I don't like mingling. I hate mingling. I hate the pressure of it. But I love interviewing. I love interviewing people. I love asking questions and shutting up. So if I have to go to a couple of parties or meet and greets and I have to do a fair bit of that in my job, I just deliberately change my view of it from mingling, which I hate, to interviewing, and I'll just pick. If there's twenty people there, I'll pick three of them. I'll pick them out almost before I go in. I'll pick them out, and I'll deliberately interview them. Take twenty minutes to talk to that person, twenty minutes talk to that person, twenty minutes to talk to that person, and then leave. And so I've sort of used a strength to mitigate a weakness.

I don't like mingling. I hate mingling. I hate the pressure of it. But I love interviewing. I love interviewing people. I love asking questions and shutting up. So if I have to go to a couple of parties or meet and greets and I have to do a fair bit of that in my job, I just deliberately change my view of it from mingling, which I hate, to interviewing, and I'll just pick. If there's twenty people there, I'll pick three of them. I'll pick them out almost before I go in. I'll pick them out, and I'll deliberately interview them. Take twenty minutes to talk to that person, twenty minutes talk to that person, twenty minutes to talk to that person, and then leave. And so I've sort of used a strength to mitigate a weakness.

Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by leading innovators to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of Innovation Consultancy Inventing, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work date. My guest today is Marcus Buckingham Marcus is the author of a stack of best selling books, including First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, The One Thing You Need to Know, and stand Out, to name just a few. His latest book, Nine Lives About Work, a freethinking leader's guide to the real World, published by Harvard Business Publishing, takes an in depth look at the lies that pervade our workplaces and the core truths that help us change it for the better. Marcus has appeared on a bunch of different media, ranging from Larry King Live to The Today Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and now leads People and Performance research at the ADP Research Institute and remains the CEO of the Marcus Buckingham Company. I was keen to get Marcus on the show. Is here someone who challenges the status quo of how organizations and people operate, and I was really keen to see how he had applied his own advice in his own life. I think that there are some really practical takeaways from this interview, including four questions that Marcus asks himself every single week, which I thought were very useful. So on that note, over to Marcus to hear about how he works Marcus, welcome to the.

Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by leading innovators to get so much out of their day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of Innovation Consultancy Inventing, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work date. My guest today is Marcus Buckingham Marcus is the author of a stack of best selling books, including First, Break All the Rules, Now, Discover Your Strengths, The One Thing You Need to Know, and stand Out, to name just a few. His latest book, Nine Lives About Work, a freethinking leader's guide to the real World, published by Harvard Business Publishing, takes an in depth look at the lies that pervade our workplaces and the core truths that help us change it for the better. Marcus has appeared on a bunch of different media, ranging from Larry King Live to The Today Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and now leads People and Performance research at the ADP Research Institute and remains the CEO of the Marcus Buckingham Company. I was keen to get Marcus on the show. Is here someone who challenges the status quo of how organizations and people operate, and I was really keen to see how he had applied his own advice in his own life. I think that there are some really practical takeaways from this interview, including four questions that Marcus asks himself every single week, which I thought were very useful. So on that note, over to Marcus to hear about how he works Marcus, welcome to the.

Show, My pleasure, thank you for having me.

Show, My pleasure, thank you for having me.

I want to start with asking about any daily or weekly rituals that you have in your life that you find your day or week up for success.

I want to start with asking about any daily or weekly rituals that you have in your life that you find your day or week up for success.

Well, daily, rich was I do a weekly check in with myself where every week, and everybody in the company does this too. But our year is fifty two little sprints. And it's one of those weird things about human beings that no matter which society you look at, wherever you go, all the way through time, humans have had a seven day week. And it wasn't a function of anything kind of cosmological I was not a function of the planet's move around the Sun or the Earth turning around every pretty much every other unit of time is a function of planetary movements days, months, years, But a week humans made a week that's just created because it just seems like it's the right time for us. And yet, no matter which human society we've gone to and studied, everyone has a seven day week. No one has a five day week, no one has a fifteen day week. There's something really beautiful and human about a seven day time period. And so every week for us, I mean, it's certainly for me, I just spend fifteen minutes going what are my priorities this week? And whose help do I need? What are my priorities? Whose hell do I need? No long term goal planning, none of that sort of long term stuff, just every week of all the things I could be doing, what are the few things I should be doing, and whose help do I need. It's such a simple rhythm. The world moves really quickly. But if you can do that for me anyway every week, it becomes a way to be super intentional about what's important this week, and of course the things that I thought were important back in January, by the first week of February it's all changed. So that kind of rhythm, it's kind of a little every week in a lot over time. It's super helpful.

Well, daily, rich was I do a weekly check in with myself where every week, and everybody in the company does this too. But our year is fifty two little sprints. And it's one of those weird things about human beings that no matter which society you look at, wherever you go, all the way through time, humans have had a seven day week. And it wasn't a function of anything kind of cosmological I was not a function of the planet's move around the Sun or the Earth turning around every pretty much every other unit of time is a function of planetary movements days, months, years, But a week humans made a week that's just created because it just seems like it's the right time for us. And yet, no matter which human society we've gone to and studied, everyone has a seven day week. No one has a five day week, no one has a fifteen day week. There's something really beautiful and human about a seven day time period. And so every week for us, I mean, it's certainly for me, I just spend fifteen minutes going what are my priorities this week? And whose help do I need? What are my priorities? Whose hell do I need? No long term goal planning, none of that sort of long term stuff, just every week of all the things I could be doing, what are the few things I should be doing, and whose help do I need. It's such a simple rhythm. The world moves really quickly. But if you can do that for me anyway every week, it becomes a way to be super intentional about what's important this week, and of course the things that I thought were important back in January, by the first week of February it's all changed. So that kind of rhythm, it's kind of a little every week in a lot over time. It's super helpful.

Yeah, I'm curious about the second part of that, in terms of whose help do I need? Because in terms of like, you know, what do I want to achieve or what do I want to get done during the week. I think that's such a helpful question to ask. But how did the second question come about? I'm curious.

Yeah, I'm curious about the second part of that, in terms of whose help do I need? Because in terms of like, you know, what do I want to achieve or what do I want to get done during the week. I think that's such a helpful question to ask. But how did the second question come about? I'm curious.

