SUPERCHARGE Your Organization with SOFT SKILLS and Leadership Lessons from the CIA

Mike, how's it going? Well I'm fine. Nick. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, man, I'm really excited to have you on. You have a background that's very interesting. So I figured maybe we'd start there. Could you introduce yourself? Sure. Mike Myers, I retired as, chief human capital at the, CIA, and started the, Leadership Academy there and ran that for quite a few years. And, was in the director of operations.

However, the good news, I guess, for your listeners is I'm so old, I've done a little bit of everything. I've worked for, ge for Jack Welch in the 90s, when that was at their peak, they were they were at the top of their game. I've started up small businesses. So I've got an appreciation for, government. Management leadership as well as, you know, as well as private sector, small and big business. So we, we talk about anything you want today.

Awesome. Well, I can tell you specifically what I'm interested in. All that I could probably go down the rabbit hole talking about GE and Jack Welch and his whole philosophy. But I do I do love the intelligence community and talking about the intelligence community and all the lessons learned, how you can apply those to other aspects of our lives and how other people can apply them, that aspects of their lives.

Being the the chief of human capital, so to speak, at the CIA, that's got to have all sorts of interesting stories. So I'd love to dive in there. I like to just start out with a thought.

If you look at a lot of the trade shows and news and events, everything's very focused, especially right now in this time, right now, focused on artificial intelligence technology, edge computing, natural language processing, machine learning, you know, these computer vision models, all this really awesome high tech stuff. And it's it's amazing what we can what we can do compared to ten years ago. And who knows what we're going to be doing ten years from now.

Exactly. But I think the the part that is so critical, there's so important and an often so overlooked is that you can't separate the technology from the people that develop it. The people. I'll tell you a quick story about my my company. When I first started my company, I was trying to automate everything. I was like, I don't need to have an HR person because I can automate that.

Other people put in their data here, and I flow here, flow here, flow there, and it didn't take me very long to realize that there was a big flaw in my process. And the process was I wasn't accounting for how dynamic and amazing people are. Yeah, people aren't robots. People aren't machines. They are dynamic. They can do a multitude of different things.

And I thought maybe we could start there about, you know, lessons you've learned from, from your experience, at the agency and elsewhere regarding the, the dynamic impact of people, of humans. Well, you know, you just gave me a thought. You mean you do a lot on the, NCA type stuff on imaging and so forth, and, it just so happens, I teamed up one time with the chief learning officer over there, and we wrote a case study, which I'll send to you because some of your readers might be interested.

It was an old study. Let me go. And way back to 1961 and n pick, which is what now was, and this is actually the chief learning officer wrote a book called In pick that some of your readers might be interested in picking up this good history of all that period. But in 1961, the, the, they were hit by a number of technologies. You know, at first, in the old days, it was looking at airplane photos.

And then, we started the U-2 flights to to get a, well, think about, the the first time the U-2 came back. The batch processing was overwhelming to the people. So there's a new technology, U-2 aircraft. And then you got to work with the people to to get them to change what they're doing, get over habitual behavior and all that. And and then right after that, when U-2 got shot down, we went to the, catching the canister of the satellites.

Right. It was, Corona, and, so at that time, what they were doing, the the technological impact on impact was huge. Again, because it's all of a sudden you've got so much data because you've got these long runs of cattle, constant satellite passes. How did they cope with that? So this is, you know, technology people, nothing new in your world. And, my old intelligence world, which is, you're always trying to get. How how do you get the best out of the technology where you're not?

If you don't get the best out of the people? So the the little, the story in the, in the little case study that I can send you was in 1961, a new leader came in there, to head up in pick, and he would grab everybody, every quarter or about a third of the employees every quarter, go offsite, and they would do a, like, a three day session on what's going well here at N pick. What's not going well. What can we change to do to get better? What can we stop doing. That was it those four questions?

But what he did was he harnessed the brainpower. The people. And he got over time, everybody got bought in. It was called. Yes. Something I call, full inclusion. I mean, you really, you're being inclusive, but I mean, it's everybody, and you're locking, getting the best at everybody's brains. So over time, they were able to, use that, use that method and that system to get the best out of people, adapt to the new technologies at the same time, improve morale and get performance.

So it's, you know, it's funny, you can go back in history like this and find, to find stories like this. I saw the same thing at GE with Jack Welch. He did something called work out or quick wins, where he harness the brainpower of, of all the all the people inside the organization. And I think that's what a what a win. If you want to implement new technologies, if you want to get the best out of the technology, link that up with people and, and, and you'll see miracles happen.

I'll give you a quick, Jack Welch story. You got one? Well, I work there at GE. This this was a story going around. I can't even tell you if it's true, but it's a great story. GE was at odds, you know, with the union Union management back then in the 90s. And, but they had a, retirement dinner for the union chief. And it was very cordial.

The, you know, Welch was there, and his key lieutenants and, very cordial dinner, but but at the end, the union chief stood up and he gave a talk, and he said he wanted to thank everybody for letting him work at, that ge he had learned so much, he loved the company deeply. And he went on and on. But right at the end, he stops and he looks at Jack Welch and he said, you know, Mr. Welch, you had use of my hands for 34 years. If you had only asked, you could have had my brain as well.

So think about that. And, and I think that changed Welch and, and started him more of the old in pick approach is suddenly realizing, if you've got all these employees, let's harness the brain power. Lessness that's just not sitting in rote jobs all day long. Let them do transactional stuff. That's that's stuff I could do. And, and, so I think that have a huge, huge impact on, on Welch going forward.

But that's the that's the thrust of it is the more people you can get, on your side and get them thinking that the better the organization is going to be. I think that's a great lesson for right now of what's happening with with artificial intelligence, especially since there's now better tools for harnessing that brain power.

It's almost like, a force multiplier, you know, if you can, if you can combine the human brainpower with the machine, computational power, then you have, you might have a winning formula. Oh. It's stunning. You know, I'm bold. Look at me. I'm an old guy, but I am so bowled over by a, practical AI. The ChatGPT advanced ChatGPT stuff. It is absolutely stunning in terms of how it's going to how it increases our, productivity and all. So, it's going to be fascinating to see how this unfolds.

So if, if, if you were focused on, let's just say, building a culture from scratch that is like, you know, has this inclusive, approach to collecting. Input from everybody across an organization. What would be how would you approach this? And, you know, what steps would you take to, implement that type of approach? Like, would you begin? Yeah. Step one, I would go back to, a lesson learned, by the OSS, which was the predecessor to CIA, in 1943.

The psychologists there went to General Donovan and they said, chief, we're we're losing a lot of our agents basically parachuting into France, because of bad leadership. We see people are having what they called nervous breakdowns or, fights going on in some of our judge bird teams and so on. So they said, we believe if we leave our, Jungian baggage and our Freudian baggage at the door, we can come up with a way to assess people, to predict future behaviors.

Well, this was one of the five biggest ideas in psychology that century. It was top secret at the time. So he said, go ahead. So three weeks later, they went down to the farm, hammered out over, over four days, how they would do this. Three weeks after that, they rented a, an old estate, not that far from where we used to live, in a place called Fairfax, Fairfax Circle. And they ran the first OS class through and assessed them for leadership abilities.

Right. So, they're looking at things like positivity, drive, empathy. These are things we can psychologically assess people on. And by golly, it works. So in 1948, they went public with this, and published a book, and it blew away the psychology were well, today the intelligence community uses that for their front end, you know, to to hire people. They've got the pathways that, psychiatrists, interviews, they got psychology, psychologist interviews, they got psych psychological assessments.

So they really screaming out the narcissist psychopaths all of that to get a great workforce. So if I were if I were starting with zero culture, the first thing I would do is apply all that to assess people who, in leadership positions for their people skills. And it's interesting, Nick, you you'd mentioned, you know, we talked about technology and, so forth.

But what happens is there's a default when in the intelligence community and everywhere else, when you pick a leader, you say, I'm going to pick him for the I'm going to get the best technical skills gal or guy, I'm going to get the best, human, skills. And but then they forget the human skills. So they always pick, the, the best technical skill person. Almost always. So it's like picking you, you pick the best salesman to be your sales manager. And then what happens?

Well, you just lost your best salesman, and you got a bad sales leader. So step one would be I'd apply some pretty simple psychological assessments on a front end, these 30 minute instruments to weed out the really bad bosses because they have huge negative impact. And there's an interesting twist on why they have a negative impact. Is, they, they treat people and they stir up something psychologists call social pain. You know, your anger, your fearful, whatever that means.

You're no longer using your head like you should. You're cowering. You're you're bolted down. And that creates culture because culture is nothing but shared behaviors. It's what, what we all do in the office, and when we're. Are we very creative in the office? Are we, do we hold back all that's all that's culture. So, what happens when the bad leader leaves after two years? That culture remains the same. It's a micro culture.

And then the bad leader goes to another location for two years, does the same thing, and then the third. So that's why they can have about three times more negative impact in a, in a in any culture. Like a it's like a, it's like a cultural virus. It, it, you know, it is it's toxic isn't it? I mean it, yeah. So the step one is just to hire people with better people skills. And even if you can, if you only got one applicant, well, at least you know, they, they lack certain people skills.

So get them a coach or something or the culture is step. But or is this still the rubric that they use at the CIA for leaders? Yeah. I'm going to send you, whatever you send me. I'll also drop in the description as well, just so that people can see it. Yeah, I'll I'm gonna send you something fun. Your listeners are going to love this. This is, when I was started up, the CIA leadership academy, we didn't have a huge budget. And so I wanted to give the graduates a gift.

