Smoke to Fire: CFO Lessons on Not Letting Fear Win | Andrew Platt (CFO, Strategy & Finance)

Yeah.

If your CEO is not speaking to how AI will and will not be used in your organization, in every single newsletter, all hands, everything else, fear wins. If your C-suite is not messaging to their department leaders how AI is going to be adopted or not adopted, not rolled out, Everybody's got AI at this point, but like, how is it going to be used? Fear wins. If your department leaders are not sitting with their teams saying, how can I help you? Fear wins. And I think what you unfortunately see in a lot of organizations is those department leaders and even some of that C-suite sees AI as a threat because they're high smoke, low fire people. And until they could either be brought around or replaced, fear is going to keep winning.

Welcome to Vlad on Leadership, interviews with technical leaders and operators about the leadership questions AI makes more difficult. I'm your host, Vlad Moskovski. I coach senior technical leaders and founders who are excellent at the job that's keeping them stuck. Andrew, nice to see you. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Kalan. It's great to see you again.

Definitely. So you are sitting in the seat of a CFO.

Indeed.

And my question to you, the first question is that if you were sitting with a forward-thinking company and you were talking to their CFO, that's ready to strategically implement AI, what would you tell them to do first? And what would you tell them not to do?

Implementing AI at any level above the, hey, we're a startup with a team of 5, is enterprise transformation. And so you have to look at it From a full enterprise transformation lens. This is something that you need to have a project manager on. Ideally, you already have a PMO, you've got a stakeholder council, you're going to talk about what are the outputs that you want to achieve. So that, that's the first big one.

Mm-hmm.

The second thing I think that is absolutely critical is before you start anything, make sure your data's good because AI has tremendous analytical capabilities. You know, it, it, we've, I've been using it to look back over 3 years, 5 years of time data. So we're talking at, you know, 200,000 rows of time entry data points, and we're finding all these small little cuts to margin that we never had the ability to focus on or the analytical power to focus on anymore. But we're also finding how much of the data is snot. And that's your real challenge. You know, I'm a professional services CFO. What What I look at is the billable hour. And so if you, for example, have a couple of people who put their time in weekly in bulk where they put 40 hours for the week rather than 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, that's going to screw things up if you didn't have good data governance and master data management around Naming conventions for your projects and your people names. That's going to screw stuff up because if you went in as Andy P on 2 projects and Andrew Platt on 3 and Drew Platt on 4 others and ADP on 2 others, who's that person? You know, if the projects don't follow a naming convention, what was the work? And so you're gonna have to spend a lot of time getting your data where you need it to be. Now, if you do that, it's amazing, but you gotta get the data there.

So, good, clean data, good governance, and then it's all about enterprise transformation. Now, when you say the words enterprise transformation, that could be any number of things.

Most people break out in hives. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's a scary thing, right? Because, oh no, not another transformation. And then, you know, I used to work at Accenture where that was my bread and butter. was enterprise transformations. And every time someone says that, you go, what does that mean? And so what I'm wondering is, when you say those words, what's the mindset shift for people, CFOs, or anyone in the C-suite for actually doing that kind of enterprise transformation around AI?

You are going to— AI is fundamentally going to change the work that is being performed, that for many roles, the value right now is in the amount of, to, to use consulting language, is in the amount of smoke they generate, not in the amount of fire that is produced. And so, You may have Betty in accounting who is the best accounts payable person you've ever seen, and she can 10-key her heart out and every PO gets entered perfectly. And she chit-chats with all your vendors and everybody loves Betty. That role, that particular set of tasks is no longer necessary. Betty is still enormously necessary. Those relationships, the ability to spot like, hey, wait, we haven't gotten an invoice from Vlad yet this month and we need it. That's critical. But 80% of Betty's job is transforming to something else.

And then the question becomes, what does Betty do with—

What will Betty do? How do you take Betty's tribal knowledge, and I'll touch on tribal knowledge and moats in a second, and transfer it into something where Betty feels empowered, is part of the process, and sees the light on the other side? And what you don't want to do is like, if you go back to the stories, and this is what I'm afraid a lot of companies are going to do, of when the US deindustrialized and offshored and, you know, sent all the jobs south is it'd be like, hey, you're, you know, a plant worker in Akron, Ohio, and here is the individual, you know, here is Maria who's up from Ciudad Juárez, and you're going to teach her how to do your job for 3 months. And if you do that, you get severance. And then Maria and all the machines are moving down to Ciudad Juárez. You do that, like this all falls apart.

