OKRs with Ben Lamorte

spk_0:   0:00
the oak chairs coach will not necessarily help you figure out what to do. But the oak chairs coach will help you figure out in a line on the outcomes that we're trying to agree on at the highest level as faras measurable statement.

spk_1:   0:10
And that has been lem. Or he is the author of Objectives and key results. And he's the president of Okay, ours dot com bidders. Our guest on this edition of CFO Bookshelf, which is coming up next. Bruce, have you had Ah, have you had a great week so far? Well, Mark, it's been a pretty eventful week. Um, you continue to work through some of the some of the government funding. Oh, my God. Did you choose that? Come along. You got some new, right? No rants. No, Randall, come on. No, No rants. Well, other than it, you know, And I think we we might have even talked about it. I know you and I talked about it off line, but, you know, this all started off of this. All started off with it was all, you know, it was all good. We just need to keep paychecks going. We need to help businesses. We need to take the decision of getting rid of employees and in downsizing, take it completely off the table. And and a big A big part of the attractiveness of the P P P loans was the forgive ability and also that there wasn't the the test for other funding sources and also the personal guarantee. And now, um, we get a letter from our bank today saying that the, um SB a has added back in a, you know, some liquidity testing, or or of access to additional liquidity, but with no real other other guidelines around it. So everything that made this an attractive program here seems to have been bait and switch. And now you know what kind of scrutiny are you going to face at the point where the loan comes, Dio? And if you know Ben, is it going to be payment? Is just gonna be repayment as alone, which is all well and good? Or is it going to Are you gonna have to start answering no value based And what was forward looking questions of what was the need in looking at that on the back end of in a very uncertain environment, you know, just seems like, um, seems like a complete change. Of course, that adds a level of uncertainty that doesn't seem like it's fair to the small, medium sized business that's trying to keep their people on the payroll. This is opinion on Lee, by the way. I like the way you rant. You're not like me, right? Yours is a very professional and polite. My opinion is that the S B A is addressing some of the bigger companies that applied for it, got the money and maybe didn't really need it. My question about what the S B. A is doing in that letter that you received this morning is that if you go to the actual Cares act the one that was passed back in late March and then got signed in the law by Trump, that I think was around April 3rd or fourth. Thereabouts is a Friday that banks opened this up. They're open for business. Take these applications. There was that second page where you initial you certify these eight or seven statements. I think if you go to those those statements are harmonious with, I believe the intent of the language in the p p p language of the cares act what you just stated. Bruce, this is opinion. I'm not an attorney. It almost seems like there there This is maybe a stretch, and I don't necessarily see that tie into the cares act. I mean, I think you have to need this, but it's almost like they're They're adding a test where I I'm I'm a little bit baffled. I'm a little confused as to why they would add this extra hurdle, because now, now they're getting into interpretation. So this is gonna be interesting to see how this thing plays out, right? And, you know, without getting too, you know, without getting too hot and bothered about the whole thing. You gotta understand, I guess the who that is directed towards and I think it's I think it's a reaction to two thes these larger companies who have got access to the public markets to go raise additional funds. Who instead took these funds. It's not necessarily directed at a small to midsize business who who might be able to weather the storm If this goes right, that goes right. Um but but all of those things being very uncertain. I I got to believe that that's directed at those large companies publicly held that that have access to the that have access to multiple lending sources who would give them money in a heartbeat and also who have access to the public markets to raise additional. I agree. Bruce, I wish we could keep talking about this, but we have a guest today. His name has been Lamarque. Hostage's name is Bin Le Morte, and he is like the okay, our expert. So been has this rich, deep background which all mentioned here in just a minute. But he's the president of okay, ours dot com He is our guest. And it was a lengthy discussion. So But before we got go, go into that conversation. Bruce, are you What's your knowledge of? Okay, Ours. What's your thought on? Okay. Ours in general. Well, in general, I would say that it's it is probably one of the most misunderstood topics, um, in in the numbers game of business. And I think the differentiation between what is an okay are and what a K p I, um, is is one of the bigger is one of the bigger discussions that probably corporate board rooms down to, you know, the the smaller business. That's just trying to be a little bit smarter and how they do things, um, gets involved in. So I mean, any anybody who can provide some clarity toe okay, ours and how those could be used to run a successful business is gonna be good listening. Okay, Ours versus KP. That is brilliant. You teed that up beautifully. So been again. You look at his LinkedIn profile. It's like, Oh, my gosh, I mean, this guy is like, he's like a five tool player. He's like Willie Mays. If if If you're a baseball fan, he's the full package, you know he can speak. He listens. Well, he's intelligent, understand software. I mean, what does this guy not have? And he's humble. But one of the first questions I asked him. Waas. Okay, he's worked with the DAP T planning he's worth with Dobie. Of course, he's the president of Okay, ours where he teaches and preaches and implements this stuff around the globe. I asked Ben first question. What's been your favorite job?

spk_0:   7:28
Well, it's a great question. I mean, when I look back, I think to myself the dot com era. So I had just left my job in management consulting. Took a job at planet Rx dot com. What? We were basically selling drugs online. Okay, now these were pharmaceuticals, right? Prescription medications. I don't want to say drugs, but that's basically what we did. And the whole thing imploded. We went through $400 million in three years. I was employed number 40 But I was also employed number three on the back end after everybody was gone. Except the CEO, the CFO and me and we had a long journey there. That's a whole other podcast right there, Mark. But I will say that one of the one of the crazy moments that happen to me as I was the guy that kind of knew the numbers so people would ask, What is the cost of fill a prescription. And, you know, that number could range anywhere from like, $7 to $47. Okay, So I would usually say it's 15 because I included certain components. But I didn't include others, and I wanted to get it down to 12 and we knew if we could get it to seven. It would be great. But depending on your assumptions, that number, you know, if it included the cause or if it included, if it was for brand prescriptions or generic. I mean, there's so many variables. Was it a 90 day supply? A 30 day supply? When the world is, it cost the full of prescription and a recruiting, shipping. And, you know, you just go on and on with that. That's when I realized that getting really specific about your language when you're talking about numbers was really important. I just had a great time with those guys.

spk_1:   8:46
Was it back around 98 99 of thereabouts?

spk_0:   8:50
Yep. I want to go right around then. Yeah, that was That was my ultimate Ah, you know, mid thirties. Kind of a thing early, I guess. Early thirties, playing basketball with those guys and just having a great time at work way had a lot of fun. Like I said, we went through $400 million.3 years. We have have anything to show for it, but I learned a lot. You know, we pave the way for the big guys to come in and take advantage of. I give you a really funny story, Mark. We actually, we're going to sell prescriptions right from Let's say they ordered him in California, but they were being shipped to New York. Well, they ordered him in California because that's where the servers were. See, we were an online pharmacy. So somebody in New York orders the prescription. It has to go to the servers in California to go through a system, but with the ship it out of Memphis, because that's where FedEx is and what we had to do at the time. Believe it or not, Mark was send faxes. So even though we were an online company, we literally had to trigger a series of faxes that would go to doctor's offices that would go across state lines and get approval from all these various bodies. It would end up costing us, in some cases $80 several days of paperwork just to fill one prescription that could have been picked up, you know, right down the street in New York. So we were paving the way for other companies to come in afterwards, after we sort of got through all the legal issues and spent probably half of that $40 million just making all the mistakes and finding out all the kinks that then the big guys could come in and sweep. So I learned a lot about how business works. And sometimes it's better to be the old guy on the block and let the new kids go out and, you know, go through their money and hurry.

