GA 147 | How to Succeed at Value Stream Mapping with Beau Keyte

You're listening to episode 147 with Bo Keats. 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 Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day and 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. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Bo Keet to the show. Now, Bo is the author of several books and one book in particular, the Complete Lean Enterprise. Actually, first edition greatly impacted my early Lean journey. I was learning about value stream mapping many years ago, and Learning to see was, I guess, the first book that I ever bought on the topic. And then I believe this Complete Lean Enterprise was probably the second or third value stream mapping book I ever bought. So it was really an honor to have Beau on. And we actually talked about the second edition of the Complete Lean Enterprise, which was released just about a year ago. And Bo and I kind of really kind of dig into value stream mapping and was a fun episode. We talked a lot about his experiences with value stream mapping and some of the changes that he's seen over the years and some the of some of the experiments that he's run and he talks a lot about some of the successes and even some of the things that didn't work out. So it was a fun episode. We got lots of links in the show notes, so be sure to check those out over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 1 47. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 147. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Bo, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Ann Arbor, Michigan. So, man, I tell you, that's like the Lean capital of the world. I'm kind of convinced now between you and. And Mr. Leiker and rather and of course, Menlo and everybody out there. There's a small army of you Lean thinkers out there.

Yeah, it's all here. I don't know why.

Yeah, I need to get to go to a Zingermans and, you know, look at that. It's like, goodness gracious, you guys have it all.

Yeah, we do sometimes.

You've probably heard maybe through the rumors. I am from Ohio, so I'm a little bit of a Buckeye fan. So I won't mention the game this year or the spot or anything like that. You know, we'll just move on. Move on.

So you don't know that my dad was a Buckeye. What?

Really? Okay.

And I was. I had early acceptance to Michigan three weeks before Bo beat Woody in 1969.

Oh, wow.

And he didn't talk to me for a while.

Okay. Oh, that's good stuff, man. That's good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I had a great time. We did the Zingermans. We did a Gemba Academy of live episode. Episode out there. And Tom Root. Do you know Tom? He's a. He's the guy for Zingerman's mail order. And got. We did the opening of the episode right in front of the big house there.

That was so cool.

So fun. Yeah. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, thanks for coming on. Let's kind of just jump right in. And before you give your background, we like to start our episodes with our guests sharing a quote or two of something that possibly inspires them. So do you have something?

Yes. I've actually turned to several quotes through my career, but the current one I really like, it's actually one from Thomas Edison that no one has really seen. And it goes like this. Vision without execution is hallucination.

What's that mean to you?

I think about that a lot.

Yeah? What's it mean to you?

Well, on the topic of the day, there's a lot of current future state maps hanging on walls and people not doing much about it. So you can think all you want to, but unless you actually try something and actually like to reach out and start down that path, you're just kidding yourself.

Yeah. You know, I love it. I actually just wrote a blog article for Gemba Academy, and I read a book recently called the Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. It's about, basically, stoicism. And one of the stories in there was of Edison and when. When his campus basically caught on fire and how he handled that. And, you know, the kind of the three phases of stoicism that they were talking about in this book are, number one, perception. How do you perceive the problem? But then the second part was action. You got to take action, you know, like. So true. And Edison definitely did that.

Yeah. He was buddies with Henry Ford for a reason. Yes.

Yeah, exactly.

They're both Action Orient.

Exactly. Good stuff. All right. Well, Bo, so we were talking before we came on and started the recording, but I'm a big fan and definitely bought your. The Green Value Stream Mapping book. Right. Way back in the day. It was one of the first value stream mapping books that I ever bought. Learning to See. And then I think the second one was yours. So great stuff. So it's an honor to have you on and thank you for all the work that you've done for the. For the movement. Really, it's been tremendous.

Well, you're welcome. And it's been tremendous for me. I've learned a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, tell us a little bit about your background and maybe how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff.

Well, I've been in the continuous improvement business, I guess, for about 30 years, and I started actually before lean was coined, but just about the time that translations were being made from Shika o Shingo smed in. When was that? The early 80s shop floors of a Ford motor company. And I was working for a large consulting company. I was a manager. I had a bunch of greenies, I'll call them, tagging along. I was supposed to help them try to figure out how to improve a million square feet of automotive production. And I really didn't know what was going on. I didn't know how to measure. I didn't know what these guys are going to do. And we had a UAW staring at us, and so we had to kind of work through. How do you work with people on the floor? How do you measure consistently between very different functions to understand what seems to be working, what doesn't seem to be working? And then how do you create some type of better conditions given what you've learned? It all seems really easy now, but 30 years ago, everyone was flying by the seat of their pants. So it was just a very, very different situation back then. Since then, I jumped off the shop floor with my book in 2004, and I actually jumped off the shop floor a little bit earlier. And I've been spending much of my time over the last 10 years in a variety of mostly service industries, in healthcare, changing my role from pure consulting to facilitator coach, things like that, to do my best to improve the capabilities of the teams I'm working with and letting them do the thinking instead of me. So that's kind of been my transition.