Well, we've just I run this global institute right now called the ADP Research Institute, and we've just finished this nineteen country study of work around all of the different countries of the world, different industries. And if you were to say what characterizes work today, like what is the most defining characteristic of work, it would be that we work on teams. Nobody works alone. I know everyone saw about the gig economy and so on, but that's all actually a falsehood. No one works even if your financial arrangements are that you're an individual contractor. We are all connected, and so work is always team work. There may be one or two people that are sitting in a shed at the bottom of the garden just all by themselves, but that is by far the exception that proves the rule. Eighty three percent of people say that they do most of their work on teams. So in that context, yeah, I mean, there maybe a little moments of flashes of genius that you do all by yourself in the course of the week, but almost everything that you're going to try and do will involve leaning into, relying on calling upon the strength of somebody else. And of course you can do so much more together than you can do alone. So thinking every single week about help whose help is not only elevating in terms of thinking about other people and how you can involve them. But it's also just pragmatic. You're going to have to work with others, so you might as well think intentionally about who those others are.

Well, we've just I run this global institute right now called the ADP Research Institute, and we've just finished this nineteen country study of work around all of the different countries of the world, different industries. And if you were to say what characterizes work today, like what is the most defining characteristic of work, it would be that we work on teams. Nobody works alone. I know everyone saw about the gig economy and so on, but that's all actually a falsehood. No one works even if your financial arrangements are that you're an individual contractor. We are all connected, and so work is always team work. There may be one or two people that are sitting in a shed at the bottom of the garden just all by themselves, but that is by far the exception that proves the rule. Eighty three percent of people say that they do most of their work on teams. So in that context, yeah, I mean, there maybe a little moments of flashes of genius that you do all by yourself in the course of the week, but almost everything that you're going to try and do will involve leaning into, relying on calling upon the strength of somebody else. And of course you can do so much more together than you can do alone. So thinking every single week about help whose help is not only elevating in terms of thinking about other people and how you can involve them. But it's also just pragmatic. You're going to have to work with others, so you might as well think intentionally about who those others are.

Yeah, fair enough. A concept that you write about in your most recent book, Nine Lives about Work. There's a whole chapter around work life balance, which is a concept that you don't believe in. And I'm curious as to what you know. You talk about love in work, I guess as an alternative to work life balance. And I want to know what this looks like in your life, because I think it's funny, like you're clearly someone that loves what you do and I can certainly relate to that. And I was reading an article in HBr just a couple of days ago around how people that love what they do are actually one of the groups that are at the biggest risk of burnout. So I'm curious what does this look like in your life? You know, loving what you do and finding that love but also affording burning out at the same time.

Yeah, fair enough. A concept that you write about in your most recent book, Nine Lives about Work. There's a whole chapter around work life balance, which is a concept that you don't believe in. And I'm curious as to what you know. You talk about love in work, I guess as an alternative to work life balance. And I want to know what this looks like in your life, because I think it's funny, like you're clearly someone that loves what you do and I can certainly relate to that. And I was reading an article in HBr just a couple of days ago around how people that love what they do are actually one of the groups that are at the biggest risk of burnout. So I'm curious what does this look like in your life? You know, loving what you do and finding that love but also affording burning out at the same time.

Yeah, this is a super interesting one, isn't it. First of all, the data in HBr, I don't know what data you're quoting, but that's unfortunately not true. We've got really significant data that shows do what you love is really not terribly helpful advice. Find love in what you do is actually really helpful advice. We know from significant male clinic data that if you have if you're a doctor, and you've got less than twenty percent of your activities in work are things that you love, with each percentage point below twenty percent, there's a commensurate at one percentage point increase in burnout risk. So we actually know causally that there's a really strong negative relationship between doing things that you love and burnout. If you do less and less and less activities that you love, your burnout risk goes up and up and up and up and up. Now funnily enough, but beyond twenty percent you don't see a commensurate decrease in burnout risks. So if you're twenty five percent, thirty five percent, forty per half of the activities on your job with things that you love, you don't get a commensurate increase in resilience and decrease and burner. So it almost seems as though a little love goes a long way. We don't need to fill our entire week with activities that we love. But if we get below twenty percent, we got a problem. So twenty percent I called them in chapter eight of the book, red threads. Everybody's work life has got these different threads, some black and gray, some white, whatever, Lots of different activities, lots of different situations and contexts and people. But some of those contexts and situations and people have a different valence and different emotional valance to them. They're made of different material. They lift you up, they invigorate you. You lean into them, time goes by faster while you're doing them. Before you do them, you look forward to them. When you're done with them, you kind of want to do them again. And everyone's weirdly different. Nobody's we call them red threads. Everyone's got red threads. Activities or situations of people that they find that actually invigorate, bring strength into you. And everyone's just different. Not a function of gender, it's not a function of race, certainly not a function of age. Every one of us, just because of our own idiosyncrasy, are drawn to certain things and repelled by others and life. What's so beautiful about life is that life does have so many multitudes of different activities and situations and actions and people. It's almost it's set up to invigorate us if we bother to really pay attention to the particular activities that we really love. And so when you think about work life balance, the problem initially there, of course, and it's not really it's not something to believe in or not believe in. We simply have to look at the real world. The categories of work life balance are wrong. There is no work, there is no life on other side, on the other end of the scale. Work is part of life, just like family is part of life. Community is part of life. There's life. There's not work in life life. And it's not like life is good and work is bad and you have to balance out the bad of the work with the good of the life. That's just that's false categories. What we have is life and in life, whether it's work or family or community or wherever, there are a lot of different aspects, actions, context, people, and some of them we lean into and some of them we are repelled by. Whether it's being a mother, whether it's being a friend. Everybody gets a different kick out of different aspects of being a mother, or being a friend, being a worker, and so the categories we should really look at aren't work and life and balancing them. It should be love and love and deliberately imbalancing. We should strive in life as desperately as we can for imbalance. We should be desperately always imbalancing our life toward more activities that we love, that invigorate us, and away from those we love. And so for me, one of the rituals that I have we do this again. We actually have technology tools and apps and so and help us do this, but we do something called love it loathe it every week when I do that check in that was talking about, where we talk about what one are the you know, one of my priorities for this week? And whose help do I need? The other two questions we ask us And this sort of prompts us to ask. The technology prompts us to ask this of ourselves, which activities did you love and which did you loath? Every week? Which you love, which you loath, which you love, which you loath, which you love, which you loath? Fifty two weeks a year, just so that it puts everybody in the driving seat, and myself certainly in the driving seat for being responsible for how much love do I put into a week? So for me, that's super helpful. I love finding patterns in data. I love trying to make sense of something and putting it into a presentation of putting it into a book. I love time spent really noodling. I love being by myself. I love being put under pressure to have a chance to share something I loathe. And then's a whole bunch of loads. And I don't have to have, as I said with the Mayo Clinic data, I don't have to have eighty percent of my week filled with loves. But if I, boy, if I get below twenty and some weeks I've had below twenty, and what.