spk_1:   10:12
I don't know what this is supposed to be. A well guarded secret. You kind of let the cat out of a hat. But it sounds like you have a rich financial modelling background. Is that correct?

spk_0:   10:25
Yeah, that's really where I started because when I graduated out of Stanford in management, science and engineering, they basically threw me in front of a spreadsheet and they said, Well, you know, this is a management consulting company, But since you know you, you know engineering and science and you're good with math here, why don't you go build some financial models? And so that's really all I did. I mean, I was more of a people person, but they didn't care. They just threw me out in front of these financial models and I did it for a long time.

spk_1:   10:48
Let's turn our attention to okay, ours objectives and key results. You're the president for okay, ours dot com. And before we get into that work, what you do with clients around the globe, how did you get interested in okay? Ours. So you may have to go back a few years. Where did the word of that that passion come from?

spk_0:   11:12
Well, let's go all the way back to when I was in graduate school and I was taking my first job in management consulting, and I was really nervous because I was taking a job in management consulting, and I was an ideal graduate student. I wondered if I could get the approval of my professor professor failing professor failing f E H l I N g Not F A i l i N g

spk_1:   11:31
thank you.

spk_0:   11:32
And he said then it doesn't matter what you do as long as you have time for critical reflection. And it was in a way I didn't understand he was talking about. It was like a Yoda kind of a response, but I realized that he was so right in my management consulting job I didn't have time for critical reflection was just working so hard. They had me working 80 to 100 hours a week in front of spreadsheets, and later on I got into a startup where I was building financial modelling software and we were we were trying to sell. This offered all sorts of people, and I was playing the role of the vice president of marketing in the vice president. Sales and I was scattered, and my advisor became this guy, Jeff Walker. Now Jeff Walker joined our board. He was the guy that started Oracle applications he created. He was the CFO of Oracle back in the 19 eighties, took him from like, I don't know, 30 million to a 1,000,000,000 over six years by creating Oracle applications, the software arm of Oracle, Larry Ellison said Jeff Walker was probably the only person he ever met that was smarter than himself. And that's a big compliment to Larry. Ellison doesn't savory many nice things about anybody, but I'll tell you, Jeff became my adviser, you know, one time after an executive call, he called me up. Right afterwards, he said, Ben, what are you working on? what's going on. And I said, Well, I got the weapon are filling up. You know, we're trying to get that new prototype out. We've got that new sales guy coming on board were operating on all cylinders. People are working like crazy. Now. Jeff said, Ben, let me ask you a question. When you go on a hike, do you have a destination? And I said, Jeff, listen, you know, when I go on a hike, my daughter at the time is pretty young. So I said, you know, we sort of have a general area, and we go up there and, you know, maybe we see a waterfall or a butterfly, and then, you know, whatever we do, we end up kind of coming home and, you know, maybe we go pretty far. Maybe we don't. But we try to have fun. And Jeff said, Ben, let me tell you something. When I ask you about your family, I'm happy to hear about your daughter and the butterfly. But when we're at work and I ask you, do you have a destination? And you you don't answer that question clearly. Instead, you start telling me all about this random stuff about your webinars and all that other stuff. Do you realize that you're wasting my time? And do you realize you're wasting your time and everybody else's time in the organization? And since you're a vice president, that's a lot of people. Let me tell you, though, Jeff Walker was a good coach, so he said, Ben, this is This is the way you could have answered that question. You could have started by saying Here's the destination and then paused and so that I understood it. And then you can tell me where we are toward getting there and what we're doing to try to get there, OK? And if you're really smart, you could even ask me what my tips are for how you could get there. Great. And he was introducing me to okay, ours that was actually it. That was okay, Ours in a nutshell. He used Jeff Walker used okay or is it Oracle in the late 19 eighties and 19 nineties? And he was trying introduce me to that at that time. Little did I know that that voice that he was building inside me of when you go on a hike you have a destination would be something that stuck with me. And I started finding myself coaching other people almost immediately after that moment. And I didn't even know I was doing OK as coaching we formally started talking about. Okay, Ours of several months later, I started adopting No cares of my startup.

spk_1:   14:34
That is an incredible story. So you before we act, I think was the last week during a pre interview. We're talking about driver based financial modelling, and you said something I thought was very insightful. You should always start with Okay, Ours before you start quantifying the business model. Is that Did I hear you correctly?

spk_0:   14:56
Yeah, that's it. You know what? What happens is Look, I was at adaptive planning at the time. They had me the director of the Center for Customer Excellence or something along those lines. And it was me. I was a one person team, okay? It was a great job. I kind of liked it. Actually. I was like a sales guy with Noah quota and I could go around and just say stuff, you know, make speeches about the trends and on budgeting and do go to conferences and things. But they said we want you to get more users. You know, they were a software company, right? So they said, When you go make your presentations, try to get more people of our customers, you know, to buy more users. How are you gonna do that? Figure out ways for them to adopt more licenses. So I said, Well, OK, but I got I got to tell you, I don't think people are gonna buy more licenses if it's just a question of budgeting, because at the time, you're not really adding value when you go to people at the individual person level and say What number should be in this account Bucket, you know, and how many customers are we going to get here? It average price of whatever in order, build the revenue model. The finance people like that kind of stuff so they can build their financial model. So I get it. That's what we're doing. It adaptive. But what I found was, in order to get really more to get more users engaged in this thing, you have to start with open questions like, what are you really trying to achieve? What's your mission. So I remember it went to an account payable team, which is one of the, you know, sort of humdrum. Business is usual organizations typically, and I said, What's your strategy? And in the accounts payable, They said, What do you mean? And actually go back to the example of Oracle that Jeff Walker showed me? And he said, Well, our our strategy is to pay the vendors and keep them happy now. Fine print. I also had a client. Sears and I went to their accounts payable team and I said, What's your mission? And they basically said something like to optimize cash flow by stringing our vendors along and not paying anybody at 120 days and hoping that they go away before we go bankrupt.

spk_1:   16:37
Rang.

