Toni Louw On Business Communication

Welcome to Peer Innovation, the podcast with Leo Bottari and me, Randy Cantrell. Building on our previous shows, The Year of the Peer and What Anyone Can Do, we turn our attention to helping business leaders build high-performing teams. We'll talk with a diverse group of thought leaders who will share stories and insights that will help you and your teams achieve new heights. If you believe there is strength in numbers and that meeting the challenges of the future can only be achieved if we do it together, then join us for the conversation. Our guest today is Tony Lowe. Tony is the founder and CEO of Lowe's Management, a business training, coaching, and consultancy service and executive coaching company. Born in Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia, now known as Zambia, he immigrated to South Africa and today is an American citizen. His favorite quote is from Robert Zinn: "The one thing we all have in common is that we are different." We welcome Tony to the show.

Tony Lo, welcome to the show. So great to have you here. I know we've been trying to put this together for a little while, and it's just, uh, great that we were able to sit down today.

Well, you know what, Leo, it's been way too long for you and I to hook up again. How many years has it been?

Actually, almost 30. I was just thinking about that. Yeah. So I want to say this is back when I was heading up the public relations subsidiary for, uh, the William Cook Agency, and they had had you come in to help us with presentation training at the time of business communication. And it was probably, you know, like I said, 1992, 1993, maybe so 28, 29 years ago at a time where we— I don't think we had two gray hairs between us, you know, and now here things have changed just a little bit. But I will tell you that, as you know, because we've stayed in contact over the years and Obviously, I've had a lot of people that I've worked with in those kind of situations, and there was always something that really struck me about the way you just handled communication and the fact that you would teach people how to communicate. And with that would come hand gestures and voice modulation and all these other kinds of things that people are often taught to do Or as you know, they're taught all those little tricks that really have nothing to do with communicating, like basically pretending that the audience isn't there when in fact, you know, so, and I remember specifically you working with one of our team members who I thought did a pretty good job the day before. And next thing you know, you gave him all kinds of things to work on. He was a little bit like, okay. Reluctant to do it because if you recall, he was one of these guys that was very, you know, he's just, his delivery was solid, he was real low-key and all that. And you wanted more energy from him. And he said, well, that's not me, I don't do that. And he said, really? He said, when your team like wins the Super Bowl or something, do you just go like this and just pretend like it's just like this, a matter-of-fact kind of thing? I'm pretty sure you're leaping out of your chair. It's in there somewhere. And you got him to bring that energy in improve his delivery to such a degree, I thought to myself, all right, anybody can come in here and take someone who basically sucks at this and make them better. But when you can take someone who does a good job and really raise their game, that was for me the thing where I said, all right, I want to make sure that I stay connected to this guy. And as you know, when I had my own firm later, we brought you in and you worked with our team as well and have gotten you involved in other things over the years. And just love what you do, the way you approach it, and, you know, I'd love for you to share some of that around business communication, um, in terms of what's top of mind with you, and then we'll, you know, kind of chat a little bit about what that looks like.

Well, I'd love to do that, Leo. I want to remind you that when we first met, uh, you were working with somebody by the name of Lou DeGusta.

Absolutely.

Okay, well, you know that Lou joined my firm. I'm not sure exactly how long after you and I met at William Cook, but he's now been with us for about, I would say, 25 years and is in fact my senior partner.

And, and, you know, it was funny because you would talk to me about Lou before he joined and asked what I thought. And I thought to myself, you know what, I think he'd be really good. And, and who knew that it would turn out the way it has? I mean, but I know that, um, and I also remember, by the way, because I was chatting with him in the, in the early days of that, that the, uh, I will put, I'll put it that the training program that he was put through in order to get him to a place where you had him working with clients was pretty rigorous and, and pretty involved. And which is great and speaks to the quality that you expect, not only of yourself, but for anyone else who's going to represent that Lowe's management name out there.