Yeah, this is a super interesting one, isn't it. First of all, the data in HBr, I don't know what data you're quoting, but that's unfortunately not true. We've got really significant data that shows do what you love is really not terribly helpful advice. Find love in what you do is actually really helpful advice. We know from significant male clinic data that if you have if you're a doctor, and you've got less than twenty percent of your activities in work are things that you love, with each percentage point below twenty percent, there's a commensurate at one percentage point increase in burnout risk. So we actually know causally that there's a really strong negative relationship between doing things that you love and burnout. If you do less and less and less activities that you love, your burnout risk goes up and up and up and up and up. Now funnily enough, but beyond twenty percent you don't see a commensurate decrease in burnout risks. So if you're twenty five percent, thirty five percent, forty per half of the activities on your job with things that you love, you don't get a commensurate increase in resilience and decrease and burner. So it almost seems as though a little love goes a long way. We don't need to fill our entire week with activities that we love. But if we get below twenty percent, we got a problem. So twenty percent I called them in chapter eight of the book, red threads. Everybody's work life has got these different threads, some black and gray, some white, whatever, Lots of different activities, lots of different situations and contexts and people. But some of those contexts and situations and people have a different valence and different emotional valance to them. They're made of different material. They lift you up, they invigorate you. You lean into them, time goes by faster while you're doing them. Before you do them, you look forward to them. When you're done with them, you kind of want to do them again. And everyone's weirdly different. Nobody's we call them red threads. Everyone's got red threads. Activities or situations of people that they find that actually invigorate, bring strength into you. And everyone's just different. Not a function of gender, it's not a function of race, certainly not a function of age. Every one of us, just because of our own idiosyncrasy, are drawn to certain things and repelled by others and life. What's so beautiful about life is that life does have so many multitudes of different activities and situations and actions and people. It's almost it's set up to invigorate us if we bother to really pay attention to the particular activities that we really love. And so when you think about work life balance, the problem initially there, of course, and it's not really it's not something to believe in or not believe in. We simply have to look at the real world. The categories of work life balance are wrong. There is no work, there is no life on other side, on the other end of the scale. Work is part of life, just like family is part of life. Community is part of life. There's life. There's not work in life life. And it's not like life is good and work is bad and you have to balance out the bad of the work with the good of the life. That's just that's false categories. What we have is life and in life, whether it's work or family or community or wherever, there are a lot of different aspects, actions, context, people, and some of them we lean into and some of them we are repelled by. Whether it's being a mother, whether it's being a friend. Everybody gets a different kick out of different aspects of being a mother, or being a friend, being a worker, and so the categories we should really look at aren't work and life and balancing them. It should be love and love and deliberately imbalancing. We should strive in life as desperately as we can for imbalance. We should be desperately always imbalancing our life toward more activities that we love, that invigorate us, and away from those we love. And so for me, one of the rituals that I have we do this again. We actually have technology tools and apps and so and help us do this, but we do something called love it loathe it every week when I do that check in that was talking about, where we talk about what one are the you know, one of my priorities for this week? And whose help do I need? The other two questions we ask us And this sort of prompts us to ask. The technology prompts us to ask this of ourselves, which activities did you love and which did you loath? Every week? Which you love, which you loath, which you love, which you loath, which you love, which you loath? Fifty two weeks a year, just so that it puts everybody in the driving seat, and myself certainly in the driving seat for being responsible for how much love do I put into a week? So for me, that's super helpful. I love finding patterns in data. I love trying to make sense of something and putting it into a presentation of putting it into a book. I love time spent really noodling. I love being by myself. I love being put under pressure to have a chance to share something I loathe. And then's a whole bunch of loads. And I don't have to have, as I said with the Mayo Clinic data, I don't have to have eighty percent of my week filled with loves. But if I, boy, if I get below twenty and some weeks I've had below twenty, and what.

Do you do, Like, what do you do in those weeks? Like when you've got your load list? Do you how do you decide what to delegate and what to just suck up? And I guess what to just stop doing?

Do you do, Like, what do you do in those weeks? Like when you've got your load list? Do you how do you decide what to delegate and what to just suck up? And I guess what to just stop doing?

Well, there's some strategies that you can use that I can use. One of the strategies for the things that you loathe is stop doing it and see if anyone cares. I mean, it's just stop it. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that we do that we think we should do, and you stop doing normal. Notice you know, for me, I I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm building business, but I don't like asking people for the clothes. I don't like it. And what I figured out is if I stop asking people the clothes, people still buy things. They just persuade themselves. It doesn't if I don't need to get better at closing, I actually need to get better at doing things that make people want to close themselves. You can actually think of the acronym stop is pretty useful. The T the S is stopped doing it. So if anyone cares, T stands for team up with people, Well that there I hate. I don't like confrontation, but there's other people on my team that do. I don't like problems. There's other people on my team that do. There's a bunch of activities that I love. Some of the things I low that I'm going to have to do, but there are some of the things I load that other people love, and that's kind of that's that's cool. I mean. Then the o you can think about is offer up one of your strengths and it might mitigate the thing that you loathe. So I don't like mingling. I hate mingling. I hate the pressure of it. But I love interviewing. I love interviewing people. I love asking questions and shutting up. So if I have to go to a couple of parties or meet and greets, and I have to do a fair bit of that in my job, I just deliberately change my view of it from mingling, which I hate, to interviewing, and I'll just pick. If there's twenty people there, I'll pick three of them. I'll pick them out almost before I go in. I'll pick them out, and I'll deliberately interview them. Take twenty minutes to talk to that person, twenty minutes talk to that person, twenty minutes to talk to that person, and then leave. And so I've sort of used a strength to mitigate a weakness. And then lastly, the peace stands. But can you change your perspective on something? Can you change your point of view on it so that it doesn't And this is more mind games. But if you, oh, I don't know. I mean, I've run a business a while, So sometimes you have to fire people. If you have to do that in the course of the week, and you know you're going to have to do it with a couple of people, because folks are complicated, and sometimes you move them into a job that they shouldn't have and so on when that happens and oh, it's horrible. Rather than seeming myself up about it, can I change my perspective on it to see that actually having someone stay in a job that is not right for them every single day and they know it and you know it, that's not caring. So can I change that conversation to think about moving this person out of the job as actually genuinely, authentically a caring thing to do for the person. So for any of your listeners that are struggling with things that they loathe but have to do, that acronym stop is actually kind of a useful way of thinking about it.

