GA 112 | How to Pursue Greatness with Ron Pereira

You're listening to episode 112 with Ron Pereira.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey there.

This is Ron Perera with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy Podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day in.

Your week to listen to the show.

And for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. So last week I attended the TWI Summit in San Antonio, Texas, and I have to say, it was fantastic. It was a smaller show, there was around a few hundred people, so there are definitely much larger shows out there. But I have to say that this may have been the best conference that I've ever been to in my entire life. It was just hearing from all of the TWI practitioners, practitioners, HR professionals, really talk about really the human side of Lean. It really moved me. And I learned so much from so many different people. There was so many awesome case studies. A team from J and J, Jonathan and Johnson was there talking about how they are implementing job instruction. Patrick Graup gave a great talk on the tie ins between Toyota Kata and TWI and just so many other people. So I want to thank Jim Hunsinger, Dwayne, and the whole Lean from Frontiers team for putting on such a great show. Now I was also able to do a keynote speech and I don't do a lot of live speeches and so forth and I still feel like I need to get a lot better at them. But man, it was so fun. It's so exhilarating to get up on a stage like that and talk to a few hundred people. So my talk was really about kind of two parts. The first part, I spent some time talking about how to motivate people so we get into things like mastery, autonomy, purpose. And then the second part part of the talk, I spent some time putting together some thoughts on how to go about creating a strong culture within your organization. And in doing so, I tried to take a slightly different slant to it than what most people talk about. In particular, I wanted to talk about things like why having focus and not becoming distracted is so important and also talked about things like why having a. A strong bias for action is so important. So what I'm gonna do in this episode is actually share the audio portion of my talk. Now, if you'd like a copy of the slides that I use, simply go to the show note page which you'll find over@gembapodcast.com and just look for episode 112. So again, that's gembapodcast.com and look for episode 112. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