Got it, Got it. All right, well, so you've recently, well, about a year ago, released the second edition of the Complete Lean Enterprise. So let's talk a little bit before that. I want to get into your head a little bit on the first edition. Like what drove you to write the first edition of the, of the book?

Oh, that's a great question. People were pretty hot at that time. You go back to the year 1999 when it came out. The economy was very different, the pressures on manufacturing were very different. So everyone was trying to understand what Toyota was doing and how to apply it to them. And this was one of the first really good books that actually peeled back the thinking, acting, not just copying what they do, but actually describing how they thought and acted differently and from a system perspective. So when I got hold of that book, I was actually on the front end of that. Mike Rother was teaching the NIST MEP folks. MEP is for manufacturing system partnerships or quasi government groups in every state tasked to help small and medium sized manufacturers. And Drew Locher and I were the master trainers for the lean curriculum that they were introducing. So Mike Rother showed up in Gaithersburg with these contraband books. They're in black covers. I still have mine. And he was saying, here's a book, we want to try something new. And it hadn't even been published yet. And I looked at that, said, this is real cool. It's been hanging on. Some things I've always worried about my whole life about. It's not just a physical map, it's about what the map is telling you that needs to be important. This is a great way to do it. And after it was published, I bet it was only six months before someone said, can you take it off the shop floor? And we said, sure. So we were mapping off the shop floor instantly. And the drama or the quandary maybe that we have in our economy and in manufacturing is that we have very few people actually producing things versus people inside the office. In a manufacturing company, there are way more people incorporate than on the shop floor.

Sure, yeah.

And so what's happening there? They haven't had the benefit, or if you want to call it a benefit, wink, wink, of 50 years of industrial engineers telling you what's wrong and what to do better. It's just the opposite. It's been very chaotic and just kind of growing up through legacies. So that was a really big thing. And then you started thinking about the service industry. Service industry now is huge compared to manufacturing, what's happening there? So it became critical that we started thinking very differently about how to use the thinking, not the tool, but the thinking. And adapt the tool to an office and service environment.

Yeah. Yeah. Good. Okay, so fast forward now to about a year or so ago. What was behind the decision for the second edition?

Well, the first edition came out In, I think, 2004, and about eight years ago, there was a small piece of the community, the lean community, that started scratching their heads about how do we continuously improve what we're doing. And so it came circled back around the value stream mapping. And I had several inflection points in my learnings over the last eight years about how to improve the ability for teams to engage, for people to learn, for organizations to improve and to sustain. So the new edition adds four elements that I think are key from my own personal experiences and my client experiences about how to improve the value stream mapping improvement effort, including how do you do a better job scoping? How do you do a better job engaging the rest of the people, not just the team that's drawing the map, but everybody else so they don't feel left out. How do we look at the future state differently? For office and service specifically, there are some. So we changed how we approach the future state design and then how to look at the end point, which is implementation and sustainment, not from a perspective of just implementing the map like a project, but to actually introduce experimentation so people could learn their way to the future state through a series of experiments, as opposed to assuming that just plopping down this map is going to work tomorrow.

I want to dig in a little bit, so I'm taking notes here. So scoping was kind of the first thing you talked about. Engaging. And then how we look at things differently. How do we look at the endpoint implementation? But I want to go back to that second one. Engaging. Talk to me a little bit about, about that aspect of it. Engaging in particular, the folks that aren't involved, you know, you know, right there on the, on the, on the paper.

