100: This Could Have Been an Email... Again

Bruce: 0:00

Now recording. Nice Thanks, Craig.

Clark: 0:02

Now it's terrifying.

Bruce: 0:06

I'm good, you good, you ready. Oh you ready, I'm ready. I'm never going to lie. I just got 100 video edition.

Clark: 0:11

I just got 100 video edition.

Bruce: 0:13

It's looking weird and I like it. It's going to be really weird, all right. Also, I'm like looking at myself. I'm looking at myself in an emoji. I know it is strange right.

Clark: 0:27

And you want to look at the phone because it's recording but you also look at your screen for like news, so it's going to be interesting. It's our first time. News and notes. Oh, do you have news, by the way?

Bruce: 0:36

Oh, do I have news? Ok? Well, good, I do too, but I don't have an actual article. So, all right, let's do this, let's do this thing. Welcome to episode 100 of Corporate Strategy, the podcast. That could have been an email. I'm Bruce and I'm Clark, and we're feeling 100 times happier to be here with you on our very special 100th episode. If you're listening to this in the feed, you don't even realize what's so special about this episode, clark. Why is this episode special?

Clark: 1:09

Listen, if this is in your ears and you don't visualize what we're doing, you're missing out, because we have our faces not our actual faces, but our an emojis from iPhone being recorded for 100th episode to make it super unique and special.

Bruce: 1:25

I have not seen Clark's an emoji and he has not seen mine either. But if I had to guess, what he cobbles together is going to be two white-looking dudes that look almost identical. You think so? It'd be great. Yeah, we're going to have the same exact an emoji. I'm calling it right now. They're going to be like are they twins? Are they related?

Clark: 1:45

That would be actually hilarious. We put this together and we look exactly the same, just totally unsolicited. That'd be incredible.

Bruce: 1:51

Now I'm sure you look more professional than I do. I've got my Banjo-Kazooie shirt on because I've got to represent Great 3D platformer of all time I had to think about.

Clark: 2:02

Oh yeah, they can see part of my body on this, so I got to put on a decent looking shirt that doesn't have food all over it. That might be a good thing to do.

Bruce: 2:10

I was going to wear my signature Hawaiian, but then I got so wrapped up in how the heck we're going to make this work that I didn't leave my computer until you popped in. And then time what is time.

Clark: 2:20

Here we are, yeah, and here we are, but this is going to be really interesting. We thought of this idea a while back. We thought about just going full face and we're like you know what we got? To save the mystery a little bit, let's build it up with a little bit of the anemojis and let's start building our YouTube presence too, so putting these episodes on YouTube, making them a little bit more engaging. So I think this will be an interesting test and you guys will have to tell us whether you like it or not.

Bruce: 2:44

Yeah, and who knows, maybe I'll scratch my nose and my face will reveal itself during the. Fs, that is the risk.

Clark: 2:50

That is the risk of this. It's like if you get an itch or something, you've got to resist it, because if you put your hand in front of your face, your face is coming out.

Bruce: 2:57

I'm resisting real hard.

Clark: 2:58

Right now my nose itches what you got to do is just move your eyebrows up and down like really fast, and it looks hilarious on the video, but then you're also scratching into that. That's not work.

Bruce: 3:08

Oh, I don't like that. It animates all of that. It's pretty good. I'll be honest, it's pretty good Like I'm super excited it's working this well, I feel like they've really captured the essence of the Disney movies that I hate that are coming out these days yeah, they kind of have that same style. Yes, they do. Hey Clark, speaking of style. Oh, vibe, check how you doing.

Clark: 3:34

Vibes check. I mean, this week is always a fun week. It's Thanksgiving week in the US, so usually a short week. We get like the Thursday and Friday off and then most people end up taking either days on the front half of that or days on the second half of that. So I ended up taking just one extra day. I did Wednesday to Friday, so I've been off since Wednesday, which honestly, has been really nice. I've been. I feel refreshed, feel like I slept in. I ate way too much food, but I balanced it with some exercise here and there. So I feel good about myself. What about you?

Bruce: 4:05

I. So, yeah, good, I took the whole week off. I've done my best connecting, do as little as humanly possible work wise. The week prior to Thanksgiving I think I was the first time I've worked like 10 hour days every day of the week oh, just, it's done. So I could take this whole week off and like, despite every urge to resist looking at the email, I've looked multiple times and bad week takeoff I am. Oh, you know, I could, I could have picked a better week. I can't believe you gave in yeah, no email.

Clark: 4:39

Why? Why'd you do that to yourself?

Bruce: 4:41

It's it's one of those things where it's one of these like very important projects that I have been very closely involved with and it's close to the finish line, like I have to review stuff tomorrow morning because I've neglected to review it this week. I didn't actually do any work, but I didn't read the email. Yeah, no, I did, but I what happened was I ended up giving myself anxiety because the I like now I have a lot of work to do, I know. So I'm getting punished for taking time off and I hate that.

Clark: 5:13

But yeah, and they made it worse for yourself because you looked at it and even though this is like the corporate We've talked about this on a few episodes previously this is like the corporate lie. It's thinking, oh, I'll just check in real quick. But really, when your brain is working, you're working, and we talked about that on a previous episode. Yes, if I go and take a shower, if I go and take a walk and I'm thinking about work, am I actually working, like, can I charge that time? Or if you're not charging that time, can I feel okay doing this? And we basically just find to say, yes, you definitely can, because you're actually thinking about the problems you're trying to solve, and so you kind of did work, even though you weren't planning to do work.

Bruce: 5:49

Yeah, and the lesson for all you listeners out there is when you take time off, whether it's uninstalling or just disabling notifications, get those apps off your phone. Because the trap I fell into was I opened my phone and I was like having a bowl of cereal and there was an email from the founder and I was like, oh no, what's going on? Got to read this and that spiraled into me. It's spending a lot more time reading things than I should have, so well, I hate to say this.

Clark: 6:19

I've got a confession. Yeah, let's hear it. I got pulled into a production issue on Friday. No, on Friday. On Friday.

Bruce: 6:28

And you were giving past.

Clark: 6:30

you know I was in my food. I ate way too much food. I felt terrible that day but I worked out in the morning so I felt okay, balance everything out. So Friday I wake up and I see some notes from some teams and I told I've talked about this before. I work internationally and there was this issue that came up, this production incident, and unfortunately, since my team is still kind of new, they don't really know how to handle everything. They don't have the connections. I had to step in and kind of help guide and smooth things over. So probably spent a good three and a half four hours on Friday working.

Bruce: 7:01

Dude. Come on, man, black Friday, you're supposed to be shopping, I know it was getting into consumerism and like buying expensive TVs that are $400, that are going to break in a year.

Clark: 7:11

Yeah, the customers we support unfortunately, you know, are always on like 365. So you kind of just never know when these things are going to come up. But it was good in a lot of ways because I think it wasn't an incident you know my team has faced before. So it was my opportunity to kind of train them up and then next time hopefully we won't have to be like hands-on, because I can make them responsible for handling the future.