spk_0:   16:37
It was it was basically something like that, right? Their accounts payable strategy was basically not pay the vendors, whereas Oracle was to pay the vendors and keep them happy. So the reason why I use that his example is you know, you might think accounts payable is not the most strategic organization. However, they had totally different missions, and you're you're even if you're a functional team that you think, Oh, I can just look up my strategy on the Internet, You have to think for yourself. And so I started becoming a coach and asking people know, what do you really trying to achieve? How will you really know your successful in five years within your department and people started getting more engaged, And then in that context, we started creating metrics. You know, if we could reduce the number of invoices that were paid, you know, without delay or if we could reduce the total number of invoices processed each month by creating purchase orders or whatever it is, if we could, you know, process more invoices per person within our team that we could be more efficient. Now we're starting to get into the metrics. But those metrics were existing in the context of our strategy. So it wasn't, you know, coming top down. It was us developing our own strategy and thinking for ourselves. And this was the part, um, of okay, ours that became very engaging. And this is the part that was gonna create more users. Now, here's the interesting part. I actually wanted adaptive to start introducing, okay, ours into their tool. I never really went anywhere. So that's when I ended up joining better works on Okay, Our software company. Really? The first. Okay, Our software vendor. And this was when they had, like, three or four people in the company of better works. Amazing idea. Better works was. And so anyway, that's where we're gonna get into. Okay, Are now That's really where I shifted my career into Okay, there's

spk_1:   18:15
one quick thing before we get into the nuts and bolts of Okay, ours is, It seemed like, and my time frame maybe off 2013 2014. I think he started a lengthen group and that group started growing quickly and again. I don't know the exact time, but it's almost like been you became an expert overnight and okay, ours. Maybe it wasn't a tip of the mont top of the mind management concept or idea. So I'm going to say you were kind of ahead of the curve. And even though John Door, his video is famous guru of famous Google video, where he talks about the okay, our process again, I would just say that you were one of the early experts. Is that correct. And is my time frame roughly in the in the ballpark?

spk_0:   19:08
Yeah, that's right. I actually took on my first okay. Ours project. That was a paid client project before the Google video came out in 2013. Really? Where They walked you through How low cares works at Google. And, Boy, I was glad that that video came out because they hired me to go in and figure out the KP eyes for a new organization of about 1000 employees, 50 departments. And so I supposed to interview everybody and figure out there KP eyes. But Mark, you'll like this. They said, by the way, we've already got the KP eyes and we brainstormed them. But we're not really sure if they're the right ones and we but we want somebody to come in here and get us to have the right ones brewing out. To be perfectly honest, Mark, I wasn't a k P I expert at the time. I was more of a planning guy, you know, looking forward. But these air sort of the metrics that we're using to measure our performance. Of course, I took the project cause I needed the job, but I'll never forget. When I flew over there, I started adopting the Jeff Walker model of the Okay, ours. This is really where Before oh cares was really popularized. I said, Look, I read through their 15 page document, right? This Ah, this company had created, I don't know, three or four different strategies. It was almost like the Bible. You know, there's multiple authors because of the acquisition that this company had gone through the different CEOs and things. It was this 15 page document that had the four pillars, the 10 values and the 15 key metrics or something. Right. And by the time you read this document, I was totally lost. The thing I did do those. I translated this document into my own words of the okay, are. So I found four objectives, you know, one of them was grow. One of them was innovation. One of them was something about international. And who knows what the other one was customer happiness or something. So I looked at those and I bubbled up. You know, the objective groupings and I came up with the key results. That would be how do we know we've achieved those objectives. And as I got down to the international one, I just read through all of that. I knew it was one of the objectives, but I didn't find anything that I could put my hat on. There was nothing measurable. That's that. This is what success looked like there was, were expanding in Singapore. We're gonna have a presence in Australia. I don't even know what that means, OK? I don't know. How do we know we have a presence in Australia? So I went to the CEO in the CFO, and this was right before we were starting the project and I said, Look, I've taken this 15 page document translated it into Okay, ours. And here's what I came up with and I'll never forget when I got to the international one and I said, Look, I didn't find any kind of key results here. You know, there's nothing measurable. And the CEO, the CFO, said we'd like you to leave the room for a minute and give us some private time now. I thought they were going to fire me right there on the spot. I thought I'd totally screwed up and shown how ignorant I was of rough their strategy document and they brought me in and I said, They said, Here's what we want you to dio. First of all, we're gonna take out the international pillar from our strategy document because we realize we don't even know we're talking about. Second of all, we want you to go produce the same document that shows the okay, ours like this for every one of our divisions in every department. And then we want to come back to us when we want to see if we're aligned. And that was they started. That's when I just started doing okay, Ours. Now, about halfway through that the Google video came out on Okay, ours. And I will tell you that every single team I met with now there were three or four teams that where I would say lukewarm about this. But just about of the 50 teams, every team was giving me the most positive feedback I'd ever been given in any work that I've ever done. Because now it was about them, you know, the customer success team I would never forget. I was asking him How will we know you've been successful? Oh, Well, we have to retain our clients. Okay, Well, how Well we done retaining clients in the past. Which are there Any are old clients? The same. Do we want to retain certain clients? You know, when If we look at this for this quarter, what the top 10 or 20 clients that you know, you really need to retain And why? And then I started thinking about this, and I started saying, Well, we have people's bonuses are paid on client retention. So they were coming at it from a sort of in the weeds model. I said, Yeah, I know. But strategically, what? As we started talking about this more and more, they realized no. These air, the eight clients that came up with which must all be retained. If we could retain all eight of these, everything else falls into place. And now they had they started reorganizing themselves so that each account rep if if in a sense was dedicated to renewing that one account, they had eight people that you're gonna be on this one. You're gonna be on that one. They picked him out and they got all eight, and this was for them. a huge success, and they proactively got all eight. In other words, they were able to focus and achieve their goals in a way that they they wouldn't have been able to do so if I just got in there and say, Well, look, let's just keep on measuring these things and put him in a dashboard. So that was the okay eras process.

spk_1:   23:17
How would you? I mean, that

spk_0:   23:18
was That was early on, right? And so that just built from there. It just built right? I just kept on sticking with Oh, cares.

spk_1:   23:24
How would you say, Or how would you answer the question? What is the biggest problem? Okay, ours is solving and it can be a $50,000,050 million company, 25 million or going the opposite way. Ah, $200 million organization. What? What's the biggest problem that Okay, ours IHS solving

spk_0:   23:47
So the book I wrote well, I co wrote back in 2016 talks about alignment, focus in engagement and clearly those are three big things that we could discuss and sort of say how oh cares tackles those. But I want to take on a different approach here. I want to talk about communication and learning. And those are the two things that I think are really problematic right now. I'm gonna give you a case study of when I'm a big Fortune five company. Of course, that I won't name called me in to facilitate a goals workshop. Okay, Mark Goals workshop. Not okay. Arza goals Workshop because I was owners in that company is an expert in okay, ours. And I'd help certain groups. But this particular team did not want to adopt. Okay, ours. But they knew. Hey, this guy is really good at facilitating goals, workshops, because it's like, OK, ours and and Oh, by the way, we're not really gonna do okay, Ours. But we need somebody to come in Still say, let's have then come in. So I never forget it. You know, I started out by saying, Listen, I'm in, okay? As coach, but we're not gonna do Okay? Ours. We're gonna have this goals workshop. And so here's how we're going to do it. And we sort of structure it and people running on their goals. And I kid you not. Some of the goals look like things like we want to be the market leader of the space, right? Another one was We want to have a best in class customer support. And another one was, we want to have 8000 customers by the end of the year. So the goals were all over the place. Some of them were these broad brushstroke statements of five years. Visionary statements. Others were, you know, more like we gotta have this many customers by this time in a very specific measure, but I'm, like, a smart goal

spk_1:   25:16
and said I didn't even

spk_0:   25:17
get into these. But others were things like values,

spk_1:   25:19
you know? We want to show

spk_0:   25:20
more respect for our employees or

spk_1:   25:22
some of those even sell. It sounded like objectives, right?