And with that, I turn it over to Ron. Thank you. So in the spring of 1977, 15 year old Rick Hoyt asked his dad if he could participate in a five mile benefit race for a young lacrosse player who'd been recently paralyzed. And while running 5 miles is nothing to take lightly, most active 15 year old boys could likely fight their way through it. Well, the problem in this particular situation is that due to oxygen deprivation at the time of his birth, Rick Hoyt was diagnosed as a spastic quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, leaving him unable to walk or speak. Shortly after his birth, Rick's parents, Dick and Judy Hoyt, were encouraged to institutionalize Rick since he had little hope of living a so called normal life. Well, they didn't listen. And on that day they began to fight for Rick. They fought for him to be able to attend school, to participate in sports, and to one day add incredible value to the world at large. So when Rick asked his dad about doing that race, his dad, who wasn't a runner by the way, said yes. And they would then set off to design a cart that Rick would sit in and his dad would push him. Well, little did he know that that first five mile race would change both of their lives as they knew it. What happened was during the race they didn't do especially well. I think they finished second to last in that first race. But what they noticed was that Rick came alive like they'd never seen him before. It was as if the wind blowing in his face was breathing new life and hope into him. And so his dad decided to sign up for another race. And then another, and then another. Eventually they would go on to run more than a thousand races together, including 72 marathons and six Ironman triathlons. So for those that don't know a triathlon involves swimming, was it 2.4 miles, bicycling, 112 miles and running a full 26.2 mile marathon. Now that's pretty crazy in and of itself. So you might wonder how in the world does he do it with a son who can't walk? Well, I'll tell you how he does it. He pushes him in a wheelchair. He pulls them in a boat while he swims in this crazy water. And then he holds them on his bicycle. So I don't know about you, but I've seen many of you maybe have seen videos of this family. If you haven't, go home and YouTube it. If you can watch them without crying, you're a stronger person than me because it's just one of the most touching stories that I've ever seen in my life. Now I have seven kids, which normally people are like, wait, what did you. Yeah, you heard it right? Seven kids. We're a big, happy Catholic family. So obviously the love we have for our kids can leave us to do extraordinary things, right? We sacrifice. We give up so much for our children. But come on, who pulls and pushes their kid through six Ironman triathlons? I mean, it just blows me away. And so the reason that I'm telling this story here at a TWI Lean HR conference is because I believe with every ounce of my being that authentic lean thinking is so much more than tools. It's so much more than coaching tools that we're talking about here. It's so much more even than respect for people that we rightly talk about. You see, I believe the Hoyt story, Team Hoyt, as they're called, is a perfect example of how much humans can accomplish when they put others first and they quit making excuses and they quit whining and crying about the struggles that they meet. Obviously, what we do as lean thinkers, as TWI practitioners, HR professionals, it's not easy. And there's many, many difficulties along the way. There's far more difficulties than there are successes. I think everyone would agree. The scary thing is there's surveys, and many have probably heard this. The Gallup poll did a few years ago, and it's really stayed the same for the last few years that 70% of all American workers are either not engaged or actively disengaged in their work. 70%. So let's just say that's not right here. We're all strong lean thinkers here. Maybe it's 50% here in this room. When it really comes down to it, how engaged you are, let me just draw a line down the middle. And everyone on one side or the other is actively disengaged. That's a huge problem. And even if it's not in this room, I can promise you, when you go back to your companies, it is there. When you walk down the hall and you see 10 people seven of them probably wish they weren't there. Okay. That's just the reality. So I mentioned Dr. Deming. He said many, many years ago that if management stopped demotivating their employees, we wouldn't have to worry so much about motivating them. And so that was true back in Dr. Deming's days. Obviously, it's still true today. So what I want to do is the first part of my talk is kind of talk about motivation. And what's been so fun about today is that I've got this sit in on several sessions, and Mike stole some stuff from me. I saw Dr. Lu stole some stuff from. No, just kidding. But there's so much good stuff going on, and we're all kind of saying similar things in slightly different ways. So that's pretty exciting to me. I have a lot of hope in the lean movement here that things are really on the right track. So the first part, we're going to talk about motivation. And as it turns out, there's really two primary ways to motivate people. The first is extrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivators. And Mike kind of touched on this a little bit this morning. But this is when you get bonuses, if you do a good job or perhaps with your children, get an A on the test, Susie, and we'll take you out for ice cream or something like that. These are extrinsic motivators. And I think back to my corporate days before Gamba Academy. I worked at a large publicly traded company that made billions and billions of dollars. And times were very, very good early in my career. And they paid out a return on net assets bonus. If you have any questions, see Jean. She can explain what that means. But a Rona bonus, Right. And so obviously, the more money the company made and profitability and so forth, the employees were going to. Were going to reap those rewards. And I remember the first Rona Bonus that I ever got was actually the biggest. And we were approaching the day that it was going to be announced, and there was like this buzz and electricity in the air of how much money we were going to make, because again, times were very, very good at this company. Well, the time came for the announcement, and we did. We made out like bandits. Big bonuses, and everyone was happy. Math maybe for a week or two. Right. And so what happened then? Fast forward two years, a European competitor came out of nowhere and snatched the market away from this particular company that I worked at. And when the Rona bonus kind of cycle was coming back around, needless to say we didn't get paid anything. I think if they really probably should have taken money from our paychecks, they didn't do that. But. So I guess my point here is that there was a very dark time in that company and things like this Rona bonus and just hearing the announcement that there wasn't going to be one paid, it just sucked the life out of the whole organization. And Mike talked about this this morning, that this extrinsic motivation is kind of the carrot and stick kind of approach, where the carrot of the reward is what we kind of dangle in front of the employee with hopes that they're going to want to get it and they'll work hard. And if they do get it, great. The company's done well, the employee wins, and all's well. And as it turns out, I don't want to just totally bash extrinsic motivation, because for certain jobs in particular, like if you're in a production environment and you're an associate on the shop floor and you produce widgets, extrinsic motivators can work because they almost gamify the work a little bit, okay? But as it turns out, for just about anybody else, extrinsic motivation just simply doesn't work. In fact, it can have the opposite effect, though. As the saying goes, show me how you're going to measure me, and I'm going to tell you how I perform, right? And whatever my objectives say, that's all I'm going to care about. And perhaps there's other things I really should be caring about, but I'm not, because I need to get that bonus. The second type of that's far more effective is intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is so powerful, and many things that Dr. Lu talked about today come into play. When we sense that we have intrinsic motivation inside of us, we're seeking a higher purpose, and we know why we're doing it. There's a lot of neuroscience that goes into it that brain chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, these things make us feel good, right? And when intrinsic motivation is working properly, these chemicals are around us all the time. And that's why people just feel happier. They enjoy being at work. And so what I want to talk about now is how to go about seeking intrinsic motivation. In particular, if your companies do extrinsic motivation, which I'm guessing everyone in here does, okay, perhaps that will continue. But I would encourage you to really focus your efforts on how to transition to more of an intrinsic motivation reward.