Bruce: 7:31

Let me ask you this Clark Clark Reno, mr Animoji face, if you were truly on vacation and I say this because you clearly weren't in vacation mode you responded like, let's say, you were in the keys and you had no cell signal and this came through. What would happen?

Clark: 7:51

Oh, I mean, I'll be honest, they would have figured it out. Yeah, I think it would have been. It would have been bumpy, and that's the thing I think you know you're you're pointing out. A good point to make is this company, and every company, will move on without you. So don't feel like if you not being there, the whole company's going to shut down. That just won't happen. They'll figure out a way through it and the right people will step up and they'll be able to get the work done. So you can take the time off your need and you shouldn't feel guilty for doing that. Um, in my case, they certainly could have done this without me, but I think by having me there, it helped make it go a little bit quicker and it just helped everyone kind of learn as well, which was good. So it just was a little less rocky and unfortunately, I'm in a culture that texts oh, Bruce, they text when there's been issues. So I got the big boss texted me like hey, I need you to step in and help figure this out.

Bruce: 8:42

I remember the no one that's a. That's a pro tip as well. Only give your number to the people you care about deeply, Yep.

Clark: 8:49

And if you get a work phone, use your like. Turn your work phone off. Honestly, if you get a work phone, that's the beautiful situation. Never put stuff on your personal. Keep it completely separate. That way, when you're on vacation, turn that phone off and you're never going to get notified. That's the way to do it.

Clark: 9:03

Alternatively, reject the work phone, just reject it, don't take it, yeah, unless you have to do on call. Just don't take a work phone, I agree, because when you, when you succumb to that, that kind of signs you up for doing those extra duties Right.

Bruce: 9:14

They're basically saying hey, yeah, we'll pay for your phone bill, but you give us your time and your privacy and everything else that comes with the phone.

Clark: 9:23

So I guess that's the trap Work phone seems cool, Paying your phone bill seems cool, but in reality there's a there's negative consequences to that decision.

Bruce: 9:31

Yes, there are. Well, you know, sorry to hear you had to work Friday. I did see a couple of emails that have my name in them. I did not respond. So at least I looked, but I did not touch, I did not engage, and I know that that's going to hurt me on Monday. But here we are. It's Sunday, it's it's the. It's Sunday after Thanksgiving. We have our faces on camera. And Clark, I'm just happy to be here with you.

Clark: 9:54

That's. That's my fight. Yeah, you know, I'm kind of feeling that way too. It's kind of fun doing it this way and we'll see what you guys think as well, but it's certainly interesting and I think we should look at something more interesting. Some news oh no, some news coming down, some crazy stuff yeah, elon's putting more strands in people's brains, apple's embracing a global standard for the second time this year, some weird corporate technology stuff going on. Okay.

Bruce: 10:24

So let's, let's go back the first thing, let's the strands in the brain. So you, you know about.

Clark: 10:30

NeuroLink? Right, I've heard of it. Okay, so, elon, he has this startup that he puts brain implants in people's heads that basically ties into their, their neurological system and it's able to help help a lot of good things. Like you know, if someone has Parkinson's, it's able to. It's able to send small pulses of you know whatever electricity to those pieces of the brain that typically you know make you shake when you have Parkinson's or other other diseases or anything like that, and it essentially can help stabilize it so that you don't shake or things like that. So it's a really cool idea in theory and what they did is they? Basically they did this.

Clark: 11:08

I don't know if you saw the demo. They did this demo where they put a NeuroLink in a pig's brain and they kind of showed how they could control what it was doing and control its emotions and doing all this. It was creepy, it was some like black mirror kind of stuff, but I can see the benefits. I can see the benefits as to how this would help, and they just raised, without talking about it, an additional $43 million to continue their trek into this technology. Would you get a? Would you get a brain implant? Absolutely not no.

Bruce: 11:37

Really no. My brain's, mine, that's like the last, that's the last bastion of what you own right Like. We pay taxes for the land we live on, we pay bills for the operations we get, we pay for everything the I'm not going to pay to have someone listen in on my brain thoughts.

Clark: 11:57

Yeah, it's super creepy. It is FDA approved for human clinical trials, Of course.

Bruce: 12:01

have you ever worked like? The FDA is one of the worst organizations we have.

Clark: 12:05

I know one thing. I just know it's like a standard that if you get that, then it's like okay, no, it's not, it's really bad.

Bruce: 12:12

They're like the FDA literally will give a factory farm like a seal of approval and they won't check in on them for seven years. So it's like it's just not a good organization. It's not well funded, it's not well represented, it's not well staffed. So, yeah, fda approval means nothing to me other than bad news. Bears, don't put these things in your brain.

Clark: 12:33

Don't give Elon more money, you know they have those like those hearing aids that actually they like put something into your head and your brain. Yeah, help.

Clark: 12:43

Like yeah yeah, exactly that's what, exactly what I would have learned about recently. So this isn't like too far off from that. But obviously it's for much broader use cases than just helping you hear better or helping you transmit whatever signals are coming your ears so you can actually interpret that. So, yeah, this is a whole nother level. But they you know I think it was founded in 2016, it says in this article and yeah, they continue to grow, so they're raising more money and they continue to pave the way to implanting things in people's brains.

Bruce: 13:14

Don't like that, don't like that at all. What's the second one?

Clark: 13:19

The second one. I mean this might be even crazier because Apple is always such a stickler when it comes to, like any, adopting any global standards, like, I think, for a while. You know the whole USBC thing. It basically took Europe and the European Union to say we won't sell your phone If you don't use USBC, so get rid of your stupid lightning thing. And they did it this year with the iPhone 15, which is one of the primary reasons I'm getting it and I also need another phone, but even bigger. They're solving a world crisis. I don't know, I don't know. I haven't heard, haven't heard about this yet. You know green bubble, blue bubble, you know they're solving it.

Clark: 13:56

Adopt RCS, which is a messaging standard that was built I don't know how many years ago now, but essentially it allows the blue bubble, green bubble to get a little bit closer. Where, for some of the likes you've been in these chats, you're talking about text, someone likes your message, yeah, yeah yeah.

Bruce: 14:11

Text I hear a green bubble, blue bubble, I think about like the ocean is full of, you know, death and the trees are all dying.

Clark: 14:18

That's what I think when I hear green bubble, blue bubble, we're talking about texting the fact that you're one in a million thinking that everyone knew what I was talking about when you say group bubble Disconnect.

Bruce: 14:30

When I get a green bubble on my phone, all I think is I'm just not going to send this person pictures, because it's going to look like crap, exactly.

Clark: 14:36

It's going to compress down and also it's going to you know, if someone likes a message. Have you been in a group chat where everybody's green? Someone likes a message? And it says like this person liked this message, like it sends it verbally out it's the worst because you get so many of those. It's, it's the absolute worst. So they're actually making. This standard essentially allows them to send those types of things and, for iPhones, essentially to get that as a thumbs up or as an exclamation point or whatever it is, and it also helps with compression of images and videos, so that way it will come through nice and smooth, just like iMessages do.

Bruce: 15:09

However, stick into their guns.