Mm-hmm.

But if you make it so that like, hey, we're bringing automation onto this line and you're not gonna have to ruin your back or stultify your brain by lifting things every day or keying things every day. And instead we're gonna use your skills 'cause we wanna see a 10% spend reduction and you have all the knowledge and now we're gonna give you the analytical power that you've never learned because You just, Excel was too much for you. Ooh, now you're buying it, but you have to sell the sizzle. Like you have to make it a positive.

It makes me think of this recent article that I read about IKEA. So IKEA automated about 80% of their customer support tasks to AI, and they had the opportunity to say bye-bye to those people. Let them go, but they didn't. Instead, they saw an opportunity to keep those people and retrain or uptrain them to be people who support their customers in doing some interior design. So customer support people became upgraded or upskilled into interior designers, and they saw a huge uptick in engagement, in sales, just all the numbers, all the numbers went up. And you see that a lot of companies chose to go the other route. And I think what it creates is more fear. It creates fear of, I'm going to lose my job, right?

Yeah. I heard an amazing quote at a conference earlier this year, and it was right after Block was like, oh, AI is going to eliminate 40% of work, so we're just going to cut 40% of our staff. And it was a very experienced CFO at a similar large tech company. And he said, you know, if AI is going to make my workers 40% more efficient and I cut 40% of them, I'm saying I have no revenue growth planned. And so my only option is to cut costs. He's like, we're bringing in AI. We expect our team to push That productivity into new revenue growth. We may not be hiring a lot more people, but everybody should be able to move the needle by 40% before we have to look at hiring again. And I thought that was a really great way to reframe the whole thing. It's not about how do you cut your way to success. Like you could look at Chainsaw Al back in the '90s, in the '80s and '90s, you could look at like The brilliance of financial engineering over the last 20 years. You can't cut your way to success. You have one quarter of amazing profitability because you have zero cost, and then it all falls apart. So like, how do you make your team better? How do you use it as a growth engine, not as a cost solution?

Hmm. I love that, especially because You know, there are huge opportunities to get unlocked with this technology.

Oh, enormous.

And I think that a lot of it now becomes about creativity in the business models, creativity around new problems to solve, creativity around understanding your customers better and deeper in ways that you didn't have time to do before.

And I think the internal lens as well. I mean, like, one of, you know, We cut our close time by 30% over the last quarter. And it was because my team went in and they were like, hey, this process is stupid and manual and repetitive. I can write some rules and ha— and push in the data and get out the results I need, you know, reconciliation tables, everything else so that we know that, we know that the process worked. But now I've taken a 4-hour task and cut it down to 20 minutes. Cool. Do that across a team, across 10 or 15 processes. You just pulled 4 days outta close.

Yeah.

Like, boom. And then you use that time to do, like, address these little 1% problems that you don't, you never have time for.

Well, cool.

If I can move the needle by 1 to 2% a quarter, That's real. And that's on top of what we're doing already, but that's real.

I love that. In a previous conversation, Andrew, you mentioned that AI can do 90% of 2 to 3 jobs that feed into your job. So, if you extrapolate that out further and further, let's say over the next 12, 18 months, Based on that trajectory, what do you think is the most important thing that remains for the humans? If 80% of Betty's job, if we use this fictitious person, gets eliminated, Betty needs to learn something or do something, and then what remains?

So there's 3 things that I have not seen AI do well. And the first is handle VUCA environments. VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Mm-hmm.

It is a very good rules-based tool. And, and it, you know, it is not, it is more than a stochastic parrot, as some people say. It is predictive. It does Think on some level, but you get into this, if you give it too much ambiguity, it doesn't know what to do. Depending on which LLM you're using, some of them are much more people pleasers than others. And so it will start giving you answers or solving problems in a way that makes it be like, good job, Fido. Good job. Yep. We love you. And that's not always helpful. And so you need that human piece of reasoning, that ability to say, there's a storm rising, the waters are choppy, like we, you know, the ship is a little bit leaky. What is our North Star? We are going to pursue this no matter— What the short-term piece is, because this is the criticality.

Hmm. Okay. So reasoning, reasoning within the volatile, uncertain, crazy times that we're living in.

