320 Randy Pennington - Leading through uncertainty, change and disruption

Randy Pennington's resume and credentials are impressive. I consider him one of the best thinkers in leadership today. Simple is usually best, however, and if you really want to know Randy and his work, it's wrapped up nicely in this simple line from his website: Randy Pennington helps leaders deliver positive results in a world of endless uncertainty and change. And that's what we're talking about in this episode of 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.

Randy Pennington is an author of award-winning books, including Results Rule! and Make Change Work. And his insights have appeared in Fast Company, Entrepreneur, The New York Times, all over the place. He's also a sought-after guest commentator on CNN, PBS, Fox News, ABC, and the BBC. And if that isn't enough, he holds a bachelor's and master's degree in psychology. But I believe even more important, he's walked the walk in leadership positions in major organizations and as a consultant. Now, Randy, when we asked you what you wanted to talk about today, you said this. You said, let's talk about what leaders need to do to build an organization that can flourish in the face of uncertainty, change, and disruption. Boy, are we ever singing in harmony. In fact, I just did a piece dealing on uncertainty and change that's really gone viral. It seems to be a hot topic these days. One of the questions that you forwarded and I found particularly interesting was this one: What do organizations need to do today to keep from being disrupted in the future? And I'm going to add to that a little bit by asking, do organizations really want to avoid disruption or do they want to be the disruptors themselves?

Well, first off, thanks for having me, Jim. It's always great to visit with you.

Always an honor.

And, you know, I think you ask a good question. Do they want to be disrupted or, I mean, do they want to disrupt or are they afraid of being disrupted? Do they want to disrupt other people's lives? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think from an organization perspective, there's a, there's a reality that you have to, you have to acknowledge. And the reality is this, is that past success proves that you were right once. Hmm. But not necessarily now. And it doesn't mean that. So every organization, really what they're focusing on is how do you stay relevant in the world? How do you stay relevant with your marketplace? And so from that standpoint, You have to change. It's one of the things that I'm saying a lot to clients right now is that everyone wants to be better. Well, if you want to be better, you have to do things differently because you're performing and organizing at exactly the place where you are today. You know, if you could be doing better, you would be. So I mean, it would So, to be better, you have to be different. You have to do things differently. And to do things differently, you have to change.

But yet, so many people, you know, so many people and organizations seem to cling to this idea that the status quo is really what they need to protect. And you know, I always find that fascinating because a lot of different philosophical cultures said the same thing. But you know, I borrow a lot from the to the Asian. And I remember Lao Tzu, 2,500 years ago, "The only constant in life is change." So, how do people still cling and particularly, how do organizations still cling to that idea of preserving the status quo? And how do you break them from it? Because I know that's a big part of your work.

That's a big part of what we do. And so, there's a couple of things that you said locked up in there. Now, I believe there are certain things that never change. And should never change in an organization. For example, I think those core values that you hold dear, that are the essence of who you are, those things never change. I think the purpose of your organization probably doesn't change often, if at all. You know, I know you work a lot with credit unions and I've worked a lot with them in the past. You know, credit unions aren't going from being member-driven in financial services to now we're going to start a fast food restaurant. The purpose of the business isn't going to change. So the playing field isn't going to change. But what changes is everything within that. And I, I, one of the things that I try to do is to get people to understand that not from the standpoint of an organization, but from the standpoint of life.

Mm-hmm.

So for example, I went to my ophthalmologist a few years back, and at the end of the exam, he came out and said to these, said to me these words. Randy, your arms will be long enough for another year.

Don't you love those? Yeah, yeah.

Right. And see, if you reach a certain age, you begin to realize, okay, I understand what that means. I understand that my life is different. I, you know, wait a minute, I've got aches and pains at a place where I didn't even know I had places before, you know. And so you start to think about that. Organizations are the same way, is that your customer, you know, I think if you focus on these two questions, and these are the two of the questions that I ask my clients to think about. First off is what else? What else? What else can I be doing right now that I'm not doing to better serve my customer? And the second is what's next? And so that's where you start looking at, do you want to be disrupted or do you want to disrupt? I got in trouble. I was speaking to a group last fall and I got in trouble a little bit because I told them— this is not going to surprise you— I told them something that they didn't want to hear. And they were worried about disruption. And my comment to them is there's only two reasons why your business will be disrupted. One, there's a catastrophic event over which you have no control. Farmers that have a tornado go through and rip their crops to sh— I'm sorry, that's disruption, and they have no control over that. So now that's about resilience and rebounding and mitigation of that risk. I said, but the other reason why you're gonna be disrupted is because you're lazy.

