Mark and Jim Talk Humane Management Collaborwocky Ep. 001

Mark: Oh, thank you for smart. Does things is better than labeling me as says things or writes things. I try to do all of the above. But it would be interesting to know the background of the people in the audience. I am one of Jim’s friends from sort of adjacent realms of work, if you will, I started my career in manufacturing, and I saw a lot of inhumane ways of treating people in that environment. Then for the last 15 years, I’ve worked in healthcare where I’ve seen, unfortunately, inhumane ways of treating people in the workplace. So, as Jim said our alignment is we want to change them. So, I’m not the guy to ask about agile points, or whatever these things are. And I know Jim doesn’t care so much about that, either. So, that’s the alignment we come from different places. But we have very similar goals when it comes to workplaces, right?

Jim: Yes. So, what Mark might not mention is that he’s a multiple award-winning author. He’s got a lot of books about lean healthcare, about ways to solve problems, to fix things when they’re broken, and generally in ways that don’t involve blame, pain, or frustration. So, later on, I’ll put up a link to one of his books that’s currently free on the Kindle. But overall, there’s a bunch of books in there, and you would be well pressed to read a bunch of them because they’re awesome. On our side, Toniann, who’s in chat, and I, as many of you already know, we wrote the book, Personal Kanban and kind of invented the form. But that for us is simply an instantiation of how we make sure that we treat ourselves well, while we’re working and share enough information with other people that they can also treat as well. So, we actually give people the opportunity to treat us well. So, if someone doesn’t know how much work is on your plate, or what you’re stuck on, they’re always going to come up and mistreat you because they don’t know any better. And they just need something. And we could go on for hours about that. But I guess to launch this. This is about humane management in general. So, Mark, when we say the word humane management, what does it make you think?

Mark: I mean, I think there’s different dimensions of that. I think the first thing that comes to mind is safety. So, when I mentioned in manufacturing environments and in healthcare environments, physical safety is still a concern in a lot of workplaces. I think it’s inhumane to put people in working conditions where they can be injured. That includes ergonomic stresses that accumulate over time. Healthcare, if you look at the data, I think this would surprise people because a lot of health care work is very physical, nurses and other healthcare professionals get injured at really high rates, like it’s up on par with logging as an industry that people might expect to be dangerous and it shouldn’t have to be. So, I think there’s physical safety in a lot of workplaces. I’m a big fan of how Amy Edmondson from Harvard frames psychological safety. And I think in general, this is what I learned -- I started my career at General Motors. My idealistic notion that people shouldn’t hate coming to work. We don’t want to see people burned out. We don’t want to see like in healthcare, there’s a really high percentage of nurses who literally quit and leave the profession within the first couple of years. That’s due to working conditions. Some of that is -- I mean, it’s all very systemic. Some of it is behavior-based. There’s a notion -- like I interviewed a nurse executive recently for a podcast. We talked about this idea that I’ve heard a lot about in my travels quote-unquote, “Nurses eat their young.” There are these cycles of hazing and cruelty in the workplace. And we can do better than that, and we need to do better than that. So, maybe in a way that sounds like that sets the bar really low. But clearly, there’s still a gap between where we are today, and I think where we should be.

Mark: Yeah, there’s professional pecking order in healthcare, even amongst physicians within the physician ranks, there are perceived hierarchies of who is better, not just from seniority, but within disciplines. And yeah, nurses sometimes get bullied by doctors. And I thought it was interesting, I asked this nurse executive, “Well, does some of this roll down hill, unfortunately, where a doctor can get away with bullying a nurse, and then that nurse maybe responds by taking it out on a medical assistant?” And actually, she challenged that and she’s like, “No, some people are just bullies. It tends not to flow along. Now like, I think the doctors bullying others may create this permissiveness. This environment that says bullying is accepted, but the bullying might be more excuse amongst those who have a higher professional rank, or the reality of surgeons bringing in maybe millions of dollars of business in a way a nurse does not. So, she was bringing up really interesting issues. And I think this would apply -- software companies and salespeople, sorry to be stereotypical there. But there are some who are notorious for behaving badly. I’ve been bullied by a software salesperson I worked with, almost 20 years ago. And that behavior is often excused if they are a quote-unquote, high performer, if they’re delivering business results.

Jim: Yeah. And that was a -- I had a boss once that had actually, like, literally systematized his bullying, also.

Mark: How so?

Jim: So, he would hire, usually young women right out of college, who were incredibly capable. And it wasn’t difficult because we were working in civil engineering, and it wasn’t easy at the time for women to get jobs at all. So, my boss would go and he would find them. And they were all awesome. They’re all completely awesome. But he would bring them in, he would build them up. And then when they got kind of a head of steam and they’re like, “Hey, I can do this, this is really great.” He would call them into a private meeting and tear them down and then build them back up again. And it was abuse. I mean, it was just straight-up abuse. And when I confronted him about it, because he was mad, because when they would be abused by him, they would come to me, and then I would basically say -- I would give them the same speech that my boss had just given them like word for word, because it was wrote, and they would be shocked. And he viewed my undermining his authority as undermining his authority. So, he called me on the carpet for it. And I said, “What you’re doing is abusive.” And he says, “No, this is the way you build people up.” He was like, [crostalk] “Have you read any books about how the military works? And this is how you build people up.” And I was like, “These people aren’t in the military.” And they were already doing okay.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. He’d read The Prince.

Mark: I mean, one of my clients at Children’s Medical Center, Dallas, an amazing leader. He was the laboratory director, he had retired from military medicine, and was working in the civilian sector. He was a Peter Sangay, I don’t know if you know the phrase. He was really into the systems thinking literature and servant leadership and Deming. And he didn’t know lean, but when he learned about lean, it resonated with him because it was, I think, building on those foundations of what he already knew, and the type of organization he wanted to build. And Jim taught me, he said well this stereotypical command and control, bark orders and do whatever I say mentality is like, well, there’s a time and a place for that maybe in battle. But daily life in the military, and especially daily life and military medicine was not like that at all. So, I learned a lot from Jim and appreciated his perspectives on that. And I say that having no experience in the military of my own.

Jim: Right. And I think that that’s true, whether somebody is adopting Six Sigma or lean or Prince 2 or some book that they read about how to get something done. When they take their interpretation of that and try to apply it as an unchanging blunt object that is inhumane management kind of like writ large. It doesn’t matter how well-meaning you are if you come in with bullying lean or bullying agile, people are going to rightly resist.