So I made up this, this crazy periodic table of the leadership and management elements. So I'll, I'll shoot that to you to give it out to everybody. Print it out on big paper 11 by 17, because you see the fine print. But on the right side of that, I had the first 80 graduates, frontline managers, CIA frontline managers write up a their leadership philosophy. So it's all you'll have it there. It's all incorporated there. And it's about the scribes and the.

Yeah, it's the names that we would recognize. Well, it's a no no, but it's got, you know, it covers, how you and I want to be, want to be led and managed. You know, all we want. We want to be listened to. Give us, let us know where we stand. Don't keep us in the dark. Give us a little bit of positive feedback. Give us a sense of purpose. You know, a higher goal that we're shooting at, let us feel like we're accomplishing something that's human nature.

And that's basically, that's what you've got to really unleash people. That's what you got to tap into. And a good, good innate manager can do that. And an average manager can to, where just up the amount of positive feedback that they give to people. It's funny how much, Gallup does these worldwide surveys, and far less than 25% of the people in the U.S. or abroad, have gotten positive feedback from their boss in the last couple of weeks. Well, that's crazy.

Everybody does something every day, that they could they could get some praise for positive feedback. So, just just giving positive feedback once a week can have a huge impact on on the culture. Again, back to your question. So it's simple stuff. But I think one of the we'll have a couple thoughts there. One one of the thoughts is today we look at a company like the one that I own and run. We're very dispersed. We have remote people everywhere. So I'd love to give praise to everybody.

It really I rely on them to to let me know, you know. Hey, what's going on? We have these reports. We do every month called Rhythm Reports. Or their first line manager says, hey, this is all the great stuff that's happening. Obviously in a operationally secure, method. So that's, that's a, that's a struggle is the kind of build that, that culture, remotely because it's just not the same when you're when you're in the building with somebody every day.

It's something else you mentioned, and I think, I think this is, this is might be a, pessimistic way of looking at leadership, ultimately leadership. And anybody that served in the military can tell you this. It's just getting people to do what they need to do, right, to to achieve an organization's goals. I think the the picture you're painting of leadership is great, and it sounds like the environment all of us would like to live and work in, right? Yeah. That's great. But, is there truth?

Is there a real tangible benefit to a different style, a more authoritarian style of leadership? If we look at let's just take, Russia as an example, right. I would hardly believe that there, KGB has is fostering this type of culture. Maybe I'm wrong. They might have a more eastern type of approach, which is. Right. Right. Negative reinforcement. Right. It's it's. Hey, do this or you're going to pay, right? You're going to you're going to pay for this.

Anybody that has kids will also tell you, yeah, that works. Right. That works. So I'm just curious to know your thoughts on on finding the balance, between those those two worlds to me, I obviously we all want to live in world A, the nice world where we lead by example and do all these great things. But if we need stuff done now and there's no ifs, ands or buts, world B can be very effective as well. So maybe your your thoughts on that.

Well I would say US military for example is is is hugely more effective than say the Russian military. Now why is that? Well, in the military you do have to receive orders. You have to take orders. If you are in, combat, combat situation, they did a study at West Point. They found that what was more important, on the leadership attribute side, just for the period of combat, is that you have a competent leader. So you want a competent sergeant. You're a rifleman.

And so that makes sense because it's survival, right? But in most of the time, the military is not actually in actual combat. And most of the military is not in combat, even if there's a war going on. So, what the US military did is they have that, hierarchical structure. But then they created a, a mechanism where, after every engagement, either training or warfare, they sit down and they talk about it, and it's the one time you can criticize an officer, openly. And get away with it.

They collect all this data and they shoot it up to, shoot it out to Kansas. And at the call center, it's called, and they come up with new doctrine on the spot. Okay. So now let's go to the Russian side. I am obsessed with the Ukraine war. And I follow, telegram and, and, which is, the Russians use that a lot to communicate. Openly. But I study every night what's going on? And it is absolutely incredible. The colossal losses of life and equipment that they have.

And it's their all time high this week. It's it's unprecedented. Highest in war. They keep grinding away, but the morale of the Russian army is so low, that, it takes, just like in the World War two days, they had a political commissar, Communist Party member with a pistol shoot you if you don't. Well, now they've got Chechens. They're going to shoot you if you if you retreat. So they use fear. Well, what does that give you? This year there was a study on.

On, how does a brain operate with on using fear as a mechanism spur. What happens is it completely closes down the logical part of the brain. And you lose all creativity. People are not creative or innovative in a, in a fear based situation. So that's a long winded answer. I apologize, but I think Eisenhower said it best on leadership. You said it's getting people to do what you want them to do. And he he twisted that. He said it's getting people to want to do what you want them to do.

You know, motivating them. And so if you want more creativity in your workplace, what you would do is you would ask questions about how can we be more creative, get back to me in a week and let me know. Or how can we be more collaborative in our in our work group? So and you put the onus down, and, and really try to make use of their brains. And that's going to help you change too.

That helps you change things because, we've got an innate, clinging to the status quo, risk aversion, based on our own survival instinct. And that's the way we overcome it is is somebody. You give me something to think about? I've got to report it out to you at some point. That's the accountability side. I'm going to be thinking about it. I have insights, and then I bought into the whatever the new approach you want is. So that's one but one way to look at it, one way to do it. I'll give you an.

So here's an example talked about tech. Microsoft was behind the eight ball on when the internet hit. You remember the early days the internet comes in, he could see it. He said, this is the future. And he talked about, the, the the leadership there talked about the internet ad nauseum about we got to get moving and, and change things. So gates was getting more and more frustrated, because nobody reacted to him given the one way communications.

So one day he just stopped and he said, look, guys, he said, I'm still here. I'm available for any problems. You have. You come to my office, you know, make an appointment, you stop me in the hallway. He said, well, we've just got one new rule. And what that rule is, is before I'll give you the answer or talk to you, you have to give me one way you can use the internet to help Microsoft get better, bigger, stronger, and left it at that.

So here's the production chief is sitting there thinking, oh my God, I got this meltdown in the in the in the packaging plant in Peoria. I got to talk to gates about it, but he's going to ask this internet question. I've got to come up. And then he starts thinking, so what does he come up with? Oh, we could if we downloaded a part of our software, we could reduce the packaging load on these boxes. We ship out everywhere.

So he that he's now bought into that idea, and he goes to, he goes to gates and they have the discussion. Same thing in marketing. Somebody thinks, gosh, we could market some on the internet. And they he thinks it through now he's bought it. So that's how you change people is is forcing them to reflect and think nicely, politely not through fear because that closes it down, but through just ways of question asking, two way conversations.

All that good ABCs of good leadership can can help push that. I feel like if Vladimir Putin were to tell me that I needed to get creative with the internet, I would be like, I would come up with some ideas pretty quickly. Well, I'm you know, that's a great point. I, I can let's see. What can I say? I can say I lived in Russia for a long period of time. Years. And I speak Russian. And so I study that closely, you know, Russian management techniques and all. And it is, it's amazing.

It's gone full circle from the time the wall fell, you know, there was the opening and we had Russians going to Harvard Business School and places like that. Anyway, it's gone full circle so that the, the government structure today is like what they used to call the nomenclature way back. It's fear based. You just you don't want to pass up any bad news, only good news. And again, going back to your analogy of Ukraine, that's what's going on.

These guys are not getting the bad news and therefore they're getting blindsided repeatedly making continued losses because they only have good news coming up. And so Putin's got a very distorted picture, as does G. And China. He's closed down all dissent and has a very narrow group of people. So that's that's the strength of that hierarchy. One person calling the shots, it can be fast. It can be quick.

And but the other side of the thing is that, that it can be disastrous to if you, if you really make a wrong call like a one child policy or, you know, it's it is really the strategic blunders that. Oh, well, since you follow the Ukraine war so closely and you have a background in Russia, what is it? What are your thoughts on, Russia using North Korean troops in Ukraine, and how does that escalate the situation there? How does that alter the situation there?

And just this is just my basic analysis. I'm no expert in this field, but I feel like this is an obvious an obvious use of human shields. I mean, this is like so obvious to me that he's gone to Kim Jong un and convinced him or coerced him or however he's he's done it to get him to supply troops to Ukraine. We're obviously going to be fodder. What are your thoughts on this? This is this is wild to me. Yeah. I think, he thought it was a brilliant, Putin thought it was a brilliant move. And, but.

And what he has done, it's clever is the North Korean troops are only in Kherson Oblast, which is Russian territory. So you see what he's done? He's not interjected third party foreign troops into Ukraine. So that's the way he he keeps that in his mind. And, and the, from what I've seen so far, it's a real mixed bag of troops. It's a lot of, 18 and 19 year olds who, have been slightly better trained

than the Russians by the time they hit the front lines. Now, longer period of training, but with no combat experience whatsoever. And now they're facing language difficulties, foreign food difficulties, logistical systems that are not Korean. So they got a huge number of problems. And I think, also but also with them, there's a considerable number. Maybe 20% of the troops are Special forces.

And I think what the South Koreans fear is the you learn a lot when you're fighting, even even these hierarchical, hierarchical organizations. So they're, they're worried that the, the North Koreans are going to pick up better tactics. Certainly better weapons and better technology because of the swaps with Russia.

But I think at the end of the day, even though we're looking at, you know, ten, I think closer to 12,000 North Korean troops, it's not going to make a huge amount of difference on the battlefield because their their training goes back to World War Two type tactics. They've never confronted drones, and they've never, never confronted any of these modern weapons. So, I think they're, they're going to suffer some, some very, very heavily heavy casualties.