Oh yeah.

Because—

Oh, we could go on on that for hours, right? I mean, I honestly say, I got myself in trouble saying this one time. Usually it goes over pretty good, but I hate lazy and complacent people or organizations. I can't stand them. They make me sick and it's contagious.

And so let's talk, you know, I don't think that it's necessarily lazy because when you ask people intellectually, do you know you need to be preparing for the future? The answer is always yes.

Who's going to disagree with that?

Yeah, everyone's gonna disagree with that. Now, for example, one of the things that I'll ask audiences for in my presentations is, how many of you know you should eat healthier than you eat today? Every hand goes up. How many of you know you should exercise more than you exercise today? Every hand goes up. If I ask the smokers, how many of you know you shouldn't smoke? Every hand goes up. So the issue of this, Jim, isn't— it isn't intellectual understanding. Everybody knows that we need to be thinking about the future. Blockbuster could have been Netflix. Mm-hmm.

That's a good example.

Yeah. Well, when you think about it, Sears should have been Amazon. Mm. But they weren't. And so, you know, part of that lazy is it's not lazy in that they're not working hard because they're working very hard. On doing what they're doing today.

Right, that's what complacency sometimes is.

Right, so it's not complacency in the standpoint of not caring. You're not working— it's not that you're not working hard. No, you're working very hard, but you're working very hard on what works today. So, but you're not working very hard to stay aware of what's over the horizon. When I was a kid, you're not old enough to remember this. Maybe you are.

You don't think so?

Yeah, remember the TV show Wagon Train?

Oh sure, yeah, yeah. And they— we were just talking about that because I have to admit a guilty pleasure, I love my rope operas.

Yeah, so Wagon Train starred Ward Bond as the wagon master. And, and so, you know, the job of the wagon master— and I think this is where leaders get into trouble— is the job of the wagon master on a day-to-day basis is to move the train 10 miles or 20 miles or wherever they're— that's the job. How do you go from where I am today to 10 miles down? And it's pretty mundane, monotonous, repetitive things. But there was a group of people on the wagon train that were employed by the wagon train, and they were the scouts. And the scout's job was to ride over the horizon because you can see anything that's on the horizon. But you can't see over the horizon. So the job of the scout is to ride over the horizon. And they were tasked with looking at for two things. One, where's the water? Two, where are the hostiles? Now, if you think about how organizations ought to be operating today, really, we need to be spending at least some time riding over the horizon looking for where's the water and where are the hostiles. Water's the next opportunity. Hostiles are the next potential for disruption. And, you know, I don't think you have to disrupt— people say, I want to disrupt my marketplace. First off, I don't think your customers want to be disrupted.

You know, Uncle, I'm glad you're going down this lane because Yeah, they want life to be easier for them.

They don't want to be disrupted. They want life to be easier and simple and more focused and more customer-centric. And they want things to, you know, they don't care whether you're disrupting your industry or not. They care about them.

Yeah. You said something just a couple of minutes ago about the idea of a catastrophe being a true disruption. Right. And I think that word I've been very curious to see what your response to this would be. That word is being thrown around so much, disruption, and I know we get these sexy buzzwords from time to time, but isn't most revolutionary disruption, it starts off as something very subtle, doesn't it? It's not a catastrophic change. It's just understand, like you say, if you have your scouts out front, they see a little bit of, right, a little bit of change in course that needs here and there, and that's how you successfully move the the wagon train is, to use your metaphor, the next 10 miles. Why are people always looking for the, or think that they have to have this enormous revolutionary change in order to progress?

First off, I think you're exactly right. Most disruptions, most industry and business disruptions started off as a small idea that somebody was willing to take a risk on.

You brought up Amazon, right? I mean, they didn't change retail, you know, as a procedure or anything. We buy things, we want to find things, we buy things, things are delivered. But he made some significant subtle changes in the way that we do that. And that became revolutionary, right?

Right. And Amazon's a great example of that. No, Amazon retail is still retail. We're still buying stuff. Instead of going to a store, we're going to the mailbox or going to the front door, as the case may be. So it really is, if you start thinking about where's the water and where are the hostiles, the hostiles that people— I remember when Amazon came out and everybody was like, really, you're going to buy books online? Who's going to worry about that?

I thought it was a miracle. Yeah.

