Episode 083: Twitter Fallout and How it Relates to Fleet

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show.

3, 2, 1.

We are a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley. With Jeff Jenkins.

You know, Josh, it's good to hear your voice introducing the podcast again. Yeah, yeah, last time it was me. That's kind of boring.

No, it's all right. Well, you know, for all those who missed me and my lovely suede tones, that's right, I'm here to help you.

The baritone.

That's right. What's that, what's that guy's name? Barry White.

Barry White, there you go.

Yeah, can't get enough of you, babe. He was, you know, I was talking to somebody about Chris Voss the other week, you know, negotiation tactics, and one of the things he always recommends is the FM radio jockey voice.

Really?

Hello and welcome to the FM radio station that you just love to listen to on your drive home.

Is it because it's like supposed to calm you? Yeah.

Oh, I actually do that with my kids, by the way, like when they're really amped up, instead of me matching their intensity I will deliberately throw on FM radio voice and be like, "Yeah, I could see how that's really bothering you, and I understand why that would be upsetting." Like, you slow the pace of your words down significantly, you lower the pitch of your voice, and that's FM radio voice. And it works too. Yeah, it's supposed to, like, de-escalate the situation and have it be a little bit more relaxing and deliberate. And right, it's just kind of like, it's like listening to Delilah in the afternoon.

You know, I bet when, when our listeners got on this episode, they were not expecting great parenting tips and they got them. They got them right there, right there, done.

It's a good negotiation tactic. And you know what, every day that you work with children, you realize that you negotiate with terrorists day in and day out. So you have to do things sometimes that are out of the norm.

I love it.

If you want a good reading tip, like, that's a great one. Never Split the Difference.

Uh, it is a great— that actually is a great book.

A great book if we're negotiating anything in business from, you getting your kid to do their laundry. So no, today's topic, we were going to talk about all what's been in the news lately is obviously Elon's takeover of Twitter has just been blowing up the social networks.

Chief Twit.

People left and right going all whatever. And I know in Fleet, we typically stay out of the fray because frankly, we've got real work to do. And social media just feels like—

well put—

a waste of time. But I thought there was some, some really, you know, unique insights that we get while watching this and, you know, kind of being spectators on the sidelines. And it related back to, you know, some of what we deal with. One, as we've been dealing with, you know, these shifting demographics as we're recruiting new technicians, you know, the environment that they've grown up in is a Twitter, Facebook environment. Total social media, you know, TikTok has been a staple in their lives for years by now. Um, and there's this expectation that's really kind of shifted, and what we're seeing at Twitter is kind of a manifestation of what happens when two worlds collide, right? You have the, the old school world like Elon Musk and like, hey, we're trying to get this thing profitable and no quit, don't sleep 24/7, right? Super high urgency.

Yep.

Like, let's go, let's go do some things really amazing. And he's done it at Tesla and he's done it at SpaceX, even though those weren't his companies originally. Like, that attitude is what helped those companies really take the step. And SpaceX, for one, and really both those companies, look at both of them. And you know what Ford and GM have done, they've only been able to do, in my opinion, because of Tesla. Agreed, right? Because Tesla shifted the market and shifted market perception. And shifted market demand. Ford and GM reacted to that shift in the marketplace because of Tesla.

Well, you remember, like, so Toyota started it with the Prius, right?

Yeah, but the Prius didn't get the market going.

No, it did not, because it was gutless. And then Chevy went to Volt. Volt never took off.

No, never. I actually really liked the, the Chevy Volt. I thought that was a great design because it had the gas generator, so you have range extending and You had, you know, it was basically an electric drivetrain versus the Prius, which was a hybrid.

Yep.

You know, true hybrid drivetrain. The Volt was all electric with a gas generator backup. And I thought that was like, that was honestly the way to do it. Just didn't take off. But then Tesla came in, is like, nope, all electric here. We're going to build out the supercharging infrastructure. We're going to build these cars, are going to be high performance. They're going to be fun to drive. And they really spoke to the driving experience and the user experience. We talk about that software all the time.

Right?

What's the user experience really like? Um, whereas Chevy and Prius just kind of like, this is a practical car, it's not a fun car, and they kind of took that element out of it, right? Um, and they— and I think they kind of lost the war there for a little bit. Now Ford coming in with Ford Lightning, GM coming in with the Hummer EV, entirely 100% impractical as electric vehicles, correct? But I will tell you what, they're doing it because of why? Well, they know that trucks are the number one selling industry in the world, and they know that, um, electrification, if you do it right, you can make it fun. Yeah. And fun vehicles sell.