The wild card would be what would undo what he at some time get frustrated because the Russians are using them as cannon fodder? Or does he pump in another 80,000? Well, it seems like from a strategic perspective, you just talked about those issues that they're having. We're just operating in a different location, different languages and things like that.

It sounds to me like what he's doing is he's going to let them acclimate to that area, to the logistical challenges of getting troops into the area. And then now he has a force that he can rely on. It might be small now, but he'll have, you know, they'll have their processes in place for getting people to and from where they need to go via those channels. And then now he's got a he has a weapon that he can deploy into Ukraine, or at least defensively to protect parts of Russia.

What's in it for North Korea? I mean as he Pana like what's all there? You know what the Kim family is getting billions of dollars and as part of that agreement, direct in their pockets, they're always starved for cash. That's why North Koreans do the bulk of the world's, counterfeiting, for example, and illicit drug trade, all kinds of stuff. But this is, real enrichment to the family. Also, the other thing is, UN has been starved for space. Space technology, and missile technology has had

a real hard problem with its long range ballistic missiles. So, the that's what's really worrisome is the technology the Russians are giving back for the, you know, the million artillery shells coming this way and the troops coming, coming this way. So that's that's what's in it for him. A slope enrichment, more technology, yada, yada, yada. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's it makes sense to me. He's got something directly, especially if, they're getting the technology from Russia that that they need.

And Russia is definitely a beast in all those areas, especially the missile technology, what they can do with Hypersonics, etc.. Kind of jumping back to leadership, but not but not unrelated to this at all. We have a new president coming in to play right now. He's electing or nominate, I should say, new leadership to which still has to be confirmed by the Senate, which, by the way, I'm going to one second. People that everyone that's happy that Trump was elected Republicans. That's great.

You should celebrate. But you can't you can't say how much you love the Constitution and then on one hand, and then cry on the other hand when they realize that all of his his nominees have to go through a confirmation process in the Senate, like the Senate, still very much has to do their job. And their job is not to just tip the cap to the president. And we don't want nobody wants it like that, right.

Because if the hand were on the the other, foot, so to speak, or the shoe was on the other foot, we wouldn't we wouldn't want that. Right. So, yeah, we still want that process to happen smoothly. But some of these nominees, these are, these are a a drastic, a drastic change from the typical types of people we see in these roles. And we can talk through some of these. But the one that just sticks out to me, the most to me is Pete Hegseth as the secretary of defense.

Yeah. Now I, I've watched some content on Pete. He was a Fox News, contributor, you know, our military veteran, which is fantastic. But traditionally, you would think you would want somebody with more executive leadership experience. That's why generals are such a natural transition into the secretary of defense role. I'm not I'm not saying anything bad about them. He might be fantastic.

And I'd like to think through it a bit with you, maybe, you know, like, what do you think about him in particular? And maybe some of the other nominees that have been presented? Well, we'll talk through, what do you need to be a, cabinet level? The chief, historically, you got to be, extraordinarily smart. Because there's so many concepts flying around reading, the reading, the demands alone, meeting demands, all that stuff. And, it appears he's got that, you know, Princeton grad and so on.

However, there's also, what else do you need? A whole list of stuff. You need expertise in the, in the area. So if you're taking over Health and Human Services, say, you really better have an extensive background, that area, you're going to get lost immediately. You also need to have throw weight, I call it, which is, Russians call it blot, but it's just, like Colin Powell, if you remember him. Yeah, he's a guy you could stick in anywhere.

And he just had, the phenomenal leadership skills and and what I call throw away, to deal with, people in foreign countries, you know, of his ilk, they, having connections helps wide range connections related to whatever that is. Personality comes in that we never select that. But that's always good. So personality wise, you get people, like a CIA. You've got, Director Burns right now who's just a phenomenal people person, as was, George Tenet.

And, Well, a few of the others come to mind, but then but then you get you get those that were bereft of people skills. Like John Deutch, he ran into a lot of trouble. Another one is you, you know, you want people in your own party, so you kind of loyalty is a little litmus test. And then character of the individual, you really you you do want people of higher character because you don't want to get snarled in, all kinds of, scandals in a year or 2 or 3 down the road.

So you think about that list we just threw out, and I'm fearful that if, say the current administration, any administration just goes after loyalty, right? As the litmus test, what's going to happen is that those other things are going to be randomly selected, basically. Right, because you're not selecting for them. So you just get this random selection of those things. And and some of those things are absolutely vital to pulling pulling off a mega job like this.

So I think some of the people, let's say somebody let's say if somebody was selected for their loyalty, they had no experience. And no, no management experience. There's another one for our list. They, they might come through it, you know, they, they could wisely quite like to rise to the occasion. But more often than not, they're not. So I think it's, I'm just hoping the lens is not too narrow. Sure. To. So. So it's not to create problems down the road, because what happens?

I was just meeting with a guy two nights ago, went out for dinner, and he's an expert on all this stuff. The, especially high level positions and government jobs and all that stuff. And, you know, we were talking and, generally, the turnover rate for political appointees is roughly 22 to 23 months on average. Because they get frustrated, right? So if you're again, selecting just for loyalty and nothing else, I don't know what will happen. Will these people get frustrated even faster?

And therefore, you, you know, have have less, less impact, positive impact than they otherwise would? I don't know, it's going to be interesting to see. Sure. Amazing. I think so much of that is dependent. I mean, you mentioned character. I mean, so much of that is dependent on that.

Like, you know, if someone like, like Pete, who by all means looks like a fantastic human, you know, and I just the one thing I think about with him is just, I don't think he has that executive leadership experience that you would want, at a certain level, I'm not saying you can't do the job. And I really hope he does a great job because it's. We all need him to it, right? Yeah. If he makes it through, Senate confirmation, but, you know, just one last thing on that, too, Nick.

It's funny, there's also a cognitive bias that, we all think we all think we can do a job. There were totally unsuited for us. Called a Krueger dunning effect, where they, they tested people in all kinds of stuff. Everything from, grammar to logic and all this stuff. And maybe they rank them, you know, like psychologists do. And they call the bottom 25% of any ranking, are the, really the basically the rejects. They're not going to, they're not going to perform. They don't perform well at all.

So, they asked the people at the top, how would you rank yourself in whatever the subject was? And then they, ranked as the bottom 25%. So here's where it gets interesting. Bottom 25% is 12.5 percentile on average. They self rate themselves as over 66 percentile. Right. And then the, the ones who are really good, the top 25% say kind of rate themselves. They know they're pretty good, but they don't think they're the best in the world. So they they rate themselves a little lower than top 25%.

But anyway, it's called Krueger Dunning effect. And so any of us if if all of us got, you know, called by president said, hey, take over the Department of Defense tomorrow. Oh, I could do that. You know, I can I can see a lot of things this guy's not doing. And, therefore I'll jump in and, and, I'll take over. And I'll give you a one last here's another CIA story to round. Round that subject up. I was walking with the CIA director one time down the hall, seventh floor.

And he turns to me and he said, Mike, why aren't they being more innovative? And I knew he was talking about the employees. But, then he paused and he said, I've told them in my first five speeches that I want more innovation and creativity. So how do you answer that? I mean, a director asks a question like that. And on one hand, it's kind of a naive question where you can't just tell people and expect them to, expect them to change culture or change behavior.

But on the other hand, it's really kind of a cosmic question of why, why doesn't that work? And yet it's, it's an interesting cognitive bias. We all we all feel like I see I see you running your company and I say, geez, Nick's not doing x, y, z. If he could only do that, he would be a better company. So I come in and take over and I start doing X, Y and Z and nothing happens because this is so much more complex than what I think in my mind. Yeah, that's a that's such a great point actually.

You know, and men that the more you think about that point, it's, it's even better because that's you've just described basically the entire media landscape right now, which is which is where you know everyone, you know, oh, the, the left, this, the right that, you know, second guessing decisions on each side. And it's like, well, there's a lot more things at play than what you're even thinking about, right? Like, everyone, nothing is ever simple, right? Things are nuanced.

And it's it's that nuance, actually, which brings a level of a great point, which is if you look at this last election, people were craving that nuance. Like, why did why did Trump win in such a big landslide? Well, there's a lot of reasons, right? You can look at failures of of Biden-Harris. You can, you know, look at his, you know, personality and like people like that or whatever. But he was willing to go in in depth on some of these subjects.

And, you know, maybe he he might not be the, the best conversationalist in the world, but he was willing to sit down and give you these in-depth, nuanced thoughts on his perspective. And I think that that is really what people crave now. This is why podcasts are such a big deal right now. That's what drove me to do. Mine is is it's not because I'm vanes, because I'm curious. I like to learn stuff.

I find that people are much more willing to talk and have in-depth conversations with me via a podcast. It's a very maybe. It is kind of a, selfish thing, but people are willing to have these long conversations with me. Now, if I were to approach you and just say, hey, Mike, you want to talk for two hours about your experience, everything, you'd be like, yeah, cool, I gotta go, Nick. But if we throw in a podcast that we can get really in-depth.

Yeah. And and it provides a lot of value to the to the people watching and listening. But that nuance, like, what you're talking about is, you know, people often have the surface level understanding of, of the position.

And so that's I mean, that's a fantastic point with all of our technology and all of our new edge stuff, I still find that communication is difficult, you know, especially in the intelligence community where people are working on inside of skiffs and things like that, where they're on different network. It's not like you can just text them and say, hey, check your check your email or whatever.

What would be kind of like you're applying everything you've learned to that, to this new remote culture. Like where, like where would you begin, inserting all of your leadership lessons? You know, it's funny, I, I've been a, I've retired from CIA in 2006, and I've been do consulting on my own teaching and all that. And so I've been a virtual worker, basically, I've got a little this. I'm in a little office. I've got, downtown, Tysons Corner. But I've also got my home office.