And, you know, if you bought a lot of books or you sold books directly or, you know, you thought, well, this is kind of cool, but everybody else went, really, that's going to be the case? I mean, Netflix is again, is another prime example. Blockbuster in December of 2008 on an earnings call to the market, to the analysts, the CEO of Blockbuster, a guy named Jim Keyes, said, as for the competition, we're not worried. The Blockbuster brand is so strong. Now, he said that, it was just, that happened 3 or 4 months or so after they had turned down to buy a little upstart company They could have paid, they could have bought them for $50 million. Maybe you've heard of them. They're called Netflix. And the reason why is that the mindset became nobody was looking over the horizon to look at what the customer experience needs to be, to realize that if you give customers a choice, they would rather walk to their mailbox than go to your video store.

Yeah, you know, you're hitting the nail right in the head. I remember living through— I was laid off from a job because of a similar change in, in, uh, in the business climate. It was when, uh, cable television— I was working in broadcast television and cable television was making inroads. And I remember sitting in a meeting, uh, where in fact our supervisor was a really cool and forward-thinking guy. He would have been one of the scouts you're talking about. And he saw this coming and he's What he did, he wanted to, while he was proposing this to the executives, he said, I'm going to put my crew to work. And he had already done this with us. He had already given us this task. He said, I want you to find any way you can to put local faces on TV. I don't care how stupid the idea is, shows, programs, whatever. We're going to put locals on TV. Well, we asked him why. He said, because cable is making inroads here and we can't do what they're doing. Well, they ignored him. They ignored him. They ignored him. And then all of a sudden, right. And that was a catastrophic event in the industry. I mean, broadcast blew up and there were people on the streets all over the country who couldn't find jobs in television and video because of that. Right. Because cable went and did something that, you know, these guys didn't think they were going to do.

Well, and the thing is, they knew it was out there, but they didn't force them to look at that and go, is that a potential hostel or is that potential water? By the way, sometimes those two things are the same things, just depends on how you look at them.

That's exactly right.

So what happens is, I mean, it wasn't that those things weren't around. By the way, taxi companies could have developed a customer ride-sharing, ride-hailing app. This is not, it's not necessarily new science. And so if you look at from an organization, the biggest disruption that I think an organization and a leader has to make today is to get people looking, spending at least a significant portion of their time in creating an environment where new ideas are allowed to flourish, or at least be considered.

Okay, so now you're digging into the culture, right? And a lot, a lot of organizations— here's, here's something that we find an awful lot in our work, especially when I'm working with middle management in the front lines. They'll tell us that, you know, the executives, the C-suite, is afraid of a culture of change, even though they might want that from the, you know, from the middle ranks and from the front lines. How do you, how do you get It's, you know, I have— tell me if your experience is different, but sometimes I see that there's more resistance from the bottom up than there is from the top down.

Well, yeah, it's interesting. I, you know, because while middle managers saying this, you know, the C-suite doesn't really want it, the C-suite saying, yeah, the people on the front lines can't do it. I mean, so here's, here's the key. If you ask senior managers in any industry do we need to be more fast, flexible, customer-focused? They're going to say yes because they get it. They know that's the market. I mean, we tell— I wrote this in Make Change Work— the 4 words that every business operates with today: faster, better, cheaper, friendlier. If you hit a combination, you get all 4 of those, you're golden. If you hit 3 of the 4, you're better than just about everybody. But if you can't hit any of them, you're toast. So the other thing though that I've come to realize, Jim, is that ultimately— and here's where organizations I think miss the mark— the middle of organizations is where change goes to die. Because if you ask the top of the organization, do we need to change things here, that things need to get better, that things need to change, They're all going to go yes. If you ask the people at the very front lines, the bottom of the organization, you know, would you be willing to do something differently if we told you what to do, what we're asking you to do, why it was important, and we gave you the tools and the training to do it? And most people are going to go, yeah, sure.

They do, don't they? Absolutely.

Yeah. Now, sometimes we don't tell them what— we don't give them the training, we don't give them the tools. And I get that. That's, that's, that's part of it. But if you ask to see the people in the middle of the organization, Those are people who have risen to where they are knowing how to play a game that suddenly you're asking them to be different at. We're changing that game in the middle. And so the middle of organizations is where things get ignored. So, you know, I think a place where if I, if I'm talking to a group of senior leaders, I want them to spend more time equipping the people in the middle of the organization to become champions. Of that change.

