144: Edward Tenner Profit — What Big Data Can’t Do

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Well, this is an interesting show. So we're all trying to solve problems and grow our companies. And in the world of coaches, we're trying to help our clients grow their companies. And we look to get more efficient and optimize and streamline and so on. But along the way, we often lose some of the discovery, serendipity and chance that leads to innovation and breakthroughs. And today's show is all about that. So we're talking with the author of the Efficiency Paradox. What big data can't do can't help you with Edward Tenor. So listen in. I hope you get a lot out of it. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Edward Tenor. Edward Tenor is a distinguished scholar and his background is more extensive than typical. So Smithsonian, Rutgers, Princeton, Harvard. He's been published all over the place, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes. He's given talks for groups, Microsoft, AT&T, Smithsonian, Ted his book, why Things Bite. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences is one of my favorite subtitles ever. And you're going to love this. We're talking all about the efficiency paradox. We spent a lot of time in our world, not just on the show, but in our world talking about how to be more efficient, more productive. And this is about how that's not always a good idea, how it can get you into some unintended areas and we'll tie into some previous shows as well. So welcome to the show. Edward.

Thank you very much, Bill.

And you're near Princeton.

Yes.

And joining us by computer phone call on famous Zencaster. So talk to us a little bit about your background. What leads you to studying efficiency in a book like this?

I have not had a terribly efficient Career in the sense of moving straight from one thing to another. I got started, started as an academic at a time when there were loads and loads of jobs available. And by the time I received my Ph.D. there were very, very few. So I had to adapt. And one of the first things that I did was to go into publishing. And I was a super specialist in early 19th century German history. And I discovered, though, that the job market was actually a good thing for me because I was not really a specialist. At heart, I was a generalist. And the job that I got, science editor at Princeton University Press, is an ideal generalist job for somebody who's interested in science, wants to learn about science, and wants to get paid for it. So I had a list that went from advanced physics and mathematics to bird field guides, and I had a really great time as a generalist. I had gone from the fast track in history to the scenic route that took me to amazing places, let me meet amazing people. And one of the people that I published, somebody that I unfortunately never had a chance to meet in person, was Richard Feynman. And I published his book, the QED, the Strange Theory of Light and Matter in 1986. And at that time, my real goal in publishing was to have a book by Feynman, to have a book by Feynman on my list. And now I'd reached that goal. So I spent about five years continuing to acquire books. And it was also a lot of fun. But I could see that I was not really growing in the same way that I was before. And I decided then to apply for a Guggenheim fellowship, which I was very fortunate to receive. And that let me go independent as a writer, which I have been ever since 1991. So as a writer, I had already published a book called Tech Speak, a humorous book. And my new project was called why Things Bite Back. Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. As you. As you. As you said. And that. Excuse me, I have a robocall.

So.

Talk about unintended consequences of efficiency. So I then had a chance to go on the speaking circuit, and I was really very happy about the number of people who were interested in my ideas. And that led me to a new book, Our Own Devices, which is about technology and the body. And finally I decided to take another look at what the web had become. And that led to my present book, the Efficiency Paradox, what Big Data Can't Do. And one of the lessons I drew on efficiency was actually in the 1980s when I saw that there were more and more computers being installed. And there were also more and more paper accumulating in the recycling bins. And I wrote an essay called the Paradoxical Proliferation of Paper. And it was that kind of thinking that actually got me into the kind of writing that I do today.

Well, I was intrigued by it because as I started to read about the book, and I haven't read the book yet, but I just got a picture of what we see a lot, that it's. If you try to narrow everything down in too much, you miss some of the opportunities. If you try to hire the exact same kind of person every time, you get into trouble. So tell us about the book a little bit.

Well, the book is a look at the new world of technology that has emerged with mobile computing, artificial intelligence, big data, the cloud, the usual suspects. And we're taking advantage of that now. I find there's a lot not only to like, but to love about it. But on the other hand, there are real problems. And my book is really about the kinds of problems that have arisen in different areas. For example, education, healthcare, and why the promise of the web and the cloud has not really been fulfilled and what we can do about it.

The first thing I think was interesting was this. What are the common problems? So why don't you talk a little bit about what happens when all these things work together and exactly the kinds of things where you become actually less productive or efficient?