Clark: 15:11

Okay, stick into their guns. They're not going to change Android messages to blue bubbles. They'll still be green. Good for them.

Bruce: 15:19

Good for you know, this was really something that needed to be done. In this day and age, you know, there's not bigger issues that I could go and tackle.

Clark: 15:29

Forget world hunger. Forget, like Russia, invading just random countries, you know, forget everything that's going on.

Bruce: 15:35

Two large scale wars happening on our planet right now, but I'm so glad, I'm so glad the green bubble, blue bubbles finally coming to an end.

Clark: 15:44

See, you know, yeah, I love that. You just understand. You know the world's problem is great.

Bruce: 15:49

I just want to also point out I don't smile all the time Like I think my anemoji just reads my face as a perpetual glad smile.

Clark: 16:00

but I'm not smiling. Well, I am now making me laugh, but I've seen those pearly white teeth, yours.

Bruce: 16:05

You smile quite a bit I do, but there's been times that I've wanted to be upset on this conversation and my anemoji smiling is very disconcerting to me. So no, there's times I am not smiling, Even when I do the funny face, it's still smiling.

Clark: 16:21

Mine's like the opposite. If I stop it like does a slight frown? I'm doing it right now Slight frown, and then I really have to like, accentuate my lips to go into like a upset face.

Bruce: 16:33

If, uh, if you're not watching this on YouTube, well, I. It's just a pity the person who just listens to this in their audio feed only. We're changing the game.

Clark: 16:42

Now we're on two different mediums. We've really made this, made this next jump into the new age. We've certainly made something.

Bruce: 16:49

We haven't even seen this thing edit together yet, so who knows, there might be no anemojis.

Clark: 16:54

Well, you know, all the magic comes with the edits. That's true. That's true.

Bruce: 16:59

I really surprised your news didn't include what happened with Open AI last week. I know.

Clark: 17:03

Well, see, the problem is and I'm battling myself here, yeah, I really. I've gone to the AI bucket, like the last two episodes in a row, and I was like you know what? I can't. I can't go back to that watering hole. I got to do something different. Fair, fair, Maybe this is your turn. Well, I've got to bring it up.

Bruce: 17:19

Everyone with a pulse on what's going on with Open AI already. I already knows this and it's not anything significant, but you know, Sam Altman, CEO and founder of Open AI, was fired by their board, who he has contentions with. Microsoft looked to make an offer to him to bring him on. Then the I think it's 740 employees at Open AI, 700 of which signed a form saying they would walk if he didn't come back. Then they fired most of the board, but not all of them, including one that Altman had contentions with and then brought him back and he's back at work again doing his job.

Clark: 17:56

Just a super weird I mean like you want to talk about.

Bruce: 17:59

You know the reason like why I don't like it's been. It's been very gray and I don't want to lead into speculation or anything. There's lots of people who have takes and thoughts and all that stuff. I'm just going to go with the fact that there was a disagreement it seems like that's really what it was is vision for the company, what Altman wanted to do versus what the board wanted to do, and they saw a chance to oust him and they did. And I mean, when you're one of the biggest tech evaluations of all time, literally fire your you know rock star CEO that everyone worships and follows at your company.

Clark: 18:36

He's the face of the company, like they, and he just did like the Dev Day, like a day before, so he just like broadly out in the open for everyone to see, in the face of open AI and their like most recent you know tech adventures that there were like basically saying, hey, we're going even further with AI and then just to get rid of them the next day, like that is insane.

Bruce: 18:56

He's also a coder. Like this is you're not just firing some useless executive who only makes decisions. This dude writes the code. Yeah, he's an engineer. Yeah.

Clark: 19:05

He's an engineer who like started it with like uh whoever of like original founders, so, yeah, they don't mess around. And the thing I saw, too, is like Microsoft owns like 50% of open AI or something like that. And basically, uh, Saudi had Nadella was like I didn't know anything about this. Like he openly said he has zero idea this was happening. And, like you said, he tried to like hire Sam to come back to Microsoft, Cause he's like what are you doing? We're not going to lose him over this.

Bruce: 19:31

Right, right, and I think they were going to basically gobble up the entire company, which would have been amazing. I mean, not really, microsoft's acquired way too much and they need to be split up, and our monopoly laws are crap and we're failing as a society. But uh, the the, so I need that anymore there. It would have been pretty great for Microsoft, who would love to acquire open AI, but probably can't because the FCC would stop them to just gobble up all their employees because the board is full of idiots. So, yeah, it was almost a really funny joke. Everyone could tell their parents at Thanksgiving.

Clark: 20:01

Yeah, yeah for sure. It's so weird Like it almost felt like it was like April 1st or something. The cool day Cause, like they were just was so unexpected and it sounds like basically Microsoft, you know, swung the heavy bat and we're like, all right, we're kicking all you out unless you're on board. So hopefully they're back. You know in the right direction of where they were heading the first place.

Bruce: 20:20

You know, clark, I think that's a, that's a good segue. He you know what would have fixed all of their problems at open AI.

Clark: 20:27

You know, I don't know. Is it like a different corporate structure? Maybe different corporate?

Bruce: 20:31

structure. It's so simple. In fact, it's so simple. We talked about it a hundred episodes ago. Our topic today is when meetings could be emails. That's right. We're revisiting, we're going back to the very beginning, this time with weird cartoon faces, to talk about the very first thing we ever talked about, spoke about, discussed on this podcast, which is should a meeting be an email and vice versa. Clark, has your opinion changed since all those?

Clark: 21:02

years ago. I think even this podcast could have been an email. I say we might just wanna cancel it.

Bruce: 21:08

Yeah, yeah, let's end it at 100. Like, let's just stop over a head. Nice round number.

Clark: 21:15

Exactly. Well, we've talked for weeks, We've done the math and the amount of hours that you and I have talked together is equivalent to two work weeks, which is wild for this podcast, After 100 episodes. I'll be honest did you re-listen to that episode before coming to this podcast?

Bruce: 21:30

I did back. No, okay One. The quality, I mean I don't know if you've ever gone back to listening to some of the earlier stuff just out of curiosity. Yeah, we have improved as hosts tremendously, I would say, and I think our listeners would agree, just in our comfort our ability to talk, ramble, be ourselves. It's 10X better than it was two plus years ago and I think we've learned a lot as people too. Oh, I've gone through multiple job changes. You've been promoted. You're some senior executive god of the world now we know a lot more. So listening to ourselves all those years ago, that's just gonna make me upset with things I said to myself. So let's be present.

Clark: 22:17

You know this is kind of like a fresh take. Yeah, this is kind of a fresh take on. Could this have been an email and it could rely on a meeting, it could rely on a conversation you had. It could, whatever it is, you know, teams call. Could it have been an email?

Bruce: 22:30

Our last two episodes, I think, were the perfect run up to this too. That's why I was excited to revisit this. Yeah, I've done all these episodes on meeting topics and how to make meetings more interesting, and I believe when we first talked about this all those years ago, I took the stance that you should get less meetings. You should just do less, less talking, less meetings, more emails, and I might have softened my stance a little bit on that whole situation.