That's what I was just going to ask you. You know, where do you start? We just had that debate with somebody and gosh, we think alike so much.

Yeah, so let me give you—

Start in the middle, right? Get those people, you know, in harmony with what you're doing and then it'll spread from there.

I'll give you an example. This group that I kind of ticked off last fall, you know, a guy came up to me—

That's the only group you ever ticked off. I know that.

Yeah, well, no, it's one of several, but it's the last one I ticked off. But they're a large organization. A guy came up to me afterwards and says, look, I'm trying to drive change. I have a— his division of this business was 200,000 employees operating globally. And he said, how do I get 200,000 employees on board with this change? And my comment to them is, you don't. He said, he looked at me funny. I said, how many direct reports? He said, well, I have 10 regional people around the world, 10 regions around the world. I said, your job is to build those 10 people into champions. Amen. Just those 10. And their job is to build the 10 underneath them into champions and that for the change. And the job is to get the 10 under them to do it. And I said, so it's a much longer process, but you know, you got to realize that you're steering the Queen Mary here. You're not steering a 16-foot runabout out on the lake on a weekend. Right, right.

And you hit such a key word there too, and I get angry sometimes when people conflate process with culture too much. You know, I said, culture isn't a piece of machinery. It's not something you can go in and just, you know, tinker a few dials and the thing is operating differently. I said, the culture really is nothing more than the reflection collectively of the behaviors, the values, right, the traditions of an organization. How can that change quickly? How can you expect that to change quickly?

Well, you're exactly right. I mean, I talk about it as the culture is the habits of the organization exhibited over time.

Right, right.

So, so if you look at, you know, what create— how long does it take to change a habit?

Hmm.

Now, by the way, the popular myth that it takes, you know, 21 to 30 days to change a habit is wrong.

I would imagine so.

Yeah. I mean, all the research says— there's some research out of the UK. Yeah. I mean, and I go back to it. So when someone says, so I can do this in 21 to 30 days, I said, well, it sort of depends on the habit.

Maybe, right? Maybe.

Yeah, yeah. And the example I use is, you know, I read that eating dark chocolate was good for my heart, and it didn't take me 21 days to develop that habit.

Took that one about a day, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's like a couple of bites, 5 minutes, and I was done because it was a really fun habit. Now, on the other hand, you know, if you ask people, you know, how long does it take to really get in a routine? I mean, you're— you see this within your martial arts training. There's a discipline that comes from someone who has practiced and devoted themselves to martial arts.

Right. There's really no shortcut to that.

Right. And so some people pick up that discipline very quickly. Some people, I'm sure, drop out before they ever— and one of the reasons why they drop out is because they never developed the love of the work, the love of the habit, the love of the discipline. And they didn't stick with it long enough. So it happens that way in organizations too, as they're trying to change, you know, especially change a culture, is that you've gotta stick with it and realize that not everyone's gonna get there. Then again, on an individual level, research out of the UK says it takes, you know, somewhere close to a year to really develop a habit. On an individual basis. My experience is if you're, you know, if you got a— the larger the organization, the longer the time. And, you know, you, you can expect it can be a year or two or three. I get really upset at the speakers that I hear that says, I can go in and change your culture in an hour. Yeah, no, you can't. You know, you can pump people up in an hour. You can give people ideas in an hour.

That's about it.

But you can't change a culture in an hour. No, no. Because, you know—

Because the time it takes in repetition, and you hit the nail right on the head, you know, from the Asian traditions, they use the word 10,000 a lot in the Chinese philosophies, and it means a lot, but it's interesting that research, contemporary research, research has shown that it takes about 10,000 repetitions of any particular skill to create a discipline, like you're talking about, you know, with a habit. And that's where the fluctuation in time is, right? How much time does it take you to reach that level of repetition? And that's been tested so much. And that's it. And you also hit another thing where you said, why— well, here's the thing. People don't like the pain, right? Why do they quit early? Sometimes because they're exposed to the pain. So now we're back, and in fact it's interesting because we were just doing some work on overcoming resistance to change. I'm doing a talk with some credit union leaders about that next week, and my point, my response was don't resist the change. Don't try to overcome the resistance to the change. The resistance is a signal. You know, there's something, there's some, it's telling you something. Embrace that resistance. Just as martial artists, we embrace some level of pain and discomfort as we're trying to train and harden our bodies, right?