So the length of time actually is 18 months. Yeah, people actually go, you know, folks have come to me over the years after they've attended a program, or I've been doing some business consulting with them on major global stuff. And they'll say, I would love to do what you do. And I say, I would love to have you. And they said, well, what's involved with it? Thinking maybe it's a couple of weeks onboarding and off we go. And I said, well, it's going to be about 6 to 8 hours a day for about 18 months. And I don't pay you. I will just donate all of that training to you. And if you make it through that internship, then we'll start you off. I just get these deer-in-the-headlight looks. People say, well, wait a minute, you know, I make $1 million a year. I'm pretty good at what I do. I've got to go through 18 months. I said, yep. So, you know, that has unfortunately limited the size of the growth of the business, but on the good side, it's always maintained the quality, which is something we've always been embarrassed about.

You know, you shared a story with me actually of when you were even younger than when we met. I think you were probably in your late teens or early 20s. And you told me you had delivered a speech in South Africa. Africa. And you came off and you said you were really nervous and you were sweaty and you had the palms and all that kind of stuff and that nervousness that you feel, which no one can imagine now that you would ever have felt that way ever. But like all of us, we go through that and we have to learn. But I remember you explaining to me that when you came down off the stage, someone said to you, "Hey, nice speech." 'Just don't be so selfish next time.' I'll never forget that story because I thought to myself, I knew exactly what you were talking about, because our focus so often can be on our own performance and we get in our own head and our own everything about it instead of caring about communicating to the people who really matter and why they're there. And the moment you start caring about them more than yourself, it takes, you know, a lot of the pressure off. And, you know, so From a business communication standpoint, because this is what I want to— obviously we want to talk with you about today because there's no one better to have this conversation. When we think about leadership, when we think about teams, we think it's all communication is central to all of it, right? So I'd love to get a sense of what you're seeing out there with regard to communication, what you like to work with people on, and what you think would be valuable for our audience here as well.

There's sort of a catch list that that I've always maintained in the back of my head, and my folks do the same thing. But it always starts with one word: reception. And what I mean by that is, think, you know, you think of yourself as a physician operating on somebody, and you put out your hand and you say, scalpel. It's very much Now the purpose of that nurse, or whoever's passing the scalpel, to absolutely make sure that that doctor, while he's holding off, you know, the blood from escaping from the patient, make sure that that scalpel rests in the hand so that the doctor really doesn't have to pay attention. Just close his hand, take the scalpel, and do what, what he or she needs to do. And it's the same thing with communication. I see so many programs are about how you look, how you appear, what you say, how you say it. And the one thing they never focus in on is, does the speaker make absolutely sure that the audience got the message they intended? As their single purpose as a speaker, as a meeting moderator, or whatever the case might be. And that has changed people's livelihoods in terms of their effectiveness when it comes to running a meeting or giving a presentation or having a business. Even in these remote environments, just checking in on people, you know, was I clear? Did you get the point before I move on to the next point? And that has been really something that passes on to emails as well. How many times do you hear, oh, I never got the email? Every email that I suggest we ever send out had a read receipt on it. Not everybody will respond, but it gives the opportunity for the other party to say, yep, got it. So you as the originator of the communication know there's been reception. And until there's reception, you were just, you know, lip flapping. So that has been a huge central core to everything we've ever done.

It's interesting because as the leader, you first have to adopt the mindset that I own that. In other words, you can't just say, oh, it was in the email. If you didn't get it, that's not on me. I remember, well, you don't remember the story that I've said this to my listeners many times, so I'm gonna repeat my junior high school tragedy with the passing the baton. But the other story was being with my daughter in the National Gallery of Art. And there was a painting there talking about this general who was relieved of his command because he gave an order to some soldiers. It was misinterpreted by the soldiers. That wasn't the order he gave, but because it was misinterpreted, because he didn't make sure that they understood the message as intended, it ended up getting a lot of people killed. And he was relieved of his command as a result of that. And it was the absolute recognition that that's on the leader. To make sure that you own the delivery of that message. And I think all too often leaders don't want to own that. People don't want to own that. They think like, well, they didn't get it, it's not my fault. And I don't think that's the way that goes.

