039 Jeff Dalton––Great Big Agile!

Since the first time I met him, I knew Jeff Dalton was a Sensei Leader, and that was before we coined the term. Jeff starts his book by sharing a poll from Gallup that confirms a belief at the core of the Sensei Leader movement that command and control is dead, and Jeff is leading the agile charge to replace it. That's what we're going to talk about today on Walking the Walk. Inspire, empower, and guide people to their very best. These are the people who are walking the walk.

Your host, The original Sensei Leader, Jim Bouchard.

Jeff Dalton's new book is Great Big Agile, and in it he shares a detailed blueprint, and I mean detailed, for exactly how to adopt and implement agile philosophies and techniques in your organization. Well, we'd expect nothing less from Jeff. He's been a leader in the tech and software industry for years, working with some of the world's most innovative companies, and he's the president of Broadsword Solutions, a consulting firm that in their own words provides an agile environment in which you can be a successful which you can be successful, learn, and be part of making a great company even better. Well, I met Jeff way back in my Think Like a Black Belt days when he invited me to do a workshop for his team at Broadsword, and I can tell you that I was preaching to the choir there. Jeff and his team are a tremendous group of human-centric leaders who can help you achieve your best. Jeff, I want to dig into agile and of course into the book, but I also want people to understand you as a person. You know, you're a pilot, a motorcycle adventurer, world traveler. And a very accomplished musician. And in fact, in the preface of Great Big Agile, you talk in detail about the influence that your life in music had on you as a leader, right? And particularly how it influenced your agile mindset. So can we start there?

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me on, Jim. It's great to see you once again. It's an honor. It's an honor. Oh, it's always an honor. And y'all must be pretty excited up there in New England today.

Yeah, for people who may be listening later, this is the day after the Super Bowl, and I know most of you are sick of hearing about the Patriots winning the Super Bowl, but we're not sick of it. In fact, we're on to number 7. We're ready for number 7 now.

I was saying this morning that it has to be one of the most overestimated underestimates of any NFL team ever. Everybody said the Pats aren't going to win. The Pats aren't going to win.

People are disappointed because it wasn't a big shootout, but you know what? I've been preaching it forever, and I guess because I played safety, but Look, defense wins championships, right?

And they proved that. They proved that yesterday. They sure did. Hey, what you're saying about music is so important to everything that I do. And, you know, a lot of people don't know this about me. They see me talking to software teams or speaking at conferences, and they don't know that I started my life as a traveling musician. My upbringing was sort of like the Partridge Family unplugged. We didn't have a yellow bus, but we did travel around and perform when I was a youngster and starting about 8 years old. And my father was a music teacher and my siblings were all musicians. And I kind of grew up in a music life and went on to study music in school and had a career as a musician for some years. And you know, you learn things as a musician that you don't learn necessarily in a typical upbringing. I mean, there's other art forms or other experiences you can have, I think, I think martial arts is probably one of those, and I've learned that from you. But, you know, and I talk about this in the book that, you know, a focus on music or art or dance or theater or martial arts gives you discipline, gives you focus, it gives you experience collaborating with others. It gives you an intense, relentless improvement, you know, real-time improvement, getting better and better all the time. Teaches you to be really excellent at what you do.

And handling criticism. I think that's one thing, right? And you touched on that, right? About the, what do you call it in music school? The juries?

Right, right, right. I talk about that in chapter 1 of the book, that the music juries, and art school has these too, that just beat the emotion out of you from an early age. Because I remember my first jury, I went to a relatively well-known music school, a conservatory in Baltimore, and my first music lesson, we had this jury, and my teacher said, "You should be a shoe repairman." I'm laughing not at you too, because, you know, I know in my world, because, you know, I have a music background too, not a scholarly one like yours.

And our juries were when I was playing what we call the chicken wire circuit, and it was usually a beer bottle flying past your head.

Exactly like in the Blues Brothers.

Exactly. Yeah, we played— actually, that place was pretty nice compared to some of the places we played. Yeah.