Well, they also know Cybertruck, right?

Well, I don't think anybody's really threatened by Cybertruck.

Well, but I'm saying just the fact that there's a truck coming out that isn't from Tesla. Yes, from EV, right? So Tesla already took huge market share in their vehicles, right?

So now they introduce another type of vehicle as a truck, and you're going after like money makers. Yes, I think that's why you ended up seeing those moves.

Agreed.

So he's— that was a total segue, but he's coming in. Well, and SpaceX is the same thing, right? You look at what Amazon, what Jeff Bezos has done with Blue Origin. You look at, you know, like, Atlas has launched rockets but nowhere near the type of launch frequency and cadence that SpaceX is doing, or success, or success, right? SpaceX is launching I think they've done like 100 launches this year already. Like they're doing almost 2 a week, it feels like.

Which is crazy.

Yeah. And they're reclaiming most of those rockets. Very rarely do they expend one. And if they do, they're charging the client double for that. Because, you know, they basically, they just did this last week as they launched one of the Falcon 9s and they weren't able to recover the core, but they recovered the 2 other boosters. And they'll reuse those again, right? But they did something that's never been done before. And that allowed them to launch with such a frequency and reliability. Like, that was the other thing too, is like they revolutionized how you do space launch, right? You know, and that wasn't really an industry people thought needed to be revolutionized, but they are so far ahead of Blue Origin and— oh, who's the other one— Virgin Galactic. Um, and I want to say there's another player, ULA. They're so far ahead of them, they're even ahead of NASA. And NASA's been doing this 60 years.

Right?

But why? Well, a lot of it's because of this super high urgency and like we need to do things different and faster. And, you know, like I love the fact that— so NASA just launched their SLS, right? I was there for it. It was amazing. You guys heard us on a past podcast talk about how bad that experience was. I will tell you they did a much better job this time communicating, keeping people apprised of what was happening. They had a real, you know, like an astronaut doing some commentary while we were all sitting out there clueless.

Cool. Yeah.

Um, but this time, like, you know, it was a lot better, and obviously they launched, right? But that SLS has been in design really, you know, you go back the Artemis missions and then Constellation before it, it's been in design for probably about 15, 16 years, right?

And technology moves so fast, right?

Well, you look at what SpaceX has done with Starship right? This is going to be something that does equivalent missions to what SLS does. And I think Starship really has only been in development for probably about 5, 6 years, right? And, and they're this year, uh, you know, they're trying to shoot and get a ship up into orbit next year, or I mean by the end of this year, by December next month.

Yeah.

Which is just crazy considering that last year they hadn't even stacked the rockets together, right? And, and they're sitting there like stacking them and unstacking them and stacking them again. Whereas SLS, that thing has been stacked, fully stacked for 2 years, and it barely lifted off last week. That's crazy, right? So it's this high sense of urgency, the speed, and he's really pushing that.

Um, what's been interesting about this is that so he comes in, he's trying to apply that same chemical mixture to Twitter, right, which has a lot of gosh, how do I say this without sounding like a jerk, uh, people that are entitled, that have grown up in this space to where you have social media, right? And it's a lot of feelings-based type mentalities.

Well, we see it a lot. Like, it's— and we really only have ourselves to blame as tech companies because we've kind of created this, correct? Um, you look at— we talk about in tech, uh, we call them the FAANG companies, right? So it's Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google.

Yep.

And they really kind of like revolutionized how we attract, develop, and retain talent, right? I mean, like, Google has a whole book. The, the head of people over there, Laszlo Bock, has a book called, I think, Work Rules, and he talks about all the things they do at Google, like bringing in daycare and hair salons and car wash companies. Pretty much any errand you would need to go run, they have it there on campus at Google.

So, but they did that just to attract talent, right? There's no other reason behind that.

Well, I mean, obviously, into— so you didn't have to leave. Oh, right, there you go. Stay there. Um, you know, they prefer if you didn't have families because then you don't have to go home, right? But you have this, the shift in dynamic though is like, you know, the ping pong tables, and you have this whole expectation now because of these companies. And like, well, I can go get that at Google and Facebook as it's like a huge you know, campus, like a college campus dorm. I mean, they call them campuses now and they're these huge hubs of, you know, just like fun and games. But we're also doing work that's fun, right? And but they did that to kind of like really, hey, you know, come work for us because this is the kind of thing we have here. And they kind of wow people, right? And eventually people either see through, you know, what we call the fluff, you know, like a ping pong table doesn't make a good culture. Correct. Right. But it's one of those things that people look for and like, well, if you don't have a ping pong table, then you must have a terrible culture.