But actually, you know, I started when I, when I finished school, I ended up in the South African military and I did a brief stint as a communications operator called a bunter. And what a bunter does is he sends messages by light. So it's, in the old days, used to have, did it, did it, did it, did it, no longer, but you did that either electronically with sound or you did that with light. And a bunter's job was to do it with light. And we had a very specific way of communicating. So we would send a message by light move the flotilla to port. They would then respond and acknowledge that receipt by repeating exactly what it is I sent to them, and then I would send back roger. So there were 3 components to every communication, because if you didn't get that right and everybody was going in a different direction, you would end up with with no fleet, they'd be running into each other. And I think that basic training that I got in the military helped me understand that whoever originates the communication, like you just said, owns the fact that they need to make sure the recipient gets it. I mean, you don't make it into the major leagues if as a second baseman, you throw the ball to first base, and you never throw it in such a way that the first base can get it, chances are you'd be canned off that team. So, I mean, it goes to anything where there's a professional relationship of communication. And frankly, second base throwing a ball to first base is a form of communication to begin with. You know, there's something going through from one person to another. So that has always been a, you know, sort of a mainstay to everything that we've I try to instill in any of the leaders that we've been coaching over the years.

So in addition to leaders and the importance of owning that communication and accepting responsibility for the message delivered as intended, what are some of the other common issues that you see out there that are important to talk about today?

Probably second on the list would be the style of communication. And it's not exactly what you might think I mean by style. It's not how you look, you know, how you raise your hand and how you, you know, comport yourself. It's really— and I learned this because my first job when I finished school was to be a— work in the publishing business. As a sales rep and straight commissioned. So if you didn't make a sale, you didn't take money home. And at the time, I had a wife and a child. I needed to put money— I bring money to put food on the table. So I had a wonderful coach. He was, um, he'd been a rugby player like myself for many years, so he had this very clear way of communicating. And he said, look, really think about communication as 3 things. There are folks out there that like a very direct style. In other words, get to the point and then back it up. Um, there are people who like more of a building approach, like a problem-solution approach. Tell me what problem you're here to resolve. 'Let me understand your analysis of it and then give me your solution.' And then the more comprehensive style, which is more about, 'Let me understand that there is a problem and how it arrived to be a problem or an issue or an opportunity, as the case might be. Then share your analysis and then give me what your solutions or recommendations are.' And if you think about publishing, those are the three basic styles of every publishing. The direct style is what you read every newspaper like. The problem solution is probably every mystery novel that you've ever read. And then if you think of biographies and the History Channel, they've got that more comprehensive style. And there are audiences that have preferences one over the other. And here's a little key that I learned very quickly. As you go up the ladder, to inseniority. So you go from comprehensive to, which is the, you know, the foot soldiers, if you will, the people that do the majority of the work, to your middle management, which is all about solve the problems and come up with great solutions and make sure that you've covered the, you know, crossed the T's and dotted the I's. And then you get senior management that says, what the hell are you going to do about this? And tell me You've got this little hierarchy happening, but many times you've got middle management presenting to senior in a middle management style, which is that problem solution. And you know, the manager's gone, it's just, please, I've got 2 more minutes, get to the point. So understanding first who the audience is in terms of their preference is sort of Before you even get to a meeting or pick up a phone or write an email, figure that out and then adapt to that style because we all have our own preferences. My wife loves thick books. I can't stand them. If I read a mystery novel, I always go to the last chapter. You've done it. And then I read the book and she thinks I'm an idiot for doing it. I just, I don't like being kept in suspense, put it that way.

Yeah.