And another lesson, he said, you can't be a bass player if you don't have any beat. You know, I— this is, this is, uh, he's talking to a guy who had probably played, I don't know, 500 to 1,000 shows by the time I— from my first meeting with him. So I was like reeling like crazy when I walked out of the room. And of course, all I did then was practice 8 hours a day, which was in retrospect the reason he did it, I'm sure. But, um, the point of the story in the book is that, uh, we need to get better at listening to feedback from people around us to improve ourselves. You know, we're so busy trying to prove our own points. We're so busy stopping and waiting so we can talk as opposed to listening for improvement opportunities that we really miss the point. And they're not teaching this in school these days. And so a lot of the folks coming up in my industry, in the computer science and software business, are not good listeners when it comes to feedback. As a matter of fact, it seems like unless you put an exclamation point and a smiley face at the end of every sentence, they think you're being critical of them.

No, exactly. I mean, it was an issue with the millennials, and now it's worse now that iGen is coming into the workplace, right? We're seeing that more and more, that they— one of the key problems and the transition that they're going to have to make is exactly what you just said. Not only are they not good at accepting criticism, they've just never had it, right?

And the problem with that isn't that we want to beat them down and they're not letting us.

Well, that's not what criticism is, right? Criticism is to improve you. It's not— it's not disparaging you. Well, it can be, I guess. You must have seen that movie Whiplash. That must have given you flashbacks.

Right. Of course it can be. But how do you get better?

Right.

I mean, I know that, that my, my shoe repairman story motivated me to get better as fast as I could. I didn't take it as if, oh man, you offended me. I'm leaving here. I'm reporting you. None of that stuff existed back then. We were just there to get better. So in any case, when the Agile software movement came along about 15 years ago, it's based on a set of values and they talk about these things like excellence and transparency, collaboration and cooperation.

Hey, careful, you're going to trigger somebody.

Right, exactly. And so I thought, man, that sounds awfully familiar. And I love the guys that started the movement. They're super sharp and they know what they're doing. I was like, hey, you guys realize you didn't make this up, right? That this has been around— and I say this in the book— this has been around for 1,000 years in Western civilization anyway, and I'm sure even longer in other civilizations. And, you know, this has been something that musicians and artists and, you know, black belt masters have been talking about for 1,000 years.

Well, that's interesting because later in the book you actually draw a point, and it's cool because You used some Japanese terms that, yes, I was familiar with through the arts, and one is kaizen, the concept of continual development, or like we say around here, perfection is not a destination, it's a never-ending process, right?

Right.

So let's skip around a little. Let's talk about that because how important is that? And you're right, these things, I applaud the agile movement because, you know, you're right, it's not anything new. I mean, sometimes when I'm doing presentations, I actually slap myself in the head and I say, you know, this stuff is not rocket surgery. It's stupid. It's just that we have to The basics, the fundamentals, especially with human behavior, need to be practiced. You talked about discipline, right? If we're not, if we're not doing it, we're not doing it, if that makes sense. So let's talk about Kaizen and how that relates to Agile.

Sure. Well, Kaizen, of course, has been around forever. It's been used in Japan and other places. It's been made more famous in recent years by Toyota and other companies that have adopted it. And while Kaizen is not specifically an Agile technique, it's used more in the Lean setting, it's something that I included in the book because it really personifies the idea of agility, where we're constantly in an iterative and incremental way, we're identifying areas and problems we're trying to solve. We do root cause analysis to figure out what can be done to improve performance. We identify it, we make those improvements, and we slip them into the system right away. What they've done in the Agile world is kind of cool, is they've shortened their work cycles to anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks depending on the team. They essentially are performing constant kaizens as they're going. So at the end of every 1 to 4-week period, the team performs one of these. They're called retrospective in the Agile world. They identify, okay, here's what we did well, here's what we didn't do so well, what are we going to change to do things better? In this way, their process is empirical. Rather than defined. And this is kind of an important point in the book that will probably resonate with you, Jim. There are basically two theories of process management, at least in my business. The defined process control, DPC, is basically the command-and-control model. It says, "Here's the process you shall follow, and you shall follow it whether you want to or not, and we'll measure the heck out of it, and when we decide that it needs to be changed based on our data, we'll go through the process of making major changes to it." Of course, what companies do is they almost never change it, and lots of stuff happens that shouldn't be happening. And that's kind of the normal behavior that we see, as opposed to empirical process control, EPC, which is kind of championed by the agile folks. This is the idea that no process is constant, that you start with a foundation, and then each team modifies and adjusts as they go, doing these iterations or sprints sometimes they're called, or you can think of them as iterative kaizens in a way. They've done a really good job. I think it's one of the powerful things about the Agile movement is this idea of teams gathering around their work every 1 to 4 weeks and making changes to the way they're going to work. So I think while the folks that put the original Agile Manifesto together in 2001 were really super innovative, their real innovation was packaging up the stuff that you and I call excellence. They created a set of what they call ceremonies. They don't use the word process so much. But they took a ceremonial approach to software development. So you can think of these as katas almost, where there's a defined set of behaviors, defined movement that they learn, and there's 6 or 7 of these that they just execute over and over again and get really good at executing, and then improving their forms and maybe adding some new things as they go. So that's really the magic it is that they've put ceremonies around stuff that we've been talking about for many years, and it really caught on like wildfire because people all of a sudden seem to get it. They're like, oh, I totally get how this works now. And, you know, a lot of us who've been giving speeches for years kind of hitting ourselves in the head saying, man, why didn't I think of that? That's a great idea.