spk_0:   25:25
Some of them could be objectives. Sure we won't improve in this area there. Qualitative. Some of them. In other words, there was no common goal language. Okay, this is the key point I want to make. I don't care whether you're a big company or a small company. I've seen people use the word objective. It mean two totally different things to people using the same word objective. And they mean two totally different things. They're actually using the same language, but they have no idea what they're talking about. And then I've seen people say, You know, um goal, vision and aspiration. You know, they used three different words, but they were basically saying the same thing on DSO. People are talking past each other. Okay, now this becomes an exponential crisis in a massive company. But even in a small company, this is really important. So by using okay, ours, we create a common goal language. Just that alone, to me can become a huge win for an organization to be able to even talk about goals and to be able to do this across teams a common golden with across teams. Mark, I've seen the sales team talking about their goals and they're saying you know you. As you can see, it's holding our quota system in salesforce dot com, the marketing team saying, Well, here's our marketing plan, these air, the marketing objectives and the marketing targets in the marketing, whatever's and that's all in our l acqua, you know, marketing platform, and you can see the reports and you can see all the different metrics we're tracking in the dashboard and all that, then you have the engineers and here's our gear, a print, sprint roadmap and all that. And here's our goals and all that. If you're a CEO, you're sitting there going, Uh, what? How does this all work together? We even aligned What? What are we even talking about? I mean, that's the feedback I'm getting from CEOs because the CEOs aren't gonna go into each of these dedicated solutions by functional silos and try to understand what the world's going on. So how do I talk to you in a language that makes sense? It gets back to that Jeff Walker thing. What is the destination and where we toward it now? Each team has a way of talking about that. You know, here's our objective. Here's why. It's important. Here's how we're gonna measure our progress against it. Boom. That's it. And if you can have a small number of okay, ours, you're gonna have a more focused discussion. You're gonna have even better communication. But the other point I wanted to make was learning. So I talked to so many organizations that say, Oh, were we value learning or we're a learning organization. Okay, so how do you operationalize learning? Oh, well, we have performance reviews and things like that. Well, I'm like, Look, I don't want to talk about learning about how do we work together? And how do we sing Kumbaya on the workplace better and stuff like that? That's not what I mean by learning. I mean, how do we get better at our work as a company? How do we learn as a company, get better work? And what I found with the key results is if we take this discipline of reflecting reset, which is at the end of each cycle, we go key result by key result, and we try to understand what is the learning for that key result If we you and then we have to apply that learning into the next cycle. So as a no Cara's coach, I hold you accountable not necessarily for the execution of your key results in goals, but rather for the learning. And how do you apply it? Great example. I'm working with this company in Singapore. They're an insurance company. They're trying to get more members, but as they're doing it, they have this new partner model where basically the partners. I guess they're going to sell their insurance policies and they have this key result grow the partners from 100 500 by the end of the quarter. First, I'm saying to myself, How in the world are you gonna grow from 100 to 500 just like massive growth and say, Trust me, we can do it So we go over the level of commitments. They say, Well, we can easily get the 200 because that's let's locked and loaded. So that will be our commitment and our stretch will be 500 about midway through the quarter. I'm doing my check in and I'm saying, How's it going? Well, not so good. Were about 100 40 on how we're gonna get at the end of the cycle. I talked. I said, Well, what happened? This if we got to 150 so we didn't really achieve this at all. Well, what was the learning? It turns out we don't really want more partners because our partners need more hand holding. They're not doing any of the sales. What we really want is Mawr good partners. And how how do we know they're good. Oh, they're good as measured by these air. The famous words. You'll hear John Dorsey. They're good as measured by they generate a certificate or sail within the first month, even just one. If they can generate just one. That's a good partner. That's how we know that there is certified partners opposed just a partner that signed up. They're actually executing. So they changed. The key result. Have 80 certified partners that have actually created a sale. Let's try to double that to 160. And then they were able to execute that because they made sure Now, whenever they got a partner, they did the hand holding to get that partner to get a sale. Once they got that first sale, they found that those partners could generate more sales on their own. Was just getting over that first hump. So they were able to apply that learning and that learning existed in just one row of their okay, our spreadsheet, a key result itself. That discussion that documented conversation drove us into that next quarter and we executed on it. And to me, this is the big win of okay, are so the communication of the common goal language and then the learning that occurs but that we hold you accountable for in terms of applying, that learning into that next. Okay, recycle, which is typically 1/4

spk_1:   30:25
regarding. Okay, ours objectives. Then you get the key results. There's also the and which may be part of that learning the and is Well, these are the steps I'm gonna take to get those 15 new clients that will generate more than $15,000 per year or this is the result. I'm gonna, for example, my My result. Maybe my throughput in my manufacturing plant is gonna go from two units per month to 3.5 units per month. That next step is in the how or the initiatives is that correct? Been. And is that also part of the training process in learning it? Okay, ours?

spk_0:   31:06
Yeah. I mean, great question. What I'll tell you is people live in the world of the how in the initiatives. So what they want to do is they want to say, Hey, we need to get the blawg updated. You know, we need to get, you know, even they'll say measurable statements like what we need to get five block post on this month, and so they're stuck in the world of getting stuff done. Okay, and often what they have is the busy but not productive problem. In other words, they're doing all this stuff, and it's like when Jeff Walker asked me, You know, what are you working on that what? We got the website. We got this. But what is the intended outcome of getting the five blog's posted? How will we know those five blog's make an impact? This is the key question that, in O Care is coach will ask you, So the Oak Chairs coach will not necessarily help you figure out what to do. But the Oak Chairs coach will help you figure out, and a line on the outcomes that we're trying to agree on at the highest level as faras measurable statements. And this is really, really valuable. So, for example, take that block case and this is this one's actually based on a true story on my clients. They were talking to me about how they need to get the five blog's on, and they wanted to say that that's a key result. I'm gonna get five, but that's output, not outcome. Simply having more outposts doesn't move the needle. I mean, it moves the needle of how maney block posts I have on my website. But what to see, How do I know that those are good? And so we talked about that. And what you what we had to do was say, can you imagine a block that was really good in the past? Like what made it good? And they said, Oh, well, it had a lot of people clicking on the landing page and signing up, okay? But they weren't just people that filled it out with the Yahoo email address. These were people that actually put in their work email. So we said, All right, what was the best will move ever had is the last month we had 22 total people sign up on the blog's from the landing pages that we're not putting in Yahoo but actually putting in their work email address. So we wrote down a specific statement. That's what we want. That's the outcome we want. So I almost imagine if you're the CEO, would I even care if I'm to see I don't really care what's on the blog's schedule. I mean, I I got a lot of things going on, but if you tell me 20 qualified leads with work emails signed up on the blog's, that's that's kind interesting, and that sort of means something to me. That's what I call the value toe

spk_1:   33:07
tax, and now

spk_0:   33:08
you're talking about outcomes.