Yeah. So I'll tell you a little story. It might take too long, so I apologize. It'll be short. The worst thing about being an external consultant or one of the things that external consultants do is they go in and they tell you what's right. And since I'm an engineer, I always know what's right. And so here's a great way to redesign your value stream map. And then they leave, basically, and no one ever does it. And when you start peeling back the onion, one of the reasons they don't do it is because just because it looks good on paper doesn't mean it's going to work. And just because it's optimum doesn't mean it's even going to fit. But the fundamental root cause is the person who's doing the thinking is not engaged in the work. They don't do the work, they're observing the work. Right. So now we migrated to the point, hey, let's have cross functional teams do this. Well, that's cool. But if you really think about what's happening on a social perspective of these cross functional teams inside organizations, most organizations pick their A team. Hey, these are the guys we always go to. They should be on the current, the value stream mapping team. Well, you know, the B and C teams are getting kind of tired of this. And so it's not that different from having an A team telling everyone else what to do than an external consultant telling everyone else what to do. Everybody has a different context, everybody has a different reality and the A team only sees theirs. So we introduced a concept called we call socialization, where we never say something is done inside the team until they've elicited comments from everybody else inside the organization close to that value stream. So a current state map is just a draft until they go out and get other people's realities on that map. Then it becomes everyone's map. The future state design is a draft until they go out and capture everyone else's different perspectives on what the vision might be. And then it's the company's future state map. And that way we found a really powerful way to engage others and the results are exceptional.

Got it. So going back to kind of the origins, well, the western origins, if you will, of value stream mapping and the famous learning to See book, what have you seen with value stream mapping as far as it changing or morphing since that book came out? I mean, there's been many years, I don't know exactly when it was released, but been a while. So talk about your experience with how you've seen it change.

So well, I've physically experienced improved ways to improve the scoping, ways to be very clear about what the leaders want to see, what's important to the company. Only mapping areas that are critical to the success of the company and having very clear boundaries on what to look at, what not to look at, and how to align that back to the strategy. So the scoping has been very cool and it's really kept a lot of missteps out of the way. So we're always focused on something important and we're always clear that we can probably meet the goal and the Target that the leadership wants to see or needs to see.

Give us a little, give us a little nugget on that though. Dig in a little bit on that. Give it, give the. Someone's listening right now, like what's one practical thing that they're probably not doing well as it relates to, say, scoping?

Okay. I'm working with an insurance company and they wanted to map one of their major processes for bringing on new clients. So when we were scoping, we said, okay, that's fine. Why is this important? Can we talk about why it's important so everyone else who needs to be involved in change actually understands why they need to change and what they need to change too. And it was incredibly difficult for the leaders to express that. They had a hard time saying what the problem really was because they just thought, well, isn't there a problem over there? Maybe we should go change that. That's really important. And when I asked them how they would define success, they kind of stared at me and said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, how good do you want them to be? Better, 1% better? No. So it became incredibly difficult for the leaders to quantify success of engaging a cross functional team over several months to fix a fundamentally broken process. So by sitting on them metaphorically until they were clear on what needed to be done, that enabled us to go to the managers and the workers to say, this is specifically what the organization is concerned about. This is specifically how good you need to be. And then through the catch ball process, the managers came back and said, well, that's what you're looking at. We need very specific areas. We're going to look at very specific types of transactions and clients are going to look at because they're the ones that will help move the needle to where you want to be. The rest we're going to forget about. So it really enabled them to be able to focus the direction and, and create boundaries and be very clear on what they wanted to do. So there's no missteps.

Yeah, it's kind of the classic what problem are you solving and why is it important?

Yeah, but, yeah, but having that alignment and waiting until they have the alignment before you get the team engaged because they're going to go different directions and not understand what they're doing because no one has told them what's important and why.

Yeah. So from a kind of mechanical perspective, just with value stream mapping, current state, future state and so forth, is there anything that you've learned along the way that possibly improves on kind of the initial concepts that we've all learned.

Well, I think the scoping, the socialization are really good things. I believe that I'm at odds with some of the folks who write books on value stream mapping now.

Okay, that's okay, that's good. Now it can get juicy.

So the geek technique is called owning the pen. So who owns the pen during a mapping effort? And there are new books out that talk about the fact that managers need to do all the thinking and all the drawing and the value stream map. And I couldn't disagree more. They are not close to the work and they're telling what worker is going to disagree with the manager.

Yeah, yeah.

So all of a sudden they're going to sub optimize everything. They're not close to it, they're not going to know what the data is. They're not going to know anything.

Yeah.

So by giving the pen and the thinking to the people who actually do the work, that's what really matters. And if you set it up right, you're going to create a great relationship form. So that's one of them. I just talked about scoping and I've also talked about socialization. I think the experimentation is really, really important in terms of improving the experience. So if you think about this distant future state that no one has yet achieved and you want to get there, but you've never been there before, the best thing to do is to continually experiment because you're going to make mistakes along the way.