But that's the thing, isn't it? Like I said, these philosophies, and I can't remember who exactly said this, but everything you're talking about, you're exactly right. Lao Tzu talked about this. Aristotle, Socrates, they all talked about these same things. But Joseph Campbell, when he was writing Power of Myth and whatnot, he was talking about the loss of ceremony and how detrimental that is because we need these rituals, we need these practices. And when you said kata, for people who don't understand that, what that is, is it's a choreographed set of movements that we practice, right? And exactly, you're supposed to follow them as close as you can and not to be bound by them. But that gives you the framework. So this is something I do believe, you know, imprints nicely in the agile world as well, right? It's not just— it can look from an untrained eye like a t-shirt slogan, go with the flow kind of philosophy.

Right.

Presupposes a lot of discipline, doesn't it? You need to know your fundamentals. You need to know your processes in order to make this work, right? It's not a lazy person's shortcut.

Right. And this is how I sort of started the book around this music metaphor because it's also exactly like learning your scales and learning your key signatures and learning your tempos and learning, you know, all of the music theory, becoming a great musician. It's a very similar process to what the agile folks are going through now, which is just really ironic when you look at a lot of other things going on in societies where people are throwing off processes and, and, and traditions like crazy, especially here in the US. We're seeing, you know, people are just tossing out traditions like, you know, like it's nobody's business. Some of them maybe deserve to be tossed, but some of them, I think, exist to make us a more, you know, let's call it lubricant society, lubricated society. Right. Because some of those things like, like general politeness and using Mr. and Miss and, and opening doors for people and all that, they exist. Exist to create a social lubricant that makes us all get along.

No, you're hitting the nail right on the head. And the thing with that too is that that's when we see sometimes, you know, those of us who are, you know, students of history and philosophy, uh, this is how I pulled all my hair out, is because literally sometimes, you know, I'm at a leadership conference and I'm listening and I'm saying, this guy said he invented this? You know, there's, there's no way. He— this is, this is nothing new. But here's what happens if we lose these traditions, we lose these ceremonies, then we do have to reinvent them. And what a waste that is if we preserve them. And again, like I said, I like the way you organized it too around, what is it, the basically circles of performance circles, right? And it includes the ceremonies, the techniques and assessment because that I want you to talk a little bit about too because we have a lot of military leaders on the program and they often talk about the, you know, the after-action assessment.

Sure.

People look wide-eyed. What do you mean you think about that afterwards? Well, hell yeah. You know, if you want to improve.

I always liken it to football players. You know, when people ask me, what's the real value of a retrospective? I'm like, do you think the NFL teams just go back to their locker rooms and go home and go drink a beer? No, they're in there watching the film.

Right.

You know, they're in there zeroing in. The coach is saying, why did you take 7 steps instead of 6? I mean, they just really are really good at it. You see it in sports too, like swimming, where they watch the videos and they're like, like one extra stroke, extra half stroke, you know, you shouldn't have done that. And they're relentlessly improving themselves every minute. And so when I put the model together, the model in the book is called the Agile Performance Hierarchy. And the reason I named it that is that in a book called Ghost in the Machine, there's a story about a halon or the whole set of—

I'm glad you're hitting this because I had a big note. What the hell is a halon? Yeah, I knew you'd have a good way to explain it.

A holon is an entity that lives and breathes all on its own, but also is part of a greater whole.

That sounds very Zen. Let's break that down.