Well, the pursuit of efficiency through artificial intelligence is really based on the power of artificial intelligence to recognize patterns. And that can be really great. If you, for example, want to determine what items have been most profitable in your inventory, which customers have been the. The most productive, There are lots of things that you can do. The weakness of all those algorithms, or one of the weaknesses is that it's really about the recent past, and it's great in general about recognizing those patterns. But the paradox is that partly because of artificial intelligence, the patterns are always changing. And so you can't count on your recent experience necessarily to be a complete guide to what you should do next. If you don't supplement it with imagination and serendipity and ability to make some carefully controlled mistakes, then you could really be missing out. For example, a company that has certain characteristics that have been successful for salespeople or for editors, in the case of my own past industry of publishing, those people might be very, very good for a certain environment. But let's say the market changes, the customers change. Well, if you have people who have been selected because they've meshed so well with the other people there and with your current suppliers and customers, then you are not going to have somebody who might be able to point the way forward, who might be able to help cultivate a new group of customers. So one of the problems of artificial intelligence is that it is not very good at achieving diversity. And this has been most notorious in the gender and ethnic discrimination that critics have discovered. And I don't discount the importance of those, but I see those as really systematic of much more fundamental problems.

Well, I think what I hear you saying is that if we simply look for the trends and pull things out, then we, we don't branch off into new areas and new discoveries. So we stay more and more the same. We're finding the middle ground. So within a human being, right, it's, it's the equivalent of I hire more people like myself, we share the same stories, we look the same. I see myself, I, and, and if, unless I go looking for, in some open way, it's something that I wasn't totally expecting, wasn't looking for, which is not normal, right?

Yes. Yeah.

Now the, as a human being, I can modify that. Instead of looking for myself, I can look for some compliment. Like when I hired my primary assistant, I went looking for somebody who had certain skills that I'm not very good at, don't love doing, and, and then hired somebody who could be that and then really appreciated what she could bring and that. But in other worlds, right, you're looking for where could we go off in a new direction? Where if you simply are using the AI prediction, right, you're not going, you're not trialing anything new.

That's right. You need to have some room for imagination. But on the other hand, you need a certain discipline. One of the examples I like to give is the history of the film industry. Thomas Edison was a genius and he was really for a time in control of the entire film industry in the United States through a, a patents trust that he organized. And woe to anybody who tried using somebody else's equipment. But the problem with Edison is that he was really concerned to manage film production totally efficiently to keep his costs down. And this meant that he had to pass up a lot of the most exciting things that were going on with the rise of feature films. On the other hand, the problem with feature films and of genius directors like Erich von Stroheim was that they had no idea of budgets and they would spend an incredible amount of money on constructing extremely elaborate sets and run way over what was expected by their financial backers. And then Expect the backers to come back with more. So there was one producer, Irving Thalberg, originally at Universal and then at mgm, who had exactly the right approach. He had a sense of what to commit to. He had a sense of what the limits would be. And he also did market testing. He pioneered the idea of showing preview previews to audiences and then adjusting what appeared. And he was willing to spend more money to do that. He compared that to an oil producer who had a profitable well, but who invested some thousands of dollars more and could make even more money. So Thalberg was known as the greatest producer of all times. And it's not so easy to find people who have that balance between the intuitive and the rational. But my book is really an argument that that's what we need.

So what's the problem, though, with, like, having a highly structured day? So I have in my calendar when I'm going to wake up and when I'm going to eat. And I have in time to get ready, and I have driving time, and I have in booked in and planned in time for emergencies and interruptions. And I have time to look ahead at my day and I have time scheduled in to review, view the day and think about tomorrow. I have scheduled in time for gratitude and a whole range of things like that. Plus all the appointments when I actually meet with people or like this is scheduled in, and then all the prep time for calls like this. So there's a whole world of things that are all structured and scheduled in. And then there are certain things that I have set up that are routinize. So I know that there's certain accounting functions to do a couple times a month and things like that. What's, what's wrong with all that? Productivity, life, hacking, scheduling and like, there's.

Nothing wrong with it. In fact, I really wish I. I did it more. And, and I have excuses for not for not doing more of it. And one of the reasons is that the life of an independent writer and speaker is really highly unstructured. So have, let's say, a. An unexpected call, an interview that interrupts this and interrupts that. And at the same time, I have deadlines that absolutely have to be met. And the problem is that it's very hard to allocate a certain time to get something done because usually what I need to do takes a lot more time than I thought would be needed. And there's even a word for that in organization theory, the planning fallacy. So I can't hold myself up as a model for that. But I Think that someone who does need to have a structured day and a structured week can still set aside time for serendipity, can find websites. There are some very good websites that offer feeds with a variety of articles. There's one called Medium for example, and I subscribe to those. And I subscribe to all kinds of other newsletters, bulletins. I read half dozen newspapers regularly. My first editor at Knopf actually subscribed to eight newspapers. So people in the writing business and the publishing business have to set aside time just to explore things. And I think the key for people who need to have their day really structured is to reserve a certain amount of time for that kind of free play of ideas.