System.

And for that to happen, there's three things. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Let's go ahead and start with autonomy. So autonomy is basically letting go. Okay. And so for the micromanager, this is very difficult, right? It's allowing your team, your associates, to simply run the business. And when I say run the business, I mean run the business. There's a man right here, my colleague, Steve Kane. Before he came to get the academy, he worked at a company called Specialty Silicone Fabricators in California and Michigan, a few other places. And they implemented autonomous teams, full blown autonomous teams, meaning the employees ran the business, full profit and loss responsibility at the shop floor level, and the supervisors and the managers transitioned into becoming coaches and so forth. And now it wasn't easy. And Steve, I'm sure, can tell you many war stories. We've covered it in some podcasts as well. If you'd like, we can point you to those. But the point is, once they got that thing rolling, it was a machine that couldn't be stopped. Now, they learned it from a company called Damon Products. Now, some folks here may have heard of Damon Products. They're close to South Bend, Indiana. Fantastic company. We got to visit them. I think it was a year or two ago. It was a small company, around 50 people. But when you walk around and you talk to Damon Associates, all they talked about was trust, how they were trusted, how they trusted leadership. And it was almost infinite infectious to be around these people. And why was it? It's because they had full autonomy to run their business. The thing about autonomy, though, is it's not easy. It's obviously not easy to let go. And I was talking to Steve earlier that, you know, here we are, I'm standing up here talking about this, and yet the other day I was talking with our video guys and here I was like, dictating how things are going. I'm like, wait a minute, I'm going to go give a talk on autonomy. And here I am telling them what to do. So it's very hard. Okay, I don't mean to say that everybody's going to get this immediately. So it's hard to give economy, but it's also hard, and this is what some people don't realize, to receive autonomy when you've never had autonomy given to you before. So this is Elaine Crescioni. She's been with Gemba Academy for almost six years now. She's been with us longer than any other employee outside of the partners of the company. And when she first came on, it was basically Elaine and myself working very closely together, and I did my best to always give her autonomy. Many times it was because she'd asked me a question and I truly didn't know, so I'd say, I don't know. What do you think? And so Elaine actually didn't like it. And I was able to kind of capture a little bit of her story in a podcast that we recorded a couple years ago. We had a team meeting and. And everybody was together, and so I kind of sat down with each person and asked them about their experiences at genba Academy and so forth. And so this clip here is of Elaine talking about how she felt about being given autonomy.

Well, in previous jobs, I had always had very well defined job descriptions. This is what I was permitted to do in my job, and this is what I was not permitted to do. And if you wanted to deviate from. From the script, you had to get approval. So when I came to work for you all and I would have a customer come to me with a different situation that maybe required a different solution, I would come to you often and say, what should I do? What should I do? The customer wants to do this. And you would always say, well, what do you think? Do you have some ideas?

And how did you feel?

I didn't like it at first because I wasn't used to. To having that type of autonomy in my job. And when you're not used to that, there's a lot of fear because you think, well, what if the solution that I come up with, my boss disagrees with and then he gets mad at me and say, why did you do that? You shouldn't have done that. That was a bad idea. But you never did that. If you thought it was a bad idea, maybe you might have offered an alternative or something and said, maybe next time we should do something more like this. But I never got in trouble.