Yeah. The second one kind of ties to that, and that's judgment calls. You know, be humans, again, going back to Betty, she's been processing vendor invoices for 20 years. She can make a judgment call in a way the AI without 20 years of data cannot, you know?

Mm-hmm.

And, and some of that is more simple judgment calls of like anti-fraud, you know, in this spy versus spy world, you know, the amount of really good looking invoices that seem real legitimate that come in. And I'm just using Betty as an example here. Like if you don't have human in the loop, the AI would be like, oh, well, this looks good. And so we processed it through and then you're like, where did that $50,000 go? But it's also the judgment calls that make relationships work. And again, speaking from the CFO seat, you want to have long-term relationships with your vendors. You want to have long-term relationships with your clients. We are in a trust-based society in professional services. It is all trust and relationship-based. Betty can say, hey, you know, Vlad always has a crappy Q1. And so just because of his business cycle. So like we make sure to push out his invoices a little bit early, maybe, you know, net 15, even though they're net 30 in Q1. Because we don't have a great Q4. And so sometimes we have to go to Vlad in Q4 and be like, look, we'll pay you half now. We'll pay you half in 2 weeks. And because we have this long relationship, you're like, that's cool. We've been working together 15 years. There's no questions or problems here. An AI can't do that.

Mm-hmm.

Like they could assign a credit score based on past activity, but it's not, it's not That human interaction piece of like, we want to do business together in the future.

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Which then to take this to a very high level gets into what humans do. Ethics. What are the ethics of business? You know, it's the, we could all name companies we've done business with that are a little bit light on the ethics scale. We could all name companies or people that we, you know, like, They got great ethics and, you know, they may sit oppositionally to me in this particular engagement or this particular situation, but I know that they're going to hold true to their values.

Mm-hmm.

And, and this can get into some ineffable discussions about the soul, which I don't think we need to get into here, but it is that like There's a lot of deep thinking going around on around ethics and AI, you know, and for those of us at our age, we grew up with Skynet. We know Terminator, like humans do ethics. I can't see an AI do ethics.

It makes me think of what's called the alignment problem in AI, right? Yeah. I'm sure you know about this as aligning AI systems new models to make sure that they support human flourishing and thriving, human wellbeing, rather than just pursuing their own needs or even pursuing the goals that we give them, which can go off the rails very easily.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it's, it's the Monuments Men is one of my favorite movies.

Monuments Men? I don't know it.

It, it's so during World War II, as you know, the Nazis stole a lot of stuff. The Allied powers established a group of, in the military, that was like art history professors and everything else, whose job it was To advise the various combatant commands and then go in once they went into Europe to retrieve and preserve the cultural history of Europe.

Hmm.

And not just see it as spoils of war, but to try and make sure that it gets back to their original owners and to say, hey, you can't really bomb the Cologne Cathedral. Like, that is a world treasure. It is not a military target. And that to me is a great example of ethics. Like, we are fighting a war to the death here, but we understand that culture and society have value, and we are going to invest in that.

Hmm.

And that's just an example of ethics in an extreme situation.

Right. Yeah. And right now we are kind of dealing in this extreme situation that the growth of AI, the speed at which these models are growing is so tremendous. And so I don't know if you're familiar with AI 2027. It's this website, it's this thesis that a bunch of people who are very deeply entrenched in the AI research lab world wrote. And it gives a scenario of what could happen. And at the end of the blog post, it says, and now we come to a critical decision point. And there are 2 buttons. One button says, continue at the speed that we are going. And the second says, slow down. and consider the ethics. And you can push each one of them and they give you a different ending to the story. And you kind of know where one of the buttons goes.

Yeah.

It goes to a Terminator-like future pretty quickly because AI and ethics and alignment and all of that stuff wasn't done well. And then the other, the slowdown button, actually, according to these authors, which is very, Debatable. It's completely fictitious essentially, but it ends in a much better scenario for humans.

Yeah. I like what they're saying. I think you need, they need to consider the economic pressures and realities. You know, we just minted the world's first trillionaire who's shown that he Both, you know, that, that his cho— his ethical choices are very different than mine and his focuses are very different than mine. And I, you know, I, I think it's more about, it's less about slowing down and it's more how do you ensure that within your own little patch it's done With ethics, because, you know, the, the, when you do those like interest maps and everything else, like all of the stakeholder interests that are funding this are all about go as fast as possible. And as one person or one group, you're just going to stand in front of a bus.