Yeah, I love this and I like the balance of it. And I would say I learned more from other people. So when I started scheduling and getting more organized with my own productivity, I did all that mapping out and it looks largely like I was saying, but my wife looked at it and she was like, oh my God, that just looks horrifying to me. And I. So I said, well, what do we need? And that kind of thing. So I ended up putting in this is how I worded it back then. It's not anymore like this, but I wrote surprised and delighted by what the universe threw my way. And that was roughly 8am until 2pm every Sunday. And it was actually programmed in time to just really protect that. Since then I've labeled things differently, like family time or like Sunday morning and a little less deliberate. But that is essentially what that's there for is to protect a little time. Because I know I need a certain amount of free unstructured time to think, discover, play.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So how does this apply then in our business setting with our leadership, with our management teams? What's the lesson of this?

Well, I think one lesson is to look beyond the essential business publications to something very different. It could be a newsletter, it could be one of the book reviews. Very often some. Some good ideas can. Can, you know, depending on your area, they. They can. They can very often come from the arts or, or from the humanities. I find for example, that I get wonderful ideas by visiting museums and something that. That I. Something I that that other people might not consider significant in. In a label of. Of an exhibition I find could article if not, if not a book. So I guess my time is really kind of the inverse of many other people's people who have real jobs because I spend a great deal of it just looking for sources for fresh projects. So my approach to writing is That I really don't want to write about something that a lot of other people have already written about. I want to get an idea that is. That's really novel and will be provocative and will stand out. And to do that, I have to spend a lot of time exploring. Now, most people are very lucky that they don't have to do that, but I think that everybody can set aside times and places for that. And to me, museums and libraries are really fantastic because the curators there often have an eye for really interesting stories. And you can actually get some really great business lessons that way, too. I visited the exhibition on the Harry Potter series at the New York Historical Society a few months ago. And what was interesting about that and what most people writing about the Harry Potter series have not focused on, was that the author had really mapped out the entire series of books as diagrams on grids before she offered it to publishers. And she is also a very talented artist. She could have illustrated the books herself because she had a concrete idea of what every one her characters would look like. So the point of that is that very often what looks like something that was really a kind of inspiration and flow is an example of tremendous discipline. And I'm sure she had a really very systematic approach to her writing that has made her maybe, well, one of the best paid writers in history. And I think everybody can learn from that, that you really need to combine this kind of discipline with sources of inspiration.

So I think what I'm hearing is that balance of the two. I'm reminded of a session with a client, it was a week or two ago, and they were looking for accelerators to their strategy and so on. So what we did was, and we spent a lot of disciplined conversation around was finding the core blockers or the constraints that the company was facing and then deciding to keep a focus on that. But we didn't work on solving them. Instead, I said, look, once you've found something like this, just keep it top of mind, post it in your office or dwell on it, and then your whole industry has similar issues. So now go looking for some new inspiration or something to hit you in a different place that coming from something that you had never thought of before, rather than the brute force or linear approach within. That's what you're talking about, isn't it?

Exactly. Exactly. Another exhibition that I visited that was really inspiring was about the work of Charles and Ray Eames, who were two of the greatest designers of the 20th century. And they had all kinds of amazing products. But what really fascinated me Was that they collected an incredible number of toys and dolls and all kinds of objects that they arranged in drawers. And this collection became a source of inspiration for their work. And this is true of a lot of artists that they will drawers and drawers. One of them will save all kinds of faces that he or she has seen in magazines or people, for example, would visit the New York Public Library's collection of images. They have a whole floor in one of the libraries with filing cabinets of photographs and drawings that were cut from magazines and books and pasted, and people can borrow them. Some of the greatest artists in New York, including Andy Warhol, borrowed those. So this is a familiar strategy or tactic for many artists. It's also true of writers that when you look at the notebooks and diaries of famous writers, they are often reading newspapers for inspiration. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, I believe, started out as a true crime story. And of course, what the artist really does is to start with the bones of the story, but really turn it into something absolutely new and different. That's what Shakespeare did. When you read the sources that Shakespeare had for his plays, which I did recently when I spoke about Shakespeare and unintended consequences, when you compare the original story with the Shakespeare play, you can see the genius of Shakespeare in modifying the story and modifying the character to bring out certain things that were really not in the original, but really make the Shakespeare work memorable in a way that very few people except specialists read the original source.