Yeah. Well, so an example of a holon might be a cell in your body, which of course you have billions of them, and each one operates under its own set of rules. It doesn't need any intelligence to operate.— it, your skin cell operates and it does its thing and interacts with other cells, but it also interacts with other cells to the greater whole. It covers your skin, right? Um, a holide might be a certain activity in an organization that can take place all standalone, but also as part of a greater whole. So it reaches an ultimate conclusion of delivering a product or something like that. So what I tried to do in the book is identify what are the key performance activities in order to run an organization. And I came up with these 6 performance circles, leading being the most important one. And the reason I made them circles is because I want them to continually evolve and continually improve and expand, right? And expand. And it's like, so I think of it like the solar system, right? And I didn't want to be limited to, to being a linear process. I wanted this to be much more empirical. So contained within each performance circle is a set of related holons. Each each one of them can stand alone and do whatever it needs to do without asking permission. And this is key to self-organization, the not asking permission in order to succeed at its task, but also contribute to the greater good and the whole of the product.

Now you're going to trigger some people there for sure, because that requires a lot of trust, doesn't it?

Yeah, so that's— so this whole notion of high trust is also part of the Agile lexicon, and I love working with— I was just working with an executive the other day that said, "I'm trying to get my team to adopt Agile, and no matter how many people I fire, they won't comply." How many people did you fire? And he's like, "Well, they just won't do what I tell them." I said, "Maybe they're not the problem, right?" And so this notion of high trust is important because people just don't know how to make this happen. And high trust doesn't mean that a leader just lets go and lets people do whatever they want and says, you just go do what you think is right. High trust requires an extraordinary amount of discipline. You know, 100%. And, and one of, one of the aspects of high trust that made me think about taking this holon approach is that people don't have real clarity about what their mission is. Individually, like they don't have individually— individual clarity about what their mission is, what's expected of them, and what they're allowed to do without asking permission. So I keep using this phrase without asking for permission because it's key to this entire model. If I have to ask for permission for something, that means I'm involving somebody else who's going to give me an answer I may or may not want to hear. And it's just going to take a lot of time and may make a big mess. Plus, I'm going to step on a lot of toes and there's going to be a lot of issues. So what, what we do is we, we encourage companies to abandon traditional job roles and job titles and instead replace it with a circular model where roles are defined based on the actual thing they produce or do, and accountabilities are then assigned to those roles. Now, a person might have 7 or 8 or 10 or 12 roles. I know in my company, I think I have about 25. And every time I'm executing that role, I have a different set of accountabilities that I use to execute that task, and I don't have to ask permission for any of them. And all of the employees in the company can— are authorized to do that and enabled to do that by senior management because all that stuff's been clearly defined, and most importantly, they self-subscribe to it when the role is defined. So the role gets defined and then people self-subscribe to the role and then they know exactly what their accountabilities are at any given point in time. And this is a bit of an improvement on the original Agile approach where the term self-subscription is used pretty liberally, but there isn't really a clear definition of these roles and accountabilities. Now, I wish I had made this concept up of the roles and accountabilities before I included it myself, but I actually didn't invent the idea. There's a gentleman named Brian Robertson that wrote a book about about it years ago. He has a completely different model, which I don't use in the book. But this concept of roles and accountabilities is one of the ceremonies that I've adopted. And it's clearly a foundation for self-organization and trust. It's really what's missing in high-trust organizations. So we've, we've recognized him and the ceremony in the book. And it's foundational to making this happen.

Well, you just opened a few cans of worms there. So let's circle back to a couple of things. First of all, what you hit on really speaks to me, and I'm going to go back 2,500 years and quote Lao Tzu again, and I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, but he said the best leader is the leader when the people barely know he exists. When the work is done, right, the work is done, they'll sit down and say we did it ourselves. And that again speaks to that level of trust you're talking about. But, you know, one of my, I guess, more contemporary heroes, General Patton, said the same thing, right? Never tell people how to do something. Tell them what to do and they'll surprise you with their ingenuity. But Patton's a good example for that. Lao Tzu the same way, because both of those, it's, how would you say, it presumes an incredibly high level of training and preparation, right? Like you said, you can't just turn people loose. You have to empower them. You have to give them the tools they need. To prepare, to be prepared for the roles that you're going to give them. Are we singing in harmony there?