I love it, I love it, I can I can wear my little, my little slippers and scoot into the kitchen and make a BLT. The queen of sandwiches and. Oh my gosh, it's wonderful. However, when f during Covid, when that hit and more people started dispersing, I was not for it for other people. Very selfish view. And the reason was it is much harder to build a culture remotely.

And so literally everything I've talked about, in a book I've got coming out and all my, all my, lectures and stuff, I talk about how, in on the remote side, you almost have to do double what you do face to face. Face to face is just easier, right? You could you could bump into somebody in a hallway, have a two way conversation, clear up some issue, or give them, some positive feedback. A great job you did on such and such. And then it took six seconds.

Well, when you're remote, what I see happening is we're all getting trapped into the the big meeting, the big zoom type meeting, and we conduct that. And psychologically, we feel, well, we've been connected, everybody. But you're not, humans. My old psychology prof was a guy named Paul Lawrence, at Harvard Business School, and he was, wrote a book called driven on the Basic Human Drives. And he told me one time he said, Mike, just remember this. We got all these human drives.

He said, first among equals is bonding, the bonding drive because we are social animals. And that's what's kept the human race going. We cooperate with each other, collaborate. We have our little tiffs, but it all works out. So that bonding drive, that social connection, we're losing somewhat.

And so if somebody doesn't, And I'll give you some ways to get around that, but if somebody doesn't do that, they're going to find, over time, all their employees are going to just be like contractors, independent contractors working. There's not going to be a common culture, not huge loyalty. They'll be fungible. They can switch your jobs, you know, in a heartbeat. Since a virtual. So how do you do it?

And the the the the thing is, I think you've got to, I would recommend to anybody running a virtual organization once a week. Just get on a five minute phone call, one on one with each person that is your direct report. And, even your employees, if you're depending on how many employees you have and just make some kind of connection, we find that the human brain, oddly enough, craves chitchat.

Even in marriages, they've done studies where, you know, my wife and I are sitting in the, in the study, and I'm working on my computer. She's reading the newspaper and she'll say, oh, there's a new Thai restaurant in town. Well, that's that's what, John Gottman, this this guy who studies marriage calls a bit. So she gives me the bid, and now I can answer the bid. I could say I look up for my computer. Well, we ought to try it. And then I go back to work. Or I could ignore and reject the bid.

So what they've done is they've tracked this over years and years and in marriages where bids are rejected 80% of the time, these little chitchat things, the marriage ends up in divorce 95% of the time. And then the reverse is the same thing where in marriages where you got 80% or more, you've got 90% probability of being still married happily five years into the future. And it's not because the secret to have marriage is not answering the bids itself. It's the fact that we do this.

We send out little signals like radar pings. And and that's how we establish these personal connections. So again, we've got a technology now with, zoom and teams and all this to that are, either breaking those apart or making them not, you know, making it harder to to do that reach in. So there's a guy up at Harvard Business School named Chowdhury who's an expert on this.

And his rule of thumb, was, try to get the people together when you can, and, you know, the, the golden point would be like 25% of the time, they'd be like one day a week or one week a month or 15 days a quarter, or like Salesforce.com, people like that, that can afford it. They've got a big branch in, in the Redlands and they pull all their employees together, for, a long period of time to get them to interact and so forth. And it's just a it's an important part, especially on the culture side.

Not that you couldn't run a pure business remote all the time. I think you could. And, that's why I run, really. I go through fiber and Upwork and all these places. So I've. I've probably hired a couple hundred people over the last two decades, that I never see again, but. And that works much. It's just something to think about. Yeah. So so the leveraging the gig economy, that's that's definitely a good, a good tool to have at your disposal.

But yeah, if you want to build any, you know, piece of long standing organization, I don't I think you're gonna find success on five or not to mention, there's so many people in India on there. Oh. Oh, my gosh. It's, I must have 50, people from Bangladesh and India, and they're great, by the way. They're fantastic. Yeah. But when you're trying to build an organization, probably not the best, the best way to connect with people across the world. Very cool.

So, I mean, we talk about quite a bit already. What? Tell me a little bit more about your your leadership philosophy. You and I have not heard this before, but on your on your website, it says leadership theoretician. Yeah. Okay. Like where did that come from? And like, what is that like, can you expand upon that? I had a, one time of the day of the deputy director of operations that at CIA. I got a call, random call, and, said the the message was come up right away.

And, of course, I get that little spike of fear that everybody does when the big boss calls. Right? What did I do wrong? And so I went up there and he asked me a question, basically changed my life, which was, simple question. But I walked in his office and he looks up and he says, Mike, why is it when I pull the levers, nothing happens? Meaning, I don't get the results from the people, that I think I should.

The levers are, you know, the metric system and the communications and training and all that. And then I quickly discovered, the. I won't say which one. Chairman of the board, one of the three biggest insurance companies in the world, told me the same thing. And so think about it. There are large number of executives who feel like, they're sitting on top of the rocket, but, you know, they're not even sure what all is going. And so it's a wonderful question to think about.

So I've thought about that question every day since, and that's 20 years. And I came up with the answer as well. The simple answer is, it's human nature, human nature is such that you can't sit up at the top like that CIA director and say, I want more creativity because it's not going to happen. It just doesn't work that way. And so I really started reverse engineering human nature, to see what makes us tick, because you have to do that as a spy.

Let me tell you, lives depend on understanding human nature. So what I came up with is, okay, survival instinct is is the basic instinct. Everybody agrees with that fear and reward reward side. You've got these intrinsic rewards which are inside us. And the extrinsic fear is stronger than reward. Which goes back to your question. Earlier, can you rule with fear? But what happens is you lose collaboration and you lose, creativity with fear.

So modern, modern audiences got to reduce the fear, give people psychological safety the buzzword and increase those intrinsic rewards. So that's that's really what, lit my fuze and got me started. So as a result, I've come up with a whole list of things you can, you better keep doing that work. For example. The one, the two way communications, asking questions. We know all that stuff works based on human nature. Active listening.

There's certain things you should stop doing if you understand human nature. And that would be the popular ways we give feedback. It's absolutely medieval. Situational feedback method, where we do performance management, keep people in the dark and wait for the annual review. But you can't do a crueler thing to the brain than that. So there's a lot you can stop doing. And then thirdly, you get into this new area of, based on human nature.

Are there things we could do that have never been done before? And I gave you the example of Bill gates. He did, something he called, I call, insight prompts. And what we've discovered, two guys discovered after after nine, 11, two neuroscientists discovered what happens to the brain when you have an moment. And it's absolutely fascinating. There's a book called The Eureka Factor they published. I think they'll get a I think they'll get a Nobel Prize for this.

But I started working with a guy, John Conyers, asking, okay, so what does this mean in the workplace? And what we found out you ready for this is kind of bizarre. Magical. What happens in your head? Okay. So if you're if you're reflecting, you're in a relaxed state kind of alpha brain state. It can happen. That's for no apparent reason. The frequency in your brain increases. You have an And what they discovered is it's not in the prefrontal cortex. It's not fast analytical thinking.

It's a little area of your right ear about the size of a dime. Lights up just like the cartoon does with the flash. You know, the light bulb when you have an moment, lights up instantaneously and they don't know why new neuron connections are made.

But this is what what really sold me was, I asked him about brain chemicals that, are released during that moment, and he went through it with me and, and told me, yeah, when you have an moment, the chemicals that are released give you a complete sense of certainty. So if you're doing a Sudoku or a crossword puzzle, had a little That that's the answer. It gives you certainty to write it down in pen.

If you're thinking big thoughts, about your future and this is the person I'm going to marry, you know, that's a big. But you got the certainty now to go through with it. So I keyed off that, and I'm using it actually in the State Department now to drive culture change. By asking people positive questions, giving them mental homework, basically, like gates did, make them think and reflect. They come up with new ideas. But then you've got to have the accountability side.

So they have to report out to the big boss or the A group. So they are going to reflect, and, and at the end you, you get this buy in for new ideas. One last story. You ready for a bin laden story? And then I'll also you want a bin laden story or why not? Okay, so, Leon Panetta, when he was, CIA director and he had he had really good people skills to, you hold a Wednesday meeting called a bin laden meeting when we were hunting bin laden.

Because, as you know, bin laden did away with all technology. So how do you track somebody with. No, no, technical connection whatsoever? And no, he didn't meet with people either. He used a one courier. So, we, Panetta was having the meeting, and he turns this one, doe officer. Ops officer. And he says, so what what new ideas have you got to catch? Bin laden and the the hapless officer says, chief, you know, I don't know. I'm I'm out of ideas. The whole group is out of ideas.

So Panetta flared up, and then he did the right thing. What good leaders do. He said, look, I'm sorry, I'm not mad at you. It was just the situation. He said, let's do this. He said, let's adjourn the meeting. And you guys come back next week with ten new ideas to catch. Bin lot. So see what he did. He gave them all mental homework. They got to report back to CIA director. So are they going to be thinking about that? For sure. So they're thinking about it driving to and from work.

They're thinking about it when they're in the shower running. So the next week at the bin laden meeting, they came up with 37 new ideas to catch bin laden. So that's what that's the potential inside people's minds that if we can harness and we can pull, you can get great, great things out. So that's that's an example of back to that whole process of human nature. What, what you can do, what you could stop doing and then what new things to do.