So again, that's the part of autonomy that I don't think gets talked about enough. We always talk about you need to give your employees autonomy, but realize it can be hard for some folks. So that's autonomy. The next one is mastery. And mastery is an interesting one. To me, you would think it's the easiest one to grasp. But see, mastery is achieved when you're working on something and you're kind of getting better at it, or you fall into a project and things are going well and you're making progress, and next thing you know, it's like, goodness, four hours have passed, right? You fall into flow sometimes, as psychology calls it, right? But the thing about mastery is it can be a slippery slope on both sides of it. First of all, if you give your associates, if you've given them autonomy, first of all, and now you want them to work, work on a project or work on some tasks and get good at them, if you make the objectives too easy, then they can't really achieve mastery because it's too easy. But if you make it too hard or impossible to achieve, they also cannot gain mastery of it. So what some folks call Dan Pink calls it Goldilocks. Goals or tasks, not too easy, not too hard. So you have to find that sweet spot. And so this is why giving your employees autonomy to run the business, to free up supervisors and coaches and managers to think about the things that people are working on. See, if you're constantly micromanaging, thing you can never worry about, are we working on the right things? Right. And so that's why these all tie together. Okay. My kids have started playing guitar. A couple of my kids, I say playing guitar, they're kind of running their fingers over these strings or whatever, making sounds, but they're learning. And their teacher is incredible. It's a young man who they've known for a while, and they really like him. And what he's doing is he's showing them just a few basic chords. But then every session, every practice session, he kind of teaches them, like, a little jingle, right? With what they just learned. And so they are immediately getting that sense of accomplishment. They're immediately getting a little dopamine, right? They've achieved something. And what that is, is they're coming closer to mastery. Eventually, if they keep it up, you know, the lessons get harder, and they get a little bit harder, but they keep making progress. Well, that's mastery. And eventually they could become incredible guitar players. And the last one is purpose. Now, Dr. Liu, if you didn't hear his talk, I think we're recording these. Is that right? Some of these sessions, you definitely. They've all been great. But Dr. Liu talked about purpose and purpose driven and how important that is. And it really, really resonated with what I'm talking about here is because if there's one thing that you take from my talk, it is to identify first of all, at the most basic level with your company's purpose, what is your company's why, as they say, what is your purpose? What is your cause? What are you fighting for? These are the things that you have to identify, and then you need to be able to then seek within yourself what is your purpose as A person, right? As a man, as a woman, as a husband, as a wife, father, son, whatever it is. We have to identify what our purpose is, because until we do, we are never, ever going to truly have intrinsic motivation, because we're always going to be kind of missing something or we're always going to be just confused on why is it that we're doing this. Lean's a perfect example. I talked to hundreds of customers and it normally goes something like this, hey, say I want to start doing maybe some 5s or some value stream mapping or something like that. And said, that's great, that's great. Don't mind me asking why? And they were like, what do you mean? Why are you supposed to. Without 5s? Forget the rest, right? That's what they say, right? Well, yeah, but no, but why do you want to do 5s or value stream mapping or quick changeover or TWI or whatever? Why? And eventually we're able to kind of help them come around to identify what some of their problems are, as Mike was talking about this morning. But if they don't understand that, what's the purpose behind these tools, this methodology, this system that we promote, you will always, always fail. So if you do nothing else, I really hope that you just kind of look into your company. If you don't know what your company's purpose is, try to find out. And then if you haven't identified your own personal purpose, I would encourage you to seek that out as well. On our podcast, I was actually able to interview Simon Sinnett last year, which is pretty incredible. Simon, as many of you may know, has the. I think it's the third most TED talk of all time. It's 25 million views. This is his famous why video, and he talks about this golden circle and the importance of finding your why. It's a really old video. It's a really poorly made video, and he never intended it for it to go viral like it did. But I actually had Simon on the podcast. And quick confession. I've interviewed hundreds of people on our over the years, and I don't normally get nervous, but, man, when I was getting ready to hit dial for Simon Sinek, I was a little nervous. I mean, the guy is a rock star and I've followed him for years. But when I was talking to him, I wanted to kind of dig a little bit into the why topic. That's his specialty. And I asked him a question that I knew would probably fire him up a little bit, and it did. He yelled at me a little bit but that was okay. It was worth it. But I asked him if some whys are better than others. And I also asked him if there's almost like a North Star that we should be following as we seek our whys, our individual whys, or our company's whys. And here's what he had to say.