That's exactly right. I refer to it as the new leader is a steward of an enabling infrastructure based on discipline and knowledge. And without that, it doesn't happen. And I always tell my clients, you know, it's not magic. This doesn't happen magically. You can't just send out an email and saying, hey guys, I trust you now. You do what's right. For the company. No, we need to define a vision of what is right for the company. Each role has to be clearly defined with clear set of accountabilities and deliverables. Now, the magic is that you can empower the teams to modify, evolve, and adjust to those roles and accountabilities. In fact, we do that in our company. We have regular quarterly meetings where we put all— put them all up on the wall and we say, look, let's go at it. Which ones don't you want anymore? Which ones did we get wrong? People start adding responsibilities to me sometimes when we do that, which is all good. I mean, if they think that they shouldn't be on the hook for doing something and I should, I'm more than happy to take it and I'm more than happy to offload some things too. But there's what I try to—

oh, go ahead, go ahead.

Yeah, this is what I try to do is be a steward of an enabling infrastructure.. And I'm in charge of operating that machine as a leader, that enabling infrastructure. What I'm not in charge of doing is telling people how to do their job. And that was a leap for us. When we started our company 15 years ago, we were very much command and control. We had directors, and we had people giving tasking. And you've met our team, not the kind of team that likes that sort of thing so much, as we've learned. You know, you can't, you can't really manage stallions and thoroughbreds. And so we switched over about 5 years ago and said, no, this is— we're gonna, we're gonna create this enabling infrastructure. And it's worked great since then.

Yeah. For what it's worth too, I believe you had much more of that in place on an informal basis, right? It's just that, yeah, you know, and we still— and this is the thing too, when people hear me criticize— I'm sure you run into the same thing— criticize the command and control, there are times when that's an appropriate technique, you know, but that's the difference between tactics and strategy. Tactics, that's something you're going to use in the moment, and it may be sometimes contrary to your overall strategy, right? You have to go, you know, with what the conditions are dictating. But having said that, the strategy is what's so key. Now, one of the things— and we do have to do some workshops together, there's just no doubt about that, we keep talking—

absolutely.

But one of the things I can, I can hear the pushback based on something you just said, and I want to hear your take on it because In martial arts, we talk an awful lot about focus, right? And definitely that's the imprint on the Sensei Leader movement. And people confuse that because they think that it means you can only do one thing. As martial artists, we learn that no, focus means letting go of distractions and detractions and doing it very quickly so that you can shift your, your complete attention from one function to another, right? From one role to another.

So that's right.

Yeah, tell us how that— because I Again, I cheated because I read the book, but how do you manage that in an agile environment? How do you help people develop that sense of focus?

Well, look, it takes practice. Humans just have trouble with this, and it takes practice, and it takes short iterations and many iterations of practice of the same role, and it takes coaching, and it takes mentoring, and it takes It takes training, and it takes a big investment in a leader's time and, frankly, financially to really bring a team up to a self-organizing state. It's really an enlightened high level of performance compared to a command-and-control organization. So one of the things that we do in our company, and I encourage our clients to do, is to be— to learn to be agile by being agile. In other words, lead using these techniques, follow using these techniques, deliver using these and run your whole company using these techniques from top to bottom. And also adopt, you know, we took kind of took a page out of the Agile movement from the early 2000s, adopt a model that works, you know, a model that you can follow that has ceremonies and has techniques and can be measured. And that's kind of, we do Section 2 of the book, it's into that, it's that Agile Performance Hierarchy model that we encourage leaders to adopt. Because it really makes it easy for them to understand what are the actions and steps they need to take to successfully make this transition happen. We've even included a way for them to assess their organization through an assessment model, through some of our partners to come on-site and really use this model as a way to give them a rating, so to speak, or a performance level for each of these 6 circles so that they understand exactly where they, you know, where they stand at the meta level. Now, we always talk about relentless improvement at individual level, but this really adopts it at the organizational level so the whole organization can move up the ladder and get better and better over time.

No, and you hit one of the quotes that I highlighted from the book too where you said, "Don't do Agile, be Agile." Or like we say around here, lead by example, right? You have to model the behavior you expect from others. You went back to that story about the guy who couldn't get the people to do it, right? Well, no, no. Do it.

You do it. You first.

You do it first. Listen, we're almost out of time, but I did want to talk about this too, because again, you're hinting at this part of the vestiges of this command and control mindset that we still hang on to so strongly. And believe me, people who are listening, we're not saying that the management parts of things are not important. They are. It's as Admiral Grace Hopper said so nicely. She said, said, management is about things, leadership is about people. The problem being that for too long we forgot about— we went overboard on management, she said, and forgot about leadership. And that's what it is. So as you make a shift to a culture like this, I think one of the things that people need to understand is that you've got to— the leaders that are higher in positions of authority have to get out of those management tasks a little more and get more into the leadership tasks, right? You've got to lead by walking around in this type of model, right?