Yeah.

So why don't you try, why don't you set up the whole thing as experiments and the people who are doing the work are running and designing the experiments and they're including others.

I love it.

So as you progress this, everybody gets a chance in running an experiment. So by the time you're done, everyone's engaged. And the cool thing about that one subtle piece for the geeks is technically when you end an experiment, you end an experiment with a new standard.

Yeah.

And so you automatically fall into standard work. It naturally occurs and it's just very cool to see it happen.

Good stuff. So one thing that we talked about earlier was socialization.

Yes.

But I'm wondering if you have any, I don't know, do you have any specific examples? Like you don't have to use people's names or company names or anything like that, but of where you've seen this, this kind of work? Because I love it. Because it's the human side of lean. Right?

Yeah. So the interesting thing about helping the service industry and offices within the manufacturing industry is that the technical piece of change is easy to see. When I was working in health care, doctors and nurses could learn the tools in two seconds, but they still couldn't learn about how to work together. So the change was much more social than technical. And when we recognize that and say, listen, these are some nice ideas that you have, we're wondering what other people think. Why don't you go out and find out what they're thinking and see how that affects what's going on. Then we'll have a better. Then we'll have a better solution, a better piece to move forward with.

So is this a real life scenario, like a situation?

I'll give you two, I'll give you two extremes. This is a real life scenario. This is what we really do. And it has always improved. But there are two that really stand out to me. Okay, One, I'll call the squeaky wheel. Okay. I was working in another insurance company a couple of years ago, and every time they socialized with this one group, there'd be one person there who just said, nope, nope, that's not the way I do it. It's not going to work. Nope, nope, that's not the way to do that. And everyone was tired of her. They said, you know, she always says that. She always has that attitude. Just, we can't believe it. We just kind of have to shut her down. Then they got to the point of experiments and they said, this is how we'd like to approach it. And she said, that will not work and the way I'm doing it is better. So they said, well, okay, why don't you do it your way and everyone else will do it their way and we're going to measure it and see which one's better. And surprise, surprise, hers was better. It really opened up the social piece, like to the fact that she's been bitching for years and don't listen to her, and she probably has some great ideas. So it totally changed the social structure in the group. So that's one. The other one was actually in healthcare. They were designing a different triage for the emergency department and they were getting close and seemed pretty good to the team and said, great, now how's everyone else going to learn about this before we try something else on this future state? They said, well, we're going to bring everybody in tomorrow from all the shifts and we're going to have a discussion and share it with them. I said, fine. So the next morning, representatives from all the shifts show up and they start Going through it. And they got done. They finished, rather. And there was a nurse that says, you know, that futures date will kill a patient on third shift in 20 minutes. And there was dead silence. And it turns out they created a very risky situation for third shift because they didn't know how third shift was staffed and the roles they had.

And I suppose nobody from third shift was on the team, right?

Yeah, yeah, because it was done during the day. So the ability to reach out and get information is really, really, really important. In this case, it was a patient safety issue. In another case it was, hey, you're not listening to someone who has good ideas. Then in each case it makes sense.

So what do you say in that situation? They should have just said someone from shirtshift change their shift for a week or two and come work on the team. Or what could they have done?

Oh, not necessarily. So there's nothing wrong with having a team design a draft, but the purpose of socialization is to vet it and gain other input. So that was an appropriate. That was an appropriate structure as long as they reach out and engage others. And then also in the design of the experiments, well, you have the a team designing experiment until everyone else gets a hand in being a scientist too. So one way or another, the influence of socialization creates the venue where others can give input, talk about issues, and arrive at a conclusion that's better for the organization.

Got it, Got it. All right, well, last question. So where do you hope to see, I don't know, value stream mapping 5, 10 years from now?

Well, I don't know. That's enough time to write another book. I don't know.

Yeah. What's your next book going to be about, Buzz?