Mark: And a little bit of trivia real quick, you might know, you might be surprised by this, Jim. I at one point was Prince 2 certified.

Jim: And at one point, so does that mean that you’ve strayed, are you like a recovering -- [crosstalk]

Mark: Do you have to renew that? I assume you have to renew that?

Jim: I thought that once you bought a Prince 2 it was yours to keep.

Mark: That workshop was a frog and it turned into a prince or something. But that’s a whole different story of an inhumane work environment. I won’t bore you with that story. But I’ll tell you time over a drink, Jim.

Jim: Well, that was -- The praise to is very big in international government -- governance. And so in our work with the UN, various elements of the UN, we’ve run into Prince 2 a lot. And what I think is always funny is people seem genuinely shocked. That you can do something less strict, like flabbergasted. They’re like, “You mean I can talk to my colleagues? For real?” Like, yeah, you can. It’s okay. There’s no Prince 2 cops hiding behind the desks that are going to jump out and say you didn’t follow the script.

Mark: I don’t need to have a conversation approved by the steering committee first?

Jim: What’s also been interesting to watch is that people become very attached to a specific outline of work. Like, let’s just say that they get together and they might even do a value stream mapping exercise, or a consultant might come in and help them with it or whatever. And it goes well, and then it stays there long after it’s shelf life. And they don’t realize that a value stream map isn’t concrete, it’s cheese and it’s going to mold and go bad. So, you need to renew it, you need to get the value out of it, and then go buy some more cheese. And I will go work at places and then we’ll go back five years later, and they’ll still have the same value stream up and then they’re like, we’ve got all these problems, the system is broken down. It’s like the system didn’t break down, you just kept driving the car after it ran out of gas.

Mark: If it’s okay I want to come back to where earlier you used the modifier bullying, and I think we would be in agreement that quote-unquote bullying lean is not lean at all. But what I saw happening 1995, General Motors, this was my first job right out of school. The General Motors management system was predicated on bullying. I mean, that’s what I saw at the plant where I worked and that was the experience that I had you know yelling and cursing and screaming and stomping your feet blaming people for systemic problems that were usually created by management, but blaming the workers for that. But GM had that bullying style and remember when the leaders there would kind of try to rationalize, maybe like that person you were talking about, Jim. He would rationalize it as well I get blamed and bullied so then that’s how we lead here. But when they hired people from Toyota suppliers, there was somebody from Nissan, there were people brought in to try to help teach lean but in that framework and foundation of bullying, it became I guess you could call it bullying lean.

I’ll use an example and there might be parallels to reviews or retrospectives or whatever you might call it in software land, but this daily review that was supposed to happen between first and second shift. And every department was expected to track their hourly production numbers. This is not rocket science but this is often considered part of lean management. You have your theoretical, if everything worked well we would make 92 parts per hour, then you’d write down the actual and then you would explain the gap in between. And in one environment, let’s say a Toyota supplier plant that’s data, right. It’s fact. We want to understand where the constraints is in the plant right now for these departments that flow into each other so we can allocate resources and be helpful and supportive and prioritize problem-solving.

But no, these hourly numbers were used to bludgeon people. You roll up that sheet of paper and it turned into a hammer. And people would get yelled at and smacked with the hammer. And the poor consultant, the people who were brought in to be internal consultants were like well, this is not what we intended at all when we taught that tool. Like well, unfortunately, yeah. I mean that -- And so was the planet better off because they had that lean practice that get armed inhumane leaders, bullying leaders with the information they needed to bully people? No, we probably weren’t that better off because of that. And that led to all kinds of dysfunction of people fudging the numbers and hiding problems and all the things that might be predictable to people in this audience.

Jim: I often see KPIs not be key performance indicators but things used to kill people indiscriminately. And it’s led, for a lot of people, to push back on metrics at all. So, it’s like we don’t want to have any metrics because we don’t want essentially to get caught. And so it’s not the thing like how can we flip the culture so that there’s no getting caught, that there’s a system and its operating, we’re professionals and we’re interacting with it and the things that it does or the things that it does. And it’s our job as professionals to turn the knobs, pull the levers, push the button so that it runs better, and we run better. We go home on time, we go home in a good mood, we go home understanding the value that we’ve created, the things that we’ve learned, and we don’t go home saying, “Oh, shit. I didn’t make my numbers. And right now one of our larger clients is going through a modern-day KPI exercise so an OKR exercise, Objectives and Key Results, which are -- it’s the same stuff we’ve always been doing just with different letters attached to it. But the mantra that we’ve had to keep coming back to is how do you make these measurements, these goals, these key results worthwhile, and not make them identified to the desired outcome. And it’s tough because we all want to see the desired outcome we all want to get to our destination safely and on time. And usually, safely is the first thing to go out the window, right.

Mark: Well, unfortunately, or if people view -- people make excuses they view trade-off so they’ll say, well we don’t have the money, we can’t afford better safety. Like well we could start putting -- we could question the values around that. But there’s a false premise that better safety cost more or that better quality costs more. And I think that’s been disproven decades ago, these false trade-offs.

Jim: Yeah. The notion in lean, which is like expressly stated in lean and not expressly stated in Agile is that there is a respect for people. But, and we talked about this last time, there aren’t any specific actions to achieve respect for people. It’s just assumed that if you’re resolving problems and have a more egalitarian system that respect for people rises naturally out of that. And I think that GM is a perfect example about how you can bring all of the forums in, but if you don’t have the culture behind it, if you haven’t operationalized that respect, it means nothing. In fact, it might be worse than nothing.

Mark: Right. I mean, it depends on what do you mean by something more egalitarian. Again, this is just from what I’ve read so I could be misunderstanding. I don’t believe the hypothesis around holacracy being a good solution to the things that ail us. Because I imagine there’s one form of holacracy that says, “Well, we have no org chart, so everybody gets to be an asshole to everybody else.” Pardon my French.

Jim: It has been known to happen. All right. Yeah. So, no, I didn’t mean holacracy. But what I did mean -- [crosstalk]

Mark: No, I didn’t think you did.

Jim: What I did mean is that people know what is expected of them, they’re able to act on what is expected of them in a way that they are professionally satisfied with. And that they get feedback from the work itself from the other people from the customers that allow them to engage in the ultimate act of professionalism, which is making your work better for you, and for the people around you. And in order to do that, you’re always going to have to have access to information and the ability to act. The way that we’ve tended to operationalize that is by removing barriers between people and what they need. So, the information they need, the access to the tools, or whatever. And you will usually do that by increasing the visual nature of the work so people know what’s expected today, what’s in flight today, how things have changed today, so you’re not stuck to some rigid notion of how work flows, but you’re actually responding to the pull of the market.