Well, there's some strategies that you can use that I can use. One of the strategies for the things that you loathe is stop doing it and see if anyone cares. I mean, it's just stop it. Like there's a whole bunch of stuff that we do that we think we should do, and you stop doing normal. Notice you know, for me, I I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm building business, but I don't like asking people for the clothes. I don't like it. And what I figured out is if I stop asking people the clothes, people still buy things. They just persuade themselves. It doesn't if I don't need to get better at closing, I actually need to get better at doing things that make people want to close themselves. You can actually think of the acronym stop is pretty useful. The T the S is stopped doing it. So if anyone cares, T stands for team up with people, Well that there I hate. I don't like confrontation, but there's other people on my team that do. I don't like problems. There's other people on my team that do. There's a bunch of activities that I love. Some of the things I low that I'm going to have to do, but there are some of the things I load that other people love, and that's kind of that's that's cool. I mean. Then the o you can think about is offer up one of your strengths and it might mitigate the thing that you loathe. So I don't like mingling. I hate mingling. I hate the pressure of it. But I love interviewing. I love interviewing people. I love asking questions and shutting up. So if I have to go to a couple of parties or meet and greets, and I have to do a fair bit of that in my job, I just deliberately change my view of it from mingling, which I hate, to interviewing, and I'll just pick. If there's twenty people there, I'll pick three of them. I'll pick them out almost before I go in. I'll pick them out, and I'll deliberately interview them. Take twenty minutes to talk to that person, twenty minutes talk to that person, twenty minutes to talk to that person, and then leave. And so I've sort of used a strength to mitigate a weakness. And then lastly, the peace stands. But can you change your perspective on something? Can you change your point of view on it so that it doesn't And this is more mind games. But if you, oh, I don't know. I mean, I've run a business a while, So sometimes you have to fire people. If you have to do that in the course of the week, and you know you're going to have to do it with a couple of people, because folks are complicated, and sometimes you move them into a job that they shouldn't have and so on when that happens and oh, it's horrible. Rather than seeming myself up about it, can I change my perspective on it to see that actually having someone stay in a job that is not right for them every single day and they know it and you know it, that's not caring. So can I change that conversation to think about moving this person out of the job as actually genuinely, authentically a caring thing to do for the person. So for any of your listeners that are struggling with things that they loathe but have to do, that acronym stop is actually kind of a useful way of thinking about it.

That is really useful. I particularly love the mingling one. I like you hate mingling. I'm definitely more on the introverted side of the spectrum, and I'm going to take that as a good tip from this interview. Through things like an interview, I like that a lot. You mentioned that one of the things that you love is, you know, sort of looking at ideas and building those into books and keynotes. And of course, when you write a book, and you've written several, one of the prices as an author goes through is turning that book into a keynote speech. And I'm curious as to what is your process of turning a book into a speech.

That is really useful. I particularly love the mingling one. I like you hate mingling. I'm definitely more on the introverted side of the spectrum, and I'm going to take that as a good tip from this interview. Through things like an interview, I like that a lot. You mentioned that one of the things that you love is, you know, sort of looking at ideas and building those into books and keynotes. And of course, when you write a book, and you've written several, one of the prices as an author goes through is turning that book into a keynote speech. And I'm curious as to what is your process of turning a book into a speech.

The best guidance I ever got about giving speeches was from a chap who was the president of Gallup, well, the chairman of Gallup when I joined. His name was doctor Donald Doll Clifton, and he was sort of the grandfather of positive psychology. But and he was a shy guy too. He was introverted, but he could stand up on stage and talk for an hour on anything like he was just unbelievable and not rah rah rah rah rah, just super engaging and easy and natural. And I was like, how'd you do that? How'd you do that? Notes? Is it learnt? And he gave me this idea that for whatever reason, it's stuck in my brain and has really helped me in doing any sort of presentation. He said, you've got to think about a speech is really beads b e a ds beads, A bead is a Joe or it's a little story or it's a little piece of data, or it's a longer story. But a bead is a thing that you like to tell people, and that you've tried it out on phone calls or in emails or in a meeting. You've just experimented with beads. And if it's a joke, it has to be something that you think is funny. If it's a story that you have to think, it's something that you are interested in. If it's a piece of data, it's something that grabs your attention. So you start always with beads that interested, that interests you, And it might take two minutes to tell your bead, it might take ten minutes. But you start off with your little bead, and then over the course of a few months, you polish your beads, You polish the story, you make it a little bit longer, or you figure out when you tried it at that meeting last week, no one really understood what the heck you were talking about, and so you go, hmm. But you keep polishing your beads, and then you string them when you give a speech. You simply and I used to have them on two by five cards. You know, you'd have like two hundred and fifty two by five cards. Now today I just keep it in my in my iPhone. But this is like your your box of beads, and then when you make a speech, you just string the beads. You choose which stories, jokes, data you're going to share, and you just ordered them into a string. And that's when I've written a book, that's what I choose to do. I'll go, what what are the beads from this book? Let me try him out, try him out, try them out, try them out for me. It ended up I actually had to. I followed Barack Obama of all people, last April, oh May, and I knew I was going to have I mean, he's amazing. I'm certainly obviously I'm not comparing myself to Barack Obama, but he had the first morning and I the next morning, and I was like, I'm not going to be able to stand up in stage in front of ten thousand people and wing this. I've got to have my beads polished. And so that's the visual imagery of the metaphor that I use for thinking about how you take a ninety thousand word book and turn it into a sixty minute speech.