Well, and you hit it. I mean, one of the chapters, and it's interestingly enough of the book Make Change Work, it's one of the chapters that gets the most response because the title of the chapter is Resistance Is Your Friend.

Amen.

Amen. And every time I talk about that, I have two perspectives. And first off, if there's no resistance, there's really no change. Exactly.

And I'm ashamed to say I don't have that book, so I've got to get a copy of it because I'm going to quote you left and right here.

Yeah, but if there's no resistance, there's no change. You know, if it's easy and people go, "Eh, okay, we got it," then chances are they're not making that— there's not that much of a change.

Exactly.

The second thing, and this is the hard part for leaders to remember, it's, you know, so I always go back to this question. I said, do you believe that the majority, if not all of the people that work on your team, want to do a good job for the customers that they serve? And invariably everyone goes, yeah, most of them. And when I say, are there ones that don't? They'll go, yeah, there's a few, 2, 3, 4, 5%. I said, okay, there's a different way to manage. Those people probably need to be gone. That's what I was going to say.

They're on the short list, right?

Yeah. But I said, so, but here's the thing. If you believe, if, you know, 95, 98% of your people want to do a good job. That means every piece of resistance is either a legitimate fear in their mind or a legitimate concern.

Exactly.

Now, as a leader, why wouldn't you want to know that?

Mm-hmm. Um, and I'll rephrase the question. As a leader, specifically talking to a leader, right? Why are you not seeking that out.

True. Yeah. And so we actually encourage people. It's one of the things is that, you know, you need to be looking for that resistance. You need to— you need to find people. And the hard part is to find and create the environment. And here's that culture, if you will, where people are willing to tell you the truth.

Right, they have to have the courage. You have to support the courage to do that.

Right, and one of the folks that I've written about a lot and I've quoted him a lot is a guy named Carl Sewell. Carl Sewell owns car dealerships. His Lexus dealership in Dallas is the number one Lexus dealership in the country for service, usually number one or two for sales. Same with Cadillac, same with Buick, same with GM. All those, all those brands. And I, and I was talking to Carl once and he said probably one of the hardest things for a leader to do is to create an environment where people are willing to tell you the truth, no matter if it's good or it's bad. So because they they tell you what you want to hear. They tell you what they think you want to hear. They tell you what will make them look better or best. They tell you, they'll tell you all those things. But getting them to tell you the truth, he said, you can't do anything without that information. He said, so that really becomes so from a resistance standpoint. And here's again, I think it's a challenge a lot of leaders face. Is that they're dealing with resistance that's disguised as going along with the change.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah.

Because people are telling them, you know, I promise you, you're dealing with credit union leaders. If the CEO of the credit union says, you know, we need to make this change, nobody's going to stand up in the middle of the room and go, well, that's the stupidest thing ever. But what they will do is they'll go in and subtly drag their feet on it.

Yeah.

Or sabotage it. Or the word that, the word that I've, that I use over and over again is what you'll really get is malicious obedience.

Right. But it takes, it takes a lot of work to develop the type of human connection So that people will trust in you enough. The trust has to be flowing both ways so that people will be honest and open. And you know, gosh, you just hit another thing. We have to do this more. I'm going to start that.

Right?

Because you stimulate so much thinking. But yeah, the idea of buy it, because that's the other side of the equation. The number of times I hear from leaders, "Well, how do I get people to buy in?" I said, "Stop trying to get them to buy in. You should start asking." And I'm not just trying to be clever with words here, you know, to make it stick. But the more you involve people, the deeper those connections are. The more you involve people early and often in a process of change, they're going to bring those problems to you early while they're very manageable, right? Instead of, like you said, dragging their feet or hiding particular issues. Until, you know, then when you roll out the big part of the change plan, those are the things that really come up and grab you, right?

So yeah, so here are two very practical ways that that can happen because I know you like this and I know your listeners are saying, "Okay, but how do I do that?" First off, the premise that we go with, the "Vaa people early and often," but also it's people support what they help create. Exactly. So, so here's the thing. When you're planning your change, and again, most people don't do this. It's intuitively, why would I want to do this? But it actually makes sense. It's you're putting together people to put together this change. You ought to find somebody who's going to be— that everyone in the, in the organization knows is going to be a skeptic. Put that person on the team. Put— make that, you know, and And then, then you get them thinking, all right, because I want people looking at that going, so when, you know what, if, you know, Jim will tell them what, how things really are, and, you know, if Jim buys into this thing, then it's got to be good because Jim doesn't like anything. And, you know, it's that type of thing.