spk_1:   33:09
That's brilliant.

spk_0:   33:10
Yeah, that's really what I want you to do is ask that question. What is the intended outcome? And people don't They don't do that right because they're just so busy doing stuff that they don't take a step back. Remember, I told you it's about critical reflection you need. There's like my professor failing said You'll be fine as long as you have time for critical reflection. But the basic problem is people are so busy that they don't have time for critical reflection. I lived my life like that for a long time. The okay ours process forces you to take that time for critical reflection in a structured way across organization. And that's that's really the exciting part.

spk_1:   33:42
Small company, midsize company, big company, easier, hard to implement. And I know that's going to maybe you're be relative, but implementation. Is it a complex process? Is it easy? Walk us through an implementation if you can.

spk_0:   33:58
Well, let me tell you, it's a great question, because in fact, it is really easy. However, people make it hard. So the first time you do OK, ours the key. And it should be a lightweight system, but the key is to make it a lightweight system. What do I mean by that? You start with your okay? Ours in a small group. Right? So maybe you set okay at the company level, or you pick one department or you pick a division or something like that. You don't just roll out, okay? Ours across the entire organization on day one. It is like any other change management program now is Alando, one of the most successful organizations I've worked with with Okay, are spent a whole year. Do we know cares with a group of baked basically 80 people and their brand solutions group before adopting, okay, ours at the company level and then rolling it out across all divisions and business units and so forth. So it took them a couple of years, Really, before they were rolling it out effectively, but that's why it works so well. And that's why their implementation was quite a bit easier then. Some of the or the other organizations I've seen that are trying to do this to aggressively.

spk_1:   34:56
Have you ever started a project where you did the kickoff? You did some of the initial training. Obviously, there there's gonna be a learning aspect to it. Did you ever come up encounter situation where there's a little bit of, Ah, inertia or maybe some resistance? If that's the case, what's usually the cause of that is it. Is it a people issue? Personality issues, because what you've described is just so incredibly simple, and it also just seems like common sense. Why isn't everybody doing this?

spk_0:   35:31
Well, let me first answer that question by saying, I just got off the company the phone with a company called Stare Supplies, which is like a manufacturer of stairs, sophisticated steps of stairs and things that are sort of prefab. But they used install and you know, architectural cool places and things like that in offices. And they're doing really well in the crisis, by the way. And I'm talking to this guy who says, Look, we're using Okay, Ours. I don't talk to him for about a year, so I'm going back to check it out and see if they're even still using. Okay. Says, I don't know how anybody would live without this, because once you start using, okay, ours and you have success and you're using that common goal language. It is really difficult. I remember when I went to a company after I'd use okay as I went to a coming that wasn't using Okay, I'm like, what the world is going on here? I I don't have any visibility and what's happening outside my department people, I can't go in and log into their Jiro system and figure I don't understand that. Can somebody tell me what they really working on? How do we know? And everybody had a different way of talking about Somebody said, Here's the road map, PowerPoint deck. I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me. I can't go to one place and figure out what's going on have no way of knowing if we're aligned. So that's really what happens at steady state with okay, Ours, However, you always have naysayers with anything. Even in my very first project, I had in a stairs were like, Well, why should I do this? They're gonna be just resistant to change. And what I would say is, you gotta You gotta embrace that. You know, you gotta You gotta welcome their, uh, their resistance to change as opposed to fight it. And I usually say, because they're usually say, Smith. What? We're already doing this. See, because hero, the metrics were ready tracking, and that's basically okay. Ours. What I found is that as soon as I engage that person in their own okay, ours conversation, then they transform into We need to have this because what? What they're saying is that I don't want this to be some new system that's gonna replace R K P I. System. Let me Let me tell you a classic story. I'm meeting with this guy Wayne Akerson, who, by the way, is one of the leaders and performance management business, intelligence, dashboards and things like that. It written a lot of books on this, but I tried to get in touch with Wayne for several months, and he just kind of blew me off and then finally said, Okay, I'll have a conversation with you and this was the okay, Ours conversation. He was like, Oh, I don't know why I'm doing this so Carris thing. But as I started asking him these questions and was supposed to be half an hour call well, three hours later he was converted. I mean, he gave me the feedback. I forgot how valuable it is to just take a step back and think about, really, what? The priorities using this framework. And so I had to tell him. Wayne, look, I gotta go. You know I can't stay on and keep on coaching you through this. And so I would argue that rather than trying to educate people on, here's how Low Cares works. And here's why you should use it. If you're working with somebody who's resistant dough cares, just say, OK, let's talk about your team. Let's talk about, you know, let's just start doing OK as coaching with you just jump right into it. And then at the end, we say, Oh, by the way, what we just did that's OK. Ours, they say, Oh wow, I really like it. So once it's about you. I really find people like we'll give you one more bullet point on this. People kept telling me then I want more examples of okay, ours in your training. And so I started adding more examples of O care is in my training. And then they said Then they started. Give me feedback, Ben, You have too many examples of okay, Ours in your training because what they were really saying was Ben, I want to do my okay. Ours in your training. Because once I do my okay, ours Now I have examples that are meaningful to me. And now I get it. So the key is to minimize as a no cars coach, I minimize the amount of training and sort of overall, you know, inculcation that ideo and just jump right into the okay, ours for those people. Then it's, I would say, almost always engaging Fine print people struggle with Okay, ours for two reasons. Number one, they're just not very smart, unusual, But there's certain cases where people just don't kid it. It's a real,

spk_1:   39:08
by the way, is hard to understand because everything I've heard in the last 30 years old minutes is incredibly simple.