The best guidance I ever got about giving speeches was from a chap who was the president of Gallup, well, the chairman of Gallup when I joined. His name was doctor Donald Doll Clifton, and he was sort of the grandfather of positive psychology. But and he was a shy guy too. He was introverted, but he could stand up on stage and talk for an hour on anything like he was just unbelievable and not rah rah rah rah rah, just super engaging and easy and natural. And I was like, how'd you do that? How'd you do that? Notes? Is it learnt? And he gave me this idea that for whatever reason, it's stuck in my brain and has really helped me in doing any sort of presentation. He said, you've got to think about a speech is really beads b e a ds beads, A bead is a Joe or it's a little story or it's a little piece of data, or it's a longer story. But a bead is a thing that you like to tell people, and that you've tried it out on phone calls or in emails or in a meeting. You've just experimented with beads. And if it's a joke, it has to be something that you think is funny. If it's a story that you have to think, it's something that you are interested in. If it's a piece of data, it's something that grabs your attention. So you start always with beads that interested, that interests you, And it might take two minutes to tell your bead, it might take ten minutes. But you start off with your little bead, and then over the course of a few months, you polish your beads, You polish the story, you make it a little bit longer, or you figure out when you tried it at that meeting last week, no one really understood what the heck you were talking about, and so you go, hmm. But you keep polishing your beads, and then you string them when you give a speech. You simply and I used to have them on two by five cards. You know, you'd have like two hundred and fifty two by five cards. Now today I just keep it in my in my iPhone. But this is like your your box of beads, and then when you make a speech, you just string the beads. You choose which stories, jokes, data you're going to share, and you just ordered them into a string. And that's when I've written a book, that's what I choose to do. I'll go, what what are the beads from this book? Let me try him out, try him out, try them out, try them out for me. It ended up I actually had to. I followed Barack Obama of all people, last April, oh May, and I knew I was going to have I mean, he's amazing. I'm certainly obviously I'm not comparing myself to Barack Obama, but he had the first morning and I the next morning, and I was like, I'm not going to be able to stand up in stage in front of ten thousand people and wing this. I've got to have my beads polished. And so that's the visual imagery of the metaphor that I use for thinking about how you take a ninety thousand word book and turn it into a sixty minute speech.

Oh, I love that metaphor. It reminds me. I had Rachel Botsman on the show quite a few months ago, and she described a somewhat similar process where she'll almost modularize different points or stories and so forth, and file them into different categories and then assemble them in a way that makes sense depending on the context and the audience and so forth. I'm curious with the beads, how do you decide on the structure for any given presentation.

Oh, I love that metaphor. It reminds me. I had Rachel Botsman on the show quite a few months ago, and she described a somewhat similar process where she'll almost modularize different points or stories and so forth, and file them into different categories and then assemble them in a way that makes sense depending on the context and the audience and so forth. I'm curious with the beads, how do you decide on the structure for any given presentation.

I start off with some inciting question or inciting event that I like to think of it as if I described this inciting event or question, and then I say, and I'm now going to tell you the answer. And then if I looked at my watch, I went, oh, my gosh, I'm toribly sorry. I have to go off stage because I got to go pick up my kid from school. That if I were to have set it up right, people would tackle me before I was able to get off stage. And so like, we've just finished, as I said, this nineteen country study. And so for me, I always start off by going, well, how would I we just did a nineteen Like who cares about that? What's the right way to get people's attention, And for me, it starts with, you know, you've got to put a couple of things in front of people that make them go huh. Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't thought about that, but god, now I do. I'm like super intrigued what the answer is. So in that case, if you put up data that says we've looked at perpose and productivity numbers in all these large countries around the world, hasn't been any real increase in purpose and productivity since nineteen seventy three. Think of all the time and the money and the effort and the energy and the technology we've thrown at getting more productivity out of people in the last fifty years, and we haven't moved it. And then you think about all the energy that we spent on all the books and the training programs and everything to get people more engaged at work, and yet engagement overall around the world hasn't moved above sixteen percent since nineteen eighty eight. Why, why, despite all of our best efforts and intentions, have we failed so miserably to increase either productivity or engagement around the world. Well, we've just done this study to find out why, and it turns out there's one thing we've missed that it can explain almost all of the variance and lack of improvement in productivity and engagement. Oh, I got to go pick up my kid now out that's how I would do it, and it would.

I start off with some inciting question or inciting event that I like to think of it as if I described this inciting event or question, and then I say, and I'm now going to tell you the answer. And then if I looked at my watch, I went, oh, my gosh, I'm toribly sorry. I have to go off stage because I got to go pick up my kid from school. That if I were to have set it up right, people would tackle me before I was able to get off stage. And so like, we've just finished, as I said, this nineteen country study. And so for me, I always start off by going, well, how would I we just did a nineteen Like who cares about that? What's the right way to get people's attention, And for me, it starts with, you know, you've got to put a couple of things in front of people that make them go huh. Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't thought about that, but god, now I do. I'm like super intrigued what the answer is. So in that case, if you put up data that says we've looked at perpose and productivity numbers in all these large countries around the world, hasn't been any real increase in purpose and productivity since nineteen seventy three. Think of all the time and the money and the effort and the energy and the technology we've thrown at getting more productivity out of people in the last fifty years, and we haven't moved it. And then you think about all the energy that we spent on all the books and the training programs and everything to get people more engaged at work, and yet engagement overall around the world hasn't moved above sixteen percent since nineteen eighty eight. Why, why, despite all of our best efforts and intentions, have we failed so miserably to increase either productivity or engagement around the world. Well, we've just done this study to find out why, and it turns out there's one thing we've missed that it can explain almost all of the variance and lack of improvement in productivity and engagement. Oh, I got to go pick up my kid now out that's how I would do it, and it would.

That's great, and hang on, we need closure here, macus.

That's great, and hang on, we need closure here, macus.

Well, I can give you the speech well for me like that. If that's your setup and you go because we've missed the elephant in the room people, then people will go, Okay, what's the elephant in the room? Is there any And then they'll start thinking for themselves, right, like, huh, what is the elephant in the room. It's got to be a pretty big elephant. But what's and then you better have a payoff. So in this case, as it turns out, when you look at levels of engagement and you look at what drives levels of engagement, and another good tip, I think what you're doing presentations is is just play out for people what they're already thinking. So if you do what I just did, and you say, you know, why haven't we seen increases in productivity or engagement around the world, and you do this research study and it turns out there's one fact that explains almost all of the variants. The moment you say that, people in their head and you're audience is starting to go, I wonder what that is, And then they're running through a list. Is it industry, maybe it's geography, maybe it's age, maybe it's the generations, maybe it's gender, maybe it's education level, maybe it's length of service. You know, they'll start asking themselves that those questions, and so it's always good, I think anyway and doing a presentation to say that, to say what they're thinking. And so you're you're now on their side. You know you you're with them, and so that's what I would do. In that case, I would go is it?