Clark: 22:59

Yeah, yeah, I think my stance was probably similar to yours, because I've talked about this many times on this podcast. You know, I'm just in a culture of meetings. It's almost like impossible to go a day without like 10 meetings. It's wild. Some days are even worse where I have like four or five meetings happening at the same time. It's just I just go into client sprees at the beginning of the week. I can't attend 75% of the meetings in my calendar. I'm declining and I think my stance was. I think there's certain exceptions where a in-person or face-to-face over teams meeting is really worthwhile and worth getting everyone on a call for, but for the most part, most things can be just handled with like just process, you know having the right process in place, understanding you know the roles and responsibilities. I think that was my take, but yet again, it was over two years ago. Who knows if I was that intelligent then.

Bruce: 23:51

So let's break it down. Let's do what we do now, which is examine the problem, which is just the fact that our calendars are all so full. If you are new in your career and you're just getting started, chances are you don't live in the nightmare yet. That is just the never ending list of meetings that starts at eight and ends, hopefully, at five, but if you're Clark, it ends like it's seven at night and there's no breathing room all day long. All you have is meetings.

Clark: 24:20

Meetings after meetings. After meetings yeah, I just hired someone actually and I went to schedule a meeting on their calendar and I was like God bless them. God bless them for having no meetings from 11 am till 5 pm. That is so nice, it is nice, isn't it? I was jealous. I was like I just wanna start, yeah, yeah.

Bruce: 24:39

No, I know that feeling. I had two people start two weeks ago and their calendars were so clear it was able I was able to schedule one-on-ones team sync ups, introductions. Oh the joy of an open and empty calendar from a scheduling perspective.

Clark: 24:54

I miss them, I miss those days so much.

Bruce: 24:57

So the meme is this meeting could have been an email. Right, and that was the original discussion is when can a meeting effectively become an email? And clearly we've over-rotated. I think you and I could both agree there's just too many meetings today. Yeah for sure.

Clark: 25:17

Ever since COVID, it seems like people just don't know how to communicate efficiently, so they just fall back to saying let's throw in another meeting on the calendar because we have to talk about this. It's wild.

Bruce: 25:27

And I think the other problem too is people are not good communicators, especially in written form. That's something I've learned in the last two years. I don't know why it took me so long to learn it, but people cannot write. They just can't, and when you ask them to explain themselves in writing, chances are you're going to get something that's pretty garbage. So sometimes it's almost better to get an email or a meeting with certain individuals than to schedule, than to ask for an email, because you don't know what you're going to get.

Clark: 25:56

Yeah, it's true. I think communication majors or people who write white papers or things like that are so underappreciated, because being able to communicate at that level where you can make your point clear, you can make sure that everyone's on the same page and that no one has any follow-up questions all in written form, not communicating at all, is amazing. I think something that also might tie into this, though as well, and we can dissect this, is I think people's ability to stay focused has gotten worse over the years, because I think every single meeting, all people do is multitask, which I stand firm in my stance. It's a myth.

Clark: 26:35

I don't think you can effectively multitask and do anything Either. Your focus is somewhere else and you don't catch everything. You're catching 60%. People are going to have to repeat things. Ever since all the whole COVID work from home thing, people have lied to themselves that they can be able to multitask during meetings answer emails while the meeting's happening. No, you're following something short and you might be missing the point of the conversation, which leads to just having more conversations, or more communication about something, which then leads to more meetings.

Bruce: 27:03

You're contributing to the problem. This entire podcast, visual 8 Time I was playing games on my Steam Deck, so multitasking is just out of control. That would be really cute, clark, when you have this together, but it's a visual guy, That'd be incredible.

Clark: 27:16

Well, actually this was actually a ploy by me to get you to focus, because by having you on camera you can't multitask, so I know the quality is just going to improve from your own.

Bruce: 27:25

Oh, on the contrary. Actually, I can multitask on camera. I can do it really well. I am great at maintaining eye contact with the top half of my screen while I just scroll Reddit right there in a tiny little window. It's a I hope your employees aren't listening to this. Oh, I hope so they don't. Actually, I know a couple that do. They're cool peeps and they probably know I'm multitasking Fair enough.

Clark: 27:49

Well, like you know, something's wrong.

Clark: 27:51

This is just the example of like the Robin culture is but when there's so many meetings that people are multitasking, obviously they don't think this meeting is important, or they're on a meeting that it's like, ok, what do I have to be here? And they think they should, or it's either that I guess maybe this will be interesting to talk about. You tell me what you think. You think the majority of people are multitasking because there's just so many meetings they can never get any worked on. Or do you think the majority of people are multitasking because they think the meetings that they are are pointless?

Bruce: 28:20

I think it's both, I think it's got to be 50-50, right?

Clark: 28:24

Yeah, for me it's definitely both. Yeah, I think it's definitely like I'm thinking through meetings this past week well, maybe prior to that, prior to the holiday week and I 100% think it's both. Like there's somewhere. I'm just like what are we even meeting about? Like there's no agenda, there's nothing like that. So the meeting is just going back to those meeting topics we had in the last two episodes having effective meetings. We talked all about it. If you don't have an agenda in it, it's like what are we even trying to accomplish? And I think I go into a lot of meetings like, OK, what's the point of this? So I try to ask that question up front what are we trying to get to at the end of this? Yeah, but I agree with you. I think either I'm trying to just multitask, to answer emails because I'm trying to catch up or, yeah, it's probably just because I don't think I understand what the point of the meeting is the?

Bruce: 29:09

my face just showed because I scratched my nose, just so you know, I don't care, I'm not hiding my face, people know who I am. You get to see my mustache, though, for like a hot second. Yeah, to your point. It's like a grizzly. Yeah, oh, it's, it's, it's nasty. It's a nasty mustache.

Bruce: 29:27

Right now I'm not happy with it at all. But what can you do? It's going to get shaved off in four days. Clark, the issue I have is, I think people use meetings as crutches and they schedule meetings because they don't know how. Like you said, they don't. People don't know how to write anymore. They don't know how to effectively communicate. It stands bad. The meeting is the quintessential crutch. If I schedule a meeting, if I put time in your calendar for you and the other stakeholders in this project I'm doing, what I've effectively done is I've shared my inability to execute on the responsibility I have with a lot of other people, and now I have others that can drag through the muck with me. I think there is a tremendous problem with the ability to execute on your own. People just don't have that anymore. Like visual work right.

Clark: 30:20

That's where you're getting at Like being able to successfully do your job well, Correct.

Bruce: 30:26

Or they know that the other stakeholders are so picky, anal, retentive, that if they're not included in the meeting, all they're going to do is stonewall you later on because they weren't included in the project. That's a great point. So the meeting becomes basically this system of buy-in or shearing the load when it comes to work, and it's truly just the ultimate work crutch. It's funny that we're reevaluating this two years later, but the thing I've taken away is the meeting is the lazy man's way of getting work done.

Clark: 31:10

Yeah, like trying to push something forward because they don't truly understand what they need to do to help in the process, or just the process is so unclear, it's the wild west and to get anything done it's always different, like there's no consistency. That's exactly it.