spk_0:   39:16
You would think it would be simple. And number two, though. And this actually happens more often than we might want to admit. They don't understand their business. So okay, ours will shine a light on the very fact that you don't know what you're doing. You're just sort of doing stuff, and this is scary. And this is the one thing that I will say, You know, Ah, a couple organizations, including Yahoo at one point actually used, okay, Ours toe, identify poor performers or people that just were lost and didn't know what they were doing. And I have been approached in a couple cases by companies that are trying to downsize, saying, Hey, look, we want you to go through every department and figure out what and have them develop Their okay are so we can come back and look at that as an executive team and sort of look for redundancies because two departments might be saying they have the same. Okay, ours or situations where you know, department produces, Oh, cars that seem like they have no value to our company. I don't take on those engagements, but I will say that That's another use case where you could see where. Okay, ours could perhaps be useful. In that case, though, it's really only useful once because, as you can imagine, once you complete that particular okay, recycle. People start to have a bad taste in their mouth about this whole okay, ours thing because they realize it's just being used to evaluate performance. What just really not the spirit of CO cares.

spk_1:   40:27
So, for example, Bruce Reed, who is our co host, he's the chief financial officer for practice link dot com, and they they're probably top physician, a job board in America. Ah, we're not going to say what the revenues are, but let's take their team. How long would it take? I'll just say that their team is under 100 people, and I I know that Bruce is gonna be a laughing it up that we'll just say their team is under 100 people about how long would it take to get in okay, our mindset embraced, and then the okay, our initiative and I we just call it the way of doing business. Ah, how long would it take? Three months, six months a year?

spk_0:   41:14
Well, now here. I'm really glad you're asking me this question because I've got a new book coming out called the Okay, Ours Field book. And it's really gonna walk you through.

spk_1:   41:21
Excellent.

spk_0:   41:22
A step by step approach to becoming a no cares coach, actually, So it's a second order book. It's written for people who want to either advise other organizations as they roll out their own cars program or for an internal coach who would basically drive there. Okay, Paris program internally in organizational. Look, I started out thinking that you could do a three month get started program, and look, I wasn't a complete idiot, mark. Okay? Three months is 1/4. There was some logic here, but what I found was that it didn't work. I had to change it to four months because there's actually Ah, there's actually three phases in any. Okay, ours program. You first have to understand the rules of the road of the deployment parameters. Like I mentioned at what level will we will we set Okay, ours for the company only for certain teams, obviously, less is more. There's basic, like best practices we can follow here, but also how are we going to score the key results? How many? Okay as we set for team. Right. So some people say you should have one. OK, are for your team other people. So you could have five, so we have to figure that out. What is the time frame? Is it a three month cycle? Is it a six month cycle? Is it a four month cycle? How long will we set? O Care is four. Before we throw the mountain, start over again. Anyway, once we have all those rules of the road in place, then we do the training. We get people up to speed and we actually apply and develop Oh, cares. And the training using these principles. I mean, it may sound obvious, but if we're setting oh, cares for, you know, six months, then we're going to say I will achieve this objective as measured by blah, blah, blah within the next six months. So you have to know how long the okay recycle is before you can really start developing Euro cares. And then once we get into the actual okay, recycle supposed. That's a three month cycle. Because 1/4 is the default. Even though secretly, I recommend four months now more on that if you want to talk to me off the offline. But what I found is that the four month way was good to go. Because then I could do the reflect and reset at the end of that cycle to capture those learnings, right, cause I want to hold you accountable for that. Then I realised, actually, the first cycle more than half of the time we end up For every win we have, we have a problem that we identify. So the first cycle is almost always a failure. So you consider that a learning cycle. And this is really what you're testing out. Okay? Ours. And you're not going to get it right. I just That's what I found after

spk_1:   43:29
a 100 black and interjects knocking it if I can. Hopefully the CEO is completely understanding. Hopefully they know that. Okay, this could happen. Is that correct?

spk_0:   43:42
Yeah, it's actually most CEOs I'm working with now are totally on board with me. It kind of saying, look, really, what I found is the first cycle you don't you're not gonna get right now. Look, you're gonna get some things right. But you're gonna also need to change and tweak certain things. So I want to stay with you for a second cycle. So now you're looking at a 6 to 8 months program just to get you through the point where you're now in an application cycle. And here is where you might scale the use of Okay, Are is based on your confidence level after that first cycle. But I've actually found that in many cases we actually use the second cycle to stick with our core group. Maybe it's the company in a few teams, and we refine that and get that right. So we actually say, See, now we've got it right. So it's that third cycle. So you might be, you know, 6 to 9 months into this thing before you're really scaling. Okay? Ours across the teams and fine print. I never want you to set individual person level. Okay? Ours. Even if you read, measure what matters, it might sound like you should do that right into the gate. You just don't want to do that. You want to get success with okay? Ours at the team level, at least for a cycle or two before you even entertain the concept of injury individual person level. Oh cares because there's a lot of reasons why. But mostly because individuals learn about okay, ours through helping to develop and shape the team level. Okay, ours. And on Lee, after they've done that, are they in a position to start creating individual person level? Okay, ours. And are you able as an organization to say, Will there be incremental value in doing so? So, for example, some companies like my friends a Twitter, they actually were kind of getting into the individual level. Oh, cars. And it wasn't working so well. So they had to cut back and say, Let's not do individual level oh cars. And then they started the like, oh cares again. Okay, after they got rid of the individual level occurs. So that's this is really where I recommend a slow, methodical rollout

spk_1:   45:26
that makes so much sense. A. They were running out of time. I want to jump into your books. You've already mentioned a new book coming out, but your first book, you wrote, by the way, that it's a wildly book. I mean, this is like this is like I mean, this is like the big leagues. Been so the name of the book is objectives and key results.

spk_0:   45:45
Driving focus, alive driving, alignment, focus and engagement with no cars.

spk_1:   45:49
One of the one of the comments or one of the definitions. Okay, ours is critical. A critical thinking framework and ongoing discipline that seeks to ensure employees work together, comma, focusing their efforts to make what measurable contributions that drive the company. What forward? Such a simple, simple definition. But you wrote this book. Did you say 2016 was when it got published?

spk_0:   46:19
Yeah, And that definition came from a white paper I wrote in 2014. And it's inspired to some expo step by professor failing right? A critical thinking framework. Remember, I said, that's so important. Which means that you're asking a set of questions and an ongoing discipline, meaning that you're never done. And John Door likes the word discipline when he talks about O. Care is an idea also because it is a practice, right? You don't just set it and forget it. You have to keep on checking it on your okay, Ours that's also getting back to my point about reflect and reset right, holding yourself accountable for learning. And the thing is, you're always asking these questions, right? So in the midst of the cove in crisis, you know, you might if you're doing OK, as you might say, Well, wait a minute. What is the priority now? How? What's the most important area you know? Focus on now, given the situation, it's not like budgeting where you say, Well, that was the budget. We have to stick to it. That's all there is to it, you know? Just don't question that. How we doing against it? You're constantly asking these questions. That's that ongoing discipline and then seeking to ensure employees work together, check out, Take a look at that right. Unlike performance management systems, which basically are KP I, models that I've seen were basically, you know, each team wants to have completely controllable Ah, you know, numbers and metrics that they can so they can get their bonuses. And then people wonder why they have silo effects. Okay, ours actually tries to get people to work together outside of their teams to achieve amazing contributions.