No, because it's subjective, right? All whys are positive. People say, look, I have a negative. That guy's a negative. Y. Nope, all Y's are positive. The other thing is, all whys have nothing to do with product or service that you sell or offer. And you only have one. People are like, we have four whys. I'm like, no, you don't. You have one why. It is the sum total of who you are, how you were raised, the lessons you learned as a young person, and the rest of your life simply serves as an opportunity to either live in or out of balance with your why. The same with an organization. A why is why. Was the organization founded? What problem was it attempting to solve? The founders, what vision did they have? It's an origin story. And there's no such thing as a North Star why. Objectively, this is why. A why is important because your why may resonate with some people, but not others. And that's the point of stating and knowing your why, which is you want to attract the people who believe what you believe, and you want to be attracted to the people who believe what you believe. That's why when we listen to political races, we want our leaders, or our would be leaders to tell us what they believe, not just what they would do. Because when we hear what they believe, we want to align ourselves with those who share our beliefs and that we trust that they will do the things to uphold those beliefs. And the same is true in a company. We want to know what the company stands for, why they do what they do so that we can devote ourselves and our energies to helping them advance that cause. Otherwise, it's just a job, just a series of transactions. I do work, you pay me money. It's a transactional relationship.

So, yeah, you can hear the whole episode on our podcast page. It's all free, but Simon's fantastic. So I'm not going to pick on anybody here today, but what I would encourage you to do is really answer this question. What is your why? You know, and I would encourage you. We spend so much time talking about other people and the organization. If everybody would just think like we did, you know, everything would be great and that's fine. But as the old cartoon saying, I really do believe sometimes that we have found the problem. And he is I right. So I think we need to look internally as well to make sure that we understand why we do what we do. Now, several people have mentioned this book, but Dan Pink's book, Drive is a must read for everyone in this room. If you haven't read this book, you really, really must read it. He talks about mastery, autonomy, purpose, and many other things. And he's a fantastic author and just a great writer. So would definitely encourage you to check that book out. Now, the thing about it is, unfortunately, even if you master intrinsic motivation, it's not quite enough. There's so much more to strong companies. And several folks have talked about culture today. And so the second part of my talk here, I want to spend just a little bit of time talking about three areas of strong cultures. And I've put a lot of thought into this. And some of the things are a little bit different, a little esoteric. You might not have put some of these things together, but hopefully they'll help you see things in a slightly different way. Herb Keller here, the chairman of Southwest Airlines, has a great quote. He said, culture is what people do when no one's looking. It's easy when the boss is there. Yeah, One piece, flow is flowing smoothly, everything's great. And then you leave. And next thing you know, there's batches of inventory everywhere or whatever it is, right? Some people are laughing, you know, and I think about the Hoyt, the Hoyt Team Hoyt. Everybody talks about their race day, right? All the cameras are out there and everything's going on. But imagine how many hours they've practiced, right? Just father and son right out there running, bicycling, swimming. That's going on behind the background when there's no cameras. And I would say I'm going to. I seriously have a goal to try to interview someone from the family and try to understand a little bit more about their story. But I bet if we could ask Rick. And he speaks actually through some computer generated systems or whatever, so he's actually able to communicate, went to school and all the rest of it. But I would love to ask him what he loved more. Just spending time with his dad during all those practice sessions or, you know, the race day. I'm sure the race day was amazing, right, with all the people. But something tells me that those quiet days running down some side road with his dad were pretty special as well. So the first thing, there's three things that I'm going To talk about kind of on this culture topic, the first one is passion. And when I think of passion, you know, it's just kind of a definition, a strong and barely controllable emotion. Right? And so, I mean, obviously you think about passion, you think about rah rah and all the rest of it. And I think that's part of it. And in fact, if anybody knows this guy Paul Akers, he epitomizes that style of passion. Okay, I'm a pretty high energy guy, but when I spend some time with Paul, I leave like I need a nap, you know, when we leave. Fast cat. But he's a fantastic guy, Fantastic, lean thinker. Runs a great company out in Washington, Bellingham, Washington. And we've been to his facility twice to shoot our new Gemba Academy live episodes that we do. And one of the things that Paul does is he takes great pride in their bathrooms. And in fact, when people come from all over the world to tour FastCap, small company, around 50 people, but big billion dollar companies come and visit FastCap. And the first place he brings the CEO of whoever it is, is the bathroom. And he explains to them why the bathroom is so critical to their lean success. So let's see what he has to say about this.

So we have three people that are responsible for cleaning the bathrooms every morning. And they stay just immaculate. Okay, so you can see again, everything simple. The paneling simple, the woodwork simple, but yet it's a very clean and pleasant place. We even put natural light in the bathroom, which is not normal, deliberately, by design, because we know natural light is very powerful. So what I want to do is I want to show you how we clean a bathroom. But I do want you to notice how clean the bathrooms are. There's a couple things here. Before we get into the cleaning, I want to point out. So we thought lean about everything. So an extra roll of toilet paper strategically placed, right? The toilet paper holder is lean. Look how easily it replaces.