To see how it evolved from there. Well, it seems like that's a kind of a. I mean, we've had a couple shows on recently that tie into the same idea. So we've had Mike Madikin on talking a couple of ideas about innovation, innovation process. His latest one about disruption, a plan D. And then we also had Chris Yeh talking about blitzscaling and the need to not have such rigid typing of people. Like, if you take values and then they become more than values, like we're hiring the same kind of person, then we end up with a boring company that doesn't have a lot of original thinking and can't deal with the changing world in quite the same way. You could also end up with political sort of diversity problems because you end up with too much of a homogeneous culture. And he was talking about the value of having random people with different perspectives in the organization itself. And what I think is interesting is by values, we're not really talking about having people from the same cultures or the same gender or race. We're talking about having People having some core business values in common in some direction and can uphold them in a work setting. And I think that's what you're going to here is providing at an individual level a richer set of inspiration and influence.

Yes, it is. One really interesting example that I found was the origin of the steel belted radial tire. Michelin was actually not a really high tech company. They were a conservative company, family owned in a very conservative and relatively remote region of France. And they were, on the other hand they, they had a real interest in, in each individual employee. They were paternalistic. And one of the. The top people there was impressed by the work of a graphic artist who devised a circular slide rule for. For taking care of some problems in print design. And he moved this man from the graphic arts department to tire R and D. And he had the idea of the steel cage of. He worked with an engineer. Obviously he was not a rubber engineer, but he had a kind of geometrical imagination that proved essential to the company. And I think that we could learn a lot that there may be people in different departments of an organization who have shown some kind of talent that could be used elsewhere in the organization.

Yeah, absolutely. I think this, we see this again and again when we go to tackle even like the cash model of the company and the flows of money in the business, there can be a tendency to try to solve it all at the leadership level rather than engaging the entire team to look at processes and leaks and imagine new business models. And we pull in people from outside of an industry or outside of a department group, we can see new approaches because they challenge the conventional ways of thinking.

Right, exactly. And I mentioned Irving Thalberg before. Well, Thalberg was a high school graduate. His family ran out of money to pay for college and he went to work as a secretary, a private secretary for Carl Laemmle, who was the man who really challenged Edison and built the first modern studio Universal in California. And he did not have any background in a professional background in theater, but he loved the New York theater. And he was such a good secretary that Laemmle actually put him in charge of production. And eventually he became so good that Laemmle was not really willing to pay him enough. And that's when he went to work for what became mgm. And he was the one who really made the reputation of MGM as the most professional of all of the studios. But he was able to do that and to manage these complex productions because he was able to balance that intuitive sense of what was really going to excite the public with the dollars and cents side. And there have been very few people, if any, who have been so good at that at once. But he started out as a secretary.

From a different realm. Well, I think our most innovative entrepreneurs often will either come at something from such a different direction that they bring a natural, fresh perspective, or they'll bring sort of original concepts, look at original principles, and bring a kind of design thinking to stuff. Deconstructing and setting aside what's already known and assumed by something.

Exactly.

You. You have so many good examples in the book and in your prep for this that you sent me. I don't know if. I mean, I can't even follow. Like, there's the meeting with John Kennedy Jr. There's the work with Feynman. There's Bobby Fischer.

Well, Bobby Fischer. Bobby Fischer actually is one of the cases that interests me most because he was somebody who really was not terribly competent at anything but chess, but was fantastic. But the interesting thing about Fisher was that even for fisherman, he really needed to get to sources of information that were very scarce at the time. So Fisher had to come to New York or a handful of other big cities and join a chess club. And the chess club had bound volumes of chess magazines, had chess books, but also it had card files of games. And so somebody who wanted to be a serious chess player, wanted to become a master then really had to work in these very, very scarce resour. Now on the web, it's possible for anyone, anywhere in the world to get fantastic free practice against very strong players, to look at the relative strengths of various chess openings, which is an important part of training. I say this as somebody who was at one point an aspiring tournament player and got knocked out relatively early. But I know what it's like. So now it's become much easier for people anywhere to become proficient chess players. But there's been a problem for chess masters, which is that now there are many, many strong players, many more strong players. And that means that the grandmasters who used to get their way paid to tournaments no longer can because there are so many people that are of tournament strength. And it is one of the illustrations of how disruptive the information on the web can be. So on one hand, it's much easier to develop your skills than it was in Bobby Fischer's day. But on the other hand, once you've developed your skills, it's even harder to get paid for this.