You're no fun.

You're no fun, right? You don't know how to do— you don't know how to have fun. Um, that's why I made the joke earlier in the podcast is like, well, you know, those of us in fleet, like, we actually have real work to do rather than build a social network where people can just talk all day. Um, what was interesting though is that, you know, he comes in, he's got this sense of urgency, right? And you have all these You know, they're tech people, they've been in the industry. We've kind of spoiled our tech industry for— this has been going for 10, 15 years.

It's been a while, right?

Um, you know, I want to say Facebook really came into its own probably around 2008. Apple really came into their own around the iPod time, which was 2005, 2006. Um, you know, Netflix didn't really get big until probably 2013, '14, really, until streaming took off. Yep. I mean, they were big before then when they were doing mailing, right? Yeah, but streaming is when they went meteoric. Um, that's your word of the day, by the way, meteoric. And then you had, uh, you know, I mean, like, Google was big, you know, they were probably the biggest first, you know, like, Apple was big and then they went small and then they got big again. But Google, from, you know, '95, I want to say, through the dot-com era, like, they really once they survived dot-com bust, they took off.

Yep.

And they were kind of like the trendsetters. Like, everybody was following Google for a long time. Even Microsoft had to pivot and counteract some of the things that were happening at Google. Um, what's interesting though is you look at like the story of where these, these big tech companies all got started, right? And they all got started in a garage pretty much. You look at Apple, That's Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs figuring out how to get the Macintosh, right? Like, yep, they're working on that Apple computer in their garage. Uh, Google in the garage, they developed that in the garage, right? Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed that in the garage of one of their other co-founders. Yep. Um, you had, uh, you know, so Microsoft, HP, Hewlett-Packard, you know, as a tech company, computer company started in a garage.

Uh, Michael Dell did Dell in a garage.

Michael Dell was in a garage. Amazon was in a garage.

Yep.

Right, selling books out of his garage and out of the trunk of his car. Um, Reed Hastings over at Netflix— you know how Netflix got started? No. He sent himself a DVD in the mail. He wanted— he wanted to know how long it took to get. Yeah.

So did he like drive or fly somewhere and mail it to himself and then went back and got it?

Yeah, I think he was at a convention or something like that. And then mail it to his home address. And he wanted to see, is A, would it get there intact?

Yep.

And B, is it playable? And then could he send it back to himself, right? And how long would it take? Because he found the, you know, like he had a late fee with Blockbuster. He was like, you know, there's something wrong with a company whose entire business model is built on you doing something wrong, right?

Late fees.

On late fees. That's how Blockbuster made all of their money was in late fees. And so that's what he's— he just started off like, well, I wonder what would happen like if I could send myself, you know, or send out DVDs in the mail and not do late fees. Like, could I eliminate the distribution costs and the acquisition cost of media? Um, you know, but that was the kind of like just figure it out and see if it works, you know. So like there's this whole mentality of do whatever it takes to get it done, to find new things and find new ways of doing things and really like turn industries on their head, right? Which is why Elon's been so successful so far, is that that's kind of his, you know, his mojo, his MO.

Yep.

He's like, I'm just going to come in and like, we're going to work our butts off to try to figure out the solution to a really massive problem. But then you have that now competing, you know. So the people who created that type of, you know, hustle and go-get-it attitude ended up creating these behemoths that have really become monsters unto themselves. And so a company like Twitter, you know, just last week laid off, you know, half of its workforce, if not more.

Well, they didn't— they didn't— because they didn't have that hustle and drive, right, right, that the people who started it, the founders, all had. It kind of disappeared with them, right? So let's sacrifice something to find talent, and the something you sacrificed was that drive, right? Well, that's like a broad statement. It's not everybody.

Right, right.

But if you can go to a company and acquire it and lay off half your people that are there, there's a lot of waste apparently.