Oh yeah. I mean, this is, this is part of their point is that it's like, this is the way it's going unless We choose a different route. And of course it's a question of who is we and then who gets to choose and how do we influence the people who, the very, very small couple of hundred thousand people who are leading humanity into this. Yeah.

Anyway, I'm a big believer in Malthus, maybe, that in the end, the consumption side of AI, Good, bad, or indifferent. Power, water, chip production, capital costs will act as a much greater limiter than anything else out there. And I think that's once we get through this bubble, you know, analogies back to 1999 when You know, we're gonna do an internet. And it took 15 years between let's do an internet and the true flourishing of the cloud and the internet as a tool really happened.

Yeah, that's right. Let's change gears, Andrew, for a moment.

Yeah.

I'm curious about If people outsource too much to AI, we have a proliferation of AI slop right now. There's all these theories of the dead internet where it's just AI writing stuff that other AI consumes, bots everywhere. And then we are already starting to see this happening. Basically, it's people putting efficiency and doing more over quality and authenticity. What's actually getting lost when leaders are choosing to use AI too much? And how do they do it with the ethics, with the reasoning, with the judgment that you just talked about?

Well, I think you've got 2 things in there, and so I'm going to tease them apart. One is the creativity side.

Hmm.

Which, which again, to, to like, what can AI do and what AI cannot do? Part of what makes humans humans is our creative abilities. Everybody expresses themselves a little bit differently. It is a function of where you grew up, how you grew up, how you learned, what your parents, how your parents grew up, what they learned, all of, you know, the environment, everything else.

Mm-hmm.

And AI slop is turning the internet into what fast food dining turned going out to di— or quick casual turned going out to dinner. It, you know, I could, I can get the same Starbucks latte for about the same price in New York Mumbai, Hong Kong, Sydney, Cape Town. Still a crappy latte, but it serves some level of function, but it doesn't feed the soul. And I think that from what I've heard, you can see the— I'll just use LinkedIn as a great example because it is the, the, the slop capital of the world. You can see The amount, like the engagement that an AI post get, a written post gets versus somebody's authentic post. And AI has the same format where it's like this and then a bunch of punchy lines and then ends with an A or B. And then what I love is LinkedIn also allows you to then respond using AI. And so you get this like. regurgitation of this by somebody trying to sound knowledgeable. And any human looking at it says, well, that's all crap. And I, and I think that spreads into everything else. People crave authenticity. And so why are Starbucks sales in the drain? Why, why are most of these quick casual sales in the drain? Some of it's pricing. You know, that inflation has taken a major toll. But another piece of it is not all of us want to eat at Buffalo Wild Wings in every city we go to. We want to find the taqueria in Phoenix. We want to find the sushi place in San Francisco. We want to find the best bagel in New York City. And I think that's where the value of that, the value to the individual creator will be huge. If you want to shop on Temu, great. You get your cheap clothing that falls apart after 3 wears tomorrow, but you're seeing more and more people who are very into thrifting because you can find garments from the '70s and '80s where things were still built with quality that will last you quite some time and give you a little bit of a distinct style.

It makes me think about the people, and honestly, I've been guilty of this too, of writing an AI post on LinkedIn. And I noticed for me, when I am driven to create that kind of stuff using AI to take shortcuts and to make it fast, or even to make it seem enticing or give it a hook.

Yeah.

I noticed that I'm getting into the mindset of almost extractive type of thinking. You know, I want to extract something. I want to get something. There's this very graspy energy that comes with it. And when you were talking about the great taco place or the very special sushi place, or I remember watching this Netflix series, Yoshi Does Sushi or something like that.

Yeah.

And it's like the number one sushi place in all of Tokyo is in the subway. It's a 6-person place. There's literally 6 chairs and that's all you have space for. And it's this guy who's been making sushi for a ridiculous amount of time. I think he's in his 80s.

Yep.

He's been doing sushi for 60 years or something.

Yep.

You know? He goes, he wakes up, he goes to the market, he buys the fish as fresh as possible. He handcrafts each one of those, and people pay an exorbitant amount of money a year in advance to get one of those seats.

Yep.

And I bet you the thing that drives him is not how can I make this more efficient, or how can I squeeze the most out of it? It's mastery. It's mastery and it's craftsmanship. And it's the, it's the ability to excel at something to such a high level that the thing of itself takes on its own life.