Mark: Yeah. Well, I think there’s a difference between looking at what’s possible. So, when you’re talking about people want to achieve what the organization is asking them to do. But there’s a comment here from Yang Bo about avoiding quotas with any dependency not entirely within the employee’s control. So, when I think to that hourly production tracking sheet, if everything went well, we would have made 92 engine blocks an hour. But the pressure placed on employees to hit certain numbers that were unachievable, that’s where it all becomes really dysfunctional, especially when blame and shame and punishment is the style. So, I mean, it’s one thing to look and say, like kind of from my exposure to former Toyota people, like, we have a gap. That is a fact. We were supposed to make 92 an hour and on average, we make 60. That’s a fact. The same as what’s the temperature outside. It’s a fact.

But then what we do with that information, say, well, the average temperature in Los Angeles is supposed to be 72. So, we’re going to scream at the weatherman because it was 65? I mean, that makes as much sense as some of the yelling that would take place in environments where people are given unachievable targets and quotas. And Dr. Deming talked about this decades ago before he passed away decades ago. So, I mean, it’s interesting to me, maybe I throw the question back to you, Jim. Some of the environments that you work in, quote-unquote, knowledge work, which manufacturing can be knowledge work too. But anyway no, I’m just being defensive manufacturing background. But you think there would be environments where you wouldn’t see those same dynamics. So, if you have, you know, white-collar workplaces people are well-educated, but then people still fall into the trap of unachievable quotas and targets and blaming and pressuring just kinda sad to see.

Jim: So, the first thing that caught my ear there, so the more I watch modern-day manufacturing the more knowledge work in manufacturing are becoming indistinguishable. So, one of our favorite and albeit two short events for Tonianne and I was we went to a place just south of here that was building experimental rocket engines. And so they had like these huge 3D printers, and they were 3D printing things out of titanium that were literally going out of the printer and into the rocket engine to then be shipped off to blast off into space. And they could at a moment’s notice redesign something and then go back and completely reprint it. So, as we go forward we’re going to get -- that’s just going to happen more and more and more and more and more small batch highly specialized manufacturers, but a very different look at then the totally rigid assembly-line world that we’ve gone through. When we work with almost any group, what we find initially is that the original group is entirely working under the assumption that they know what they’re doing and why. And it doesn’t take too long to poke some pinholes in that, that very quickly become swiss cheese that very quickly becomes just another blow out. And all you ever have to do is make people tell you what’s going on.

Jim: Yeah, I’ll make them. So, there’s one thing that I had to quote, become comfortable with coaching a long time ago which is that there’s a lot of -- that coaching quite often is manipulation, It’s manipulation it’s white hat manipulation, it’s you know Jedi manipulation if you will then not sith manipulation. But that you need to come in and often people want a specific outcome that is immediately apparently inappropriate. And there’s a bullying way of doing that. So, you come in and you’re like angry lean sensei and you say, “Oh, rearrange your painting bay,” or you come in and you say, “Hey, can we actually just kind of talk about how this part of the company works?” And almost immediately the discrepancies in different people’s stories in the group will become apparent to them and then they start to own and solve that problem. And it’s the thing that I love about value stream mapping, it’s the thing that I love about affinity mapping, it’s the thing that I love about lean coffee, and is that thing that I don’t like about how we apply the other more rigid tools in our various toolkits is that we come in and we’ll teach a rigid tool first before we’ve allowed people to understand what their context is about what they’re building and why.

Mark: Yeah. Now, I have heard the argument. I’m not advocating for this, but I have heard lean folks say you should like teach the rigid approach and then let people adapt it from there. But my concern would be that people get anchored on that really rigid way. Because I can’t think of how many times I’ve been someplace and people are really hung up on let’s say how they visualize and post metrics. And let’s say maybe they’ve only been using some practice for six months, but they get really hung up on it. Like, “Well but that’s what our consultant told us to do.” So, I don’t If some of the folks who say well teach the really rigid way, do it this way because I said so because I’m an expert because this works someplace else. And then once you’ve learned this rigid way, you can make it better. I wonder if that’s sort of a fallacy around how often do people then get out of the shackles of the rigid way of doing it.

Jim: It’s a fallacy because we’re assuming that other people want to do that. Or -- [crosstalk]

Mark: That they want to improve?

Jim: Yeah, that they have time.

Mark: Well, that might be the bigger assumption that’s disproven. Do people have time to improve? Often not. Because I think generally, I’ll say inhumane management wants people to be 100% busy all the time. Which is non-systems view of looking at things.

Jim: Productivity models or accountability models naturally drive inhumane behavior.

Mark: I’ll share something I heard at a conference once, somebody who worked at a -- an industrial engineer who worked at a health system doing improvement work. He said, “Our daily productivity metric is the single biggest barrier to us improving our productivity. Because what she meant was like there was this tyranny of you cannot allow your nursing and staffing ratios to ever exceed this prescriptive number. And those numbers are set so tight in the sort of benchmarking comparative race to the bottom that people don’t have time to improve because they take a hit, they get yelled at for exceeding their labor metric. And without creating organizational hoops, such as codes that we’re now going to log people’s improvement. Like that doesn’t last, that doesn’t scale to log people’s time as improvement time, or that might get abused. Like, who said you have to hit that productivity number every single day? Like my thought had been like if I were ever hired at a hospital and made a manager or director or some department, I would say, “Okay. Here’s what I propose. You give me labor productivity ratio relief for six months. And you allow me to do what I think is right for the long term of the department. And if I haven’t dramatically improved our metrics, including productivity at the end of the six months, then fire me because I’m full of -- Yeah.

Jim: Well, the set target every day makes as much sense as saying, Well, our new metric is everyone survived. Everyone that comes into this hospital has to walk out and I guarantee you, what will happen is they’ll start to invent, like mechanical legs that you can attach to corpses and you have corpses walk walking out the door under their own power. And I know you and I have both seen things that ludicrous when people are working, what essentially is what unions would call work to rule. You tell me what to do, I will do exactly that, whether it’s good for the company or not.