Well, I can give you the speech well for me like that. If that's your setup and you go because we've missed the elephant in the room people, then people will go, Okay, what's the elephant in the room? Is there any And then they'll start thinking for themselves, right, like, huh, what is the elephant in the room. It's got to be a pretty big elephant. But what's and then you better have a payoff. So in this case, as it turns out, when you look at levels of engagement and you look at what drives levels of engagement, and another good tip, I think what you're doing presentations is is just play out for people what they're already thinking. So if you do what I just did, and you say, you know, why haven't we seen increases in productivity or engagement around the world, and you do this research study and it turns out there's one fact that explains almost all of the variants. The moment you say that, people in their head and you're audience is starting to go, I wonder what that is, And then they're running through a list. Is it industry, maybe it's geography, maybe it's age, maybe it's the generations, maybe it's gender, maybe it's education level, maybe it's length of service. You know, they'll start asking themselves that those questions, and so it's always good, I think anyway and doing a presentation to say that, to say what they're thinking. And so you're you're now on their side. You know you you're with them, and so that's what I would do. In that case, I would go is it?

This is it?

This is it?

This is it? This is it? That is it? This that's interesting? And then you can land whatever you want to land. And in this case, what I had to land was when you run the analysis. By far, the strongest driver of whether or not you feel engaged in productive at work is whether you say you work on a team. That if you say you work on a team and you deeply trust the team leader of the team, you're fourteen times more likely to be fully engaged at work. Two and a half times more likely if you're just on a team, and then if you deeply trust the team leader, which means you say five on a scale of one to five, then you're twelve times more likely to be fully engaged at work. So we have missed that all work is team work. We don't organize our hospitals that way, we don't organize our schools that way, we don't organize our factories that way. And even really sophisticated companies like at Lassion and Google have no idea how many teams they have, who's on those teams, which are their best teams, how to build more teams like the best teams. They don't have any idea about any of that. Because the way that we organize everything we do at work, from goals to leadership development to performance to succession planning, everything at work is organized and arranged through what are called human capital management systems, which are the HR systems and the HR systems because they are extensions of financial systems. Simply tell you the boxes on the ORG chart, who reports to who reports to who, and which salary is in which box on the ORG chart. And yet if you ask people where they work, they'll say eighty three percent of them say they work on teams, but sixty five percent of those people say they will work on more than one team, and more than three quarters of those people say that those extra teams are not reflected on the ORG chart. So there is a huge swath at work that is invisible to even the most like Google has not as face, but I mean pick up sort of whatever you think as a sophisticated company, they don't know where the work is because they can't see teams.

This is it? This is it? That is it? This that's interesting? And then you can land whatever you want to land. And in this case, what I had to land was when you run the analysis. By far, the strongest driver of whether or not you feel engaged in productive at work is whether you say you work on a team. That if you say you work on a team and you deeply trust the team leader of the team, you're fourteen times more likely to be fully engaged at work. Two and a half times more likely if you're just on a team, and then if you deeply trust the team leader, which means you say five on a scale of one to five, then you're twelve times more likely to be fully engaged at work. So we have missed that all work is team work. We don't organize our hospitals that way, we don't organize our schools that way, we don't organize our factories that way. And even really sophisticated companies like at Lassion and Google have no idea how many teams they have, who's on those teams, which are their best teams, how to build more teams like the best teams. They don't have any idea about any of that. Because the way that we organize everything we do at work, from goals to leadership development to performance to succession planning, everything at work is organized and arranged through what are called human capital management systems, which are the HR systems and the HR systems because they are extensions of financial systems. Simply tell you the boxes on the ORG chart, who reports to who reports to who, and which salary is in which box on the ORG chart. And yet if you ask people where they work, they'll say eighty three percent of them say they work on teams, but sixty five percent of those people say they will work on more than one team, and more than three quarters of those people say that those extra teams are not reflected on the ORG chart. So there is a huge swath at work that is invisible to even the most like Google has not as face, but I mean pick up sort of whatever you think as a sophisticated company, they don't know where the work is because they can't see teams.

Absolutely fascinating. And one of the other things that you talk about being broken in Nine Lies is around the planning process, which I found really interesting, and you talk about how we need an intelligence system, and when I was reading that part of the book, I was curious, how have you applied that in your own working life, And maybe if you could just give listeners that haven't read Nine Lies just sort of like a snapshot of what you mean around this annual planning process that businesses go on, you know, perhaps not being the best use of their time.

Absolutely fascinating. And one of the other things that you talk about being broken in Nine Lies is around the planning process, which I found really interesting, and you talk about how we need an intelligence system, and when I was reading that part of the book, I was curious, how have you applied that in your own working life, And maybe if you could just give listeners that haven't read Nine Lies just sort of like a snapshot of what you mean around this annual planning process that businesses go on, you know, perhaps not being the best use of their time.