Clark: 31:27

Yeah, I 100% agree with you Because, as I think about like the thing I love about Agile and we've talked about this before the Agile way of working used to be primarily for software development Short two weeks sprints where you as a team kind of commit to work that you guys are fully capable of accomplishing, whether it's a development task or whatever, or marketing or sales, whatever it might be and then through that two weeks, you're able to then have a retrospective say how did these two weeks go? You're able to say, ok, how can we help move work faster, like having that short feedback loop so you can continue doing and delivering work better and faster. The thing that I love about it is they every day. The only mandatory meeting really is a daily stand up and it's supposed to be just 15 minutes where you check in what did you do yesterday, what are you doing today or do you have new blockers? And outside of that you might have your meetings for planning the next sprint.

Clark: 32:17

You might have a retrospective, but you could likely do all those other activities in a full day where you say we're going to take the whole day to have a retrospective, to refine the next sprint's work and then to plan the next couple of sprints together and so you can kind of do that all in one day and the rest of the week. You could theoretically only have that 15 minute stand up every single day of the week. But obviously that sounds good in theory and I think everyone else, if you don't have every other process around you kind of coming together to enable you to do your work like that, or your team is not able to do your work on your own, you're going to be stuck in other meetings trying to basically close the gap between other teams or pull other teams along with you so that they can do the work you need them to deliver on.

Bruce: 33:00

Whatever your objectives are, I really like that play in theory and I think that does work for teams that are fully brought into Agile and where you have a single owner or one leader who's kind of saying here's, you got to go, do, go, do it Right. That falls apart when you are in a more hierarchical structure where you're reporting to maybe four different people and they all want skin in the game and they all want to give you their opinion all the time. This is, I mean, maybe I'm leaning into some marketing problems here, but I remember those days. Those days were the developer days, clark, that you're talking about. They were so nice.

Clark: 33:45

Oh, I missed those because there were times where I was on teams where I was like I rarely had meetings beyond them. They always stand up. Occasionally I'd have code reviews in the afternoon, but it was all for the work that I was doing and so I didn't really need anyone else and have to have all these coordination meetings just to do work. I can just do my work and the process was there to enable me to get it in the right place have it tested against Lintin, end-to-end tested, uat tested, unit tested all the good stuff. And then it has a production pipeline to say, okay, as long as I merge it into this branch, it's going to be out in the next release. So the process was really really clear. So we didn't have to have a bunch of coordination because we knew what was going on and typically, kind of the manager of the team would kind of help close gaps or pull people in when we needed the help. So we were kind of abstracted away from it, which was really nice that is nice.

Bruce: 34:33

Is it still that way for you today?

Clark: 34:35

No, You're hilarious. I know, I really wish it was, and I think the thing I'm trying to turn to. I really think there's ways you can solve this, but it's really really hard without top-down buy-in and also bottom-up kind of support and showing that it works. Yeah, and I'm curious from your perspective, like how do you solve this at an organization where it feels like you're just running around from meeting to meeting and you can't seem to effectively do any work?

Bruce: 35:06

So I've got two examples and it's both ends of the spectrum, yeah, real-life examples on how I've found meetings to either be the most amazing thing or the bane of my existence. We'll start with the bad. The bad is the leadership oriented meeting when you have too many cooks in the kitchen, but not enough. Too many, maybe too many chefs, not enough line cooks it's probably the appropriate analogy. That is when meeting hell begins, right, because all it is is people flexing their authority, trying to say what they want to see, but no one's coming into any compromise. You're going to end up scheduling another meeting to check back in and the only thing that's going to have changed is the opinions of the week, and you're kicking the can to effectively, just through sheer brute force of meetings, hopefully get some kind of consensus down the line, and what ends up happening is you go through dozens of hours of meetings to get to a subpar outcome.

Clark: 36:10

That's the bad. Sounds like you've been dealing with this one a little bit.

Bruce: 36:13

Yeah, just a little bit. Just a little bit. You know my entire life it never changes.

Clark: 36:18

Yeah, I know it's tough, and the other thing I'd say is, you know leadership is coming in to like flex their muscle or just the lack of trust is there between the leader and the team and I think that's just bad management.

Clark: 36:31

Frankly, like I think when you hire people as a manager, you know I'm a people leader, I hire people to do the job and I think something I try to do I'll be completely frank, I don't think I've done it well, as things have gotten crazy, you know, through the end of this year because I haven't been able to look far enough ahead is define what success looks like and what those guide rails are.

Clark: 36:52

But in theory, like I try to protect my team when you know, let's say, senior vice president tries to step in or something like give their feedback, I'm like, hey, this person on my team, you know there is their responsibility to own this, and like I appreciate your feedback.

Clark: 37:05

But let's go through the right process here. Instead of scheduling this ad hoc meeting where you can, you know, kind of jump in and share all your feedback, let's let them do go through the normal process, come to you with kind of a demo or read out and kind of share their perspective on it so you can hear the whole story before just jumping in to share feedback. So I try to provide that umbrella coverage to my team and I would say, a majority time it unfortunately doesn't work, but some of the times it does and that makes me feel really good because then it's like okay, my team feels like they're empowered, they feel like they can be trusted and they get an opportunity to get visibility with you know, the senior leaders, which is great. But I think that is like the biggest thing in the company is you either have lack of skill, lack of trust, lack of process, where no one knows where anything is at, which then leads to exactly what you're saying Executive leadership having to like jump in and like control the situation every single time.

Bruce: 37:55

Yeah, the so frustrating, the I don't think so. My conclusion that I've come to is if the meeting is scheduled and if it is recurring, chances are it's not a good meeting. And I say that because if you felt the need to schedule something and make it recurring, then you didn't have confidence on its ability to execute on its own right. You have no trust in the people doing the work.

Clark: 38:21

Yep, yeah, exactly, I think. I'm trying to take examples like project check-ins, like I oversee probably 20 plus projects and every single one of those projects, bruce, has a project check-in. Yep, that's 30 minutes of my time every single week, yep, for 20 different projects. Now let me ask you this it's 10 hours of meetings.

Bruce: 38:42

Right there, right, it's 10 hours of meetings. Do you find them productive?

Clark: 38:49

I would say a majority of the time no.

Bruce: 38:52

You could probably have a status update from the team leader, and that would be just as useful to you, correct?

Clark: 38:59

Yeah, Shared out via email or something like that, rather than us meeting every single week on it. It's like, okay, here's the update, Send it via email. If anyone has questions, send them over. Or just go to this. I mean, ideally, go to this system that we have in place like a ticket management system, like GRO or something like that, and say you can see our split readout, here it is. And they can kind of look at it, Because we spend time building those PowerPoint decks for these presentations. That it's like where are we doing this? Yep.

Bruce: 39:25

Yep, and that is my thought exactly is once you've gotten to that level, you've effectively removed the productivity of the meeting altogether.

Clark: 39:34

Yeah, so my second and the problem is so many people attend those meetings to your point, sorry.