You do know me.

Yeah, but, but yeah, but even beyond that, and this is how I start if I'm doing a large change effort. And a lot of my career over the last 30 years has been helping organizations manage and lead significant changes in their culture and how they perform and how they behave and how they operate. But I always start with two things. Or, you know, one is making sure I have the right people on the team. But the second is I start that team off by saying, let's talk about— this is what we're trying to accomplish. Let's identify all the reasons why this might not work.

Mm-hmm.

And so we're going to, we're going to spend a lot of time talking about success. But first, we're going to talk about failure. Because what that does is the realization that when it comes into change, especially in organizations, everyone carries baggage of past experience. Now, some of that past experience is good. A lot of it's bad. Some people are carrying overnight bags. Others of us have great big steamer trunks. On our backs. But what we're really trying to do there on a very practical level is unload all that baggage, because by unloading the baggage, two things are going to happen. One is I start to understand all the things that we have to avoid to make this change work. And the second is we clear the space to allow new things, new ideas to come in.

Exactly.

By acknowledging the fact that we're going to deal with all these fears, all these frustrations, all the reasons why, now we've cleared the space to look at it and say, I no longer have to hold on to that fear or that frustration or the fact that I got, you know, clobbered in the senior leadership team meeting the last time we tried something. And now I can focus on how do we make it work and how do we make it work better. And so from a practical leadership standpoint, I mean, it's a very tactical thing to do, but it's a very tactical thing to achieve a very strategic goal. And the strategic goal is to help people, is to one, identify the resistance, involve people early and often because buy-in is the key, and then be able for the organization to look at what you're trying to accomplish. And say, I can trust that they've, you know, they've turned over all the stones, that they've looked under all the rocks, that they've thought through everything. And again, that builds confidence in what they're trying to do.

Are you sure you're not a black belt?

Randy, that's the perfect—

again, you know, it's a blessing to have so many parallels from the martial arts world. Rolled over into the leadership and business space. But you just sounded like you could have been giving that lecture in a dojo.

Well, you know, here's what I found, Jim. There's no new truth.

No, exactly, exactly.

And we may all arrive at the truth from a different place.

Yeah, or we discover it for ourselves. We each have to discover it for ourselves, and that's a great process, but it doesn't mean that it's new.

Yeah, by the way, I just wrote an article last week that I think I— probably some people probably got upset, but the title of the article was "The Truth Won't Set You Free." And, you know, I grew up in the South. I grew up in the Bible Belt. I grew up going to church every time the doors were open. And I remember hearing that scripture, you know, the truth— they'll know the truth and the truth will set you free. No, the truth is crippling.

It's dangerous. It's aggravating. It's, it's, uh, oh my God.

Well, and, and, you know, I said, you know, if knowing the truth set you free, people would be healthier.

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

Um, if knowing the truth set you free, yeah, I mean, you can list of a thousand things that would be different. And so it's not the knowing of the truth. It's the acting on the truth.

There it is.

That's what frees you to experience new results in your business, better quality relationships, all those things.

Randy, we could do this all day. We try to keep this to a lunch-friendly sort of half-hour flexible, but I'm going to put you on the spot. We've got to have you as a as a regular. It's been way too long, and I get so much from listening to you and talking with you, and you challenge my thinking so much. Will we do this again soon?

Absolutely. I mean, just have that lovely bride slash boss of yours, because I know, I really know who's the boss in that relationship. Um, but yeah, I mean, let's get, let's get something on the, on the schedule. This is always fun. Uh, I, I enjoy it. A great deal, and I appreciate the opportunity.

Let's tell people how to get in touch with you.

Well, the easy way to find me is on the web at PenningtonGroup, all one word, PenningtonGroup.com. If you're socially active, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook, and those are primarily the top 3, but all of those works. If you look for Randy Pennington, you type him in, I'm pretty easy to find.

There you go. Stay with me after the music and we'll say goodbye. And for now, we'll say goodbye to listeners. Hey, thank you guys for tuning in again and thanks for making the Sensei Leader Movement the global phenomenon that it's starting to become. It's because of you guys. So thanks so much, Randy. Thank you so much for being with us.

My pleasure. Keynotes, workshops, retreats, webinars, and ongoing training. Each program customized to your unique needs, interests, goals and budget. Inspire, empower, and guide people to their very best. Learn more about Jim Bouchard and The Sensei Leader at thesenseileader.com.