The "Meaning Revolution" In Leadership with Google's Fred Kofman| Greymatter

This episode of Gray Matter is in partnership with sfelc, a curated community of engineering leaders working to evolve the way leadership is implemented in the tech industry. At the annual SFELC Summit, Google's leadership Development advisor, Fred Kaufman discusses the meaning revolution in leadership and advice to optimize your company's structure. We have an amazing person in Fred Kaufman who is here to talk about the meaning revolution. He has a PhD in economics from UC Berkeley, he's Google's leadership development advisor, and he's the Director of the Conscious Leadership Institute at the Monterey Institute of Technology. He's also the founder and President of the Conscious Business center and he previously was the Vice President of executive development at LinkedIn and and the co founder of Acciolent. The concepts that Fred's about to dive into have had a wave of impact in the engineering leaders community. So please join me in having a huge and warm welcome to Fred Kaufman.

I bet you don't know your jobs. I'm willing to put money on the table. Are you? Will you bet with me that you know your jobs? No, I'm from Argentina. You shouldn't bet against an Argentinian. But play with me. Let's say I met you out there and we didn't know each other and you didn't know I was going to use whatever you said to embarrass you in front of everybody. And I asked you, so what do you do? What's your job? How would you answer that question? Just pause for a second and think. How would you answer my question? What's your job? So we met, I asked you about your job. I and I say, no, that's not your job. You'd be surprised. I said, prove it to me. I'll give you an analogy. It's not a proof, but I'll give you an analogy. So let's talk about soccer for a second. Everybody knows we Argentinians are the best soccer players and the humblest ones in the world. If I ask you, what's the job of a goalie, trick question, but just play with me, what would you say? Stop Goals. Of course, what could be more obvious? But then, I don't know if you watched the last World cup, but that brings up a question. What the hell was the goalie of Germany doing in the attack in the last three minutes of the game against Mexico? This is a very awkward thing. Why would a goalie that is supposed to stop goals be forward? Now, if you haven't seen the game, trust me, this guy was on the side of Mexico trying to Score a goal. Doesn't he know his job? He's the goalie of the national soccer team. He's the captain. Even so, he should know his job. So what the hell is he doing? What's the job of a team? To win. So the job of the team is to win. And if the job of the team is to win and you're a player, meaning a member of this team, what is your job? So what's the goal is for? First and foremost, job? To help the team win. Do you agree with that? Okay, maybe I missed it. So let's go back a couple slides. You know where I'm going. Some of you are already, ooh, ooh. I'm glad I didn't bet. So the job of the goalie is not to stop goals. Stopping goals is the way that, that normally the goalie does his job or her job. But the true job of the goalie is the same as the job of an offensive player, which is to help the team win. And it's also the job of the water boy and the coach and everybody who's affiliated to the team. Everybody is there to help the team win. That's the main contribution, the main value of the players. Now, let's go to a business context. So if I go to any of the code heads at Google and I ask, what's your job? What do you think this guy's going to tell me? Code. I'm an engineer. I code program. It's just what engineers do. And then I go to the salespeople, I ask the salespeople, what's your job to sell? You see, this is exactly like the defense and the offense in a soccer team. You know, people are trying to kill the bugs and the others are trying to make money or sell and make revenue. But they're both wrong. And this mistake is deadly. I'm going to prove to you this is what kills every successful organization. When people ask me, what do I do, I. I tell them, I am an organizational oncologist. People are like, what? Yeah, I study tumors in organizations. I've never seen a tumor. It's like, oh, believe me, your organization is full of them. And they'll kill your organization. Where are they? Look in the mirror. Remember the Matrix? The first movie when Agent Smith tells Morpheus, you humans are a disease? Well, we are a disease. We are like tumors. Because everybody is self interested. Everybody wants more power, more budget, more authority, more autonomy. But that doesn't work for the system as a whole. Just like a cancer cell goes into a tissue grows into a tumor. And the tumor is incredibly successful at growing and achieving more space, more power, more nutrients, until it kills the host and then everybody dies. But the tumor is very successful. The host is the one that is not successful. So in an organization, the deadly disease is that it disorganizes because everybody starts working, doing his or her job instead of contributing to helping the team win. This is not a joke. I like to say it in a humorous way, but it's not a joke. And there's a lot of suffering that comes