Clark: 39:38

I'm diving deep on this, but there's like 30 people in each of those meetings. So think about how many man hours are wasted by having so many people on the meeting. Why does everyone need to be there? And occasionally someone jumps in with like feedback or something. But I'd rather have the meeting to say, hey, call me when things are going off track. Here's your success criteria. I need you to have this done by this date. If you feel like you can't get the thing done by that date, let's set up a meeting. Let's talk about why.

Bruce: 40:02

Perfect segue, clark, because that was my solution. What I've found works so well for me when it comes to communication, meeting, email, what have you is the impromptu slack huddle. It works so well. If you can get someone on the phone when you have an actual problem and have a one-on-one conversation with them, you can solve that problem, and you can solve it pretty quickly. Two brains communicating, like we are right now, is a very effective way to hash something out. I think. The second you add more people suddenly, the thought process of oh, it's what I'm going to say, going to embarrass myself or someone around me. What if they don't take the feedback? Well, I'm not comfortable speaking up in front of leadership. You add levels of discomfort, which means you're adding levels of, basically, communication blockage.

Bruce: 40:53

Yeah that's fair. The impromptu call or not impromptu? I say hey, I have a question. I think it'd be way easier for us to just hash this out in 15 minutes. Can we chat? One I'm saving you 30 minutes of scheduling an email. Two we're going to end the call once the problem is resolved. We're not going to run the clock and say oh, are there other?

Bruce: 41:11

business we have to take care of. It leads to a far more natural and focused conversation with two individuals versus going super gung-ho in a room of 10 or 30 or however many, where the confidence isn't there and the communication isn't there.

Clark: 41:28

Yeah, oh man, I agree with you. I think those are way more effective Because, to your point, you've got a couple of things going on there. We really break down. What you're saying is you're bringing the people together that are actually doing the work, the line folks. Those two people are getting together, they're the subject matter experts for whatever's being worked on, whatever the project is, they're solving the problem together. Truthfully, even if you think these project meetings seem essential and the leaders come down and they say, oh, you guys need to go do this, go figure this out, if you really look at what you just said, bruce, at the end of the day, that's exactly what it leads to. You leave that meeting and those two people end up getting back together or being forced to get back together and just working out the issue.

Bruce: 42:12

Anyway, if you just started with that, you could have avoided all those steps and the other thing you end up doing. So let's say you eliminate all of the scheduled meetings you actually have the ability to influence this and say let's get rid of all the schedule things. Now your calendar is actually free up to take calls when you need to, when work actually needs to get done, versus when we want to push it to get done. It ends up opening up you for more focus time to actually do the job you were hired for. It ends up opening up you to take the call when someone else needs your help or for you to call them when you need their help. It's a win-win all around, and that was the conclusion I came to over these last two years was the meeting shouldn't have been an email. It should have been a phone call.

Clark: 42:55

Yeah, either a phone call or, to your point, to avoid the meeting. I think there's a lot of steps to get to what you said and maybe it's worth breaking down with those At the beginning I talked through. I think you need the top-down support and trust as well as you need the bottom up. You guys are saying we're not going to schedule meetings. We're going to send out our weekly report because it is my role as whoever the project manager or the program manager it's my role to send out communication about how the project's going. So I'm going to send out weekly report on Monday with our status and if anyone has questions they can come back.

Clark: 43:29

But I'm going to tell basically the high-level things. Right Is how's the project going? Are we on track? If we're not on track, what are we doing about it and where are we blocked and where can we use support? And I think if you cover those three things in that email, you'll get the outputs that you're looking for is like leadership saying oh hey, I see you're blocked on that, this team's working on something else, but I'm going to shift their priorities so that they can come support you, because that's more important for the company and I think if you have those three things in the report, like I think I challenge everybody who's listening to this look at your meetings or your project meetings and see if those three things are there, I guarantee you they're not.

Clark: 44:04

Like there's a missing link there where they say the project's off track but they don't say why and what they're doing to mitigate it. Or it's something to say hey, we're on track but we're closely coming up to this blocker. Here's the support we need and who we need it from. Like I can almost 100% guarantee if you were to break down those meetings, one of those things is missing, which is why you have the meeting. Yep.

Bruce: 44:26

And I'm going to throw in one more wrinkle. One more wrinkle because I do remember the stance I took on the first episode, which was when you send an email, you have it in writing. But the challenge with email is it's technology. That's older than dirt Clark. How many times does this happen to you? People get dropped from email threads Yep yeah. And suddenly, just because it's in writing doesn't mean anything because, oh well, I wasn't on the thread, I didn't get my chance to contribute or to offer my opinion. Another pro tip and this might sound like we're just endorsing Slack the whole time, or I'm endorsing Slack Now create a Slack channel for the projects you run.

Bruce: 45:09

That includes the stakeholders and those doing the work, and what you'll find is all communication can happen in there. Little breakouts can happen when they need to, because conversations will just naturally occur in real time versus an email. People don't get dropped from Slack channels. They don't. If you plan the project appropriately, you create a channel for the project. It leads to a very natural place for the conversation to occur. When you need to have a meeting, you can either do a quick breakout huddle or you can call somebody individually. But I think all three of these things together leads to a far more natural way for work to get done and collaboration to occur than just scheduling it and force feeding it, hoping that something occurs.

Clark: 45:54

Also just adds up. I completely just lost video. I got a temperature warning on my phone. It says iPhone needs to cool down before you can use it.

Bruce: 46:01

Nice. What do you keep that?

Clark: 46:05

It's like 70 degrees in there. I think it's just because I'm charging it and I had the camera on and. I was doing that all the same time. I think the charging did it. Yeah, wow, that's crazy. Well, this is why we do these, so that we can understand for the future if this is going to be effective or not.

Bruce: 46:20

You would not believe how much time I spent looking at other technologies that we'd have to pay for to do this, but we would look like anime cats, so I figured that wasn't up here Allie Clark.

Clark: 46:30

Yeah, probably not. I mean, I might be able to get into it. I just need a little bit of a try. I'm always down to try. Well, you're probably not going to have my video, maybe for the rest of this, but we'll just continue going.

Bruce: 46:41

Should I stop lying? Should we just say, hey, this is the end of the YouTube, go watch the rest or listen to the rest on our podcast feed, which is corporate strategy of the podcast. Look it up on any of your podcast platforms of choice. This is the end of the video. I'm going to stop recording that. What?

Clark: 46:55

a lead in. Oh my goodness, that was massively done. It's like we've done 100 episodes of this. We're finally getting comfortable. Oh, I love it. But yeah, everything to your point, I agree. I actually really like that. I like the fact that there's a slack channel. I think the thing that gets out of hands and, I'll be honest, it's this way for me and maybe this is why we need to talk about that top down support. Those things are done but no one has any time to actually check those channels. I think the people like the meeting because it allows them to essentially have a set aside time to talk about the project, to understand where it's at and then basically to move on whatever's next on their calendar. I think the leaders like to have those because it gives them an opportunity to review it when they can't keep up with all the different slack channels that are going on.

Bruce: 47:45

I'm going to throw a counter on that, throw a counter.

Clark: 47:48

I think part of the reason.