There's two things that I don't see enough of that I would love to see more of, and one I talked about earlier that talks about really good alignment between what's strategically important for the organization and where do we demand capacity from team members to go fix stuff, to improve stuff? So the alignments to strategy is really, really important, and I don't see enough of it. Yeah, I see people in the middle or people in Iowa saying, hey, we need to start something here. Well, that's good, but is this important to the company or not? Because we really shouldn't be using your precious capacity in something that's not important. So I'd love to see more of that. If you think about policy deployment or Hoshin connery or some other type of alignment, how are we sure that what we're doing to engage These teams and. And use up all their thinking is important. So that's one thing. The other thing is I'd like to see. This is a general. This is a general issue with me. I think I'd like to see more focus off the front line. There's a lot of people worried about how to make the front line better. And I'm guessing there's three times as many people off the front lines on the front line. So what are we doing about them? And I think it's not just off the front line. It's also up the organizational ladder. There are problems to be solved that are not frontline problems. I'll give you a great example. I talked to a. Was a temporary employment agency about a year ago, and they said, you know, our turnover is 40% on the front line. The front line faces the customer every day. They're the ones that make or break a relationship. Turnover is 40%. I said, yeah, that's pretty bad. Said, yeah, it takes two years to get them capable. I'm thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. I just did the math. That means you only have 20% of capable people manning those phones right now. And they said, yeah. And I realized this is a problem the frontline can't solve, but it's critical to the business. If they don't solve that turnover problem, they'll never increase their sales. So this would be a great example. In this case, employee retention, we actually take a stab at the value stream app of onboarding or something else. Employee development, which, one way or another would have a goal of reducing the turnover or improving the retention. And so it's the ability of organizations to see different levels of problems that would help the organization, not just the frontline performance.

Good stuff. Good stuff, Beau. All right, well, let's go ahead and transition into. Into the reflection section. And so this first question that we've asked for since the very beginning, it's one of my favorite questions, is, you know, we spend a lot of time in lean talking about, you know, the two pillars, Respect for people and continuous improvement. With continuous improvement, the tools, the things that we can touch and see. But respect for people can be a little bit harder to. To wrap your arms around. So I'm curious, what does it mean to you?

I learned something very important from my dad. My dad was the vice president of manufacturing for four manufacturing facilities, three in the US and one in Europe. And he was also the person that the union negotiated against. And I worked at one of those factories one summer, and I saw deep respect for my father, and not fear, but respect. And I'm thinking, what's going on here? And it turned out that my dad made it a point of walking through the factory every day and talking to people, remembering their names, talk to them about their families. And I talked to him about this. He said, you got to know the people. You have to understand people. If you don't reach out to them, you're not going to get anything. So what I've done from this is thought very deeply about what respect for people really means in my life. And in my life, it's not just reaching out and recognizing them, but it's also not robbing them of their ability to understand how to think and act differently. How do we allow them the respect and to acknowledge their intelligence, to use their skills and their expertise and show them how to be curious, how to be scientists for a while and change the world they live in, both to make themselves better and the performance of the organization better. It's very. Got a deep root there. Yeah, I really feel deeply about that.

It sounds like your dad was a pretty special, special guy.

Yeah. Yeah.

Awesome. Well, maybe this kind of answers the second question. We have to use a different example, but what's the best advice you've ever received?

Well, I've actually received a lot of advice. Most of it's been good and I needed a lot of it through my years. But one recent thing that stands out was actually came from a course I attended with Edgar Schein teaching, and he's MIT emeritus professor. And he talked about, I will paraphrase it some. His message was to be very conscious of how you meet and talk to people and if you are talking above them or below them or equal to them. He called the social theater and how you approach someone and the conversation you have with someone really matters. So what I want to do, I took away from that, that I really wanted to not only meet them where they were, but do so in such a way that it didn't appear that I was smarter or better than them. And I really thought a lot about that and how to do that to all, to always acknowledge and meet them at whatever level they're at. That's where I'm going to show respect for them. So that is actually transformed into things like not using any Japanese terms in front of clients because they don't know Japanese. So I'm showing I'm smarter or I'm one up because I have all these neat terms I can throw at them. So I don't do that anymore. As an example, I'm very conscious of people and how I approach them. And that was a great piece of advice.

Got it. Can you think of an experiment or maybe a project that didn't turn out as you planned? And if so, what did you learn.

When projects have gone south, believe it or not, I reflect immediately. So I do my own continuous improvement loop. What? I had a plan. The plan is not going according to schedule. What exactly is going on and what do I really understand about what's going on? How do I need to learn more about what's going on and then how do I adjust? So that's basically the process my head goes through. That being said, usually when things go south early in a project, it's because of scoping. One way or another, everyone wasn't aligned to understand what needed to be done. And we didn't take enough time in some area to socialize to scoping to someone. And things just didn't go well. Yeah, when they don't go well in experiments, I actually expect that. But then part of that's social too, and it's the roles of leadership is to provide air cover or allow failure in order to move forward and learn. So there's a couple things that bother me both at the front and the back end of some of the client works I have. Yeah.