from this. So my goal in this time that we have together is to show to you how does this work and why. This is, in my opinion, the most difficult problem. Every organization has, every family has, every group of people has. From a couple to a family, to a community, to a business, to humanity as a whole. How do we live together without blowing ourselves up? So let's just say that everybody's job in a business is to accomplish the mission with integrity as a first approach to an answer. But let's see what happens when somebody doesn't. So we have the salespeople that are trying to sell and. And that's their mission. They've been told, think like an owner. I own my piece. I own this part. And to make this part successful, I'm going to do everything I can to accomplish my mission, which is to maximize revenue. But then you have a credit analyst that is the one that decides whether to give credit to a customer or not. Or you can take a legal department. Legal department would be playing defense. Or the credit analyst, that is. What's the job of a credit analyst? Just guess. Well, not to say no when the credit analyst says no, or when a finance person says no, you can't do that deal. What are they trying to do? Prevent. Reduce risk. Exactly. Prevent bad debt or minimize losses. Or just if it's a lawyer just signing a contract, that could create trouble in the future. So prevent risk. Again, playing defense. What's the best way to have no bad debt? Don't lend. I mean, you know what? Type 1 and type 2 errors. So the salesperson has never seen a customer that doesn't deserve credit, and the credit analyst has never seen a customer that deserves credit. So what happens? Well, these people are going to get into a tug of war because each one of them is trying to optimize for their subsystem. You're being told, minimize bad debt, minimize cost, shut down the factory. Of course, nobody's that stupid, but you will have a temptation to do that, or you're being told, maximize revenue. What you want to sell, are you selling the highest margin product? No, you're selling the highest revenue product. But the highest revenue product doesn't mean it's the highest margin product. The goal of the company is to make profits, not to make revenue, but you're being paid and, and you're being told your job is to maximize revenue because that's what you control. So you think like an owner and you do it. And then these are your enemies. The people that want to launch are the enemies of the quality assurance people, because the quality assurance people want to test and the other people want to launch. And when you get requests for reliability engineering, the product, people are saying, who the hell needs. I mean, we need features, we need cool stuff to put out in the market. So here's the problem. The problem is that in order to optimize the system, you have to sub optimize the subsystems. So if you're being told you have to optimize your subsystem, for sure, the convergence of those instructions are going to sub optimize the system and eventually kill the system. You cannot avoid this. This is pure math. It has nothing to do with people being good or bad. It's just the way it is. But you say, oh, we just need to work together. How do we work together? How do you evaluate the marginal contribution of a person to optimizing the system? It's a huge problem. I taught at MIT for a while, and my first meeting with a person in industry was with someone from Digital Equipment Corporation. And I asked the person, it was an engineer, head of supply chain. And I asked him, how do you optimize the supply chain? I'm an economist, so I used to think in objective functions, constraints. He looked at me like, we don't have a clue about any objective function. My problem is that Harry, not real names, but Harry hates Sarah's guts, and Sarah hates Harry's guts. And they're not communicating, so they're dropping all the balls between the two of them. So our supply chain cycle time is correct through the roof. That was literally what he said. He said, well, how do I calculate this? I was coming from mit. I said, we don't need calculation. We need some human judgment here. And I said, well, I got a PhD. I have bad news. I have a PhD in mathematical economics. And he said, well, we can get PhDs at dime A dozen, but that doesn't solve the problem. That was not what I wanted to hear after 12 years of study. So you might Be thinking, cool, this guy just gave me the keys to the kingdom. I used to think I have to optimize my subsystem. Now I realize that's not the way to go. I should work to optimize the system. Well, let me give you a word of caution. Doing your job may be very hazardous to your career. Why? Well, the problem is that you take a bullet for the team and then the coach will shoot you. You're all proud. It's like, coach, I took a bullet for the team. Then you get shot again. Because KPIs are like playing Russian roulette. Five out of six times KPIs will give you the right answer. But the six times, they'll blow your head off because the KPI is telling you to optimize your subsystem. The there are times when you need to trade things off where you have to sub optimize. Just like where was the defensive player, the goalie in the attack? Because they were losing 10 