Yeah, you know, it's really interesting because there's a lot of people talking today about how we can't have screens in front of us, too much screen time and we're too locked into our things. And for sure we travel around and we see people sitting in restaurants, all having interactions with other people or just mildly looking at content on their phones while sitting in proximity to close friends and family. We see people walking down the street oblivious to things that are going on around them and so on. And we have this concern that there's a dumbing down. But at the same time, I look at my own two kids now, young adults, and the pace of their careers, both of them in very different realms. The connections, the access, the self teaching is staggering to me compared to what I have. And I was excited to have access to a university and Encyclopedia Britannica and a range of things like that. And I had very early access to all kinds of computers. But it's so different today. My daughter discovers and works with artists all over the US certainly all over the world even. And she's 19 and she has begun to build her career. And my son works with investors from all corners of the world and has a small team and he's 21.

It's amazing and I think that's really fantastic. The one caution that I have is that there are some advantages of analog that have not been replaced. It's not that screens make you dumber or anything like that, but it's really that analog print gives you a different way to get information. And even though I do most of my reading, as probably most people do by now on screens, I'm very careful to read print versions of papers. I subscribe to three daily papers, and I often find that I understand things differently when I see the whole picture on a printed page than when I would see a version of it on my iPhone, for example, or on my computer screen. And psychologists have studied this, that this is one of the things that I talk about in my book. There's an idea called desirable difficulty. And sometimes when it's harder to do something, you actually get to understand it more deeply. For example, psychologists studied people's comprehension of lectures when they were able to take verbatim notes if they were fast typus on a portable device with a keyboard versus having to take notes in longhand. And what they discovered was that the people who took notes in longhand, even though the notes were less complete and might have had errors, actually understood the subjects better. And the reason, which is kind of obvious when you think about it, is that when you're taking notes, since unless you're a master of the lost art of shorthand, you can't do it verbatim. When you're taking notes, you really have to do a lot of rephrasing of the speaker's words in your own words. In other words, you have to learn how to explain this to other people as you are noting it down for yourself. So in the process of writing it down, there's a whole other. Whole other process that goes on in your mind. Whereas when you're taking it down verbatim, that's what psychologists call fluency. So somebody can read, let's say, an article or a book a number of times. They can go through a textbook again and again, and they can have a fluency. They could tell you what's on the pages. But if you ask them to explain it to a kid or to summarize it in their own words, they might have a hard time, because while they can recall things literally, they don't necessarily understand the ideas behind them.

So there's a certain amount of processing, mental processing, grappling with something that improves the understanding and remembering when we're taking notes.

That's right. And that is what the experimenters called desirable difficulties.

Well, I notice when I'm reading, and I have a lot of paper books here too, but most of the new books and most of the things I get, I'll keep on my iPad or phone or it'll sync to all the devices. And the value of that is like, I always have stuff with me, right? So I can go find it and search it out and cut and paste and things like that. On the other hand, when I'm flipping through a regular traditional printed paper book.

Book.

It feels like I can move around a lot more easily and find things quickly, Even though there's not any difference between the speed of flipping pages one to the other. I don't think they're not meaningful, but it just feels easy to recognize it and find things faster in the other way. And so the books that I use the most in some reference or review fashion, I'll have in both forms. And I might even have an audiobook version, because certain books lend themselves to listening while I'm driving, flying, running, etc.

That's exactly right, that there are different things that you can get from each mode. And one of those things about the printed book or about print in general, is that the printed page is like. Like a territory. It's almost like a place. And so when you see a page like that or when you're flipping pages, you form a different kind of mental map of the territory than when you, for example, are scrolling it. That doesn't mean that one is right and the other is wrong. It's just there are just two ways of understanding the same thing.

Well, the same thing's true of writing. Right. Like, I will take notes in scribble and paper notes and so on, and I almost never look back at them. But there is some value in taking notes in that way. And a lot of times I'm just trying to keep my attention on the subject instead of wandering because I'm pretty add and get distracted by everything in my environment and my own thoughts and go off, somebody says something and then I go off down a whole thing and then I'm like, what are they talking think about? And I. So the act of note taking keeps me a little bit more close. But I'll take notes and I'll do first drafts of things by hand, just writing them out. But the more elaborate editing I will need to do and move to a computer on. So it's like I'll start first draft handwritten and then I'll move out from there. Combining this.