Bruce: 47:50

I think part of the reason why people don't buy into that method is because the other projects they're on, because no one just gets to work on one thing anymore. The other 18 projects they're doing. I'll still have the meetings. You know what, as soon as a slot opens up on their calendar, some inefficient program manager is going to come in and gobble up that time. Oh, clark's free now I'm going to take his 30 minutes to have him look at another. It's so true we're going to do what happens. Double weekly check in. Now it's got to be. You know, for those who might just be joining us for the first time, let's say you were watching the video and now you're listening to the podcast. We have this method, this principle, a corporate strategy called cat Hit him with it.

Bruce: 48:35

Culture, autonomy, challenge and compensation Not always in that order. When you have a good cat and everything's functioning the way it should be, you're not going to have those meeting vultures swoop in and grab your free space. The issue is, let's say you're able to clean up one little pocket, your team meeting. We're able. Hey, you know what. Our team meetings are just going to be a 15-minute check-in. We're going to talk about what we did over the weekend, make sure everyone's doing okay, ask if anyone needs anything and peace out. It's not going to be a stuffy corporate meeting. It's going to be something a little more chill. The second you turn that 30 minutes into 15, the buzzard's going to swoop in and grab that other 15 minutes. That's because your cat's not good at a corporate level. It's great at a team level.

Clark: 49:24

Yeah, I agree with you. I think that is a perfect sign of the culture being wrong, the autonomy being bad. Because, in theory, if you're a project leader and I want to talk just a little about that top-down for anyone who's listening from higher level management, because I think everything we're saying makes sense but you might be trying to think about, well, how do I actually like stay engaged on this projects it's about having that trust. If I hire Bruce to do a job and say, bruce, I trust you to run this project, I'm going to check in with you in our weekly one-on-ones because you report to me and we're going to just talk about how things are going. I don't need to step in further than that, unless you need my support or if things are going off the track.

Clark: 50:03

Here's what success looks like. Here are your guide rails. Come tell me if you have any problems. And I think if I have that level of trust, I don't need all these check-ins, right? Because I can just trust that work is going to get done and Bruce is going to get it done. And if Bruce doesn't get it done, in our reviews I'm going to give him the feedback and I'm going to step in and help him where he needs it, to help him get on the right track and say, okay, why can't you be successful doing this? How do I help you? And let's think about how we can keep moving things forward on this project. But I think that's the problem, it's the trust. It's like they have to be involved in everything because they can't trust it's being done properly. And it's a great indicator of CAC, to your point, it's a good indicator of this place. All they do is add meetings and it's because of lack of trust from the top and a lack of process from the bottom.

Bruce: 50:46

And I love the point on trust you made, clark, and I think what ends up happening when you start to have trust and you're able to implement our little idea here, maybe just locally with your team, you say, hey, we're going to go ad hoc, we're not going to do as many emails, we're not going to do as many meetings, we're going to do more ad hoc calls and conversations. You prove it works. Yeah, you say, is this helping? Do we feel like this is actually making our jobs and work easier? Hey, corporate strategy gets it wrong sometimes, but let's say, what we've suggested here actually works.

Bruce: 51:20

What you do is you say hey to the vulture who keeps swooping in. I got a great idea. I know that you're super comfortable with scheduling these meetings. This is how things have always been done, but I want to show you what we've started doing and we found that we can actually increase our productivity, get projects out quicker and have better collaboration and tracking for everything by doing it this way. Teach them how to be a better meeting maker. See if you can get away from and educate them, maybe even have them listen to this podcast. Get them out of the meeting. Land grab the calendar, land grab and they will then proselytize this out and you might find your organization turns far for the better just by making this one change. Yep, no I love that.

Clark: 52:10

I think that's a really good point. Yeah, it's idealist. But I agree with you and I think if your team, if you guys, can hold strong and say nicely to people who are like, hey, we need a project meeting for this, and be like, wait, hold on. No, we don't. We send out our meetings, why do you want this meeting? I think you can go back to them Obviously, say it much nicer than this.

Clark: 52:29

But you can say, ok, bruce, why do you want us to have a project meeting?

Clark: 52:32

And they'll kind of tell you the program manager will say, well, we need to understand the status, how you're doing on budget, if you're driving towards your timelines. But OK, I actually send this out in an email for a project update every single week. Are you doing to have other people in the meeting? Is there other communication you'd like to be sent out or something added to this report? Because we're trying to protect our team's time and do more work by not having additional meetings. And I think, if you can phrase it nicely and also hold the line, to say it's not that I'm trying to not have other meetings or follow the process, but I'm trying to just have my team do all the work so we can keep these projects on track, and by having all these meetings we're delaying the work. I think if you can say that nicely and have someone who has courage, who can help lead that and drive through upper management, I think you could be really effective in what you're saying.

Bruce: 53:17

Bruce, I completely agree and even though I'm agreeing with you, I'm agreeing with my point. It's leading by example. And the added benefit of this is when you start to do this and you start to take charge and show that, hey, my team is the one that's kind of pushing the needle towards good right, we're moving away from the old, stuffy corporate way of doing things and we're modernizing. That's how you become leaders in the company. You will start to see other people come to you for other things, say, hey, I like the way you guys ran this. Can you help us do this with another project? And that's elevation of both your status, your brand. Maybe your compensation? That'd be nice. Probably not. Let's be real here. That's the one thing that's never going to change. You're not going to get paid more money, but hey, two out of three ain't bad.

Clark: 54:06

Not bad at all. Yeah, I agree, I love it and honestly, you're getting me pumped up, Bruce. I've got some leadership combos, I've got coming up just to kind of talk about how things are going. It's with some very senior leaders. We kind of established a different way of working where we're just organizing in pillars and I'm one of the leaders on one of the pillars and I think I'm going to pitch this same thing for the pillar that I'm leading is just to be like hey, I know it's comfortable to run projects the way we've always run them, but I've got a better way to do it and let's give us some time, trust that we're going to deliver on the results. And if you feel like you don't have the exposure that you need, let's talk about what you need in order to feel like it's being effective for you. But let's not just throw other meetings on the board just so that people can check in here and there.

Bruce: 54:50

I'm actually in the process of building a process with a couple of team members of like mind around this, and it's all about, when a project or a campaign gets kicked started, that you have the stakeholders included. It all gets tracked in a JIRA ticket. You have a kickoff call with everyone who's involved to ensure that levels set and that everything else is managed through the Project Slack channel and everything's ad hoc after that. I would be more than happy, once we finalize this, to share it both in the Discord, on our LinkedIn, wherever, and make it just an open asset, because it's nothing proprietary. It's our idea on how to work better and I'll be happy to share it with the world, but if it helps us maybe it'll help you.

Clark: 55:33

I almost wonder if we should take an episode. We do a little working session, a little corporate strategy working session, where we kind of take an example project, make something up, hypothetical and we kind of go through how to successfully run the project from soup to nuts.

Bruce: 55:49

Oh, dang it, Clark. And now we have to end it, because I just can't Once you say that phrase. I just can't continue.

Clark: 55:57

It's like a safe word for you when I say it. You know we've got to stop.