Mark: I saw a lot of that at General Motors, for sure. “Okay, boss, whatever you say.” And it’s the irony of what managers in the factory would make some dumb decision, because they were under throughput pressure. They would make some decision overruling the frontline worker who is trying to follow the quality plan. So, they were basically telling the worker to ignore the standard work of don’t stop and pull those parts off to inspect them for key physical dimensions, because we don’t have time for that. Or no, I know you’re supposed to stop that machine, every X number of parts to change the tooling. But we don’t have time for that. And then 20 minutes later, there was some catastrophic failure, because guess what, some idiot told us not to change the tooling, according to plan. And so then they’d get to sit around for a day and a half not working while that machine was being repaired by people flown in from Germany. But yet those managers were improving productivity.

Jim: One of the things that we see, and we’ve seen this in insurance, we’ve seen it in software development, we saw it in banking, we’ve seen it all over the place is that we’ll come in and we’ll start to talk to people about standard work. And they’ll say, “My work just comes from everywhere. There’s no standard work.” And then what they’re doing is they’re creating their own interruptions. They’re creating their own failure demand. They’re creating their own blown processes, because they’re not taking the work that can be defined and defining it, calming it such that they can actually pay attention to their work that literally is that complex. And in knowledge work, there’s always going to be that certain bubble, we’re not going to get it down to where we’re cutting seconds off of attaching doors to cars. But we’re going to get it so that we’re not spending weeks wasting weeks of our time fighting about things that never needed to be fought about in the first place. And I watched so many people painstakingly buy all of the materials and build their own prisons. And it’s a lot of work for them to hurt themselves that much. And they get very frustrated if you say you do have standard work. There are some things you could call them.

Mark: So, Tonianne is suggesting we might want to take a look at questions. Yeah, there’s another comment here. I mean, I’m not a Tesla Insider, but there’s a comment. “There’s been reports about production delays at Tesla stems from premature automation.” Elon Musk has said as much after the fact. And when he announced his idea of a lights out factory. Well, he had more colorful language for this -- the machine that builds in machines, what did he go on and on about? But for anyone who thinks like in the year -- what year that might have been -- 2015. “Oh, Elon Musk is such a visionary.” You know who else had that idea of a lights out factory? General Motors CEO, Roger Smith in about 1982. And General Motors wasted 10s of billions of dollars on trying to automate stuff that arguably shouldn’t have been automated, or it wasn’t technically feasible yet. Now, some people defend Elon Musk and say like, “Well, he was just a little bit ahead of his time.” Whereas Roger Smith was maybe a lot ahead of his time.

But I think at General Motors, I don’t know Elon Musk’s mindset, but at General Motors, the management mindset was, “We hate people and people are the bane of our existence, and they’re a pain in the butt. So, let’s automate stuff. Oh, and they’re expensive and they go on strike. So, let’s automate everything. Without really going back to root causes around well, why do you think people are behaving this way? But -- [crosstalk] I think Elon was maybe just a belief in technology and a love for technology. But at Toyota, they tend to have less automation. And they’ll automate things that would either be unsafe for a human or they’ll automate things where the quality can actually be better done by a robot. So, certain painting or welding is done better by robots, and certain painting or welding is actually done better by a human, which is kind of interesting to see.

Jim: What I loved about GM, love in the ironic sardonic, I’m not GM sort of way was that they literally -- [crosstalk]

Mark: But the new logo now everything is better. Right?

Jim: That’s right. They built an entire division with its own plants that solved all of their problems. And then they systematically recreated all of their problems in those plants.

Mark: And that is Saturn for people who don’t remember Saturn. But yeah, I mean, a different type of car company, a different type of car. Those were like the slogans. And they literally had a different contract with UAW, they had a different leadership style, and the rest of GM saw that as a competitive threat in different ways. Like Chevrolet was mad that GM was investing in Saturn instead of investing in Chevrolet. And then when Saturn became popular, and they couldn’t build enough cars at the plant in Tennessee, they started building them at a typical GM plant in Delaware with the typical union contract and the typical dysfunction. And that was probably the beginning of the end for Saturn. But the Elon Musk comment, so he eventually kind of came around that they had over automated, and there was that comment he made, “Humans are underrated.” I’m like okay, better to learn that later than never at all.

Jim: Surprise, humans actually have some value. So, I think I’d like to transition over to the lean coffee board. So, if anybody hasn’t joined the board, I see a bunch of people on the board but I see a lot more people in the chat, please come over and put up anything that you would like to discuss or hear us discuss. One of the things that I do want to mention is that of course, the things that we’re discussing here, the reasons that they’re relevant to me at any rate is that currently we have two different products at Modus Institute, our online school. One is just a subscription, where you come in you join a global community of people who think about these things. And there’s a lot of classes in there to take and a lot of conversations to join in. The other is that there’s a certification called the Lean-Agile Visual Management Certification. But what that does is it takes the things that we’ve learned from lean, the things that we’ve learned from agile, from behavioral economics, a bunch of other things and says, if we were going to build a humane system of work, what do we actually have to know?

And we did that because we were frustrated because no one else was teaching that. You had to like Toni and Mark and I have done, which is like, go out and just get repeatedly beat in the face with bad ways to do things and say you know, it’d be better if work didn’t hurt so much. So, again, come on over into the lean coffee, the link is in the chat there, LeanCoffeeTable.com, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anything you want to talk about, enter in there, and give a minute or so for more topics to arrive. And we’ll see if it looks like lots of them are arriving. One of the benefits of doing this in a webinar-style is that I can’t see all of you so I don’t know if anybody’s typing. But I’m going to assume that a few of you are. I do like the topics that are up here, and a lot of them are nice. And if any of you -- [crosstalk]

Mark: Are you going to say out loud which topics you don’t think are nice? No, I’m kidding.

Jim: Oh, yeah. That’s right. Some of these topics, oh, man.

Mark: I’m teasing. But that’s the lesson I’ve learned about doing puddles around continuous improvement ideas is that you do like as a leader has to be fairly even keel. Like if you have three people in a huddle who bring up an idea. And you’re like, really effusive to the first person about, “Oh, that’s such a great idea.” And then the second person, “Oh, that’s awesome. That’s even better than the first.” then the third person brings in their idea and you’re like, “Okay. let’s talk about that one later.” It’s like opening gifts at a birthday party. You go on and on about a couple of them. And then you’re like, “Oh, socks.” Not very nice. Right?

Jim: It’s nice that you showed up. [crosstalk]

Mark: That was something that I learned from the late Norman Bodak taught me. He’s like you need to treat ideas like a gift and think a little bit about some of the -- not passive aggressiveness, but politeness. Being careful especially when it’s a group setting.