Yeah, I mean, my experience is kind of similar. What I tend to do is to diagram what I'm planning to say on paper. And that way I can have arrows or heads or subheads, I can revise those. I was always somebody who was always tinkering with writing. Even when I was a college student, I would retype a paper again and again to kind of squeeze out anything that was unnecessary. Maybe that was ADD tuberculosis. But I was really obsessed with getting everything as punchy and direct as possible. So for me, word processing was an extremely natural thing. This is how I had always written, this is how I had always thought. But on the other hand, I find that there is a lot. I take a lot of notes too. And like you, I don't often go back to the notes I've taken. But there is something about knowing that I could go back to the notes that is really helpful, that that information has not evaporated. That if I needed to confirm something, I could flip back through these many notebooks and find it.

Right, and sometimes you do, and sometimes I do.

Yeah.

Sometimes I can visualize what I wrote and that helps me to remember it. Even without looking at it. I can remember, oh yeah, it was up in the upper left corner of that page.

Yeah. In fact, in reading, we are very often looking at the shapes of words rather than at individual letters. And I discovered this when I was in my original specialty of early 19th century German history because they wrote with a script that is undecipherable to the great majority of German people today. If they have an old deed or will or something that needs to go through a legal process, they have to hire an accredited paleographer to understand it, which we generally don't in the English speaking world. So you can imagine if Germans find it that difficult how English speaking historians must find it. And so those of us who have written on material from those archives have a kind of shared, shared sense of being veterans. But we learn to do that by recognizing the shapes of words, by recognizing the ascenders and descenders and various combinations of letters. And after you've done that for a while, you will learn that impossible script.

Yeah, my grandmother had had a beautiful handwriting and it's really hard to read, but it is really gorgeous and it takes a minute. And after reading her letters for a little while, it starts to come back to me. But it always was really challenging. And it is extremely beautiful and flowing, but also not as discreetly recognizable as my own ham fisted writing.

Well, that's a very interesting point because as I discovered when I was writing in our own devices about the history of the typewriter and the typewriter keyboard, the big reason for the adoption of the typewriter was not faster writing. Typewriter, for one thing, early in its history was very, very expensive. But for another thing, a skilled clerk could probably write almost as fast as someone could type. The big advantage of the typewriter was that organizations were larger and larger, insurance companies, banks, and so they would have many people writing memos and keeping accounts. And the problem was that even if people's writing was very beautiful, it was really very different. And so if you had too many different handwritings to understand, there was very easy to make errors. And that is why typewriter fonts for a long time were so uniform. Because the point of them was not necessarily to be beautiful, but to be uniform and legible.

To be legible, yeah. Well, this has been a great conversation. I think the takeaways are that in a world where we're optimizing and streamlining and systematizing and there's a huge place for that in the world of scaling up. There's also an importance to leave time and room for discovery, serendipity, the odd chance, the unusual reference, the strange influence and some variation, and that that will help you solve it. And I think if I were bridging between that and our company scaling, I probably would say that especially if you identify a constraint or a blocker of some kind to Scaling and then just hold that as you go about and do some unusual things. Then you may find patterns and discoveries and things of value that you weren't expecting.

That's a great way to summarize it. Thank you.

Yeah. So Edward Tenor, the book is the Efficiency Paradox. We'll put a link to it right in there. Of course you can find it in the usual place, but we'll put a link right to the original publisher, Penguin Random House and give you a chance to go give it a read. Thanks so much for joining us on the show.

Thank you very much.

As always. We bring a new show with something related to the world of scaling up and growing your business here every week on the Scaling Up Podcast. And thanks for listening. Please like it, share it, subscribe, all that kind of thing. You'll find our 140plus episodes that we've done so far. There's a great deal of of of back material that's useful there on a whole range of topics. At scalingcoach.com you can get a copy of the Scaling app book. You can get our growth tools, worksheets and things like that on on aspects to grow your business all for free free download scaling coach.com thanks again for listening. We'll talk to you next time. Well special thanks to the original growth guru, Vern Harnish. This show is produced by Crystal Carson and audio production by Podfly Productions with audio editing by Albert Burge and show notes compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of the show, please share it. Pass it along to somebody else. Let us know the parts that you love with an email to info scalingcoach.com and and of course you can like and subscribe and all that kind of thing. Thanks again for listening. Keep scaling up.

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