spk_1:   47:32
My recommendation is just get the book Now the nagging this, in my opinion, been I'm not just saying this just because I've known you for a while, but this is the best book on. Okay, ours out there. I think this book is the deepest dive. Now, the fact that I said this is the deepest dive it that scares you. Just read the 1st 3 chapters and then skim the parts that you like. Just get the again. This is the best book people may be say, Well, what about John Doors book? I do not think Jon's book was that great. It could have been better. I think it had you been John's co author it he could have knocked it out of the ballpark. I think if you've never known about okay, ours. It's a good book. But this is the book you want. If okay, ours is new to you. And again read the 1st 3 chapters. You've got to read the 1st 3 and and then skim if you don't want to get into the details. So is that a fair representation of the book?

spk_0:   48:32
Well, I think so, but I think we need to think we all in the O cares community need to give a big thanks to John Door because

spk_1:   48:37
when he voted for

spk_0:   48:37
the measure, what matters? What happened was he created a best seller that sold probably 1000 times more copies in my book in the first you know, first Week.

spk_1:   48:45
But there's a But I just I like the video better and and when he speaks, he is so easy Kind of like you been He's very easy. Teoh Listen to he's the kind of guide would love.

spk_0:   48:56
Okay, so with measure, what matters if you haven't read it yet? Congratulations. Because I don't really recommend reading the book. What I recommend is get the audiobook and listen to the 1st 5 chapters. They're very engaging, and you're gonna hear case studies from the various people. You know, speaking in John Doe facilitating It's great,

spk_1:   49:12
but you'll get the point. Did he is He did see reading his own book.

spk_0:   49:17
He reads parts of it and then also has different guest speakers coming in. You know, the CEO from for various companies where they're using no cares. And it's really nice to read and listen to. I'm sorry to listen to the 1st 5

spk_1:   49:26
chaps I've read it, but I don't want to do that. And then been you mentioned you have a new book, and it sounds like it's going to get the field guide to implementation that like,

spk_0:   49:36
yeah, the Okay, ours field book. A step by step guide to coaching. Okay, ours. And this is coming out. I hope later this year I'm gonna also have something called the. Okay, His coaching network, which is going to be Theo Cares. Coaching field book, right? Plus access to all the things you need to be in. Okay. As coach, right? I mean, literally. Here's the handout. You use it. A workshop here is this. You know the template that we use to track. Okay, Ours. Here's the set of questions that you will ask as a no cares coach. And here's when you ask them. Here are the three phases of a no cares coaching engagement house. How long does it does A typical engagement need to run in order for you to be successful. So all of those types of ah materials will be included if you do the okay, His coaching network, That's also I hope coming later this year

spk_1:   50:22
later this year, maybe Q. For let's probably Q four. Realistically, I need to do your okay. Ours for the book? No, I'm actually I'm sure you I bet you have something. Well, here

spk_0:   50:34
is an interesting story, because I say, you know, here I am some great okay, eras guru. But I have my own coach, and my own coach was talking to me about this next book saying, Well, Ben, what is the intended outcome of your next OK, Air's book. And I said, Well, this and it's definitely not to generate revenue because, you know, I'm never really gonna make a lot of money selling a book about okay, Ours. And I know that because I've already written one book, right? I want too much money I made, but let's just say it, you know, it covered maybe a mortgage payment or two, and that's about it. And what I'll tell you is, um, in this next book, I said, Well, it's not really about establishing credibility because the incremental value of having two books versus one book just isn't there, you know, I can say check the box. I have a book on. Okay, ours. So I don't need more marketing prowess right now. So my coach said, Well, Ben, it seems like we know why you're not writing the OK Air's book. But what will be the intended outcome? And I realized the real priority is for me to provide a tool that gets into these second order questions. So, unlike John Doors book, which just gets you excited about why you should do okay, Ours and how you know Bonner is doing it now. Gore recommends that all these people like Bill Gates or saying Duo cares Great, I'm gonna do. Okay, but this is gonna be really the second order question of Wait a minute. How does o care is work If I'm a big company, how does it work? If I'm in manufacturing, how do I use Okay? Ours if I also have a k p I performance system. Because the first order answers are things like, we'll just keep them separate. But I don't want to really want to keep them separate. I want to integrate them in some way. How do I you know, Do I d couple them? What is that word? Decouple really mean? And how toe How do I leverage. OK, ours and bring them into performance review discussions. So these are the second order questions that I really want to get into.

spk_1:   52:07
Final question. I asked us to everybody that I talked to favor books. What are just 234 books that you absolutely love? Maybe they shaped your career or they just mean something to you personally. What are those few books that have meant a lot to you?

spk_0:   52:27
Well, let me go back to communication and learning as a topic and let me let me throw out my pitch for the fifth Discipline Field book in particular.

spk_1:   52:34
Brilliant,

spk_0:   52:35
which is in a way, an inspiration for my field book, where it's just a bunch of stories and examples and templates and things that you can use in the one example in that book. If you get the fifth discipline field book that I really use in my field book, and I use it as a reflection tool is the left hand column right hand column exercise. So here is where you go over a conversation that you've had difficult conversation, or maybe where there was a challenge or a breakthrough moment or whatever it was you got stuck and you write down what was said in one column, and then you write down what you were thinking or feeling but didn't say in the other column. And so I use this approach as a reflection tool on my own. OK, Air's coaching to show you excerpts of how my oh cares coaching sessions have gone. And when you reveal your underlying thinking, it makes that reflection such a better process that the other parts of the fifth disciple that I love are things like the ladders of inference. Mental models, right? There are all these

spk_1:   53:28
different systems, sinkings thinking, Yeah,

spk_0:   53:31
I think that's a definite book that anyone in business would would want to have. The other one that I'm going through out there, of course, is radical Focus, which is the first book written on Okay, ours, and it's more of a narrative story. You could read it at the beach in an hour or two, and it's a lot of fun because it goes through the classic of, you know, the classic approach of Here's What happened. We did it all wrong. We were excited, and then this guy comes in. That's like We're in a unicorn shirt who's like an engineer, and he figures it all out and get some all on track. And it's just a fun read and it has a lot of good lessons in it. And then the final book, all throughout their and the honor of Letzion, is three signs of a miserable job. I remember reading that and just really relating to it and saying that this is such a timely book, and it also reinforces a lot of the concepts of Okay, ours around measurement. But I will say that it's just like it's a well written kind of a novel that makes you wish that there were that the movie would come out. And yet it's a business book,

spk_1:   54:18
and I

spk_0:   54:18
feel like any time somebody writes a business book and you know, you really relate to the characters and it's just it's just to me. It's an exemplary business novel, and I think anybody who's ever worked or had a job of any kind can relate to, which is basically anybody on earth should read that book.

spk_1:   54:33
Is that the story where the executive, he the retires or quits and then he starts a Was it a pizza joint? Is that the same one?