Well, and I think that's the key, right, is that people didn't see it as waste. The company's not profitable, they're running at a loss, and for them, like, somehow they became disconnected from reality. Yeah, right, which is that you can't run at a loss forever. Eventually you run out of other people's money. True, right? And that's the, the key here is that they, they were running at a loss. They were either going to run out of investor money or they were going to run out of bank's money or something. And so it had to happen, you know. Now the question is, why did they start running out of people's money? Well, maybe they hired too many people from the get-go. Maybe it wasn't that they hired too many people, but they weren't as productive as they should have been, right? Um, you know, but somewhere along the line they lost sight of what was most important. And for Twitter, you know, like, what was most important is we didn't have a product that sells ad revenue, just like Google, right? We need to have a product that has content, is engaging, and they lost sight of that. And so now they've got a ton of people that are dependent on this platform providing them livelihood, but they weren't providing that same value in return. So it's like, no wonder they had to let go of all these people. But then the— man, the uproar and the backlash, like, that's really where it's exposed to us, is like, what had happened culturally at this company? To even allow this to be a thing where it's like, I care more that my best friend has a job at Twitter than I do with whether or not Twitter survives.

So I, I think a lot of it is hate of Elon, right? The backlash. So it's not necessarily just the layoffs.

Had the old board done the layoffs, like, it would have been like, oh, it would have been a lot quieter, right?

Yeah, nowhere near as loud. But they didn't.

Well, get this, right? Twitter laid off like 3,000 people. And it's, you know, like the world ended. Yeah, Facebook laid off 11,000 people and you don't hear any backlash, right? Like, it's like some, but it's definitely, you know, Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot and all this, but it's just nowhere near the level of vitriol that you're getting from Twitter right now. Yeah, um, and, and some of that's just because a lot of people do not like Elon, you know, politically. They don't like him for what he's done so far at SpaceX and Tesla. Um, you know, they don't like how outspoken he is, and he is very outspoken.

Sarcastic.

And he's sarcastic as hell. Yeah, that's great, right? Like, so, you know, he definitely could do more to win over some followers. So he's not, you know, he's not a, you know, like, empathy is not going to be his strong suit.

No, right?

Like, he would not do well at our company, uh, you know, just from that side of things. Um, but it definitely, it's exposed to, like, it's created this reaction, right? And so you're like, you're watching some of this and One of the things that, that was really enlightening to me yesterday, um, so last week he went through and he, he basically sent out this email to the entire company. He says, hey, you all know where we're going, we all know the struggles we're going through right now, and we all know that you, you either love what I'm doing or you hate what I'm doing. So here's your, here's your choice. If you have an intention, all right, and your intention is to stay at Twitter and push forward with all you can, right? Working with a high sense of urgency and working hard to achieve our dreams. And he's laid out the vision. He's told everybody what he wants the platform to become.

Yep.

Which is something we talk about all the time, right? Is that a leader has to build the team, set the vision, don't run out of cash, right? So he's definitely setting the vision. Then, you know, last week he sends out this email and says, look, you have until today at 5 PM All you have to do is, if you intend to remain at Twitter, click this button and fill out the form.

So just click a button, fill out a form, right?

A pretty low barrier to entry to essentially keep your job. Yeah, if you really want to be here, then you would click the button and fill out the form. Like, no, I'm in, I'm here and I'm doing it, right? We did something similar a year and a half ago, 2 years ago, where I basically gave everybody a 10% severance check and said, hey, if you want to be here, then just give me the check back, right? Like, hang on to it over the weekend, but if you want to be here, then on Monday bring the check back to me, right? Uh, kind of that same thing, like you had to turn down the money, like you had to opt in to staying at Twitter. And a lot of people didn't. A lot of people just refused, like, no, I'm not doing this.

Well, now, but he did tell them that if they didn't opt in, they would get 3 months severance.

And so like, he definitely— like, it wasn't like a year cutoff.

Exactly. Like, so I'm gonna take care of you for 3 months.

And 3-month severance is generous, right? Very generous, right? When you've got a company that's, you know, losing $10 million a day, right?

If you believe him, right?

So, so he does the 3-month severance if you choose not to. And, you know, a lot of people took him up on the deal. I mean, a lot of people are pissed. They're like, well, look, you know, Twitter may not be here tomorrow and all this. Like, really, guys, does it matter? Right? Like, you know, if it really is as important as Elon thinks it is, it's $44 billion important, then it'll be here. It'll be here tomorrow. Well, and he'll figure it out.

And there haven't been— the funny thing is, is there haven't been a lot of hiccups since all these people have been gone. A couple, but nothing.