What are you most proud of as it relates to your lean journey?

I'm proud that I can call myself an engineer and still figure out a way to have others do thinking for themselves.

That's a feat.

This is a high bar and it did not come overnight. So how can you be technically competent and still help people go through a cultural transformation? This is. I don't think that's easy for engineers to do. And I don't, you know, it's just not easy to do.

Yeah.

So I'm proud that I've been able to get to that level.

Yeah, well. And also there's not a lot of engineers running around talking about socialization, I can tell you that. So.

Yeah. So the University of Michigan has put me on notice. They may be yanking my Bachelor of Engineering degree if I keep this up.

Yeah, got it. Hey, so over this last year, was there a book, a particular book that really struck you as great? And it doesn't even have to be continuous improvement related. It could be any book.

Well, one that I go back to. It wasn't this year was a couple years ago. It's one of the books by Edgar Schein. And this is for all the geeks out there to get ungeeky. He's written two that are fairly similar. Drew Locker likes the book Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein, which I skimmed through. I think it's great. The one he had just written when I took his class is called Helping. Just Helping.

I never heard of that.

Yeah, it preceded Humble Inquiry, and it's about a quarter of an inch thick. And I take it to all my clients. It is amazing in terms of helping coaches or facilitators weave the fabric of coaching and helping people the whole time. And it actually goes into a lot of the social theater and different ways to inquire. It's just. It's really good.

I'm going to pick it up as soon as we get off here. All right. So you've been around a long time, Bo, and you've learned a lot, you've seen a lot. Um, but I'm curious, is there one knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve on in order to become a better, stronger, lean thinker?

I think it's continuing to work on the fact that I need to be focused on helping others and not telling them what to do. I think it's. For an engineer, it's a constant battle. So I worry about that a lot. About that a lot. And after I leave a client, I'm back in a hotel room. I think about that, too. Okay, what did I do today that may have been doing too much thinking? If I did step in to be more directive, was it helpful or not? And what might I have done as opposed to that? When I think about what I'm really proud of, I'm really proud to see to be a part of teams that light up when they understand that they are enabled and accountable to make the changes that they've always been thinking about making. And instead of having a manager tell them what to do, you physically see a reaction when they say, oh, you mean I don't have to ask permission? I can just try this and see if it works? It is a totally different conversation and atmosphere when these teams finally have the ability to do some thinking for themselves. And it's a wonderful place to be when they see this.

Got it. Love it. All right. Well, Bo, I really, really had a good time talking to you. It's a Friday when we're recording it, and it's about the end of the day, so I can't think of a better way to kind of wrap the week up here. It's Thursday. When someone's listening to this right now. Not to throw people off, but let's go ahead and wrap things up, but with you sharing some final words of wisdom and then be sure to tell people how they can connect with you.

My final word, wisdom, is pretty simple. It's never stop learning. Don't get stuck in what you know now because it won't be good by tomorrow.

Yeah.

So how can you constantly challenge yourself to. Can you just learn more and be curious about what you don't know and learn more. So that's the one piece. And in terms of getting hold of me, please reach out. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not on Twitter or anything else. I have enough energy for LinkedIn and that's it. But you'll find me under Beau Keaton.

Go ahead and spell that.

My name is spelled B, E, A, U. That's Beau.

Yeah.

Last name is Keats. K, E, Y, T, E. And please reach out and tell me you've heard the web, the podcast, and if you have questions, fine. Yeah, let's, let's take some questions that way. And you can find my website and my articles and stuff through LinkedIn. Yeah.

And we'll link to everything on the show. Notes. This will be go to gembapodcast.com, go to episode 147 and we'll link to everything including second edition completely Enterprise Echo link to the first edition and we'll link them to them all. And. Yeah, well, hopefully we can connect. I don't know, gonna be at AME or any other shows this year.

AME for sure. I'm actually trying to get into acc, which you wouldn't know of. It's the association for Corporate Counsel. And one of my clients this year were legal offices and they did stuff I've never seen before. They outstripped any other team I ever saw in my life. And so I'm trying to find a way to give them a keynote or a podium at a major conference that talks about how to look at legal services very differently.

Nice. Oh, that sounds good. All right, Bo, well, thanks again for coming on. Hopefully we get Connect soon in person. And like I said, it's been a fun way to end a Friday. So take care and we'll see you soon.

Thanks. And thanks for the opportunity to talk to you and your posts.

All right, Bo, take care.

Okay, bye. Bye.

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