Bruce: 56:02

Man, you just ruined my Sunday. I got the Sunday scaries now. How dare you.

Clark: 56:06

Sorry, you're going to have to throw it in there. Well, I love it. I think we covered it pretty well and I think we both still kind of held true to what we said 2 and 1 half years ago that I think most meetings could be emails. But I think what we added is there's some special cases where in-person meetings are good for, like a first kickoff or getting to know someone, a little one-on-one ad hoc or just a team meeting, just for you guys to have some fun together. Those things are probably worth having a meeting about. But if you're just running like you're running about projects, just do the math real quick. It's like if you have 20 projects and each of them has a 30 or 45 minute meeting a week, how many hours are you just sitting in check-ins? And could that all be ad hoc? Like really listen to those meetings and say, were there any big takeaways that really made a difference in this call? And you'll probably find that it didn't, unfortunately.

Bruce: 56:56

And if you assume that 75% of the people on the call are on Reddit or Instagram or TikTok and they're not paying attention, what's that actually costing you, like, what is the benefit to your company by doing it? It's really expensive, right, right. So let's make the logical call here. I mean, 75% is a made-up statistic, but let's assume if your audience is living and breathing in our modern society, they have some form of inability to multitask and pay attention. They're not listening to the meeting.

Clark: 57:23

Yeah, unless you're Sam.

Bruce: 57:25

Altman. Yes, in which case you are the meeting. Well, good job, Clark. I think we did it. I think we did a hundred of these now. A hundred of these things Now, I feel like we're doing what we're doing. We really do. I think we're getting there. Our next episode we've got to schedule it, but Restrepo wants to come back on. He wants to give us the current state of late-stage capitalism Love. When he does this, I'm so excited.

Clark: 57:48

I'm feeling better. I literally so. I don't watch the news or anything, but every time Alex comes on this call, I feel like I can get educated. I'm like oh, that's what's happening in this world. Good to know, yeah, he's coming back First time.

Bruce: 57:59

he's going to be doing this, this new way of recording things. He's going to be in the Discord call, which is much better than what we used to do things.

Clark: 58:05

We need to get him to do an emoji. He's on enough. Where it's worth the investment, I think he's got?

Bruce: 58:11

I think he's got a, is he a?

Clark: 58:13

green bubble guy. Oh no, he's a green bubble.

Bruce: 58:16

Yeah, I mean, I don't even know If we got the emoji figured out yet get the stats of this call.

Clark: 58:22

But it's going to be so funny, we're going to build all this up and then that's going to be like sorry guys, we actually can't post the video due to whatever.

Bruce: 58:28

Oh yeah, that's totally going to happen. That's totally going to happen. My phone is, you know, charging, syncing with the cloud, and it's going to be gone.

Clark: 58:38

So, fingers crossed, it doesn't.

Bruce: 58:39

But anyways, yeah, yeah, I mean we've been. We've been going a long time. Today, Clark, I think we can skip. What do you mean? Mostly because we don't have one so easy, easy to work through that. But hey, let's talk about how people can get in touch with us, how they can meet Mr Restrepo himself and asking questions about late stage capitalism in real time, the way you do it. Go to our website, corporatestrategybiz that's dot, B-I-Z stands for business cause, that's how we spell it here and go to the contact us page and from there you're able to submit topics. But, more importantly, you're able to join our discord, which is where we do everything we hang, we chat, we meme, we record this podcast. It's truly the catch-all for all things corporate strategy. It's the pulse, the heartbeat, the lungs, the whole shenanigans.

Clark: 59:28

Yeah, if you want to hear us talk about anything, go to the discord. I mean, it's just a good group of people. You know there's people talking about technology, people posting memes, people talking about jobs, compensation there's so many good topics happening and you can be anonymous. Don't feel like you have to review yourself. You can just come in and be anonymous and just contribute. It's a really fun community, everyone's great.

Bruce: 59:45

So many good folks in the channel, Stop by say hi.

Clark: 59:49

Please do and also just stay updated with everything we're doing. I mean now, this will be the first time we're going to post on YouTube and also you know we have a newsletter on our site, so you can send it for the newsletter if you want to hear you know when we launch a new episode. You'll be the first to know and email will go out. You'll be sent to it. Have a nice little link to go to your podcast player of choice and essentially you'll be able to just tap that link and listen to it before anyone else. Or also on LinkedIn, get your corporate strategy tag. We're going to do that in 2024. We're going to create some sort of LinkedIn certification for corporate strategist and you're going to be able to put that in your LinkedIn bio. Put the little pipe underneath your name to see your corporate strategist and also just experience us on a new level with the new medium of video. That's right and reviews Also.

Clark: 1:00:32

Like our videos. Subscribe to our YouTube channel, leave us a review. It helps a ton and honestly, it's just building the community. I think it's just getting more good people doing good things in one place, and we're happy to talk about anything you want to talk about.

Bruce: 1:00:44

Yeah, this show has good momentum. Strangely enough, I complained about the dip in viewers or listeners we had in October, but November seems to be right in the ship. I think we're doing better. I'm looking at the stats right now. Yeah, it seems like the October slump might be through. Yeah, yeah, october was a bad month. This episode could put us over the edge. So if you want to help us out, share with your friends, give us that review, like Clark said. But, more importantly, I have to call out the thing that might be here, which is the ads. If you heard an ad in this episode, I'm sorry. What can be done? Actually, there is one thing you can support the show and if you're interested in doing that, click the link. We host everything through a service called Buzzsprout. They're great, but they're not free, so this is a completely self-funded podcast. If you're interested in helping, we thank you. We love you. Our goal is to eventually get to the point where listener support gets us to where we don't have to put up ads at all.

Clark: 1:01:43

Yeah, Every day we run this podcast. Bruce is one step further away from retiring.

Bruce: 1:01:48

Yes, I contribute nothing monetarily.

Clark: 1:01:51

So he is just having a double dip before the age limit and it's bad. It's bad guys Contribute.

Bruce: 1:01:57

Yeah, this is the cross-eye bear, but I love the show and I love doing it and I love providing it to y'all. So I'll continue to pay for it until y'all help supplement it, and then the ads will go away. So that's the good news, yeah.

Clark: 1:02:10

That's the benefit. I think it's like a dollar. What's the lowest? Did we confirm what the lowest patronage is?

Bruce: 1:02:15

I think it's $3, which I kind of hate. One thing we need to look into. Video has been the current thing We've been chasing down and who knows if that actually worked. But one thing that I think we should investigate on our own is not just support through Buzzsprout, but something like Buy Me a Coffee, where if you just want to give a dollar one time in your life, that's fine, we'll take the dollar and you can feel good knowing that we spin it on hosting our podcast.

Clark: 1:02:41

Oh, I love it. Well, I've got a hard stop, so I guess it's time to leave, I guess.

Bruce: 1:02:51

So I guess it is so. Thanks again for listening. We appreciate your listenership, you being here spending time with us as always. Remember, drink the Kool-Aid. I'm Bruce and I'm Clark and you're on mute. We'll touch base with you next week. Happy hundo, Hundo.