And is that impatience on my side? Maybe it is, but it's about preference. But in general, the more senior the audience, the more you don't have to sit there educating them or trying to make sure that you've covered everything possible. You know, tell them what, why you're there, What outcome can they expect from you? Make sure that the recommendation is slammed right up front unless it's highly controversial. And then tell them why you think this is right and give a couple of pros and cons to it. I learned that also from the legal community. One of the ways great lawyers operate is nothing's perfect. With every solution, there is a potential plus and there's a potential minus. As long as the pluses outweigh the minus, 'Let's try it.' And I think that's what managers prefer in terms of their style.

I think for the top management though, I remember you communicating this, and I've used this quite a bit because I think it has been really effective for some of the senior-level audiences that I've addressed, and that is that legal construct. Make your strong opening argument, provide the evidence, and then deliver that strong close, right? That brings it all, brings it all home. And that's a pretty tried and true And again, you know, that was almost 30 years ago you shared with me, and I've used it countless times, and it is a really powerful construct and keeps things for everyone. You know, as we know, we talk about what Chip and Dan Heath have, that book where they talk about the curse of knowledge, the idea of trying to explain something that you know so well to someone who has no idea, and to be able to really do that and with clarity is a real challenge, no question about it.

You know, it's kind of interesting. I wish I'd come up with that, that construct, but I learned that construct, uh, with the help of my clients. I actually started asking my clients over the years, and this goes back as long as we've known each other, what style do you like? What format do you like? Um, do you like getting to the point? Do you like it more comprehensive? Do you like a lot of that? You know, what do you like? And more importantly, who delivers that well for you? And the number one answer that I constantly got back from these folks— these, uh, the clients are most of the advertising community, for example, as one community that I've worked with— and they said, well, we love our business consultants. And I said, well, what is it that they do? They said, well, they always tell me exactly what I can expect and what that— recommend that they'll start off by saying, look, you're going to need $1.4 million to fund this Project X. Now let me tell you how we can raise that. They don't say, hey, there are some pro— there's a Project X that we need to fund, go through all the rigmarole, and at the end say, and by the way, that'll cost you $1.4 million because that It doesn't look like there's transparency with that kind of conversation. And so I said, okay, well, let me do some investigation on this. And at the time, I had been working with Booz Allen, which is a consulting firm, Anderson Consulting, which, you know, has changed since then. And I went to them and I said, what is it that you do? Where did you get your learnings from? And I discovered something fascinating. The majority of these folks had graduated with a joint degree, not only business but law. And now those are joint degrees that you can find in any university. And that was their training. The legal system had become their training of communication. So I thought, ah, okay, so what's the legal system look like? And it was from that we actually developed a more direct style more about prove your point rather than trying to explain your point, which really does change the mentality because you dump out the wasted information. If it doesn't prove it, then why talk about it? Stick it in the appendix.

See, all of this just brings back all these lessons that I've been sharing with people that have come directly from you. One of them was illustrate, don't explain, which I think is really powerful. But the other one that I actually tried several times to your point, and it really worked really because you know a lot of ad agencies, PR firms, what they do is they present, they get you all invested in this creative work and all this stuff and everything, and you're all in until you find out it costs like 10 times more than you plan to spend. And they're like, and the whole thing is blown and it becomes just a disaster. And now what do you do? Say, oh no, we can do it for a tenth of the price? Well, of course not. Then it's like, why did you come to me with the big number? And it just gets silly and you lose all credibility. So I remember on several occasions trying, and as a real differentiator, I put the budget right up there ahead of time. Here's what, based on what you said you wanted to do, here's what the investment looks like. Now we wanna show you how we arrived at that, what that looks like, and how it's gonna help you get to where you wanna go. So at least now, to your point, it's not only transparent, but you haven't disappointed them by the end. Like if they really love the work and they know what the price tag is in advance, you have a much better shot of having them see where that came from, as opposed to just presenting the work and getting them all excited about it. And then you throw the— and you know how people present budgets at the end. It's all very sheepishly, like they throw the number up, they leave the slide up for like a second, and then they drop it. Yeah, exactly.