They couldn't get back into the building, I guess.

Well, no, that was a joke. No, that was satire, 100%. That guy didn't even work for Twitter that posted that.

Oh man, you know, there's been so many of those polls too. Like, you see these guys posting on Twitter, you know, like, uh, Ligma Johnson. Yes, right.

There was a news Minister who actually 2 days ago talked about Ligma Johnson and how, how helpless they are now being let go from Twitter.

Well, they— and they got their jobs back, right?

Right, because Elon posted it.

Well, then— but it's been a total— and that's the thing, like, you can't tell what's real and fake anymore, right? Right. And, and— but they are totally trolling a lot of people because of that. Oh, it's, it's too easy because it's like almost too easy for them to get a rise out of people who don't like them.

Well, yeah, they're extra sensitive, right? I hate him, so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to make up a big deal. So let me ask a question. This is going to be totally hypothetical. Okay, so I go online, let's call it LinkedIn, right? Because we're a professional network.

Yep.

And I sit there and I, and I sit there and I type a post and say, Josh Turley is taking RTA in the wrong direction. He sucks as a leader. Um, he doesn't know what he's doing. And I post it.

It would be your last day at the company. Okay, so like, there's no question about it. And I'll tell you, like, the conversation I would have with you is the same conversation like we I just did this in staff meeting last week, right? It's like, I tell people all the time, look, if you're not aligned with our vision and you're not aligned with me and where we're going, that's totally okay, y'all. Like, I do not take this personally, and it's not offensive to me in the slightest, right? You don't agree with me, totally fine. You want to post that up on LinkedIn, whatever. But guess what? The minute you post it up on LinkedIn, you've made your declaration known, and now we know where you stand, and you're not standing with me. You're not standing with the company, which means you must be against us in the company. All you're going to do is bring friction and toxicity to the company. We ain't got time for that, right? Like, we're done, you're out. And it's, you know, like, I'll give you your generous severance package and away you go, but nope, we're done.

So I— obviously you're not smart if you do that, which goes against our core values.

But you've seen the people on Twitter that have done that left and right, left and right. It blows my mind.

Like, it's amazing to me that you're going to publicly sham your boss?

It doesn't blow my mind that they did it. That's not the part that bothers me.

Okay.

The part that blows my mind is that people defend that. People are defending them like, yeah, they should have a right to post their opinion about their boss online. You're like, you're right, but they don't have a right to stay employed there. That's very different. Like, I don't know how you can defend that they should have the ability to, you know, speak their voice in a public setting, you know. And I think the The old axiom of, you know, praise in public and criticize in private, that works both ways, right? Like, if you've got a public criticism against your boss, um, there's much better ways to handle that, right? Same way if I had a criticism of an employee, like, I would not put that on the— on Twitter and say like, oh man, you know, Jeff Jenkins is a terrible employee, you'd never want to hire him. Like, you're liable to get hit with slander and libel.

Well, it's a— it's a public temper tantrum is all it is, right?

Uh, so the fact that people defend that type of behavior is really what blows my mind. Um, if you don't want to work there, it's okay. Like, let's let— can we just finally agree to be— to disagree on things and move on and take ownership of our lives and let's go find something else?

Let's be adults, right?

Like, let's go do something. And that's the whole deal here is if you don't like where he's taking the company— and shoot, I, you know, I'll tell you, like, I would hate working for him. I wouldn't want to work for him. Then go find something else. Like, take ownership of your life instead of sitting there and trying to rip down somebody else's, right? And I, I think I worry about us sometimes, you know, and I don't know how much— Fleet, I don't see this very often, but you do see it, like, you know, going through the RFP process and, you know, like, you're publicly blasting people instead of just, let's try to work this out. And if you don't really want to be here, then I don't really want to keep you, you know? Like, what on earth? Why can't we just be civilized adults about the thing?

Who was it that said it? Mike Tyson was like, the problem with social media is a lot of you got way too tough because you haven't been hit in the mouth.

It sounds about right, right?

You know what I'm saying? But that's what it feels like. It's like everybody's a keyboard warrior, right? And you feel like you're protected and you can say whatever you want because you have this platform to do it. But guess what? Choices have consequences.

Well, there's a lot of people that say that, right? But like, I tell you, I won't— I don't say half of what I want to say.

Oh, I don't either.

On public forums because it's just, it's too dangerous.

Yeah. You know, I say a lot.

Yeah. I've got emails about you.