So simple.

No struggle there. Right? Bidet toilet seats from Japan. These are awesome toilet seats. And people say, why would you do that? Those are $500 toilet seats. Because we respect our people, because we're trying to teach them to think differently about things. Now, this is the men's bathroom. The toilet seats down. There's no piss on the toilet. Everything's totally clean. Right? Because we trained our people to think this way. We've had people come in here and say, this is advanced training for husbands. When you come here, think about it. When you come here as a young kid, you're learning to keep things at a very high level. What wife wouldn't appreciate a husband that.

Would pick up, hey, I gotta tell you, when every time I've used the bathroom at Fast Cab, I have never been more careful in my life.

And the truck drivers are, too. The truck drivers come here and they know because our people actually train the truck driver. They're walking across the floor and say, you're going to go into a bathroom that's world class. You need to respect it.

So what happens if a truck driver leaves a little bit of a mess?

I swear, they chase him down. They literally, when they walk out the door, they are. People walk in here, inspect the area that they've been in, and if they don't leave it perfect, they'll go. Go back and clean it. And every truck driver knows this story, right? So they come here, Whether it be UPS, FedEx, it doesn't matter who it is, expediters. They know you're gonna go to the best bath. We say that people wait to go to the bathroom here because it's such a great experience.

I mean, it's crazy.

We're influencing people to say, hey, respect other people. Leave it great. So we have Wind.