and they were going to be eliminated. And everybody knows your job is to help the team win. So if you're losing, you try to tie the game and you go forward, even if you're in the defense. But let's just say that your coach has been trained by Harvard Business School, not at mit. This never happened at mit. What would you say? Well, we have two sub teams. Let's give them incentives. Let's create a good incentive mechanism. How will we evaluate the defensive players? Well, their KPI is preventing goals. And the offensive players, they have to score. Okay, now, if you're a defensive player, and let's just say that this bonus really, really counts. This is your career progress. Do you prefer your team to win five to four or your team to lose 01. Where do you look better? Where does your career look better? Your goal is to minimize scores against you. What's better for you? 01. Losing 01 is better for you because one goal against you is much better than four. Now you may say, well, this is a fluke. No, I can create this with any example. Losing 4 to 5 for an offensive player is better than winning 1, 2 0. This is one of those KPIs where the round is in the chamber and you're going to blow your head up. So what are you supposed to do? Don't use KPIs? I don't think so. The problem is not just that people don't know their jobs. They. The problem is, even if you know your job, you can't do it because you'll be fired because everything is set up for you not to do your job, regardless of how aware you are of what your real job is. What are the two problems? So I'm going to present to you something that's very similar than the problem we have in physics. The lack of an integrated field theory or a theory of everything. If you look at quantum physics, it doesn't cohere with relativity. If you look at relativity and you try to make it small, you get contradictions. So any of you have seen physics? This is like the biggest problem in physics for 100 years, more or less, since Einstein started fighting with a quantum physicist about is reality stochastic or deterministic? And we're still in that problem. We live in a continuous universe. I mean, what the hell is going on? Something is missing. Well, here I'm going to tell you that if you look at the organization from the parts to the whole, you get one perspective. If you look from the whole to see what the parts are supposed to do, you get the opposite perspective. And in that contradiction, organizations die. Even if you understand what I'm saying, what I try to prove is that there's no solution to this problem. I mean, we're screwed. Essentially. Life is a terminal disease. So in economics, we have two issues in economics of information, which are called moral hazard and adverse selection. You may have heard these are usually applied to the insurance industry, but they apply to incentive mechanisms as well. So let me talk first about moral hazard. Imagine we all go to a restaurant after this. We're going to have dinner, and they have place for all of us. And someone has the brilliant idea like, hey, let's just order, and then we'll split the bill. And people are like, ooh, I don't know these people. Ok, let's try. And they have tacos and lobster. And the tacos are worth $6, and the lobster is $600. Now, if you were alone, the taco for $6 looks. Looks pretty good. Lobster for 600. No, but you would pay $10 for a lobster. I mean, $10, it would be reasonable for you to pay for a lobster. So now you say, oh, if I order a lobster, what part of the lobster I will pay? And there's 600 people there. Well, it's going to be only $1, because the other $599 are going to be charged to these suckers who are going to have to pay for it. That's called moral hazard. Because I only pay 1, 600 of my order, you pay the other 599, 600. And being Argentinian, I think I'm the only smart one here. So all these suckers are going to get the tacos, and I'm going to get the lobster. And I'll pay $6 for each taco, $1 for my lobster. That's a $7 bill. That's great. It's amazing. This is my chance to try this $600 lobster order. Of course, I'm not the only smart one. Then we all end up paying $600 each. It's like, who did that? Everybody starts being angry against everybody else, except for, let's just say, one person who's kind of the tea player, the scrupled diner. The person has scruples. No, I'm not going to take advantage of my colleagues here. I'm going to order tacos. So the truth is, Our bill is 599.10 because one person ordered tacos. But what's worse is that her bill is also $5.99 and 10 cents. It's the most expensive taco this lady ever ordered in her life. So let's just say this repeats the next week. There's another conference and everybody shows up. Now, what do you think this lady's going to do? She'll get two lobsters to make up, ant caviar to put on top. It's like, this is my chance to get back at these people. So essentially, you get Animal Farm. This is the problem. You can't solve this problem. The only way you can do it is not split the bill, but as soon as you split the bill, you create this moral hazard situation where people don't have to pay for the cost they impose on the rest. And now, Messi, just suppose that the Barcelona Club where he plays says, we don't like this income inequality