I know. And it's totally muted for what I want to say in a lot of cases.

Yeah. But you don't say it because, A, I know that I represent the company. Right. There's a lot of opinions that I have here. Right. You know, like I represent the entire company, not just me. And it's one of those things that it's like, you know, there's a lot of the keyboard warriors and I'm like, wow, how did you find yourself so liberated to be able to say that about something? You know, well, it's because they're not here. Well, that's just like— and to feel like you have no consequences for that, right? And it's like, there's always consequences, you know. And you see these people online just putting Elon on blast, you're like, oh, you totally thought there would be no consequences and then complained when the consequences happen.

Yeah.

I don't understand how mentally, as a society, we allowed this to create itself within our, our, uh, our country and our, our really as a society, as a world. You know, global society as a whole. How on earth did this behavior ever think— like, did we ever think this would be okay?

You know, it's funny, it's, it's only been a pivot like in the last 6 years to where people have been really, I think, that emboldened to have that attitude. Yeah, like, honestly, like, it hasn't had— it hasn't been around for a long time. I mean, Facebook was around way before all this division started happening. Yeah, so something changed to where people did get emboldened to just say, hey, screw it, I'm gonna say whatever I want, don't even care about the consequences.

Well, it could be the generational deal too, right? Like us as millennials coming in, you know, you talk about Facebook because Facebook was really designed by Gen X for Gen X, and then it got, you know, like really pushed with the millennial generation coming through college.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, like, the boomers got into Facebook and everybody was like, yeah, we're out, right? Uh, and then they went to Twitter, and then they went to TikTok, and they went to Insta for a while, Instagram. Um, but I really do think like that really shifted. There was something, maybe it was a like button or whatever. Social Dilemma is a great documentary on this whole deal as well.

I saw it.

Yeah, a terrific documentary on the, on the negative impacts that social media has had on society as a whole. But there's definitely been a shift, and I don't know if it's, you know, if it's political swings, you know, like you talk about the 2008 the election, there was a, you know, like, I felt a shift then. I felt a shift in 2012. You definitely saw the shift in '16.

Oh, big time, right?

Like, the, the amount—

that was probably the biggest pivot.

The vitriol that just like came out of that campaign, right, on both sides. And just the level of like, say whatever you want and get away with that kind of stuff. Like, I definitely think we've seen that, and we've seen like this just absolute abandonment of civility, and it's manifesting itself on, you know, in workplaces like Twitter now. So I think that says a, you know, a fleet in my mind has always run about 10 to 20 years behind tech. Yeah, right. It's some of that demographic, some of it's just technology-based, but like, what are we doing now to kind of prepare for this new upcoming generation and their expectations? And, you know, this world where they're seeing their buddies go off to Twitter and Facebook and get all these perks and tweets and, you know, like, whatever. What do we do as an industry to make sure we're prepared for that and to make sure that we can always have good civil debate and like an open discourse of ideas without it turning into, you know, you're an ass and I want you out of, out of my life, but I still want you to pay me.

Yeah.

How do we get into that and make sure that everybody's, you know, we just get along? It's really interesting. This has been a major case study too in just culture. And what it looks like when you have an outsider come in. And this is, you know, if you're, if you're talking about succession planning, this is a topic I didn't think we'd get into. How about that? One of the things that Jim Collins talks a lot about in like the great companies, the reason why they were able to sustain their greatness is that they typically didn't look for an outside savior CEO to come in and turn the company around. What you're seeing at Twitter is a reason, is like a manifestation of why that is. When you have somebody come in from the outside, what ends up happening is usually they have a total change in direction.

Yes.

And that creates a lot of gears grinding in the machine that is the company, because if that machine has to change direction, it's a lot of momentum, right? And people don't fit in with a new vision, and they don't like the new vision, and so you have a lot of turnover. Um, whereas companies that really sustained greatness were— because they were sustaining greatness, they were able to promote from within and, you know, like, there was a lot less gears jamming. Uh, Jack Welch at GE is probably one of my favorite examples. A lot of people don't realize that he grew up within the ranks of GE. You know, they always called him Neutron Jack because he, you know, he had his whole rank and yank philosophy, but he knew and breathed and lived GE. He knew that company from inside out. Southwest Airlines, every one of their CEOs worked for the founder, or at least worked around the founder, right? And they've been around Herb, and they've been around Gary Kelly, and like, they've been around the, the company for so long that they live, breathe, and die that company. And that's a huge reason for sustained success. So us as fleet managers, us as, you know, if we're public works, government, trucking, whatever, succession planning is a huge, huge part of continued success. As long as you're profitable, you know, or at least you're running under budget, because if you are doing like, you know, Twitter was doing, burning $10 million a day, change is gonna have to happen. The way you're doing it's not working.