That would be a new one of the new things you could do to to really push your organization or push people, accept change, so forth. So yeah, searching for that moment. Yeah. Exactly. And and, and we all know how that ended with, with bin laden and how they tracked him and there's been movies and stuff made about that. And I did an episode with Rick Prada who went through that whole process was right. Right. Very heavily involved with that. So check out that episode if you're interested.

He's a great guy, by the way. All that one down. Indeed, indeed. Very good. So. You mentioned some work you're doing in the State Department. And, and kind of brought up like, made me think about, how and of where the intelligence community is at and where it's moving.

In the future, if you look at, agencies like Unga, who's building a new headquarters in Saint Louis, they already have one there, but they're building a new, new building there, which is spurred a lot of interest in geospatial intelligence in Saint Louis. Yeah, that multi-billion-dollar building going over there. And with this new and a modern focus on open source intelligence, which you're mentioning, how you're following so much of Ukraine war on telegram.

I just my my wheels have been spinning about, like, this new administration coming in, open source intelligence revolution. And the idea of efficiency. Right. These, these, these paradigms. Do we need to have 18 intelligence agencies anymore? Do we need to have all of our operations in skiffs? Do we need to have, 15 different departments looking at China? Like what do you think about in general,

the efficiency within our intelligence community? And, is it right for these types of things like you've probably heard of this DDoS, right? The department. Right, which is a massive troll. It's I think it's hilarious. Are they going to look at the intelligence community and all this new technology and say, you know, this is kind of this is kind of ancient the way we do things, even though, we have, you know, the, the always has the coolest tools and all that good stuff.

But they operate on different networks, right? And it's right complex and, you know, causes a lot of friction. I mean, it's not even that they operate on different networks. The agencies operate on their own networks within the networks. I mean, it just gets it gets wild and crazy. What are your thoughts on this? The idea of efficiency and, you know, is the is the intelligence community ready for that?

Well, the the interesting thing, we're coming up the 20th anniversary of the, Intelligence Reorganization Act. And, which created the DNI structure, superstructure to help coordinate all this. I got to tell you, I got decades, decades of experience on this, and I am not a fan of restructuring and reorganizing to solve soft problems. If the problem is lack of coordination and collaboration, which it was back then, I can tell you putting a new level of hierarchy on top is not the answer.

I was, I did with the DNI. Yeah, I got called up to the number, the WMD commission. I got called up there three times and we had the best discussions about culture, the importance of culture, and and how do you change all the some of the stuff we're talking about today? It was wondrous. However, when they came out with the report, they pushed aside all the people stuff, all the soft stuff. And the recommendation was, well, let's let's have a new oversight.

It used to be called the community management staff. You know, that the CIA director had to hatch responsible for the whole, I say, plus responsible CIA. Well, anyway, DNI replace that. And I was there for the birth of that, and the the, you know, the fighting fights were awesome about how many analysts they pull out of CIA to stick up topside and this, that and the other.

So anyway, I think the answer is not trying to shift boxes around, because next week some new technology is going to come or, some new event will occur in the world, and you're going to find that the structure doesn't fit that. I mean, there is no, the answer is on the people side, which is just increasing. You're always pressing to increase collaboration and cooperation. And, a guy named Ron Sanders, who was the first, air chief up at the DNI level, started something called joint duty.

Well, that was good. That was like Nichols. The the at the act that the DoD was acting on to do joint duty was brought in. And so as people started serving in NCA and CIA and and that say they found the other side didn't have horns, they're making connections. Remember, we're back to this human connection thing. As that happens, you're less fearful of your own little, your own little area. You're less protective. You've got contacts outside.

So that's the stuff that that's the answer to all this and the fact that there are you know, you mentioned how many different agencies there are. Remember a lot of those are very small, like, DIY intelligence. I've worked a lot with them. Well, they focus on, nuclear matters that they know best. Right. State Department, the INR is, is a little group that punches above its weight. And you look at the big ones, NRO launches the satellites.

India does just more and more powerful work all the time because of what they're specializing and CIA's doing, the Humint and analysis, those are all pretty, pretty different tasks. But I see a lot more cooperation and collaboration today, Nick, than than I did even ten years ago and certainly 20 years ago. But, yeah, I just hope that the end result, the new administration is not.

Well, we're going to we're going to knock out this box and replace it with that box and put this person over here that that doesn't do anything. Yeah. Just from a maybe not too in-depth perspective. I look at the different agencies, just just their infrastructure alone, operating on different networks and, well, some of it, like, manifest itself. It makes sense. I know that you have to have an internal network

that is totally unconnected. Yeah. Because I look at cyber defense today, it's the fastest growing cybersecurity, fastest growing area there is. So you got to do that. And then there are you know the you've got Jay Wicks and you've got all these other other connect connections that that go in between. So the organizations can, can communicate separately. But yeah, I hear you, I hear you. I even think about the efficiency of. Of just operating on the networks themselves.

Like. Like, when you're operating on Jay because you don't have access to ChatGPT. Well, I know they're working on some language models, but you don't have access to all the new tools. That saves so much time. I mean, you talked about how ChatGPT is is amazing and Revolution ized. You know, the way you look at things. Well, the reason is you just get instant access to it. I mean, how much time would be saved on an an an analytic report?

Yeah. If you just put the data in a form and then ChatGPT spits out the report. Yeah. How much, you know, like, there's so much to be gained from just the technology standpoint. And then, and then if you overlap that with there's so many different departments looking at the same thing, it drives me insane. I, I can't I mean, I can tell you I've been to a lot of the, the different agencies and I've seen that, you know, I've been in the rooms.

I'm like, oh yeah, those guys, I was just in another room at the other place and they're looking at the same thing. Are you guys? You guys talk and they're like, no, my okay, all right. What are we doing here? So we're all on the same team. But what we're we're not quite doing it as, as smartly as we could, but and I just respect the human nature and I think, you know that. That's right.

You know, just going to be publishing a book on that is how do and the book, the ulterior of the book, ulterior motive is how to make the IC work better, frankly. And I give I only give a few stories, you know, from, I see intelligence community organizations, but that's that's my target audience is how do we solve the problem you're talking about? Because the the, there'll always be a little bit of a, a lag on efficiency, say, with new software like, chat. Sure. However, or, internal texting.

And the reason is, boy, you'd better be sure of the complete pedigree of anything that you adopt inside of as a secret, communication system. Because stuff comes from all over the world. So you, you know, you find out when you look at something, looks looks like plain. It looks like it was it was made in the UK. And suddenly find out 30% of the software was written in China. Well, so there's always going to be that lag we'll never get.

You'll never get government to operate, with the, you know, the, the, the rapidity that you could in the private sector. But aside from that, it gets us right back to the whole thing you've been talking about, which is it's the people. You just got to get the people to work together, be more collaborative, be more giving, more trusting. Apply common sense and and so on to, to get them all to work together in these organizations.

So, you know, I attend a lot of the industry conferences and all that. Yeah. And, it's heavy focus on technology ahead of thought. And I post on LinkedIn about this actually had a lot of a lot of post. But the thought was, what if we started to assemble more gatherings and, focused on people as opposed to the technology, like have people as the central organizing factor and not xyzzy AI at the edge, which is the new thing, right? Yeah. Domain.

That's. Yeah, that's where I want I tell you what I'm waiting for that I push for that. Somebody has got to put a conference on, say, hey guys, what about the people? And again, I go back to what I said. Every blue ribbon panel says we need more innovation. Talking about same thing you are about the. I say, and yet nobody tells us how do you be more innovative? Well, back to ABCs. So you got a really good manager who builds psychological safety.

And by saying hello in the morning and smiling, and they build trust and, say people's name, how, I don't exactly. I'll tell you a quick story, Mike. Yep. I have an office in in downtown Starkville here. I'm in beautiful, illustrious Mississippi, and, I drink, I drink Coca-Cola, and I do the monsters and everything. I don't do coffee. That's what I do. For my daily drugs. Caffeine. And the other day, I was going.

Going into work, and I swung into this gas station there near where my office is at, and I just go in there, grab my stuff, and I was just kind of feeling pretty good, you know, a good day. I actually slept that night, which is been, Yeah. The two year old. That's that's not always the case. And, I looked at the person behind the counter and, and I said, well, thank you very much, ro. Can I call you ro? Thank you for for helping here.

And, she looked at me like nobody has said her name in months. I mean, all my eyes lit up. She was like, oh my gosh. Like, yes. Like, you know. And I could just see she was so exuberant. Like, nobody has said, this person's name. And then she's like, how did you know my name? And I'm being silly, you know, I'm like, well, you know your name tag. That's right, that's right. Your name tag did not realize she was wearing an impact.

But that those little, little things, like saying someone's name like that, that made a big difference to her at that moment. And, you know, I'm sure she forgot about it. Two seconds. But every time I go in there now, I say her name. You know, I'm like, hey, Ray, how are you doing? We're best friends now, right? You know, what are some other kind of soft skills like that that maybe could really alter an organization if they're applied properly? What? What comes to your mind?

And it's it's what you just said. It's all the little stuff. I'll give you an example. I did a study. I got ratings of 200 best bosses at CIA. Now, they were anonymous. But what I did was and interviewed, the folks who had rated the the best bosses and said, well, tell me stories about what they did or what they were like. What how did they behave? And I just collected all this data and then broke it down.

And it basically, 20 years ago, what what we were teaching the CIA is kind of leadership is got like five steps. One of them is first one is establish psychological safety. And this was before, 1999 was the first study that came out outside of the. I see that about psychological safety. Now, it's a big deal, but psychological safety is just smile, say hello to people in the morning, pay attention to them and actively listen. Second step you can't build trust if people fear you.