You know who's really good at that, Leo? In the real estate business, I have met some really bad real estate agents, but there are some that I really admire tremendously. And they have this knack of saying, so what is your budget? And you say, okay, half a million dollars. Terrific. So what they do is they show you a house for $450,000. They show you a house for $550,000, $600,000 because there's negotiating room there. And then they show you a house for $700,000. So they give you the options, and inevitably you always seem to be coming back to that $700,000 because, oh my God, if it's just only $100,000 more, look how much more you get. And they have this ability to do that. The bad ones start with the $700,000. Yeah, you know, the good ones start with the middle one and say, by the way, I've got one above it and one below it. Interested? Well, heck, why not? Because you already got what you wanted. And that is another thing that I've learned over the years, sort of a catch-all phrase, an axiom you can live by: give the client what they want first, then show them the potentials of what they could have that you might believe they need. But, you know, always start with giving the person what they want.

Totally.

Maintain their attention on what it is you're talking about. And more than anything, to me, that's a courtesy. If you say—

And I think, yeah, and those realtors you talk about, by the way, they all know that there's more budget there than what people are admitting to at the start.

Well, of course it's more than that.

Who walks in and says, I have a budget of $500, period. And that's it. There's not a dime more. You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah.

Some real masters at that in the business community. And then suddenly a million dollars is found from somewhere because they see that the potential return is exponentially more than the one they asked for initially.

So I want to get to one other topic really quick that I think speaks to dynamics in organizations, because as the leader, I can be really clear about what I'm communicating. That doesn't always mean that employees aren't left to their own devices to engage one another in sense-making exercises to decide what it is you said, what does that mean for them now, right? So there's a whole other layer of, you know, I get it. Now I'm going to talk— now we're going to engage one another and what this really means and what this looks like. And how does one kind of recognize that as much as our organizations have this vertical construct, right, you've got VPs and directors and managers and all that, but you also have these incredible influencers that run horizontally through your organization, right, that give that vertical structure strength, but also recognizing that some of the most influential people don't have the fanciest titles. And so, so here I am, the leader, I've got this message to communicate. I need, because maybe it's some kind of strategic initiative, and we know most of these things fall short. Why? Not that it was a bad idea, but because we can't get everybody behind it to the level we need them in order to execute it successfully. So are there any thoughts you have around what leaders can do to help in these sense-making exercises, if you will, to recognize kind of the dynamics both vertical and horizontal through the organization?

I do actually. Let me give it to you by example because I had the opportunity to work with some really powerful people over the years. Lee Iacocca, Leo Kyley, who ran Coors and ran Frito-Lay before that. And one of the things that I noticed is I actually had that question for many years until I saw the masters of how they did it, and then it made total sense to me. A circle of influence. The, the most common way of doing it is you have a board, and the board gets together, makes all the decisions based on some feedback, and then filters it throughout the organization. What these folks would do is that circle, or that board of influence, was expanded out much beyond the classic board member. Who are the most influential people within my organization? I consider those people part of my circle of influence or my board. And they would be in constant contact weekly, sometimes daily, with those individuals to ensure they were actually on the same page as the initial directive, if you will, that was given to them by the CEO, the CFO, the board, or whoever. And that, to me, it's like the senior management walking the halls and going to visit and keeping close that influence group has been, to me, the most powerful and most effective way to ensure that the message is actually drove them down through the organization as originally intended. Because if it isn't being intended as intended, you know those influences have the ability to influence that it go a different direction.