thing. We're committed to income equality, so we're going to pay everybody the same. What's going to happen with Messi? What do you think he'll do? He's going to quit. Why? Because average pay drives the best people away. If you're the best salesperson in the world, do you want to be paid average commission or you want to be paid your own? If you're the best, you want your own. The average brings you way down. You're way above average. Now, if you're the worst, do you want to be paid average or you want to pay your own? You want average because you're way below average. That's what it means, being the worst. So adverse selection is you create a system and say, we're all in this together, we're a team, so we're going to work together. And then we're going to split equally. It's the opposite of the moral hazard. We're going to split equally all our proceeds. We're a cooperative and we're all the same. All the best people are going to leave because they'll say it's not fair. Fair is I need to be paid by my contribution. And not everybody contributes. They say not everybody studied the same, not everybody works equally hard, not everybody has the same talent or is willing to stretch the same. It's not fair that everybody gets the same. I teach at a university, I offer the kids. Here's the deal. If you want to reduce grade inequality, we'll agree at the beginning of the class that everybody gets the same grade. So we take the exam I and whatever the exam yields, everybody gets the average. Do you want that deal? Nobody wants that deal ever. And if I enforce that deal, people will drop the class because they know what will happen. Some people are going to shirk in the first test and then more people will do it in the second test. And by the time of the final, nobody's studying anything because you're getting 1, 600 of your grade because everybody else is counting on you to carry them. And then you die, like the horse in Animal Farm. You work harder, you work harder and you die. I'm sure you have seen some traces of this in your companies. This happens in families, in communities. It's called the tragedy of the commons, where everybody tries to piggyback or ride other people coattails and take their sheep to graze in the commons until the commons is over grazed anyway. It's a big problem to deal with collective property or schemes that are collectivist. And essentially that's what destroys communist economies. I mean, Mathematica has nothing to do with political ideology. It's an information and incentive problem in an economy where you cannot evaluate the marginal contribution of people and you can not calculate economically the cost of capital and, and different production methods. You just get disorganization. You can't keep things together. It happens everywhere. There's a famous story about six blind men trying to discover the nature of the elephant. And of course they're fighting because one of them says no. The elephant is like a pipe touching the trunk. They say no, it's like a column hugging the leg and the other is touching the side and saying no. It's like a wall and they're all fighting and A passerby who's sighted says, no, no, you're all wrong. You're right. But you're wrong. The blind man, what the hell do you mean you were right? Well, you're kind of right because the part that you're touching looks like the part what you described, but nobody can touch the whole elephant. So you're all wrong because you're extrapolating your part to the rest of the elephant. And they say, how do you know? Well, let me walk back and say I. And see. I can see the elephant because I'm way back. So the blind men say, yeah, you can see the elephant, but you have no idea of the elephant's texture. You can't touch the skin. You don't know what's happening in each part of the elephant. And the sighted man says, you're right. Well, that same thing happens in companies. If you're on the ground, you have very good granularity, but you don't understand how the system works because you can't see the interactions. And if you assume that the rest of the system is like your part, you're wrong. But if you're far enough, let's say an executive to see the whole picture, well, then you don't see the granularity. You just don't understand the particular circumstances of time and place, as Friedrich Heit described them. So in this dilemma, most leaders decide to say, okay, here are the rules. You're going to do that, and you're going to do that, and you're going to do that. And that's the collapse. Because when you do that, people get stuck and they can't do anything. And when people don't do anything, people get aggressive, people get angry. And when people get angry, they get totalitarian. I mean, I'm dead serious. There's 150 million people that were murdered by their own totalitarian governments in the 20th century. And every one of those governments tries to impose centralized control on the economy and society. All of them right wing, left wing. That's less important than are you going to have some measure of autonomy for people where they can make decisions and have a decentralized information processing system, or are you going to have a totalitarian, centrally controlled economy? I say, oh, well, we don't have to worry about that because