But the so you've got the psychological safety. Now you can build trust. Well how do you do that? Well that hinges on the law of reciprocity, which is nothing more than very small. Repetitive. Basically gifts that you give to other people, you could give them advice, you give them opportunities, you could give them positive feedback. You can you can give them data. Maybe they're driven data driven people. You can.

There's all these little gifts that just, you know, periodically and consist and say is so important on the trust thing. You just keep doing that and you don't. By the same token, at the trust level, you don't do this social pain stuff. I just I talked about alluded to earlier that the brain shuts down if you get yelled at or you're shamed at a meeting or, you your boss makes you angry. They've lost you for some period of time. So that's safety, trust. And then you.

Now that you've built trust, now you've got their attention. You can build clarity. And clarity comes again. Simple things like you're saying two way conversations, active listening, using visual cues to, to give, give people everything from infographics to graphic display data to using stories or metaphors to get at the visioning part of the brain. But that's building the clarity of, what's the mission and what your expectations are. It's all a little stuff.

And then finally you get to a fourth step, which is now you can challenge a lot of people. You can really push them because you they feel psychologically safe. You've got their trust in you. They're perfectly clear of your expectations where the guardrails are, how much they can experiment. That's the clarity. And now now you just push the let's go guy and gang and let's go for it. And we're going to really sprint here and do this, this and this.

And then you just at the end, you review it and start all over again. So anyway, that's what we taught 20 years ago. But it's all little tiny stuff. It's just no magic in it. You know, I'm not much of a political correctness person. I'm not I'm not big on this stuff. Okay. You know, but I, I like the idea of psychological safety. I just the word safety, to me, it sounds it sounds like it sounds a little PC for me. I actually like I like the term psychological empowerment.

Yeah. It's not it's not like safety. You're not providing some, like, you know, cube space for them to care about themselves. It's no you are empowered to express your ideas to get your your thoughts and emotion. So anyways, but that's a super cool I, I'm going to steal that shamelessly from you and go ahead and quote you on that one. That's a good one. Yeah. No no no problem no problem. I love logical empowerment. Yeah, yeah. No, I feel like psychological safety sounds too much like safe space.

And I'm like, okay, all right. We need to avoid safe space. Like you need to do the opposite. That's, That that's pushing people down. That's assuming they're not capable of great things. Yeah, exactly. You kind of talk on this a little bit. I think we we kind of overlook this this portion of soft skills. You mentioned active listening. Yeah. That is a skill. That is. It sounds simple, but, man, that is a real skill that takes developing.

I don't that's something I've actually got a little bit better at doing the podcast because if you don't, if I don't sit here and actually pay attention to every word that you say, yeah, our conversation is going to die in two seconds, right? I'll be like, why did you say what? But I've gotten a lot better at this, over time, and it's actually helped me quite a bit. I that's why I tell everybody everybody should do a podcast is is going to help you, with your communication skills.

What are some what are what are your thoughts on on this idea of just, like, strengthening soft skills through conversation or like, how do you how do you exercise those without being overt? You know what? It's, And I'll let me go to the active listening thing. That's the hardest. I think that's the hardest thing for me personally to do, because my brain works real fast at a high level, 30,000ft. And I just can't wait to interject. Right.

And here's, here's a quick story of how you could control that. I was teaching a narrow class, through, one of the universities and, it was in an amphitheater, you know, with the, arena type seating. And they had name tags, name cards up. Right. So I like to roam around, go up to the, the back and I'm coming down and I see this guy on the backside of his name card. He's got these check marks. And so I turned to him and said, you know what is what is that?

And, he had, two check, two check marks over this side and four over here. And, and he, you know, he said, oh, well, I tend I'm an extrovert. I tend to talk too much and not listen. And, so what I do is each class I allow myself to make two big points, and I'll check those on the right side of the card once I've done that. And then. But I also allow myself to make four little points when somebody else has spoken, I'll say, oh, I really agree with that. Or, you know, it's just a small.

And he checked that and that's he's using visual cues to hold himself back. Hold the line back. I thought that was so clever of what he did. Two really good books on that. That on how you do that. One of them is called, crucial Conversation. So there's sold millions and millions of books. It's an old book, but all it is is how do you learn to. If you and I were having a debate on something and my temperatures rising, how do you keep it civil?

How do you break your brain from doing automatically jumping to conclusions or whatever? And then keep the conversation civil so that you come up with a solution both sides want. So it's called crucial conversations. And then the other one is called odd name leadership and self-deception. By a group called the Harbinger Institute.

And it, it, it's a different look of, doing what you're just saying it, but it outlines very simple approach to control yourself from going absolutely bonkers or haywire. And by doing so, you never get caught up in this, you know, angry disputes or hard feelings. You have actually come up with constructive results. So I'll shoot you the two books so you could post them. That's right. You know, for your listeners if any any were interested but that.

Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll try to take all the books that you mentioned, like, you, you have a good library. And we'll make sure that those are in the description so people can check those out. We'll have a letter to your, leadership. What is it? A table of all the periodic table of elements. Yeah. Yeah, you'll love that. Your your your background. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. I'll definitely check that out. I think the, the business world and, more of the. How's it going?

I guess you say the commercial markets, they really like to learn lessons from places like CIA, places like special operations units. Because of their focus on mission, I think is is really. The thing is, they know that their mission first organizations. The great mentor of mine, Bob sharp, says, you know, People first mission always like that's his thing is, like, people love that people. People run the missions. And he's former director of MGI super, super great guy.

Anyways, what are some some of the lessons you've learned, maybe from just your time at CIA that could be applied in a business sense? That maybe gets at some of these. I know we've maybe touched on some of them, but what are some, some maybe deeper issues you've ran into that you think business. Maybe, maybe you've had an moment where you were like, you were like, hey, you know what? Business people could really learn from this?

Or you know, so-and-so over at, you know, Ford could really use this knowledge, right? You mentioned you work with Jack Welch at GE. What are some of those other lessons learned that you could that you'd be willing to share with us? I think part well, one of them, this is boring. But metrics, is I don't like using metrics to guide people, because what happens is they get myopic. You know, you got to produce Nick.

You got to produce four reports this quarter, but that's all you're going to do, and you're not going to be thinking more broadly. But where metrics are great is where do you where do you stand? So we developed a whole series of soft metrics, for example, what is your culture? Well, if you ask that of most organizations, they kind of flail a little bit. It's hard for them to come up. They've got the value statement on the wall, but that doesn't mean anything. You know what?

What's the actual culture? So for example, again, easy to gather. You just give a group of 30 random folks, a list of, corporate or organizational values. And they tell them, circle the top five that you see in the workplace, and then you just collect all these from several groups and you rank them.

And by the way, number one, just to back to your point for the intelligence agencies that have done it in this mission, always number one, always because they know that they're just mission, mission centric. And then you get the other stuff, you know, excellence or, caution or whatever the, the other things are. So that one thing that you can do is it's very easy to measure. Number two, we talked about right on the front end, which is really know who your people are.

Screen them carefully so you get the right people in the right jobs, people that are in the right job, love it. They're happier. They're they're playing to their strengths. And that goes that goes a long way to building morale and everything. And I think the agencies all do a really good job that, then another thing going the other way, you know, you've, something that Jack Welch started when I was there. He got rid of the.

He had invented the GE, invented performance management when they were in the Industrial age company, which really helped them in the early 1900s. But then they found that. Wait a minute. This this is we're keeping people in the dark for a whole year before we give them feedback. It's kind of cruel and unusual punishment. So, he did away with it and started something that Adobe later picked up and called check ins. So what this is, is every manager once a week has a quick,

just a quick five minute informal session with an employee. Hi. How's it going? Anything I can help you with? Any. What are you proudest of this week? You know, simple questions. And it has huge impact on morale. So we're pulling that in. We're stealing on the other way, you know, bringing that into some of the intelligence agencies. It's a great, great practice. Best practice. So when I was in the Army, we didn't call it stealing. We called it tactically acquiring.

Yeah. Knowledge. Oh. Were you. That's right. I forgot you were like me. You're an old army hand. So you're, you know, the call center, all that stuff. That's. That's wonderful stuff. The after action, discussions. Yeah. That's it. Exactly. Yeah. We all need to do that a lot more. And I think, half of the country right now is probably doing a hot wash on watching what just happened, saying that that's who they are. They, what's happening here?

I know we talked earlier about some of the the nominations that the president is putting in place, and, I just, I don't know, I, I think you're a great person to, to to talk on, on some of these matters. He's put Tulsi Gabbard is nominating to be the the director of national intelligence. I know we talked about those a little bit. Maybe they'll reorganize and do some things there.

What are your thoughts on on one I guess that role of DNI, you talked about the history of it, but, you know, her potentially going into that, that position and I'll and I'll caveat with, I believe what he's doing. You mentioned, you know, focusing on loyalty, which which is clearly a part of his part of his plan, not necessarily a bad thing. Depends on your perspective. We talked a little bit about Pete Hegseth, and I mentioned maybe he doesn't quite have, the executive experience.

Tulsi certainly has experience in Congress and, all that. And she's a veteran as well. What what are your thoughts on on her as DNI? And then I guess maybe this, I don't know, this thought on the different types of the different types of personalities that have kind of built this the that are just going into this, this it seems it's so has it always been like this? It's so personality driven. Maybe because a lot of these people are out there on the news and media and stuff.

It's like, right, feel like I know a lot of these people. It's not like it used to be where you you hear like a DNI selected, you're like, oh, who's that? Never heard of them. But now it's like, oh yeah, yeah, I saw them on this podcast or I saw them on the news or you know, what are your what are your thoughts on all of this? It's kind of wild. Well, it's interesting they did a, back to DNI. They did in the first Trump administration. They assigned somebody to look at that and rationalize it.