That's right. And I'm so tickled. Admiral Grace Hopper is one of my favorite characters in history.

Oh, she's wonderful.

And I love her story about— she always used to say, you know, you think you're drowning in data, wait until 10 years from now, we'll be drowning in information.

True.

Boy, she was right about that, huh? She got that one right. But yeah, so a couple of things going on there, Jim, that are really interesting. First of all, business schools in the country, from Cambridge to Stanford, haven't caught on yet that command and control is dead. And all you have to do is look at the Gallup studies that I quote in the book going back to the '70s, that every institution that we hold dear in this country, people have lost faith in the command and control leadership of politicians, banks, schools, businesses, police, you name it. Every single category, religion, every single category, We've gone down 30, 40 percentage points in terms of approval of those entities. So they haven't caught on yet and they're still pumping out MBAs. And I'm sure they're wonderful educations and everything, but they're pumping out people with MBAs that are more based on traditional command and control. The other side of it, if I could just sort of finish with this, I know we're running out of time, is that I think it was de Israel. I can't remember the gentleman, the prime minister of of Israel, and I actually quote him in the book, but now in the interview, his name is at the tip of my tongue. One of the former prime ministers of Israel was quoted as saying, "I learned to climb a greasy pole to get here, and you don't think I'm letting go of it now, do you?" And so we've got an entire cadre of literally millions of leaders/managers who frankly don't always know which they are. That have gotten there by using command-and-control methods, sometimes climbing on other people, sometimes by doing it by hurting people, sometimes doing it completely honestly but just getting up in the levels because they were good at numbers or whatever that requirement happened to be.

Promotion by performance, right?

Promotion by performance. And so we've got this huge impediment in front of us now. Not only do we have this huge cadre Even the folks that came into business with an agile mindset, they learned that in order to move up, they had to change that. And I've seen this happen so many times where like a software development manager gets in, all of a sudden he becomes chief information officer and he's forgotten what got him there. And then the business schools, of course, are replenishing at thousands and thousands and thousands a year. So we need to start at the schools and we need to transform the leaders that we have. So it's a massive task. But until you do that, we have what I like to call an organizational type mismatch. I use that term because in software, a type mismatch is when one data type tries to talk to another data type, like a character to a number, and it blows up the software. That's a really classic software error that all programmers know about. You have an organizational type mismatch. We have all these people on the lower levels trying to self-organize and be agile, and being really excited about it. And then you got just one or two levels of management up, people squashing them down, saying, "Duh, it's nice that you're doing some of those things. Just don't go too far, buddy." Right.

They don't recognize the leadership on the front lines. Yeah.

Just don't try to climb my greasy pole. Right? So, that's what's going on. And, you know, I wrote the book just for those people. You know, hope they like it because it's coming.

We've got to have you on again, and we're going to start something where we're going to be shifting some of our content over to probably the Patreon model.

Oh yeah.

And when we do, one of the things that we've got planned is an exclusive book club for patrons at a certain level, and we're going to have authors like yourself on. We're going to make sure people get a copy of the book first and get some time to digest it, and then hopefully the authors will come on and we'll really dig into into the content. So hope you'll be back on that, and you're always welcome on this show, obviously. And Great Big Agile, how do we get the book, and how do we get in touch with you at Broadsword?

You can definitely get the book at Amazon or at any, you know, any book retailer online that you would like. So I'd love to have you check it out. You can get it in both Kindle and book format, and you can always reach me at Broadsword at broadswordsolutions.com., or at my blog, askthecmmiappraiser.com. And I would love to hear from you. And, uh, Jim, we'd love to have you on our podcast in the future also. So thanks for having me.

Oh, anytime, anytime. Thanks so much. Hey, listen, get involved with the Sensei Leader movement. I'm unabashedly recruiting all of you who have listened to this program. If you liked it, of course, like it and share it. Please share it with people you think would appreciate Jeff's insights. And just all you got to do to get involved is really simple. It doesn't cost you a dime to get started. All you have to do is come to thesenseileader.com and you'll get— I still think you'll get a free copy, ebook copy of The Sensei Leader when you sign up. That's all you need to do, and then we'll tell you about all the other good stuff that's going on. So, Jeff, again, thank you so much, and we'll be talking to you very, very soon.

My pleasure, Jim. Thank you.

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