I know what it's late in Australia, but certainly in the US we build planning systems. Everybody's forever planning. We put a lot of stock on plans and plans are defined this way. The frontline people provide data information. That information is pushed up, up and back away from the front line to the people who are five miles behind the front line. Once a year, maybe twice a year. They take all the information and they put it together in the there's always some sort of executive summary. In fact, that's a pretty good definition, isn't It's a summary for an executive of pieces of information from the front line. Those executives take the executive summary, which is summarized, and then they'll use that summary to try and put together plans about what we're going to go do and what we're going to go spend, and how we're going to allocate our assets. And then the plan is put together. Normally, it's presented to the board in some way. It's then called a strategic plan. And then and then that gets passed down and passed down and passed down. And so while the plan, the strategic plan might have been put together in October and then approved in November, it starts to get implemented in April, maybe March, and of course by that time it's worse than useless, it's worse than useless because it seems like it's really well put together and functional, but it's falsely precise because the world has moved on by the time that the plan was put together in October, yeah, but by the time you bump into April next April, the world's moved. So your plan was put together to engage with one set of circumstances that it's no longer real. The plan helps you engage with the recent past. The example we quoted in the book was General Stanley McCrystal, who was the General in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan at the end of the or maybe it was in Iraq, I think in the after the Rack War, and he had a planning system to help him find the bad guys, the terrorists in their cells and attack them, kill them. And no matter how fast he run the planning process, he kept missing. They were gone, They had cell phones, they had small dynamic cells of people that broke apart and moved quickly. So there's no point having an executive summary when you're trying to find that team, that terrorist cell hiding in that hideout on that day in that town. Well, that's a whole bunch of specific detail executive summaries don't help there. So no matter how fast they ran their planning system, they were always late. They couldn't find anybody. And so what he did, it's super smart. He flipped it around. He flipped the whole model around, and he built an intelligence system. And the characteristics of an intelligence system are that the people that are five miles behind the front line, their entire job really is to develop systems and rituals that enable the people on the front line to have as much real world information as possible. And then the people on the front lines are the ones who take that real world information and try and make sense of it together so they can decide what to do. And it's the people on the front line that take the real world, reliable information and then make the decisions on what to do. That's an intelligence system. And the intelligence that we're talking about there is on the front lines, in the classrooms with the patient writing the software code. That's where the real world is. And if you're going to engage with the real world, you can't build a planning system. It's too slow. Planning isn't useless because it helps you sort of scope the problem but it doesn't help you at all with the solution. And that's something you know, the federal government here in the US has got to figure out. I'm sure the Australian government is a planning system. You know, some of your big banks, I've worked with them, they're planning systems, and it all means that they're too slow and they're too late and through some of the certainly some of the financial brew ha ha that's gone on with your financial system in Australia lately, it's all the decisions were being made in the wrong place, wrong time. Yeah.

I know what it's late in Australia, but certainly in the US we build planning systems. Everybody's forever planning. We put a lot of stock on plans and plans are defined this way. The frontline people provide data information. That information is pushed up, up and back away from the front line to the people who are five miles behind the front line. Once a year, maybe twice a year. They take all the information and they put it together in the there's always some sort of executive summary. In fact, that's a pretty good definition, isn't It's a summary for an executive of pieces of information from the front line. Those executives take the executive summary, which is summarized, and then they'll use that summary to try and put together plans about what we're going to go do and what we're going to go spend, and how we're going to allocate our assets. And then the plan is put together. Normally, it's presented to the board in some way. It's then called a strategic plan. And then and then that gets passed down and passed down and passed down. And so while the plan, the strategic plan might have been put together in October and then approved in November, it starts to get implemented in April, maybe March, and of course by that time it's worse than useless, it's worse than useless because it seems like it's really well put together and functional, but it's falsely precise because the world has moved on by the time that the plan was put together in October, yeah, but by the time you bump into April next April, the world's moved. So your plan was put together to engage with one set of circumstances that it's no longer real. The plan helps you engage with the recent past. The example we quoted in the book was General Stanley McCrystal, who was the General in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan at the end of the or maybe it was in Iraq, I think in the after the Rack War, and he had a planning system to help him find the bad guys, the terrorists in their cells and attack them, kill them. And no matter how fast he run the planning process, he kept missing. They were gone, They had cell phones, they had small dynamic cells of people that broke apart and moved quickly. So there's no point having an executive summary when you're trying to find that team, that terrorist cell hiding in that hideout on that day in that town. Well, that's a whole bunch of specific detail executive summaries don't help there. So no matter how fast they ran their planning system, they were always late. They couldn't find anybody. And so what he did, it's super smart. He flipped it around. He flipped the whole model around, and he built an intelligence system. And the characteristics of an intelligence system are that the people that are five miles behind the front line, their entire job really is to develop systems and rituals that enable the people on the front line to have as much real world information as possible. And then the people on the front lines are the ones who take that real world information and try and make sense of it together so they can decide what to do. And it's the people on the front line that take the real world, reliable information and then make the decisions on what to do. That's an intelligence system. And the intelligence that we're talking about there is on the front lines, in the classrooms with the patient writing the software code. That's where the real world is. And if you're going to engage with the real world, you can't build a planning system. It's too slow. Planning isn't useless because it helps you sort of scope the problem but it doesn't help you at all with the solution. And that's something you know, the federal government here in the US has got to figure out. I'm sure the Australian government is a planning system. You know, some of your big banks, I've worked with them, they're planning systems, and it all means that they're too slow and they're too late and through some of the certainly some of the financial brew ha ha that's gone on with your financial system in Australia lately, it's all the decisions were being made in the wrong place, wrong time. Yeah.

Absolutely, And I'm sure that there are a lot of listeners that can that are nodding their heads and relating to this. And I want to know how how does this work? Like in your consultancy and like are there are there still annual goals that you're aiming for? Like what what does that look like? In your working life?

Absolutely, And I'm sure that there are a lot of listeners that can that are nodding their heads and relating to this. And I want to know how how does this work? Like in your consultancy and like are there are there still annual goals that you're aiming for? Like what what does that look like? In your working life?

There are certainly things that are longer than a week for us. I think I like to think of them as as as projects. Everything's a project. So you start with the and I like Simon Sinek's stuff on this, you know, you start with the why what? Why are we doing? What? We're doing. What's the thing that gets out of bed? And I don't mean in terms of a general mission. I mean like I run a research institute. Why, why what are we trying to do here? Who's it for? And so just talk a lot about In this case for me, oh my word, we're living in a world of content marketing where seemingly everyone's figured out that if you just throw a bit of a statistic here and a bit of statistic there, we are running into a world in which people aren't data fluent, as in, no one knows what's true anymore. Everyone's just putting fake research out that they don't even know it's fake. But it's really just content marketing. So where's the source of truth about what we know, what we provably, humbly reliably know about the world of work? Where's that? Well that doesn't exist. So for me in the institute, it's like, all right, let's go find some things that we can know for sure. We don't have to overclaim, we can underclaim actually, and then just say well, this is what we know for sure. And then from that point comes projects, Okay, what should we go and try and do. What are the specific things that clearly are going to take longer than a week that we think are important in making that Why become real?