And I don't know why nothing ever came of it. In this case, I have no idea what her marching orders are. I asked the historians one time to to do a study on what does the president say to the new CIA director or the new DNI, you know, do they say, go in there, go in there, and shake up the place? Or are they saying, go in there and keep it out of the press? Or you know what, right. Yeah, it would be an interesting study. And I don't know that anybody's ever done that.

So I don't know what he would tell. The president would tell Tulsi. It may be I mean, this is just personal opinion. I feel that the, DNI got a little too large. They they built they pulled up too much staff over time. And that's easy to do. You know, you get this natural bloat. So maybe, maybe her goal is going to be somehow to, reduce the number of personnel, up there, by, you know, few scores of people. That's not going to change the world.

I do what I hope is that the new people don't get so obsessed with, reducing, say, reducing Dei or reducing staff levels on the margins and then forgetting about, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, which is what it's all about. What are these guys up to? And, you know, you you talked about you like, you know, you be curious to hear that conversation between the president and his his cabinet appointees. I think that's that's kind of the idea.

If you look at, like, the stuff that Pete Hegseth has written about. Right. And even some of the stuff I've heard Ron DeSantis say about just getting back to mission, like get back to mission, right. This is this is all in our mission, I and I, and I feel like that's probably the marching orders he's given them.

I hope because they're, you know, no matter what you think about Dei, there is good stuff in the D and the I especially, that, you know, you wouldn't want to you wouldn't want to get rid of, that can't be the focus. It should be mission first. Of course. Or people first mission always. You know, people on a mission have to be first. That's that's my sense of the thing. It seems like very much like, let's let's let's focus on mission.

Let's let's get back to mission on what we're supposed to be doing here. I want the the mission of DNI is supposed to be, you mentioned has has changed a bit. Mission mission creep does happen. I remember Obama saying this very clearly about talking about mission creep. And I think that's right. Things alter and change. The mission creep on DNI is pretty, pretty clear.

It's been they went from being the the organization that's supposed to, you know, hold policy and analytic standards and, and really make everything cohesive. Well, now they have actual they're doing actual intelligence. That's that's not what the DNI is supposed to do. They're supposed to be the right, organizing, agency, which everything should be organized around. So I don't know that there's, there's, there needs to be some somebody in there to, to get a hold on that.

Now, Tulsi in particular, though, she's kind of interesting because she obviously has combat experience. She has she's no doubt a, you know, patriotic American person, but she doesn't have I don't see that, like, intelligence, experience. Maybe she's got some in Congress or something. I'm, I'm unaware of, what are your thoughts on, like, somebody coming in a leadership position? And maybe this is a good lesson for people that we talked a little bit about.

You talked about the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? Yeah. Everybody thinks they're better than they actually are. And the ones that think they're worse are actually the ones that are more qualified. What are your thoughts on somebody like her coming in to DNI, maybe as an outsider and and does the IC need some type of shake up, you know, yeah. It's interesting. I think, it's the approach you take. Any time you got a new boss coming in anywhere. I've worked with neuroscientists.

I've been out to UCLA and seen what happens to your brain when you have this jolt of uncertainty. And let me tell you, it's pretty ugly what it does. It shuts down. Your, analytical thinking. It shuts down creativity and everything. So the the bigger the splash you come in to make. And I'll use John Deutch as a prime example. CIA he might as well. The Russians could have flipped the switch and shut the place down for six months, because that's what he did.

So if you come in and you're striking fear in, in people, and you, you come in and say you've got all the answers and they don't, you just lost them all. And ironically, I just wrote a paper. I'll send it to you. Believe it or not, it says, why getting back to mission is may not be the right answer. And the reason is that 98% of the people in the intelligence agencies and I've gathered data, know what the mission is, and they're cranking away on a mission every day.

And then you got 2% is the garbage, the not garbage. But I'm just saying bells and whistles that maybe you're going to be attacked and reduced, but in doing so, you you can create more turmoil to actually affect operations below. Operations and analysis, all the good stuff we do. And, and inadvertently, people are not taking the prudent risk that they should or so on because there's all these thunderstorms going on the top level. And I know I'm not a big fan.

I was not a big fan of creating the DNI structure to begin with. You know, I just again, I don't see how you can ever, ever, change, fix people problems or soft issues with organizational change and putting up new org charts. It just doesn't work. So it'll be interesting to see what I don't. I have not a clue. Again, I wish I knew what her marching orders were and I could give you a better answer. What I hope they are. What for me? You much earlier, like, barely touched on this word.

Excellent to me, that has a very strong meaning. To me, it means, you know, you're you're selecting great people, you're pushing for a performance based culture, constantly trying to be better than the day before. I hope that that's what the her marching orders are, right? Like like, okay, you want to push this idea and then usher in a culture of excellence and and that has good and bad ramifications because, as you know, a players are going to love that. They're going to love that.

They're the ones are gonna sit there like, yes, let's get this the best of the best. You know, the cream, rises to the top. I'm in, but you have your second tier people, the B players, the C players. It's not it's not going to be safe for them. They're not going to feel psychologically empowered in that type of environment where you're constantly pushing excellence. So that kind of kind of goes full circle back into your experience.

And where I could ask you more questions about, yeah. You know, you know, to me, I, I'd love to build and continue to build a culture of a players of excellence, of being the best at what we do, selecting the great people, promoting the right people. My camera just going up with all of. I don't know, just giving us struggles. The, the you know. Synology says technology. Anyways, so there's this idea of excellence. I want to jump back into that real quick.

So to me, when I hear excellence, I think about, you know, pushing the boundaries, bringing in a players, having the best people doing the work. And, you know, some people aren't going to necessarily like that. They're going to they're going to be kind of pushed out of a culture like that. Right? They might think it's too, too masculine. Right. You hear this toxic masculinity.

But really, if you're really just pushing a culture of excellence, then it doesn't it doesn't have, it shouldn't, shouldn't have anyways, any type of toxicity associated with that. What it does mean is that people got to step up their game, right? They got they got to elevate their game. The CEO of Goldman Sachs, he has a cool saying. It's, it's very simple.

But, you know, he talks about some of his lower level, people that are coming in and, and notoriously, they have a, a, a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. Right. So it's harder to get a job tax on the doors to get into Harvard. You know, that tells you anything .000 1% or something of the people get hired. And, those entry level positions are incredibly difficult. I mean, oftentimes people are working 80, you know, hours a week. Really, sharpen their teeth, on their craft.

And the CEO has a great short saying, it's like, it's a great place to work, but it's a tough job. And I love that concept. I love that, that concept of, you know what? We're going to create a great organization for the people that are here, and it's not for everybody. It's just not right. You know, we're specialized in what we do in, it's almost counter to this idea of inclusivity. It's like, no, no, no, it's inclusive.

But for the people that are here, it's exclusive of the type of people we don't want here. Right? Like, it's I see these two things at odds. It's almost like these battling factions. It's like there's excellence and then there's the. Yeah, I don't think you can have both. Right? You can't have maximum inclusivity if you're trying to build a great culture. Special operations units. Right. They have the Special Forces has. There are five soft truths, right.

One of them is soft, cannot be mass produced. Right. And what they're saying is you can't create excellence at scale. You just can't. Right? You can't do that. What are what are your thoughts on on these kind of battling ideologies that are really I see I see this taking place just across the world, really. But specifically in the I see it, I think this is going to be the battle. And I think, even in, in business as well. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, on, on, on specifically Dei or specific or just in general, this battle between excellence, you know, seeking performance a players. Oh, okay. Boundaries are also, you know, creating these kind of psychologically empowered spaces. Right, right, right. It's kind of like a it's a yin and yang sort of situation in my opinion, you know, because you want to have you want to push your people. You want to have the best people doing doing the work.

You want to create, a culture of performance, like when we talk about excellence. But that is at odds with, you know, the other side of the house, because now you have to exclude certain people, right? You can't. If you're not a high performer, then, you know, the culture of excellence is not something that is going to suit you very well. Right? Right. So first off, the Goldman concept, works really well. It used to work actually at GE, he would only promote eight players, right?

Jack Welch I mean, excuse me, not eight players, but A-type personality. So these are very aggressive people. And so what that did over time started creating a culture of, very high aggression and a lot of internal competition. So there's a downside to that. So what Goldman does too, is they're also looking for people who run and this is a rarity. They are more interested in extrinsic rewards than intrinsic. What that means is they're very hungry for bonuses and money.

And putting scores on the, on the board. Then they are in this intrinsic stuff of internal satisfaction, you know, accomplishing something every day and having linked to a higher purpose and all that stuff. So the the Goldman model works with, my son, you know, runs a, hedge fund. I mean, a, private equity fund. So it works in that financial area. But that's not something we tried.

Somebody tried to bring something called pay for performance into DoD and CIA, and that was the biggest RF I had ever seen in my life. It was unbelievably, because people don't run on an extra 3% of money. They run on wanting to do a good job internally and so forth. So, the performance culture question is such a good one, but here's I'm going to spill the beans on some secret information for you. You ready for this? Here we go. The the CIA culture. The NGO culture are not what they look like.

It is not monolithic. So I could I can give you the CIA, actual values practice. Right. But it's it's for the entire organization. Here's what happens. Because I was in the chief human capital position, right? HR I started collecting data on the operating units underneath the directorates. Five. Now, and I collected data on all the divisions, and offices there called that the next level.