spk_0:   54:42
Yeah, there's somebody that's like up in Tahoe or something. You turned around this, you know, this fast food joint, and I remember he's talking about, you know, how many smiles did you have? You know, every time you know, you went there, did you smile and have to keep track of those smiles. I mean, it sounds cheesy, but he turns around this little restaurant operation and then he'd start applying that to other businesses, even though he's retired,

spk_1:   55:00
he wrote, and it just Yeah, he wrote the book right out of side Air up. He wrote that book right after the ideal team player. So that one came right after that one. And I thought, What a perfect comeback book after the ideal team player, But no so three signs of, ah, miserable job. That's that miserable job.

spk_0:   55:20
I think it's particularly relevant right now during this ah Corona crisis and all things like that, because I think a lot of us feel like we have miserable jobs. If we're lucky enough to have a job, and this is the kind of book that I think will really motivate you and help you to think about how to be proactive about making your job. Not a miserable job, you know, in finding a way to to get more engaged at work, which really is, You know, one of the big challenges that we're all experiencing right now.

spk_1:   55:46
We will have all this in the show notes. But how do we reach out to you? Someone wants toe. Just learn more about. Okay, Ours. Maybe this is maybe I want to do this in my business. How? How can people reach out and get connected to you?

spk_0:   56:02
Well, you can go on tok ra's dot com If you go there. Resource is you can download the first chapter of my book that's come but came out in 2016. You can also request a preview copy of the upcoming book, which I think is a great idea,

spk_1:   56:14
by the way. And you can also Yeah, I was You do know that domain name is probably worth millions? Okay, ours dot com. I mean, what a domain name mean? Gold?

spk_0:   56:25
Yeah, it's funny, because I remember when I bought it, The guy said, Well, you know, I said how much, is it? He said 5000. I said, Well, why is that? He said, Well, the four letter ones or 5000 the three letter ones or 20,000. So this guy just had a had a library of domain names that he had bought randomly and Okay, rs at the time, nobody had any idea what in the world that wouldn't stand for. And so, you know, I kind of wanted Okay, our dot com, but I think it was, like, 25,000. So I said, Forget it. I want Okay, Ours And I've always prefer to think of it as ok. Ours because its objectives and key results. And we'll just to kind of leave you with something in O. K. R. Is an objective with its underlying key results, but typically, a company will have Okay, ours, meaning objectives and key results of the whole object. Okay, are becomes plural. And I guess it's kind of like KP eyes or embryos. You know, your age acronyms. They put a little s lower. Case s at the end, so we've done that with Okay. So you can get me at Ben at. Okay, rs dot com and I'm still very interested in replying to people via email. If you want to explore becoming a no cares Coach, I'd say now is a great time because I have a beta program where I'm pretty much inviting people to come in at a very, very low cost to just get some exposure. Tow cars, coaches and coaching as I'm developing this okay, as coach Network, which will be more formally launched, hopefully later this year. I mean, realistically, probably launching that early next year. Long thinks

spk_1:   57:42
I'm going to tell the world I believe I'm going to become a guinea pig. Yeah.

spk_0:   57:46
Joined the okay, His coaching network.

spk_1:   57:48
You heard it here. And that sounds terrible. I'm actually I'm actually looking forward to this. Can We already

spk_0:   57:54
are a guinea pig, Mark. No,

spk_1:   57:56
no, no, no. And then finally, we will also have your linked in profile. Is it okay if they can reach out through LinkedIn as well?

spk_0:   58:03
Absolutely. I love it. I'm in a pretty active Lincoln person.

spk_1:   58:06
This has been fantastic again. I could listen to you. By the way, did you know? I've been taking notes? Ah, I don't know if I'm supposed to buy. I've been been writing notes and then typing a few notes again. I could listen to you all day, and I have a feeling this will not be the last conversation we have, at least on the show. So again, Thank you. And Ben. It's an honor. They have you on the on the show. Thank you very much.

spk_0:   58:32
Likewise. And I look forward to, you know, catching up in the future again. Market. Maybe we'll do podcast part two after the, uh oh, cares. Coaching field book is actually on the market and weaken. I actually have a more productive discussion about what's in that book and what it's gonna dio.

spk_1:   58:46
Bruce, What do you think? Well, that guy is articulate that I mean, that was a completely thorough evaluation or discussion around around that topic. I could I could listen, I could listen for another hour what we're going to do, Bruce next week. Now we do have a Liz Wiseman coming up, and that why, I think will be in two weeks. So what we're gonna be doing next week is we are going to unpack this, so we will be revisiting some clips of bin and then I if you're if you're up to it, I want to throw you about five or six questions of how Okay, ours could work in your organization or or weaken percent like you're gonna be a coach. Two other midsize businesses in the ST Louis region or even in the Midwest. And I just want to get your take on some of these. So that's how we'll unpack some of Ben's content from from today. Are you up to that? Oh, that's great. I I look, I look forward to that. That's we're gonna have Ah, we're gonna have a great conversation around this topic. Hey, before we leave Bruce, I get to ask one question, What is the one book you're looking forward to reading this summer? I'm embarrassed to say it. I have never read American icon and I am going to, but it with all of our with all of the discussions and especially with talking with Brian Jones from the table group last week in their association with Alan Mulally. I am I am very excited to crack that one. So what we're gonna do? Bruce and I did not know you're going to say that what we're gonna do is coming up sometime in June. We're gonna have a book club day, and our book Club Day will be American icon. So it will be you and I. And we're just gonna go through our notes, and we may take a full hour of that discussion. I I will grow on a limb and say he is the number one CEO of the 21st century. I mean, I that's and that's how good I think he is. He is that good. You could put him in any business. Microsoft, Amazon. I don't care. He is gonna make that company be better. And I cannot wait for you to get through that book. It's going to be excellent. Good pick. Good. Vic. Some. I'm really looking forward to it. How about you? I don't know where I found this book. I'm actually holding it in my hand cause I knew you would ask that question. So were were ST Louis people. I mean, my first job. You work in ST Louis. My first job, real job out of school was working at KPMG KPMG on 10. 10 Market Street. And I'm a big fan of Charles Lindbergh. So I've got the book called The Spirit of ST Louis by Charles Lindbergh. And this is on several peoples to read list or not to real is their book loss. And so it's like I didn't know he'd read in a book. So I'm anxious to read is It's an autobiography, some anxious to read it. It's It's a thick book, but I'll start reading it. Probably. I think I'm gonna save it for a Memorial Day weekend. It'll probably take me a couple of weeks to get through it. That's gonna be my pick. Nice. Nice. Look forward to hearing more about that one too, Sir Bruce. Sir Bruce, the top CFO, the best CFO ever for practice link. Dude, can you take us home? I can. I can. Everybody out there, please stay safe. Stay happy and healthy with your families while we're staying distant. We're going to get through this and we'll look forward to talking. You talking to all of you again next week?