100% agree. You know, like I spent 20 years in the event services industry and that is pure craft. There's artistry involved, but if you're good, it's the craft. It's how do you craft a show? How do you make it technically amazing? And the joy is in that output. It's not, we threw up some lights and whoopee. It's like, no, we transformed this. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's actually a really interesting time to be a creator or creative or even to be a leader in a business.

Yeah.

There's a calling to— yes, there's a huge opportunity for efficiency and automation, but maybe when that is done, what's left is what's your craft? What's your mastery? What do you want to spend time finessing and fine-tuning so that it's a masterpiece?

Absolutely. And to tie back to what I said at the beginning of this response, that's the bifurcation as a leader that just like a good EA knows how and when, like what emails get in front of you, what emails Don't, what decision, you know, like what meetings make it, what meetings don't. There is a lot of time that you spend as a senior leader that is, I won't say nonproductive because it is productive, but it's low. Like it's, it's not your greatest value add to the organization.

Hmm.

And that's where AI becomes an incredibly powerful tool. You know, like we all remember when Calendly came out a decade ago and it was like, woo, I don't need to send 14 emails back and forth to schedule a 20-minute meeting. This is amazing. And so you apply that same principle across a lot of what you do. That is administrative burden. And that's where AI takes that load off of you and allows you to focus on what you are there to do. Setting strategic direction, wrestling with those big challenges of like, do we choose A or B? You know, like relationships. If I can clear 3 And I'll, I'll use the Calendly exa— like the EA example. If I can clear 3 meetings where I am attendee by default off of my calendar so that I can spend 3 hours with my head of sales at a whiteboard, really chewing through a pricing strategy. How much more value does that have to the organization than sitting in this standing talent pipeline meeting, biweekly talent pipeline meeting? Like, you know, and, and so if you think about how AI could handle a lot of these things, it's an enormous left hand, left arm. Your right arm is still your skillset.

Yeah.

But it takes a lot of that administrative off the table and gives you more ability to do what you do best.

Hmm. Amazing. Yeah, I think I see a huge opportunity for the people who are early adopters, for the people who are really leveraging this to the maximum, to, to give them the time and the space, because space is such a You know, time is the most precious resource and if they can be given time back to use it wisely, to use it for the highest ROI.

Yep.

I mean, that could make a huge difference for any business.

Yeah. I mean, it's, and by using it to its maximum does not mean you're token maxing on Opus 4.8. Using it to its maximum means you are To, to speak to the sushi chef, like that you have the one perfect knife that you keep at the finest sharpness and it allows you to slice that perfect piece of tuna precisely.

Mm-hmm.

And so if AI gives me 15 minutes to go sit on my patio in the sunshine, and think about a decision, that is maxing. It's not, did I do 14 more analysis? That's not maxing. That's analysis paralysis.

That's right. And actually, this is a trap, I think, is you can fall into the trap of, I can do more, I can be more productive. But I think the opportunity is not just raw productivity of output. It's actually about thinking about the most important pieces of your work, putting on your strategic hat. That's what I'm hearing you say.

It's what I said at the beginning, smoke to fire.

Smoke to fire.

Smokeless fire is some of the hottest fire out there.

Hmm.

Okay.

I want an Andrew quote that that says smoke to fire, something, something. Give it to me.

You know, looking at every task, looking at every person in the organization, you need to look at their smoke to fire ratio. And if they're producing a lot more smoke than fire, you need to look very closely at, could I enable a brighter, hotter fire, or are they just a big smoker? I love it.

Okay, Andrew, as we project out, I know things are moving very quickly in the tech space. What's the best scenario? How can leaders shape that future? AI progresses 12, 18, 24 months out. I'm not going to take us 5 or 7 years because who knows what's going to happen in that timeframe, but how can leaders shape that future? What are the key decisions that they should be making or things they should be thinking about?