Jim: Yeah. Well, I will stack rank these in the order that I appreciate them. And then I will physically reward people based on their prowess at asking lean coffee questions. So, what I do want to say really quickly, is that what you’re going through right now is a lean coffee. If you haven’t done one before, this is exactly what happens. A bunch of people show up to a meeting, everybody writes down what they would like to talk about, and then you vote on the order. So, you create a democratically generated agenda, which makes the best use of all of the brains that are in the room, you can have a topic. So, right now kind of the topic is the stuff that we’re talking about. But it beats having a rigid agenda that I write and then force you into. Because then you don’t ever get to talk about what you need to, and we might miss some value that’s hidden. So, anybody that hasn’t voted, please vote, and we will hit the button and we’ll start talking about these things.

Mark: And I’m going to maybe violate protocol here. There’s one that only has one vote, we might not get to it. But I just want to make a quick comment. Somebody put in, it seems like people quote, just want sometimes people quote, just want to be told what to do. Is it disrespectful if that is what they say they want? So, I would frame that as what does the organization really need to become successful? I would argue to the end of the day that people just doing what they’re told to do is not a path to world class excellence. That might not even be a path to survival. So, if people say, “well, I just want to be told what to do,” I say, “Well, for how long have they been conditioned into believing that?” And so I think we can’t just say end of discussion. “Oh okay. Yeah, we’ll just tell you what to do. That’s not going to be a successful organization. Learned helplessness as Tonianne rightfully calls it. Yeah.

Jim: All right. I’m going to click the start button. All right. And so the first one is what are some examples of healthy metrics? And I’ll just go. I think that that one kind of speaks for itself. So, I will state this generically. Healthy metrics are temporal, they have a shelf life, they are born, they do some good, and then they go away. A healthy metric is something that helps you get to your goal, so it gives you feedback that allows you to improve. If the goal is a demand like Mark was saying you have to do 92 of these things an hour or a day, that is not a metric, like I said that is a demand. That’s kind of wage slavery. And the most dangerous metrics are the ones that go into physical documents, right. So, yes, we want to measure things over time, but what we’re interested in is the narrative behind the metric. So, this number is fluctuating. Why? Is that within acceptable variation that it is fluctuating? And so we should just be happy with the ups and the downs is that fluctuating within normal variation but we could improve it anyway. Is it dangerous? Is it being used by somebody as a political tool? So, what do you think, Mark?

Mark: Yeah. I mean, you said a lot of the things that I might have said. So, just to reemphasize, I think it’s -- I mean we could ask what metrics are we using, but I think even once that’s been established how are we reacting to the metrics, and what are we doing to people as a result of those metrics. So, metrics should be used for improvement, not for punishment. And I fall back on Dr. Deming who’s idealistic that he said the role of the manager is not to judge, the role of the manager is to help people improve. And especially when most results are driven by the system, leaders have a responsibility to help improve this system with their employees. But when you talk about politics and narrative you know deming, Demming and Don Wheeler, a statistician who’s still with us and still working would talk about these charts and metrics as being the voice of the process. The voice of the process does not lie to you but it might have a narrative that’s different than the narrative we want to tell, which comes back to politics.

My narrative is we spent $100,000 on this initiative and I’m hell bent to prove that it was a success, data be damned. So, that’s really where I think we get into trouble. But as Jim put it, this is what my book, Measures of Success is about is looking at performance. And if it’s fluctuating within a predictable range the lesson is don’t overreact or try to explain or demand a root cause analysis about every single data point up and down, better, worse, above average, below average. But if there is a wide range of variation, and that’s bad for the organization or bad for the customer, we can do something about it and that thing is improve the system. But that requires being systematic instead of being reactive, right? So, why is our average level of performance too low? System problems, let’s improve the system. Why is the variation so large? That’s built into the system. We need to improve the system. And all the time we spend asking: why was that number worse last month? That’s literally a waste of time if that metric was fluctuating around an average. So, Google, they did it to me today.

They send me an email every month that said my blog traffic is up 1.5%. That is factually correct, but useless information because last month it was probably down 2.7%. And if I were an organization with employees I wouldn’t have fired somebody because it was down 2.7%. And that’s a trap organizations fall into all the time. But even if they’re not firing, they’re overreacting, they’re pressuring, they’re cajoling.

Jim: They’re having long meetings.

Mark: And those long meetings are the reasons why we can’t improve anything. [crosstalk]

Jim: Everyone hates meetings. So, if anyone, while we’re going in through these -- the way that this is kind of set up is I’m the gatekeeper. So, if you want to talk, just raise your hand, there’s like a little raised hand button there and I will allow you to talk. I feel a little sheepish allowing people to talk.

Mark: Can I throw what Toniann posted and kind of react to it? So, she says in the chat, “At Modus, the most valuable metric we found and our clients have implemented is subjective well being, SWB, tracking how we or others feel about a task after completion.” There’s emoticons there. “Gives us insight into if work is going well or if it’s not. When we see a bunch of unhappy faces on a board that tells us a quality issue is likely to result. And so then we stop and have a conversation about it.” So, I can imagine that working well in your environment where there’s healthy respect and trust and honesty I would wonder if that scales well into an organization where people would then be pressured to say yeah, happy face.

Jim: So, that’s what we thought too. And a giant international bank that might start with the initials JP proved us wrong. And so this was kind of where we launched this idea. They had some issues and they were trying to get rid of the issues and so we instituted this. So, on their boards, we said when you get to the end of your thing just put happy face, flat face, sad face, angry face about how you feel professionally about the work that you’d done. And for some reason the lightness of that metric was enough that people were honest about it. And we told them up front this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to do this because if it is in that kind of that negative emotion territory, the only reason you’ll feel that way is because there’s a deadline you don’t feel good about making. Your pushing work out before the work is professionally done. And so in software this is a huge problem because software loves to give itself deadlines every two weeks now which means that they’re always rushing work out the door whether they think they are or not. There’s just a psychological barrier, I’ve made this commitment to get things done in two weeks. So, immediately what we found was that that resonated with that team. And within a year it had spread to offices around the world. And we know that -- the reason that Toni and I tell the story at conferences and in classes is because we’re still shocked because we still think you’re right. But it’s the weirdest thing. I’ve been thrilled by how that didn’t work.

Mark: I’m just reminded this is a different dynamic where there’s a story that was I think in the news somewhere and I included it in measures of success where we want to avoid the temptation for people to distort metrics or fudge the numbers, or in England they say fiddling the figures, which is especially in the British accent which I won’t try to do. It’s a charming way of saying that. But there was this -- I think it was a gym, health club gym where they had one of these things and I’ve seen them in airports and security lines, how was your experience today, smiley face, neutral face, frowny face, and I’m not going to touch one of those in an airport bathroom. No way. But at the gym they were being measured, there was a target of how many happy faces or the percentage of happy faces they were getting. And the intent was that gym members would be pushing the button. And that there was some employee who learned that you just walk by and go smack, smack, smack, smack, smack and just hit the smiley face a bunch of times and there’s no audit trail. There you go. Customer satisfaction.