He's about to go on. He's Greek, so he tells us they use Windex for everything. And so, yeah, so that's Paul. And obviously, it's a great, you know, lean story, bathroom and all the rest of it. But did you just see his passion? You know, this guy loves life. You know, he loves lean, he loves his company, he loves his employees, and he's just a great person to be around. But here's the thing. Not everybody can be like Paul, right? And to be passionate doesn't mean that you have to be like Paul, okay? You don't have to be super high energy, super charismatic. Passion can come in many flavors. As I show here with the ice cream cones. In fact, what I want to do is just talk about a few other characteristics that I believe passionate people and passionate organizations all have in common. First one is they're not afraid to take action, okay? Doesn't mean that we don't plan. Right? You got to plan, but eventually you got to go. You got to try. It's game time, right? You've got to go and experiment, run the experiment and see what happens. It may fail. That's fine. We'll learn from it. If it does fail, okay? But if you get trapped into this analysis, paralysis. And I'm a big Six Sigma guy as well. Lean, I'M both. But this is where my Six Sigma brethren many times fall down a little bit, is we get so lost in our minitab that we forget to actually get up and go to Gemba and run an experiment. Now, there's lean folks like that too, so it's not just a Six Sigma thing. But we have to have the courage to get up and take action. We also can't be scared to fail. If you have fear in your organization, then there's no way you're passionate, there's no way you can have intrinsic motivation. You probably just have a really terrible place to work if there's fear in the air. Now, I have a picture, I think here of my daughter, Brenna. She's 11, my second oldest daughter, and she's a great little soccer player. And by the way, she took a free kick and her teammate headed it in. Swear it was awesome. I don't know how they got that shot, but she's been playing soccer since she's, I think, 4 years old. And in the beginning I coached her little. She's playing kind of competitive teams now, but back in the day, I coached her little teams and the little Angels, that was her first team, the little, mighty little Angels. And I used to tell her that daddy doesn't care if you make a mistake. Just make it going fast, baby. That's all I wanted, right? Make it going fast, okay? Not to be reckless and not to be out of control, but to be aggressive and to play hard. Because I believe sports are a great opportunity for young people. Dr. Liu was talking about teaching some boys, meaning basketball, through basketball life skills. And I think that we can teach our kids that it's not about winning and losing on all the rest of it. Everybody wants to win, but it's more about the love of the game, the process, and trying hard and not ever giving up, right? And so that's what my kids have taught me. And I got another story of one of my kids coming up here in a little bit that came to me this morning via text message. It was pretty cool. So we made a quick change to the presentation. So the other thing that people that are passionate and organizations that are passionate have in common is that they're, generally speaking, pretty pleasant people. There's joy in the air, okay? Now, joy is not necessarily to be confused with happiness. They're different. You can be joyful and having a bad day and not feeling great, but you get this joy within your organization and within your life when you know your purpose, when you have the purpose and you're grounded in your personal purpose and your organization's purpose, then you can have joy. Okay? And I would say joyful people, generally speaking, are going to be more happy than non joyful people, but they are different. Another book I would highly encourage you to read is Joy, Inc. Written by my friend Richard Sheridan, even though he is a Michigan Wolverine guy. Great company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Menlo Innovations. And they're a software development company. And what Richard talks about is that their company exists for one reason, to exhibit joy. And he's a great storyteller. So I can't summarize the book quickly, but they do many things within Menlo to foster this joy, including understanding their purpose. But they do other things. Like two people, they program, right? They're programmers and they work two to a machine. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen. So they work in pairs. So one guy's or gal is typing, another person see sitting beside them, watching. Then they switch. One will type, the other will watch. And you think, well, that's crazy. I told my wife that. She's like, why would they do that? You could have two people and you could get double done. But the thing that Richard explains is he said, have you heard the phone ring? This was late in the day. Have you heard the phone ring here since you've been here? I'm like, no. He says, because what we build and what we sell is perfect and there's no flaws in it. And so this is like this joy that they have in their organization, this deep commitment to excellence. And that's why they're willing to, perhaps they would argue, productivity wise, they're still ahead of the game because they don't make mistakes. There's no rework ever. When they build it, it's right and it goes out the door. But I would encourage you to read that if you want to kind of understand that whole concept of joy a bit deeper. So the next one that I want to talk about for this strong culture is trust. Trust is a two way street. And you have to be able to trust your employees. Your employees have to be able to trust you. Okay? So it can't be just one way. The trust can't go one way. It's got to go both ways. Kind of like some folks were talking about JR today and the line between the leader, if you will, the teacher and the student. You've got to have that communication going both ways. You got to have trust going both ways. And so there's a few things that I would like to. There's something called the Jacobs model. It might be something to Google and check it out. And there's eight points to this Jacobs model on trust. And I've picked four out here that really resonated with me. And the first one is bullet belonging. For people to feel like trust within the organization, they got to feel like they belong, right? This is why I believe, and I'm no psychologist, but in my mind, I believe that's why we are attracted. And we align ourselves with our favorite sports team, whether Green Bay Packers, Dallas Cowboys, whatever, whatever it might be, we align ourselves. We feel like we belong to that team. And so when the Green Bay packers lose, Mike feels bad. Hate to say it, Mike, but you didn't have anything to do with it, win or lose, right? But we feel like we belong, right? And so within our organizations, we need to make sure that we foster that as well. People need to feel like they belong to a tribe, that they're part of something bigger than themselves. And if they don't, then there's not going to be any trust within the organization. Significance is also important. People need to feel valued, right? If they're not feeling valued