There are certainly things that are longer than a week for us. I think I like to think of them as as as projects. Everything's a project. So you start with the and I like Simon Sinek's stuff on this, you know, you start with the why what? Why are we doing? What? We're doing. What's the thing that gets out of bed? And I don't mean in terms of a general mission. I mean like I run a research institute. Why, why what are we trying to do here? Who's it for? And so just talk a lot about In this case for me, oh my word, we're living in a world of content marketing where seemingly everyone's figured out that if you just throw a bit of a statistic here and a bit of statistic there, we are running into a world in which people aren't data fluent, as in, no one knows what's true anymore. Everyone's just putting fake research out that they don't even know it's fake. But it's really just content marketing. So where's the source of truth about what we know, what we provably, humbly reliably know about the world of work? Where's that? Well that doesn't exist. So for me in the institute, it's like, all right, let's go find some things that we can know for sure. We don't have to overclaim, we can underclaim actually, and then just say well, this is what we know for sure. And then from that point comes projects, Okay, what should we go and try and do. What are the specific things that clearly are going to take longer than a week that we think are important in making that Why become real?

I wanted to ask, like in terms of defining the projects, like how how tightly or loosely is a project defined for you and your world?

I wanted to ask, like in terms of defining the projects, like how how tightly or loosely is a project defined for you and your world?

Before we did this global study of engagement, we had to define I said, we ought to This is about a year ago. It's like we ought to find out we are. There is no global calibrated measure of engagement around the world. We don't know how engaged the Japanese are versus the people who work in the United Arab Emirates versus the people who work in Brazil, there's no calibrated. By calibrated, I mean the Japanese respond to scales in a way that's meaningfully and measurably different than the way the Brazilians do. So you can't compare data from Brazil data to japan survey data because we know that the Japanese respond differently in different uses of scales. So where's the Where's that? Where's the global study of engagement that takes into account the different nationalities and how they respond to scales? But there isn't any. So I'm like well, we should do that, and so then it's a function of going on, well what would that look like, how would we get the sample? How many countries, how many people? So then you start just breaking it down into how would we make this real? At least that's how I work.

Before we did this global study of engagement, we had to define I said, we ought to This is about a year ago. It's like we ought to find out we are. There is no global calibrated measure of engagement around the world. We don't know how engaged the Japanese are versus the people who work in the United Arab Emirates versus the people who work in Brazil, there's no calibrated. By calibrated, I mean the Japanese respond to scales in a way that's meaningfully and measurably different than the way the Brazilians do. So you can't compare data from Brazil data to japan survey data because we know that the Japanese respond differently in different uses of scales. So where's the Where's that? Where's the global study of engagement that takes into account the different nationalities and how they respond to scales? But there isn't any. So I'm like well, we should do that, and so then it's a function of going on, well what would that look like, how would we get the sample? How many countries, how many people? So then you start just breaking it down into how would we make this real? At least that's how I work.

I like, that's that's very cool. And now we somehow the time has flown by, and I know that we are now out of time. So my last question for you, Mac is is if people want to consume more of what you're doing and more of your research and thinking, how can they do that.

I like, that's that's very cool. And now we somehow the time has flown by, and I know that we are now out of time. So my last question for you, Mac is is if people want to consume more of what you're doing and more of your research and thinking, how can they do that.

Obviously, we put a lot of this thinking into Nine Lives About Work, which is the book, but we also wanted to work with Harvard to create a place where anybody that is interested in taking these knowable truths and apply them in the real world of work. We wanted a place whe people could go to engage with that. So we created a Freethinking Leader coalition. So if you go to free thinking Leader dot org freethinking Leader dot org, it's kind of ours. And have a business reviews place where any leader of a small team or a big company, a team of teams who thinks, you know what, an awful lot of what we currently do to get the best out of ourselves and our people is clearly not working. What are the lies that I need to pull back? And then what are the truths that will uncover behind provable, measurable, tangible truths, no matter how messy the truths are. Anybody who wants to really engage with those tooths and make change in the world so that we don't have another fifty years of super low engagement and low productivity, or just maybe because of the moral reason that you've got kids and you don't want to go to work and field alienated, go to freethinking Leader dot org and you'll find a lot of people like you.

Obviously, we put a lot of this thinking into Nine Lives About Work, which is the book, but we also wanted to work with Harvard to create a place where anybody that is interested in taking these knowable truths and apply them in the real world of work. We wanted a place whe people could go to engage with that. So we created a Freethinking Leader coalition. So if you go to free thinking Leader dot org freethinking Leader dot org, it's kind of ours. And have a business reviews place where any leader of a small team or a big company, a team of teams who thinks, you know what, an awful lot of what we currently do to get the best out of ourselves and our people is clearly not working. What are the lies that I need to pull back? And then what are the truths that will uncover behind provable, measurable, tangible truths, no matter how messy the truths are. Anybody who wants to really engage with those tooths and make change in the world so that we don't have another fifty years of super low engagement and low productivity, or just maybe because of the moral reason that you've got kids and you don't want to go to work and field alienated, go to freethinking Leader dot org and you'll find a lot of people like you.

Fantastic. That's awesomething. I will link to are that in the show notes as well. Well. Marcus, I've love chatting to you. I love nine Lies, and I recommend it for anyone that is kind of feeling like, hang on, surely there's a better way than this about their organization. So thank you, Marcus. It's just been an absolute pleasure, my pleasure. So that is it for today's show. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Marcus, and if you know someone else that would enjoy it, why not share this episode with them. And if you're enjoying how I work, I would love it if you could take like two or three seconds to leave a review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. And thank you to all the lovely people who have left reviews. You're wonderful and it brings a huge smile to my face whenever I read a new review. So thank you. And that is it for today and I'll see you next time.

Fantastic. That's awesomething. I will link to are that in the show notes as well. Well. Marcus, I've love chatting to you. I love nine Lies, and I recommend it for anyone that is kind of feeling like, hang on, surely there's a better way than this about their organization. So thank you, Marcus. It's just been an absolute pleasure, my pleasure. So that is it for today's show. I hope you enjoyed my chat with Marcus, and if you know someone else that would enjoy it, why not share this episode with them. And if you're enjoying how I work, I would love it if you could take like two or three seconds to leave a review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. And thank you to all the lovely people who have left reviews. You're wonderful and it brings a huge smile to my face whenever I read a new review. So thank you. And that is it for today and I'll see you next time.