Are you doing it because it's flashy and it's cool, or are you doing it because you fundamentally want to change the calculus and the structure of your organization? I think, you know, Allbirds, we'll just call out Allbirds. Hey, we're a failing sneaker company. No, we're an AI company like that. So many things are, we are AI, we are this. No, you, you've, you've thrown a layer of shitty frosting over top of a really mediocre cupcake, and now you're trying to sell it like it's amazing and it's not. And I think if you look at it as we are going to Enter— do an enterprise transformation. This back to the beginning. And in 36 months, we expect the business to have 5% greater margins and 10% better time to market. These are, these would be huge improvements on any business over that time span. How are we going to take these tools and implement them in a way to do that that is lasting? And that is not, I'm going to use Lovable to build myself a new CRM that when, you know, that my CRM person quits, nobody understands it. It is, what are the incremental gains that we can produce? How do we roll this out? Team by team, department by department, area by area, what needs to happen beforehand and what, and this is the critical piece, and people get so excited about the journey that they don't think about the destination. I'm all down with road trips. Trust me, I love me a good road trip. It's all about the journey. But this is A destination. Enterprise transformation is a destination experience. What does this organization look like on the other side? Is it Betty gets laid off? Is it Betty is now our manager of vendor relations as opposed to our head of accounts payable? Like, what does that look like? Sit down with your senior leadership team, say, this is what we think it should look like. Bring in your mid-level team and say, this is what our vision is. Do you guys buy in?

Hmm.

Get them to buy in. What are the first wins? How do we socialize this across the organization so it is not a fear-based, hey, we're going to lay off 40% of the people because we don't need them. But it is the IKEA piece of like, hey, who wants to be an interior designer rather than a customer support? Like, how, where are the screws to my Bjorn wall? You know, like, how do you move that forward? What does the win look like? Where are we landing? Not you get an AI and you get an AI and you get an AI and everybody just throws spaghetti and let's see what works.

Yeah, I love this. You know, I've done a lot of enterprise transformations, and I would say the hardest part is not the tools. It's not in the adoption of the tools. It's the alignment of the people of, as you said, bringing everyone together is not an easy thing. Bringing everyone together and having them congeal around a unified future state, that's powerful.

It's incredibly powerful. It's incredibly hard to do. And if, if you're doing it from, we have big fear-based sticks, it's not gonna work.

Mm-hmm.

And if you're doing it from a, hey, this is going to make us so much better and everybody gets to win, that's a much better place. Now, there will always be people who disagree with that vision. And you as an organization need to be prepared to deal with that because one bad apple ruins the barrel.

Sure. Yeah. You know, I'm glad that you mentioned fear-based because I think right now there's a lot of fear. Oh yeah. There's a lot of fear. And we all know what it's like when fear takes the driving seat and holds onto the steering wheel and pushes the pedals. It goes into bad places.

Very bad places.

And I think organizations right now, especially, especially right now, because of the pace of change, they need to be really aware and attentive and actively managing the fear that is being spread by media, the fear that is being spread by maybe even governments. Yeah.

If your CEO is not speaking to how AI will and will not be used in your organization, in every single newsletter, all hands, everything else, fear wins. If your C-suite is not messaging to their department leaders at every single meeting, How AI is going to be adopted or not adopted, not rolled out. Everybody's got AI at this point, but like, how is it going to be used? Fear wins. If your department leaders are not sitting with their teams saying, how can I help you? Fear wins. And I think what you unfortunately see in a lot of organizations is those department leaders and even some of that C-suite sees AI as a threat because they're high smoke, low fire people. And until they could either be brought around or replaced, and CFO, you have to be brutal about this, replaced, fear's going to keep winning because the fear goes all the way up and it's like, no, Your value is that you're a human and you have experience. Your value is not that you produce the most perfect TPS reports with 27 crosstabs on a Friday, every Friday. That's, that's not the value anymore. But there's a lot of people in roles where that is the value they bring to the organization, or that's the perceived value, and you have to change that.

I think this is my biggest takeaway from our conversation, Andrew, is that As a leader in an organization right now, you have to actively engage in not letting fear dominate the conversation.

There is an entirely different, and I would love to have it, podcast that we can do on leadership. But I think you just called out the big difference between leaders and managers.

Yes. Yes. And the people that I coach, this is probably the biggest thing that I help people actively do is transition from mindset of I need to manage people to leading towards what end. Right. And it's partially a creativity exercise of what's the future that you envision, then how do you invite people into that?

Exactly. How do you invite people? How do you invite people into your vision and inspire them to stay as part of your vision? That's leadership. Being a manager is, hey, this is your job. Do it better. How can I help?

All right. Mic drop.

There we go.

Thanks, Andrew. This is a great conversation. I really appreciate your thought and your, I mean, your directness.