or they feel like, you know, they're just a number or whatever it might be, then they're also not going to trust certainty. This is. There's a lot of, again, a lot of neuroscience behind this that says that if you have. If you're uncertain or you're nervous and cortisol is going to be flooding your body and it's not good, cortisol is bad. And so we need to make sure that. That we are giving people not always good news, but we're at least communicating with them what's going on within the organization. So they know what's going on, what's our plan? And then obviously, fairness. We need to be fair to our employees. It's pretty straightforward, but it's also very difficult. I myself have had situations in past lives where you get an employee where, for whatever reason, you just don't really care for that person and you find yourself maybe not being as kind or whatever to that person, but that's just being a bad leader. So we've got to rise above emotions, and we've got to make sure that we're being fair to everybody. And when you think about trust, the story that keeps popping in my mind is when Dick Hoyt puts his son Rick in the boat and starts off to swim. I mean, can you imagine the trust that Rick has in his dad? I Mean, he's hopeless, right? He's laying in this boat he can't see because he's laying on his back. And his dad has got waves crashing around him for 2.4 miles. So he has incredible trust for his dad. But also, again, it's a two way thing. Rick or Dick Hoyt, the dad, he has incredible trust in himself that he's not going to drown, right, on a practice session or whatever it is, and that he's going to be able to do it. What I would challenge you to do is to think about this scenario. Would your employees trust you to lay them in a lifeboat and swim 2.4 miles? Not physically speaking, metaphorically speaking, but if we don't have that level of trust, then we need to really look in the mirror and figure out what we need to do or what changes we need to make. And finally, perseverance is the last thing. And this one, I got a few different spins on perseverance. This is an app called Folkara Moment. It's a free app and iPhone app and it measures how much you use your iPhone and it's pretty scary when you first turn it on. Okay. And the reason that I installed this app is that I wanted to be be able to be more connected, especially at home. I get home, a lot of kids, wife, all the rest of it. I need to be able to focus on them. I want to find a way to be less distracted in my life. That's just one example. But I think that we are a very distracted people. Whether it's sports, whether it's tv, whether it's even at work, we're distracted a things that don't really matter. Right. And so to be able to persevere over the long run, I believe we really need to find ways to remove all distractions from our life and truly focus on what it is that we're here to do. The second thing that I would encourage you to do is join a mastermind group or a network, whatever you want to call it. And this is a perfect forum to get these things going. Going. I belong to a kind of a mastermind group of three other friends of mine outside of work and we meet every Saturday and we're all aligned in our faith and so forth. So a lot of it is faith based, but we also talk about, man, I had a crappy week at work or whatever it is. And we're constantly kind of lifting each other up and supporting each other and it's been so powerful. We've been doing it for about four, four Months, we meet every Saturday and we don't miss ever. And so I would encourage you to think about that in your personal life, but also at work. It's so important to find people that you can connect with because many of you are maybe out on an island and you don't have a lot of support maybe in your company. So you need to seek out other people who can lift you up. Okay? So I would challenge everyone here to find at least three other people and agree that you're all going to for the next six months you're going to have a weekly call, maybe make a 20 minute call and just how's it going? You don't have to have a big agenda or anything like that. Just connect with each other and support each other. I think it's very, very important for perseverance. Napoleon Hill wrote a great book, Think and Grow Rich says no two minds ever come together without creating a third. Invisible and tangible force may be likened to a third mind. The mastermind. Okay, great book by the way. Not just about being rich, but Take care of yourself. This is the last thing that I want to talk about as it relates to perseverance. I don't think this gets talked enough about except for Dr. Liu's talk about the importance of taking care of ourselves and this nation in particular. We're a little bit of a mess, right, with our health. And this is a before and after of myself. Kind of a little swollen on one side and less swollen on the other side. So this picture was taken about five months ago. Paul Akers, who many of you guys that we just talked about, wrote a book, Lean Health, kind of woke me up a little bit. So I started eating clean, stopped eating bread, sugar, all the rest of it, beer. Not all beer, but most beer. And start working out CrossFit. Every morning my kids join me and you know, it's paid off in like in well about four, four or five months or whatever. So that's the Swollen Ron and non Swollen Ron. So this morning then I got a text message and I don't know how well you can see that. This is from my 13 year old daughter. My kids, they work out with me every morning. I mean, I mean we get up at 6am, I don't wake them up, they're up and we go out. I have, my friend is a big CrossFit guy, he programs all my crazy workouts and so I kind of dumb it down for them. But before I left, Kylie, my 13 year old, she said, daddy, make sure you give us our workouts so we know what to do. And I was like, okay, so this was our workout today. It was a 12 minute AMRAP. As many rounds as possible is what that means. In 12 minutes, you had to do eight squats, eight push ups. And she noted hand release push ups. You go down and pull your hands off. They're harder. So she wanted to make sure I knew she did hand release and sit ups. Eight sit ups. Well, she did 14 rounds, so go ahead and write that down. If you work out, 12 minute AMRAP, eight squats, eight push ups, eight sit ups, and see if you can beat my 13 year old daughter. She did 14 rounds. But then what I loved about it and almost brought a tear to my eye. Is there a little quote there in the middle? Middle. The only disability in life is a bad attitude. This is my 13 year old, you know, and I was like, golly, you know, and I'm not sure she would have ever said that five months ago when I was sleeping in, you know, drinking wine, watching baseball, eating junk food till midnight. So what I'm getting at is me taking a step forward and taking care of myself is impacting my children in a dramatic way, and I hope it pays dividends for the rest of their life. Lastly, as it relates to perseverance, one of my favorite quotes of all time, Dr. King, said, if you can't fly, then run. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward. Thank you. All right, my sister, thanks for listening.

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Sam.