of the answers and I'm going to send them out to every single employee and say, this is what we heard. This is what we heard. And here's all of the answers everybody else said, in case you're interested in what we, what the data was, we might aggregate the data for them, but we would, and it was always like fun things like what customers are most profitable or. You know, who's killing it for us right now? We'll be like Tom, Sally, and Mary got like the top scores across the company is like the key employees. We want to share that data out to everybody. So there are very simple things anybody can do.

Right. And that consistency is so key. And that's why I love the one question a week, because if I just waited until December or January to ask them a bunch of questions, they're like, is anyone really going to read this? Does anyone care? If I go out on a limb and I say something, am I going to get in trouble? Do I have the psychological safety? And so by cutting it down, it's just, well, here's one question. And now you see how I reacted. I was another question and you see how I reacted. We're building and we're building and we're building that trust. And, you know, it doesn't happen on the first question, but about five or six weeks in, you're going to start getting magic. You're going to get some good stuff even when you start, but like they start seeing that you're really sticking with this and you're really going to keep listening to them. It's huge.

Well, I mean, and Simon Sinek made this really famous, you know, start with why. That's the most important question you can answer for your business is why do we do what we do? And again, that's our purpose. Why? And then we elevate that into a higher level. I mean, Apple's was to make a small ding in the universe or something like that, right? And that kind of sounds very obscure or whatever, but they were trying to make cool stuff that would actually make an impact on society. You know, that was them. you want to translate into you're a plumber, right? Maybe you're not going to make it a ding in the universe is not your why. Your why might be like, you know, something else, but it really helps focus our work and our people in a way that that matters. Because otherwise, to your point, it's just we'll do what I say because I say so. But the problem is, is they ultimately end up in situations where they need to make decisions and you're not there. And they need a guiding force, a guiding light. If they got to make a 50-50 decision, do I give credit for here? Do I do this extra work? Do I help this person out? Well, why do we do what we do? What is that why? And that will usually help them answer that question pretty consistently.

That's a good question. You know, probably the other one that I find really helps people is the positivity pillar. So you didn't ask me about that one. Just so people understand, I'm not talking about toxic positivity, that everything's okay and everything's happy and we're going to ignore problems. What I'm talking about is that the best cultures, the best leaders, the best employees always are very curious about why something's working, why something is good. Why is this customer such a good relationship? Or why is this employee doing such a great job? We get very curious about that. I can't tell you how many times I've had people tell me, you know, like, oh, you know, how's work going? Oh, I'm doing great. Like my division's number one, you know, in the company or nationwide, like we're doing great. And then one of my friends will ask, oh, they come and ask you like how you're doing. I'm like, no, nobody wants to know. Like nobody, like they just leave me alone. Like I'm on a little island and they're over there like yelling and screaming at the people who are making their number. And they're completely ignoring this anomaly. of like your division or your department or your team is killing it. Great companies go, I don't care that this other division is terrible. I care that this one's doing really well and I want to understand why. And I want to help take that information and share it with everybody else so everyone else can get better and the company can get better. Instead of spending all my time, resources, and energy on trying to lift up a division or a team that's failing. I need to get curious about who's winning and why. And that information is ultimately guides us in a much more impactful way.

Three, actually, because my first one, I did a second edition. So it's like the same book, but we re-released it with twice the content. Gotcha.

Can't pick my own. I'm currently reading The Laws of Connection by David Robson, which is really interesting. If you want to... kind of understand loneliness and how to make friends and how that impacts your health. I think Captivate by Vanessa Van Edwards is really interesting if you want to get better at just making better connections with people and being able to come off as more warm or more authoritative. If you're in sales, if you're in customer service, like it's a great book to kind of understand just some really simple things that you can do to kind of be better. Trying to think I, a couple of other, I always reread, um, how to influence, how to win friends and influence people every single year. It's a, an annual read for me. And I always like, feel like, how did I not remember that one bit of information that I reread? Um, don't complain, right? Don't be the complainer is like the big one that I always have to remind myself. Don't be critical. Cause it's easy to. people had me come in as a consultant to come in and be like, well, that's wrong and that's wrong and that's wrong and that's wrong. And like, that's not the way to get people to change.

Yeah. Revenge of the tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell was fantastic book this year. Kind of re-release of his. I could go on and on forever, but those are some recent books I did last month that I think would be great.

Thanks for having me, Brad.