Jim: That’s right. Thank you everybody. All right. I noticed and I’m grateful that people are entering notes. So, the more notes we add, the more we learn together, here or over here, in either the discussions or in the add learnings on the side. At the end of this, we will make a kind of a printout of the results of this lean coffee, and we’ll send them to everybody. So, how do you operationalize respect? So, I will start with the anti-pattern. So, what you don’t do is go tell people, “Hey, today, we’re lean.” Or, “Hey, guess what? We’re agile now, and everything you’ve ever done is going to change from 12:15 today onward.” That is not respectful. Regardless of your intent, it is literally the rudest thing you can do to another human being. So, what any operationalization of respect needs to do is examine who are the human beings that are working in this space at this time? Who are the human beings that are their customers? Who are the human beings who are stakeholders, be the management, other teams you interact with, what have you. What is that kind of collaborative human space? We all know that when we have a team, regardless of how we’re managing it, and one person leaves, and a new person shows up, the team changes. Regardless of what process religion, you have signed on to the team changes, which means that the people are important.

So, what we want to do is get people together, who are doing the work, and our customers are stakeholders of that work and get them to say a few things. One is, why are we here? What are we building? How do we build it? What are the steps that we take? How are those steps painful to us as professionals? When I get to here, this hurts, it wastes my time, it makes me do something, I don’t want to, I have to release something early, I have to talk to somebody I hate, whatever it might be, we understand that flow of work. Then we get together and we say okay, as a group, what do we value? We value learning and good onboarding, and not burning out and coffee, and kittens and rockets. And so now that we know that, we build our visual control, our value stream to directly respond to those stated needs by the people who do the work. Right? And we do that, because if our visual control just says, I have to do this crap, I’m doing this crap, this crap is done, that’s just a regular report of your pain. It’s not like, “Yay, I’ve got a visual control.” It’s more like a time until I’m released from prison calendar. So, that would be -- the shortest answer that I could give is you build it to meet the needs of the people doing the work and the people receiving the value from that work.

Mark: So, my answer to how would you operationalize respect, and I assume this is coming from -- we throw around coming from Toyota this notion of, quote-unquote, respect for people or respect for humanity, depending on how you want to translate it. And I think the way we operationalize it is getting much more granular and specific about what we mean by respect. Because if we just say we practice respect for people, that’s way open for interpretation. Well, to me, respect means I never disagree with anybody. Well, is that the path to a world-class company? I would argue, no. Whatever world classes, I’m sorry for throwing that around, but forgive me. It’s a platitude, world-class, and respect might become just a slogan or a platitude. Right? So, one of my favorite books about Toyota is called Toyota by Toyota, it’s chapters written by different people from, I think, mainly the Kentucky plant. And they talk a lot in the first chapter about humility, respect, challenge, and Kaizen. And we can’t forget that word challenge.

Right?

So, I think it’s, to me, respect is a sports coach or for me, it’s a marching band director who at times is hard on you. But they’re doing it because they know you can do better, and it’s for a purpose. So, it doesn’t mean we -- It doesn’t mean quote-unquote, being nice. It certainly doesn’t mean I wouldn’t excuse being wildly disrespectful. I wouldn’t excuse that, as you hear some of the stories about the old guard, Japanese Sensei. We’re in a different type of workplace now, so we can be respectful and we can make sure we’re not at that extreme disrespectful yell and scream. But we can challenge people in a way that’s constructive and engaging because we know they can do better, and we’re going to work together to do better. So, I think we just have to be much more specific around what are the behaviors? What are examples of respectful interactions?

There was one week, I was working a couple of days at a hospital in New York on Long Island. And then I was also a couple of days in Indianapolis. I’ll tell you, in Indianapolis, it would have been considered really disrespectful to interrupt somebody else or speak over them. In Long Island, that was the norm and the default, right. It was driving me crazy, we’d be in a meeting of nine people, and seven of the nine would be speaking at once. And if I didn’t interrupt and talk over anybody, I would have never gotten a word in. And they would have thought, why do we hire this guy, he just sits there quiet. So, I think each organization kind of draws its own boundaries around, I think you should have a conversation, what is considered respectful, and the contrary, what would be considered disrespectful, and I think sort of just draw that out in a little bit more detail.

Jim: So, we’ve kind of operationalized this with -- I’m sharing my screen, for those of you who are looking at the screen -- with five, what we call lenses, for our classes on Modus Institute, and actually just how we work with all projects now. Is that we make sure that when we build any system is providing the information that people need to get their work done. And when that happens, when people have the relationship that they need, they tend to form better relationships with each other in the team and with each other in the company, and each other with customers. That building of relationships is structural. So, before there was a lot of disrespect because people had to, like Mark was saying talk over each other or interrupt each other to get information out and across. But if this is being handled in a visual way, or in a video way, or in some way that isn’t a status meeting or a fight, then these relationships can build, respect naturally comes out of that almost immediately is that you’re building a platform that allows respect, you’re not demanding that people respect each other, you’re building that platform. But that platform comes out of this very tangible communications need.

And when you have these three things, work starts to flow because people aren’t interrupting each other so much. And if I interrupt you, you rightly feel disrespected. That’s just how life is. And so we want to say okay, when we’re communicating well, now that we’ve had this relationship, what is the right time, and the right way for me to interact with you? And that is a social contract, that is actually something that we can build. Once we do that, then PDSA or continuous improvement follows, without even trying. And the problem with the way that we handle it now is we try and handle it the other way around. We start with continuous improvement, and we say go do this and soon everything will be fine. But we haven’t laid the foundation, and the foundation is in these very, very tangible yet human things.

Mark: So, I’m wondering do you know Gwendolyn Goldsworth, Jim?

Jim: Yes.

Mark: So, she talks about visual workplace and visuality, and people too often mistake visual management is meeting metrics that get posted on the wall. Where I was taught visual management is real-time process management. How do you tell if things are normal or abnormal? And Glenn puts it really well. She says like every time I have to interrupt you, Jim in the workplace to ask something, that means there is missing information, and we can often make that information very visual. So, I think of an example, hospital laboratory. There are different wraps on a workbench next to a machine, and it might be they might not be clearly labeled. And people are constantly interrupting, “Hey, have these specimens already been run yet or not?” And when you hear that question you step back and say, “Well how could we make that information visual?” “Well, we could have color coded rats and we can make sure we always take the specimens that have already been run through the machine into that rack. And now we don’t need the interruption to the work into the flow because we’ve made things more visual.