we are in a free market. We work in a business. Well, inside the company. It's exactly like a communist economy. You don't own the means of production. There's a board. You're not the owners of the company. You, you take centralized instructions from the executive team. So essentially the executive team is trying to figure out how to run a company like the Soviets were trying to run an economy. It's a lot smaller and they have a lot of price information around, but it's not very different. It's an isomorphic problem from pure information theory perspective. I don't want to pitch my book, but I'm being a little loose here. But if you look at the book or if you read stuff I put online, you'll see that there's very strong science. In fact, one Nobel laureate, Friedrich Hayek, wrote, the economic problem of any organization is rapid adaptation to changes in its particular circumstances. Then the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resource available to meet them. This problem cannot be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which then issues its orders. So he seems to be saying, decentralized. You can't manage this system from a central perspective because to optimize the system you have to subsidize. You don't know, you just don't know. But the man on the spot, if you let people make decisions, cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him so such further information as he needs to fit his decisions in the whole pattern of changes of the larger system. So there he seems to be saying, well, you can't decentralize because people are going to do the best for themselves, but not the best for the system. Well, Hayek won the Nobel Prize for studying how the price system in a competitive economy is sufficient. It's a vector of sufficient information to allow people to make decentralized decisions that converge to to the core of a competitive economy, or what could be approach an optimal point. Now I arrived in UC Berkeley to study with Gerard Debreu, who was another Nobel laureate, a French who actually studied the core of an economy under what conditions an economy will converge. But then in Berkeley, I had the pleasure to work with another French guy who then won the Nobel Prize. And my advisor was Drew Fudenberg, and then Jean Tirol was his co author. So I got to work with Tirol and the two of them were working on agency theory. And this is the clash in economics. General equilibrium would be like general relativity theory, looking at the company as a whole. Agency theory is contract theory looking at individual agents. And you would say, well, you put together the individual agents, you should get the system no, you don't. Exactly. Like we have the same field problem now. When I discovered that, I was like, oh my God, this is great, this is big. I can write something about this. And then I thought, oh shit, I'm sure I just discovered gunpowder. There's a phrase in Spanish that you just discover that the earth is round. Like, you know, big deal, everybody knows this. So slightly embarrassed. I wrote to Jean Tirol and I asked him, can you look at this manuscript and tell me if I'm screwing up? That I basically wrote something that there's 100 papers about this and I never saw them. I'm going to look like a stupid idiot for having rewritten what has been covered in 20 journals. He wrote back to me and said, no, this is pretty cool. I haven't read something like this, really, Would you write a quote for my book? And he did. So if somebody accuses me, I say, well, if John didn't know it, you don't blame me because he's the Nobel Prize, not me. So we're screwed. You will be thinking, so are we going to get something uplifting here or do we have to wait for the wine? Well, yeah, I have some good news. And the good news, I'll tell you the story of these two hikers that encounter bear. And the bear is menacingly approaching them. But one of them sits down and pulls a pair of running shoes from his pack. And as he's putting the running shoes there, he says, what the hell are you doing? Well, I'm going to run. You can't outrun the bear. I don't have to. I only have to outrun you. This is an unsolvable problem, but you don't have to solve it. You just have to do it better than others to win. Because every organization has has this problem. So in a competitive market, you're not trying to have the bear eat the other person, but you're trying to serve the people that depend on your products and services to have better lives. So that's a very noble goal. It's a race to serve people better, cheaper, with higher quality, and so on, faster, you name it. So the question is, who's going to win this race? And the one that's going to win this race is the one that ameliorates this problem as best. In the land of the blind, the one eyed is king. Everybody's blind now. I think after Studying this for 25 years, I can explain it, but my God, I broke the whole wall trying to hit the nail in the head. Now I feel like, yeah, this is the freaking nail and this is the problem. Now. It's not easy, even after you know the problem. What to do about that in the last nine minutes? I'll tell you what's the answer, because the solution turns out to be trivially simple, wickedly difficult, but very simple to understand. But