Yeah, the, the guy I took over for when I went to run Fleetwood, he never worked in trucking before, but they made him the CEO, and he was there for 14 years, and he took an extremely profitable company to unprofitable because he didn't grow up in the environment, right? He didn't know those things, and he didn't— you know what I'm saying? Like, it's like the live and breathe. Like, if you're going to an industry that you know nothing about and you don't live and breathe that, it's going to be very hard.

Yeah.

To actually make a change for the better, right?

Because you don't know what changes to make. You don't know.

Exactly.

Right. And even if you know what changes to make, you know, like winning the hearts and the minds of the people, that's, you know, that's a big thing. And Elon's definitely not doing that for most, right?

You know, but, but I'm sure he's got the hearts and minds of some, the ones who stayed. Yeah, exactly.

And that's, and that's honestly the ones that you want. Um, and for him, because he owns it, that also makes it a little bit different than, you know, like a board coming in and appointing a CEO. Yeah, right. Because they have a lot less patience, right? And so you see CEOs like 2 or 3 years and they're gone. And why? Well, it's because, you know, they came in, they had a bunch of ideas, and then The ideas didn't pan out and they're on to something else. But for us in fleet, I think that's something that we should plan for, is if we are running a really good operation, you know, like, don't let your retirement, you know, force like a county board to go find somebody else to come in because they're gonna have a different way of doing things. Groom your replacement now, right, so that they can come in and keep the machine running. And, you know, they're gonna have their own vision and things they want to do a little bit differently. You see that at Disney, you see that at Southwest Airlines is even going through that a little bit. But at the same time, most of it's going to be because they were in that culture and they believe in what they're doing. You know, it's going to be in line with what's in the best interest of the fleet.

And if you take that time to groom, you get the benefits of that as you work towards the succession. That's the other thing, right? If you bring someone out from the cold, they don't know anything. But if I'm grooming someone to take my place, guess what? You get all the benefits of the hard work that they do.

And you're seeing that at Twitter right now, right? It's like Elon came in and he's like, well, wait a minute, what about this? What about that? He had to bring in engineers from SpaceX and Tesla to look at the code base for Twitter to try to figure out where the inefficiencies were because his own people were like sabotaging the effort.

It's crazy.

And that's like, that's where, you know, you've got a problem, right? It's like when, you know, the in-house engineers are actively fighting against the boss coming in, right? But you're going to have that when you have essentially what's, you know, what could be deemed a hostile takeover. Is, you know, it's not a smooth transition, right? You know, and you kind of owe it to your people to have a smooth transition. Yeah, that's fun. I hadn't planned on talking about succession planning, but it's in there. It's in there when you talk about it, you know, having a brand new CEO come in. It's always nice when the CEO has been somebody you've worked with before, aware, you know, been in the industry, been in the company, been in the meetings, you know, the room where it's happened. Like, why do we make that decision? Well, I've been in the meetings for 5 years, so I know all the context, right? Somebody coming in, you know, from the outside looking in like Elon at Twitter, they're not gonna have any of that context. And some of that might be good, some of it might be bad. You definitely don't want context at $10 million loss a day.

No, making waves.

All right, well, that's gonna wrap it up for us for all this episode. As always, you know, we've got the Fleet Success Summit coming up in March. If you want to find out more about that, we have all 12 speakers confirmed.

It's great.

We're going to be doing some podcast episodes with each of them. You heard us talk to Don last week. Great conversation. I love that conversation.

Yeah, I actually got 2 compliments today alone on that episode just about how insightful Don was.

And he's just an easy guy to talk to, too, which I really appreciate and loved. And not knowing much about him, prior. I came away from that conversation very impressed. So I'm excited to hear his full hour-long, you know, discussion about, you know, safety and culture. Yep. Um, so yeah, so that's going to be a speaker coming up. We've got a lot more coming out. Come check it out on fleetsuccesssummit.com. March 21st, 22nd at the Luxor Las Vegas. We'll see you there.

Peace.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you like the show, we'd appreciate 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us on social media at Fleet Success. See you next time.