I want to bring up -- talk about demanding respect. On one of his first days in office, President Biden, it was in the news that -- I’m paraphrasing he basically told a bunch of executive branch employees that if any of you treat anybody else disrespectfully I will fire you on the spot.” And I’m not trying to duplicate the tone. And there was, I think, an interesting debate with some of my colleagues of saying, well, on the one hand, it’s great that he’s drawing the line and holding to some standards and saying there will be consequences. And then there was the counter argument of like, well, is he treating people respectfully by saying basically demanding respectful behavior and threatening to fire people? Does that create an environment of fear, does that create the risk of overreacting to hearsay?

And like well, I’ll withhold judgment on that and look for evidence of reasonable middle ground. Because I think there’s this rhetorical point, “If any of you are jerks, I will fire you.” Well, he might not really literally mean that. But there was somebody within the first couple weeks of the administration who treated a reporter really disrespectfully and ended up resigning. I don’t know if he hadn’t resigned if he would have been fired. There’s this catch 22 of like I’m going to demand participation and continuous improvement. And is that quota or target or that demand inherently disrespectful when continuous improvement should be more self motivated and come from a place of respect? I can see why people were interested in debating that point of like if you act badly I will fire you. I would probably come down on the side of well, hey, it’s better to kind of draw the line and set expectations.

Jim: Yeah. And there may have been some reaction to the previous four years that may have caused a stronger than necessary way of phrasing that, which is just that we’re going to couch the next four years in more polite language.

Mark: And I think he could have set the expectation without threatening to fire people. Yeah, I think it could have been framed a little bit more positively.

Jim: I would say that that is true. All right. So, how do you construct a system that has psychological safety built in? And I have four or five hours worth of material in my head for this, so Mark, why don’t you go first?

Mark: So, I don’t have the Amy Edmondson definition of psychological safety handy, but from memory, really it’s about an environment where people are free to speak their minds, I think if you had to boil it down to anything. So, how do you create that environment or how do you remove the impediments to speaking freely? I think you could come at it from either direction. I think it comes down to leadership behaviors, what are the behaviors -- We can’t just say the platitudes. Everyone needs to be respectful or we’re going to have psychological safety. Again, I think we have to be more specific. What are the behaviors that are known to increase the levels of professional psychological safety, and what are behaviors that are known to squash that.

Jim: So, what we’ve found is that psychological safety is much deeper than the conversations that we’ve been having, and that’s simultaneously a good thing and a frustrating thing. So, the good thing about it is that it means that there’s a lot more knobs that we can turn, a lot more things that we can tweak to create a more psychologically safe environment. But it’s been interesting over the last several years working in construction, in like construction of skyscrapers and things in New York, where that has a 100-plus year history of being pretty much the least psychologically safe, and physically safe place to be in all of New York. And what we found was that, first of all, as Mark said, leadership is ridiculously important because leaders can kill psychological safety in less than one sentence. They can kill psychological safety with a grunt.

Mark: With a look.

Jim: And so that comes back to positional power, and then how we treat positional power in an organization. So, there’s the flip side of that, which is the playground free for all that would be holacracy. And there’s somewhere in between where it’s saying leaders actually have a purpose, and they need to actually do leadery things. And middle managers have a purpose, and everyone there has a purpose. Can we please figure out what those purposes are? And then again, build that system that has built in from the beginning, the assumption that people are there to be professionals. And if we don’t allow them to be professionals, that is an organizational failing. And this is my story from construction. I knew a guy who worked on a project, whose name was John. And one day I was in a lean coffee with a bunch of people at Turner Construction. And they asked the head of lean, what is the most lean project in New York. And he said, “The Greenpoint project is the most lean.”

And somebody looked at him, and they’re like -- they kind of went kind of confused puppy on him. And they said, “Isn’t John, like leading that project?” And he says, “Well, yeah.” And they said, “He’s an asshole.” And he’s like, “Well you should probably talk to him about it.” So, then the next time I saw him, I said, “Hey, dude. I learned something the other day. I learned that you’re an asshole.” And he’s like, “Oh, man, I have been such an asshole through my entire career.” And he said, “Look, the system of Turner -- the system of construction, in general, was that when something goes wrong, you yell and scream about it. And you beat the hell out of somebody verbally until you’ve won. And then you swear, and cuss at them for about five more minutes to make sure they really got the message. And then they go off and they do what you want.” And he says, “So, I did that for years, and I was really good at this.” And he says, “But who wants to live that way?”. And here’s the thing. So, Peter Davern, the CEO of Turner Construction, had said a few years before that, that he wanted every construction site to have the right environment. Which was professionals at Turner would be able to act like professionals, they’d be able to make decisions, get their work done, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

When they started that project, they said, “Well, how are we going to engage right environment for this construction project?” And they did it with one rule. And that rule was no yelling in the trailer. And it changed everything. Is that a panacea? Is that a fix everywhere? No. But what it is, is it’s an indication that lots of times we look at the huge weight and pain of these problems, and then we think that we need a commensurately huge weighty solution. And sometimes it’s just as simple as that. So, when you’re confronted with a situation like that, where there is an issue of psychological safety, don’t blame the people who are causing the lack of psychological safety and just say they’re assholes. Make sure that if you do feel that way, you’ve actually done your research. You’ve… three and the goal of the A three is to prove that this person or disprove this person is an asshole. And then you fill out the whole thing. And by the end, I’m reasonably sure you’re going to find that they’re like Jessica Rabbit. They’re just drawn that way.

Mark: Yeah. And I think it’s a fool’s errand to blame individuals for the behaviors that are driven by the system, that they’ve been a part in for years, if not decades. So, behavioral norms, and people model the behaviors of their leaders. And like when I was at General Motors, we would have directors of… come in. And I personally have nothing against cursing, I’m often holding back. I got really good at it. Not that I was yelling and screaming, but it was just part of fine, it was the culture. But these executives would come in and like there was one time we were talking about Theory of Constraints and throughput, and somebody was not on board with all of that. And it was like, I think it was the vice president who said something to the effect of, I remember this vividly. He’s like, “Well, you’ve got to effing stuff the goose full of food, so you can make it shit.” All right. He was not in favor of limiting wit, Jim. I think that was the point he was making, you got to stuff the effing goose. I go, “Come on.” But then somebody else who once told me, like, in that culture, if you weren’t swearing, people didn’t think you took it seriously, and they thought you didn’t mean it. Like, wow. All right. So, was that guy who’s cursing is he a foul-mouthed jerk. And his core, maybe not. But people learn how to get by and they do what the environment rewards.