it's not a solution we can't solve. This is a mathematical impossibility. Under the assumptions that I told you, self interest, private information about the immediate environment, talent and effort, there's no way to solve this problem. That's proved mathematically in agency theory. You need to condition compensation on performance in order to incentivize the right effort. But if you condition compensation on performance, meaning KPIs, you're going to destroy the global optimality because people will optimize their subsystems. That's the crux of the argument. So what do you do? Well, you have to change some assumption. You have to change something. And a basic assumption that I've been using in all my presentations so far is, is the one that it's called the Homo economicus, the economic man or economic human, which is people respond to incentives and they respond to material incentives that have to do with rewards and punishments. I am going to argue, I argue extensively in the book. This is like the first three chapters of the book. There's eight more chapters in the book, but these are the first three because I find the problem incredibly elegant as a mathematician, when I discover, oh, this is so such a beautiful structure and how everything comes together. And in a sense, it's part of my history. I started with general equilibrium, then I went to contract theory. And then it turns out the two of them give you the exact opposite recommendations on how to centrally manage or decentrally manage a system. So I said, what's the opportunity? So 90% of human energy comes from commitment. Nobody can make you do things if you don't want to with your best effort. And I discovered this thinking with my kids, because as a manager, I wanted my kids to. They were dirty and fighting over the iPad. No, they were not reading like this book. They were all dirty. They hadn't taken a bath. And they were fighting, yelling at each other, pulling on the iPad. My turn. No, my turn, my turn. So what did they do as a manager? Take away the iPad? No iPad until you read. So I succeeded. They read, cursing me under their breath. And I realized as I was watching them and not feeling satisfied, saying, okay, I got them to read, why am I not feeling good about this? I realized I don't want them to read. I want them to want to read. That's a very different problem. So I went to them and said, until you want to read, no iPad. Yes, exactly. Yeah, you got it. That's like a thief saying, be my friend. Yes, of course I'm your friend. Give me your money. Okay. No, as a gift. Well, here, have a gift. No, you don't really mean it. I'll shoot you. Mean it or I'll shoot you. No gun in the world can get you to respect someone. No gun in the world can get your best. No incentive can get your best. You will only give your best because you want to. It's not contractable. That's the difference between management and leadership. For me, leadership is about eliciting internal commitment. You do it because it comes from the inside. Now, how do you lead people? How do you engage people's internal commitment to pursue a mission? Not because it's convenient, but because it's worth it? That's a totally different problem. And I don't know about you, but nobody taught me that in business school. I didn't go to business school, but I didn't teach that. I have to confess, I didn't teach that at Sloan. I studied economics, and I talked to some professors at the Haas School, the Berkeley School of Business. They don't teach this now. They have some leadership courses. But how do you become worthy of being followed? How do you earn the moral authority so that other people will want to pursue the mission that you're inviting them to contribute to? That's not an engineering problem. That's changing the context in which people will solve any engineering problem. And that's what leaders do. If you remember, there's a part in the movie where the nobles are leading the Scottish army to fight the English, and people are leaving, say, oh, we don't want to fight. And he comes and he says, yes, leave, and you might leave. Stay, and you might die. But wouldn't you trade off every day from now until the end of your life to come back to this moment and prove to the English that we stand for freedom? Something along those lines. He wasn't saying, we're going to win, they won. But that's Hollywood. He was saying, it's Henry V. I haven't seen Saint Crispin's day go to YouTube. Watch Kenneth Branagh's Saint Crispin's Day address. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For whoever sheds blood with me will be my brother being in earnest or vile. This Day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now are bed will feel themselves accursed. They were not here to fight with us upon St. Crispin's day. Now, that is not management. That is not like, hey, guys, stay and we're going to win. It's like, no, no, no, we're probably going to get our asses kicked because the French are seven times our number. They're fresh. Well, we'll do our best, but the fewer the men, the greater the share of honor. We'll just die. We don't need more people to die with us. I mean, what kind of attractive speech is that as a recruiter? They suck. But what people want in their lives is not just more goodies. I'm not saying that goodies are not important. So that's like walking with your right leg. And you know, it's good to walk with your right leg, but if your left leg is stuck, you're not going to go very far. So what I'm saying is use the two legs. You have compensation mechanisms. You have bonuses, benefits, stock plans. I mean, whatever. You have to incentivize you and your people. But to get people's best to solve this problem, really, you have to go way beyond that and you have to add another tool, another tool, which is non material incentives. And non material incentives are what in economics, we call club goods. A club good. It's not exclusive in consumption, but it's exclusionary. You can exclude people from the club if they don't live up to the standards or they don't contribute to the mission. But once they're in the club, everybody's equal member of the club. Everybody can feel proud, everybody can connect to a similar purpose. Everybody can uphold certain principles and feel fully integrated and included in a community. This is what we most want as human beings. This is what we live for. The other stuff. We need the other stuff to live, but this is what we live for. So as a leader, as an engineering leader, or any leader, you have to engage the two parts. Make it the right and the left leg. If you want people to walk, you have to get them to understand what you're trying to do. But then you have to make them like my kids. I had to find a way to have them want to read. I can force them to read only while I'm controlling them. But the moment I turn around, they don't read anymore. And if I pay them to read, I punish them with their reward because I'm taking away any pleasure they might have of reading. I. I'M educating them to only respond to monetary incentives. So the moment they don't get it, it's like, why should I read? I mean, I read to make a dollar per page or something. Whatever Daddy gives me, that's very bad education. So how do you get people to commit? And I'll finish with this story, which will give you my ultimate answer. When I was writing the book, I took my wife to Egypt. And I had been to Egypt before, so it was more a gift to her. I wanted to go with her. I'm writing the book and all that. We went to this temple. It's an Egyptian temple. We went in a barge down the Nile. I think it's Luxor, but we go there. And I remember this temple. But when I saw the temple, I was like, wow, these people, the Egyptians, built this temple to say, look at us. We are important. We are powerful people. We created something worth admiring, and it's an issue of identity. We participated in a project that gave us symbolic immortality. Our purpose was to transcend. We wanted to mean something. And this is our call to you to recognize that we were great people. I was like, whoa. It's very similar to what every person wants. It's like, I want to mean something. I want my life to mean something. And then I walk in, and I didn't remember this, but the moment I entered, I realized. I remember this was. It's full of graffiti. The soldiers from Napoleon, when they conquered, and the British afterwards, they wrote their names like, jean Francois was here, 1802. I mean, literally, they chiseled that. I said, my God, you know, there's 5,000 years, more or less of difference between this temple being built and Napoleon and his soldiers getting there. But these soldiers wanted the same thing. Jean Francois was saying, I was here. Remember me? I did something important. I'm worth remembering and admiring because we conquered this place with my other fellow soldiers. And I said, wow, this is an absolute human need. We all feel the need to transcend because we know we're going to die. And we know that in the big scheme of things, this life is absolutely meaningless by itself. So we need to create something that will go beyond just our material existence. Meaning does not come from lasting. We want to really live. Some people say, I want to change the world. We can be very grandiose about that, but the impulse is true. It's a very powerful driver of people's motivation. We all want to do something that matters. Well, businesses can create things that matter, and they can help us transcend in service our own concern for ourselves or our egoic stuckness because essentially when we're in business, we're there to serve the people that we want to help live better lives. And my goal when I wrote the book was to say is it possible to inspire people with a purpose that will give meaning to their lives? And I believe business is the best shot we have. But business is about people really helping other people live better lives and being compensated for that. But that's what we get paid because hopefully we can help our companies develop products and services that will be so valuable that people will want to pay for them and that creates a cycle of goodness that we can call a free market economy. Honestly, I do believe the ultimate driver for human engagement as a leader that you can get is engaging people in a transcendent project that will give meaning to their lives in a community that accepts it, includes them and operates with values that will make everybody proud. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Fred.