Here's, here's what the big the amazing thing is, as you go down, the organization is no longer this, this mass of what you get back on the Human capital survey every year, right. That that looks looks pretty good. And what you get is you get one unit in which it it is glowing green. I mean, this is this is where you want to work. And in fact, the write in comments are like, thank you for letting me work here. I cannot I cannot wait to drive to work in the morning. Okay, that's this unit.

Now I'm over here at this unit. And the write in comment is I never thought about quitting until now. My boss is driving me crazy. So the deeper you go, the more separate mini and micro culture you see. So let's take a new DNI or a new CIA director. They come in and they're they're they've got this perceived notion that this, this, this monolithic thing that they that needs to repair. And it's not the case. It is individual units. And Gallup backs this up with very solid data.

60% of the culture of each of these subunits is created by the boss. Right. So by Dan it's better start instead of coming in and shaking people up and moving boxes around like we always do. Come in and just start selecting people with some people skills to replace those bad bosses. Then you're going to get the performance. You're going to get the best at a human nature by doing that. So I just strongly react to this top down crap.

We've been going, Nick, we've been going through this for six decades that I've seen, and it never works. There is no fairy godmothers. There's going to come in and sprinkle dust from the top down and make anything huge change. It's just not going to happen. So it's got to be it's really got to be longer term and grind it out and just pick better leaders. Keep people in positions longer. There's a huge turnover that's very disruptive internally. And they I say slow that down.

And that's how you're going to start to get get more. Now, if you're disagreeing with certain programs, you know, like Dei, that's, that's up to the individual, administration. And but that's not going to affect the, the overall mission. It's not like the the CIA is just clogged down in diversity and thinking and talking about diversity all day long. It's just, you know, that's just a that's a part, a 2% part or whatever.

And so I just hope that we don't do what we always do, which is create, like the chaos basically trying to fix one thing or two things or three things that we perceive when you don't understand the whole complexity of the organization. It does indeed. Improvement. You betcha. And that's what I devote my life to, that that's my purpose in life, is, is to see fewer bad bosses in the intelligence community. And I that's why I get up in the morning. I'll never stop.

But, that it's it's got to be done the, the hard way, which is we call the soft way. It's not going to be done with some existential thing coming crashing down and fixing fixing things just like our work. It won't hold it back to what we talked about. Nuance, right? There's a lot more nuance happening at these. How how do you select people based on these skills? I mean, we talked about it a bit earlier.

But what are some, like, tangible things that people could use to help select these types of leaders? Because that's incredibly challenging. I can tell you as someone that I've interviewed hundreds of people for, for jobs, various and various, places, it's incredibly difficult to tell from an interview if somebody is going to be good at a job, it's thank you. It's almost impossible. They might be very good at communicating and talking and talking about themselves, especially.

But when it comes down to do they show up to work on time? Do they, you know, yeah, the actual nuts and bolts, like, can they actually write an email? Can they, you know, these kind of crazy simple things. They're just hard to tease out in a, in a simple interview. I'll, I'll add that, this is actually a big problem in the special operations community as well. They try to be very selective, especially in the joint special operations community.

You know, supports like the National Mission Force, they try to select and be very selective. Other people, they go through a skills verification process. This skills verification process is completely bonkers to me because it's totally subjective. There's no objective metric. It's just like, I don't know, he kind of didn't answer that question, right. Or, you know, I didn't I didn't wake up in the morning on the right side of the bed. So, I'm not selecting this person.

What are some tangible things that anyone can use to help select these types of good leaders? You're talking about? First off, I want to commend you. I've never heard anybody before admit that when you do an interview, you're not pulling out. You don't really get them quite the results. You don't. And this has been scientifically measured. They have something called validity coefficients. I don't want to get geeky here, but your interview and your interview or my interview of somebody is called.

It's a point to validity coefficient, which means it's better than flipping the coin, which is zero. Okay, okay. It's still 0.21 would be perfect selection all the time and never making mistake. It's two sides of the same coin. So point two is what I call layman's interview. We'll we'll filter out some. It's better certainly better than nothing. And I would advise everybody to keep doing that. You still want to have that touch time right. But there are other things you can do to really boost it.

One of them would be, and you can't afford to do this, but obviously, on the job training, think about something like that, that get your validity way up because you're actually seeing it, and now you're realizing, oh, they do come in to late every morning, you know. So that's a high, another one is that when the OSS invented this psychological assessment concept to predict future behaviors, the private sector back in 43, private sector stolen it.

So companies like Talent Plus and Connex, and Gallup do very short psychological assessments, maybe 30, 35 minutes. You can buy off the shelf. That gets you up to almost double the validity of the layman's interview. So that's another one. You could buy something off the shelf. Just an add a step to selection. Thirdly, use behavioral interviews. What are called behavioral interviews that are structured meaning you're asking the same questions basically that are backward looking.

And I'll tell you why. Here's here's an interesting fact. You tell me the the last thing you'd want me for is handling detail, okay. Because I'm again, strategic guy. So you ask me a question like, Mike, you're going to be taking over this unit, and it's important that we have attention to detail and really get things right can help. How would you do that? That's a standard. And what happens is my brain can conjure up anything that's future based really easily. So that's like a setup for me.

Oh, well, I would I would form a team to, to double check everything that we do. I would, I would set aside 15 minutes out of every day to really pay attention to the details that we're doing. I would set up the, Six Sigma like metric system, to, to track everything, real time. I mean, I could spew off all this stuff, but in reality, I would never do it because my brain is not even go there. So the. You have to use past tense on your interviews.

Mike, tell me about a time when you came into a group that needed, a lot more attention to detail. They were kind of loose cannons, and we needed, we needed. And now I, I can't answer it because I have to go back to reality. So that's a long winded answer. But those are different ways that you can get your validity way. And select people with better people skills to, to run, I say the intelligence community or anything else, you know, you could do just in time training.

You, I mean, not just in time training, but, OJT you could do the off the shelf psychological assessments. You could do the structured behavioral interviews or backward looking. You could train anybody to do that in three hours. So anybody in your company or anywhere else could learn to do that? So you just got you're moving to higher validity and you're going to be making a lot better too, so you won't make as many bad decisions. And I used to start up small companies.

And let me tell you, you get one bad worker when you're at that 4 or 5 six deploy level. That's a disaster because that's going to soak up 80% of your time. So the selection is so, so critical. And again, that goes back to the Tulsi question of what would I do. I would hone in on cure the bad units. Don't put strike fear in the monolithic whole, if you want, if you want really huge changes in performance, then it sounds like Tulsi needs to come stick out. Mike's advice.

You know who's actually really good at this is chick fil A. Oh, isn't that interesting? Yeah. You know, I was I was at a chick fil A once. I don't remember where I was. It doesn't matter. They're all the same, and they're all amazing. Yeah. And, I was just kind of curious. I'm curious. Person. So I asked one of the workers, I'm like, you know, hey, you know, how did you get this job at a chick fil A? And she's like, oh, well, you know, I did a lot of interviews.

I'm like, well, why is everybody so happy here? She's like, well, you know, they just kind of they do a lot of screening and she's she said, I've had three different interviews before they would hire me. Yeah. And this is not the manager of the store, mind you. This is someone that was, you know, the front line worker and man, they really know what they're doing, don't they? You know, that's a beautiful example. You know, another one is, Ritz-Carlton.

If you've ever been to a Ritz Carlton, they test, assess basically every employee and one time, and so that the employees are really working to their strengths. So you get somebody working at the reception area, has got to be somebody who is very attentive to helping people out. But there's a twist to it. But they've got to have the ability that if they can't, it's it doesn't trouble them greatly.

The person that likes to help people, but can't cope if if they can't meet the person's demand, you'd have to put those on the front of the restaurant as greeters. And so it's that finely tuned. But here's what they did. They did. There was an the leadership assessment. Two, they discovered a woman, a maid, in housekeeping, who had leadership skills off the chart. I mean, she was, she was a learner. She was a, passionate drive, empathy. She she had the full, full package.

And they smartly didn't make her a manager. What they did is they put her in some gentle training programs. So she still work there. They got her a coach today that made is senior vice president at Ritz-Carlton. Wow. Isn't that cool? So you talk about discovering strengths inside people. Some of these assessments we were just talking about, including your interview in my interview. Right. You have to do that part two. But put the full package together.

You can really make a huge change in an organization. Man. That's that's such a great point. Yeah. Those interviews, I'm always, you know. Yeah. I'd like to think that, and I think all of us probably have this stuff like, oh, I'm really good at selecting great people. I mean, I've hired some people that turned out to be duds. And yeah, I have to, let me tell you. Yeah, yeah. Like you're talking about, if you if you hire the wrong person at the wrong time, it's not going to be good.

Anyways. Well, Mike. Hey, man, it was great talking to you. Absolutely. Well, and real quick, though, where can people find your your stuff? You know what, Mike mirrors.com in the IRS. Mike mirror. Com is my, new book site, and it's got I'm loading a lot of blogs and stuff in there. I'll send you a link, if you want to post it, that if people want a free bi weekly leadership newsletter, they've got it. And then, also, please tell people I'm on LinkedIn and just send me an invite.

I would love to link up with any, especially your listeners, because you've got such a unique group, you know, with, with all that you're doing. So just Mike Myers on LinkedIn, they'll find me. Awesome. Awesome. Appreciate it, Mike, and really great for you to come on and share some of your wisdom with us. And that's so really I could go a lot, a lot longer, but, I've been drinking too much, too many of these Cokes and gotta take care of business. But anyways, Mike, thanks so much.

Appreciate everything. Thanks for watching everybody. Nick. Thank you sir. Been fun. All right. Bye bye.