Jim: Yeah. And then the scary thing is that once they start doing that, they feel like it’s always been that way. And that’s why we feel like culture can’t be changed. But it’s crazy how easy it can be. Consultants are fond of saying it will take three years to change any culture. And that’s because the consultant wants you to hire them for three years.

Mark: I’ve seen a culture and a department when it comes to continuous improvement in the hospital change much faster than three years.

Jim: Yep. So, one of the things I did, I wrote this in the comments, but I want to say it verbally is that can we build visual systems that do the standard work of psychological safety? So, the psychological safety thing is, can we be a whistleblower? Can we say something’s wrong? Something needs improvement? But can we just build the system that does that for us? You know, so all the ultimate system of psychological safety is one in which the system’s already saying, “Hey, this is going off the rails, this could be done better. Here’s an opportunity for improvement here. And that we don’t have to rely on individuals feeling like they’re bucking the trend. We just set up a system that does the trendspotting for us.” And once you do that, then people feel ultimate psychological safety to talk about anything. Which I think is eminently cool. All right. So, we are in six minutes to ending. I want to pull this one over. And we’ll just do like four minutes on it. [crosstalk]

Mark: Which one? Okay. Yeah.

Jim: And I would argue that the story I just told you as a way to stop bullying culture, but Mark has had a lot of different experiences than I have. So, what would be your first?

Mark: So, I’m going to share a perspective that actually comes from the nurse executive, Phyllis Quinlan, who I interviewed recently, for an episode of My Favorite Mistake, hold up a mug, pretend to take a sip. That episode hasn’t been released yet, but she’s written a book about bullying and she does a lot of consulting and she’s tried to eliminate bullying in the organization she works in. And she says dysfunctional workplace behaviors fall in the two categories. Some people are just clueless, those people can be coached. So, there are some people who are just bullies, and they are never going to reform and you need to get rid of them. She drew a pretty hard line there. And I thought that was interesting. So, I would defer to her expertise around that. So, I would maybe add a comment. So, I mean, she said some of these bullies, they just grew up bullies, and there’s no fixing them. There are some people maybe who are a culture of their environment, and they’ve been damaged by that environment, and I would give them a generous and apologetic retirement package. And then I would also think, how do we avoid hiring bullies and prevent that cycle from continuing? So, those are, I guess, if you believe in the idea of you need to just identify the bullies and get rid of them, I think you also have to step back and fix the system that hired and promoted and rewarded said bullies.

Jim: Yeah. And that’s one of the problems is that we have built systems -- there’s a reason why narcissists are in the C suite, is because we’ve built systems that allow narcissists to get to the C suite.

Mark: And Phyllis has said most of these bullies are also narcissists.

Jim: What’s also interesting there is to broaden that word. So, -- [crosstalk]

Mark: Bullying or narcissist?

Jim: Well, we’ll call it the bully-sist is that there are people who, for reasons of their own, will want to opt-out of the collaborative culture that you’re building. And they could be really awesome, talented people. And at Grey Hill, my software company, when we were about to engage, or we were about to enter into an engagement that was extremely immersive, it was going to be very creatively, intellectually, everything challenging for the people that were working on this particular project. And it was a GIS, a mapping-based system that we were building. And the guy who was our GIS expert, when we got to getting ready to start the project, he said, “Okay. So, we’ve designed this kanban, and we’ve designed the way the work is going to flow and stuff.” He says, “But you know, I don’t really want to do all that stuff. So, I’m just going to sit at my desk, and you guys tell me what to do.”

And I said, “Dude, we all agreed that this is how we were going to work together.” He says, “I know.” He says, “It’s okay. You just go do that, and I’m going to go work at my desk.” And I said, “The value that we get out of this is the collaboration.” He says, “I know, but I don’t need the collaboration.” And at that point, I just had to Gordon Ramsay him, right? I was just like, “Pack up your knives and go home.” And everyone in the room was shocked. They’re like, “What? That guy’s an important guy, you can’t let go of him.” But he was opting out of the culture that everyone had designed, which is the very definition of lack of respect. And so I said, “We’ll find someone else who wants to do it this way.” And to his credit, he packed up his knives and went home.

Mark: Just a quick contrary story to that. Again, I’m thinking of Jim Adams, that lab director from Dallas, former military medicine, who I mentioned earlier. I think he looked at and said there are some people who have been so damaged by the prevailing old way of doing things, that if they can show up to work and be a good individual contributor, and they’re not interfering with any improvement, that’s okay. And he calibrated their performance evaluation system, not to get into that rat hole, but they had one. So, he basically set the expectation of employees that if you show up and do your work, and you’re a good teammate to others, you’ll get a small raise. But it’s participating in that continuous improvement system that puts you in that top tier in terms of compensation and evaluations. That’s how he chose to handle it. I could -- [crosstalk]

Jim: Yeah. On an eight-person team, that was not an option.

Okay. This is more of a team with 50 or 100 -- is over 100 people, I think.

Jim: Yeah. So, you can allow people to fall in. But in our case, it was literally 12% of the entire decision-making structure of the team.

Sure. No, I see your point with that case. But I think it goes maybe to show that a lot of this is situational.

Jim: It’s context.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. And that’s a huge thing. So, really
quickly, let me grab the -- where’d it go. Here it is. Here is and I should have posted this in the beginning, and I’m sorry that I didn’t, but we’ll put it in the email as well. Here is the link to Mark’s Measures of Success book. And that is the low low price of $0 at the moment if you want to read it on your slab of plastic. And Dave has dropped into both chats information about Modus Institute. We ran up and now right up to the end here. So, Mark, thank you very much for today. And thank you all for you for sitting all the way through an hour and a half of this.

Mark: We didn’t brainstorm any podcast names today, Jim.

Jim: We did not. We did not do the silly things we did last time. I guess I’m too serious.

Mark: Hey, this was the only meeting that could have been, right?

Jim: That’s right. That’s right. But neither of us could exercise the law of two feet because that would look weird.

Mark: I’m going to do that. It’s a sunny day here. I’m going to go for a walk.

Jim: All right, awesome. Thank you all everybody. And we will see you all soon.