Now, that's great. That's so helpful and so true. And, you know, one other thought that I wanted to bring to you, because oftentimes when we are presenting to a larger audience, we look at them as, quote, the audience, like it's this singular, you know, and yet we have maybe hundreds of people who are— who knows what happened in their day and what's going on and whether they're hungry or whether— whatever, right? It was going through everyone's mind. Um, as someone who's a business communicator talking to these audience members, How do you consider the fact that everyone in that audience is really listening through very different ears with a very different mindset with very different things going on in the background? What does that feel like for the presenter? And is there— does it make the burden that much or make the bar that much higher for us in terms of what we've got to bring in terms of our energy and our enthusiasm and how compelling we need to be in order to capture all of the various states of mind that are out there?

Yes. Um, there are actually a couple of answers to it. Now I'll be brief on each of them. The first is never to consider that the audience is a whole. In other words, it's a glob of people, but to you, in other words, you embrace the entire audience by treating everyone as an individual. So one of the quickest ways to engage an audience is to ask the question before you walk in, what is common on everybody's minds in that room at that time? And you might end up with one item, or you might end up with three items, or you might end up with four items. That is how I would recommend you open the meeting. We know today that we're here to table 4 issues: A, B, C, D. And you're hoping you've done your homework and you know that at least A, B, C, D has hit a minimum of 50+ interest in the audience. So you, you're gaining the majority by demonstrating that you understand the majority. And you're so right, because you might have a field force in there, you might have senior management in there, you might have production in there, you might have IT in there, and you really do have to very quickly tell them, listen up, because what I'm about to talk about is relevant to why you exist in the business. Yep. That's the first thing that I would always recommend, versus come up with, you know, a cute joke to open the presentation, then have a singular subject. You know, we're in a very different world today. The second thing that I would do is engage. I'm going to say it 3 times: engage, engage, engage. By bringing up specific items that people can relate to, separate your presentation or your speech into, you know, chunks of data. So if it's an hour time period, think of it as 4 quarters. Go through the first quarter addressing possibly one of those major issues, and then pause for a second and get some feedback before you go to the second quarter. Because if you wait, you know, this whole thing about let me speak for an hour, right? Well, you might have gotten a quarter of the audience really interested because it was relevant to them, but what about the other 3 quarters of the people? The assumption now is they'll wait long enough for you to get to what they are wanting to talk about. No, they're gone. And doing what we're doing in Zoom, boy, are they gone. They've got up and put a screensaver on and they're out. They're feeding the dog. They're having lunch. So that would be the second thing. And I think the third thing is, I sort of summarize it as RID, R-I-D, like get rid of something, right? The R stands for redundancy, the I stands for irrelevance, and the D stands for data dump. In other words, assume, and this is a very odd thing to consider, but assume that the audience already knows pretty much everything you're going to say versus I'm going to cover everything just to make sure, which most audiences, the feedback we have gotten over the last 4 decades is that's incredibly condescending. So instead, you always ask this question, what could I include that the audience would find surprising? Interesting, educational, or say to themselves, heck, I didn't know that. Um, actually, in a recent example, I'm working— I can't say who the name is, but I'm working with a very large card manufacturer who has a very large client in that the client happens to be Walmart. There are more than one card manufacturer at Walmart, just so you know, right? And they were having trouble with this particular client paying attention to them while they were presenting their concepts and their ideas and their credit books. So I said— the person I was working with was dealing specifically with the Hispanic segment. And I said, what percentage of Hispanics shop at Walmart? And she said, oh, she didn't really know. So I said, well, hang on a second. That night I actually went and Googled it. It's 25% of Walmart shoppers are Hispanic. And if you add that up, it's in the billions of dollars. So I said, why don't you start off with your Hispanic concepts by saying, look, the reason we're here today is to talk about— and I'm making up this number, okay, because it's kind of right— um, there's $7 billion on the table that we have access to through the Hispanic market. Because 25% of your people shop there. You probably know that number. However, if we could get 1% of 10% of everything there, that adds up to— and she had a wonderful number. She said, we have never seen our audience sit forward as quickly in the meeting. And by the way, their meetings are walking down halls at Walmart. So, it just changed the perspective because they used something that Walmart would find interesting. Another one was that— Leo, I can ask you. If you take millennials, Gen Xs, or baby boomers, who is the most— which of those three groups smokes the most currently?

Well, probably millennials.

Why would you say that?

Um, because just because of observation, just I've seen it. It's almost like this, all of the stuff with the tobacco companies and all that stuff is kind of, you know, frittered away a little bit, and you start seeing more and more younger people smoking.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting. That was absolutely true 5 years ago.

Okay.

And today Baby boomers.

Wow, back to back smoking.

That's not regular cigarettes, the other stuff.

Ah, okay, there we go.

You know, bringing something like that up, just something that is unusual. And so one of the things that I've discovered, especially when you're trying to— as a leader, you have to bring ideas, you have to do your research. You have to look at what can I find out that not everybody necessarily knows? Because frankly, that's what the definition of lead means. It means I'm taking you to a place. Well, if you don't have an information source that says where I'm taking you to, that's an attractive location, why would I want to follow you? And so the beauty of these brilliant leaders I've worked with over the years is that They very often even have a couple of people and all they do is research. All they do is, you know, check the newspaper out every morning, go online, check Google out, find new things. What's happening with the economy? What's happening to our society? What's happening in Europe? How is Europe affecting us? How are we affecting Europe? What's happening with the euro? What's happening with this new cryptocurrency that's happening? Just, just getting data together and then looking at how that might have an application to the purpose that I have as the leader within this organization. All of that kind of thing gives people the idea of saying, they know something that I didn't know, maybe they've got something I should listen to. But if all you're doing is repeating what people already know in a meeting or a presentation, Frankly, you're redundant.

Yeah, what I love about that, and I think that's just great guidance for everyone. If you're trying to make a presentation anywhere, look for the places in that presentation where you're going to perk people up like that and make them lean in. I did a thing, you know, kind of forever ago, even before we met, by the way, where my portion of the presentation, I had spent all kinds of time, it was a pitch to a major eyewear manufacturer. And so what did I do? This is where I learned, by the way, that I could call all the buyers from like LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, whatever, they'll They'll talk to me. And the way I would joke about it was like, their spouses don't want to hear about their work and what they do. So they just want to be the expert to someone. They'll talk to anyone who's willing to listen. And it was really great. And I get this incredible feedback from these people about what they're looking for at retail and what that looks like. So you can only imagine when my part of the presentation came up and I said, let's tell you what all of the customers, all the people that you really care about, think about all this stuff. Boom, everybody's leaning forward. They're all about every quote and every word and everything that happened there and makes a huge difference. You know, so, hey, with that, though, time has flown by. But I really want, if we could, if you could give, you know, our audience where they can find out more about you, Lowe's management, how they can work with you and all that. I just want to make sure that we leave that. And we'll also provide links in the show notes and everything for everyone as well, so that they can also have the privileges I have of getting to work with you?

You're way too kind, Leo. To get a hold of us, it's real simple. We have a website, it's LouwsTraining.com, and it's L-O-U-W-S, it's South African spelling, and then the word training dot com. People can always call directly, our number is 520-664-1881. And, um, they can always contact you, Leo. You know my number.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah, but this has been great. Thank you very much for the invitation, Leo. It's been a long time coming. And I, by the way, I follow you now avidly. I listen to, uh, I read a lot of what you write. I've read your books and, um, I am delighted that the clarity that you bring to a leadership community is something that is really good to see because there's so much confusion out there. There's so much opinion that it becomes, it becomes mushy. And you have a wonderful way of being very clear with your point, which is very nice to see. It's terrific.

Well, I had a good teacher. So, hey, hey, thanks very much. And, you know, again, for all your listeners out there, you know, Lowestraining.com, it will be in the show notes and highly encourage you to really look into Tony's work. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Thank you for joining us. To subscribe to the podcast and learn more about how you can engage peer innovation for your organization, contact us on the website at peerinnovation.co. Until next week, remember, the power of we begins with you.