Be More Podcast: Sustainable Leadership with Dave Ulrich

In this podcast, we're joined by Dave Ulrich, speaker, professor, best-selling author, and arguably the father of modern HR.

 

Be More is a weekly one-on-one podcast about how everyone can thrive in the new world of work, hosted by Workday’s Patrick Cournoyer. This week we’re joined by Dave Ulrich, speaker, professor, best-selling author, and arguably the father of modern HR.

How a leader positions themselves is essential to the dynamic of any team. Without clear figureheads, how can you expect your teams to coalesce and produce results sustainably over time? So says Dave Ulrich, one of the leading voices when it comes to championing the power of people leaders.

Described by some as the father of modern HR, Dave is a best-selling author of over 30 books, notably Leadership Sustainability. He has been working in HR for over 40 years and was recently ranked as the #1 management guru by Businessweek

“Hope focuses on the future while sustainability tries to turn those ideas into something that consist over time.”

Dave Ulrich

If you’re looking to develop your understanding of the modern HR landscape, then tune in, check out the key takeaways, or read the transcript below

Key Takeaways

  • From hope to sustainable results in 2021. Hope doesn’t look back to where we have been, it looks forward to where we can go. Leaders and HR managers should focus on the future, define the right course of action for their businesses and people, and then focus on building a sustainable plan of action.

  • Unfolding the START ME acronym 

Simplicity: Focus on the few key behaviors that will have the most impact.

Time: Allocate your time so that your calendar matches your intentions.

Accountability: Take personal responsibility for doing what you say you will do.

Resources: Support your leadership with effective, ongoing coaching, and HR systems to sustain what you do.

Tracking: Develop metrics for measuring your leadership improvement.

Melioration: Learn from your mistakes and demonstrate resilience.

Emotion: Draw on deep personal values to keep yourself motivated.

  • A leader’s focus. Leaders have to embrace uncertainty to discover opportunities around them. They should focus more on empowering and developing their employees if they want to see growth.

  • Pioneers don’t go to a destination. They go in a direction. A leader must inspire employees to go in a direction driven by a mission, purpose, and vision, and supported by values. It is also crucial for a leader to constantly learn.

Transcript:

Patrick Cournoyer: Today we’re going to discuss moving hopes to sustainable results with Dave Ulrich. Dave is a best-selling author of over 30 books, including one focusing on leadership sustainability. He has been working in HR for over 40 years and has been ranked as the number one management guru by Businessweek. Some also say that he is the father of modern HR. Dave, thank you for joining the conversation today.

Dave: Patrick, what a privilege to be with you. I am very, very excited about our discussion.

Patrick: Great. I am too. I have been looking forward to this for the past couple of weeks. Let’s jump right in. We have quite a bit to discuss today. First, let’s talk a little bit about this concept of moving from hope to sustainable results this year. How can you frame that for us? Tell us about your perspective on how we could start thinking about this?

Dave: Let me take those into two pathways. A, the pathway of hope, and B, the pathway of sustainability. A lot of people in our field have looked and said, “You have to be resilient, you have to have agility, you have to have growth.” A lot of those ideas look backwards. After-action review. How did we do? What could we have done better? How do we improve? I’m beginning to think that hope doesn’t look backwards to where we’ve been. It looks forward to where we can go. Coming out of a very difficult 2020-21, instead of looking back and saying, “What did I learn?” I’d like to look forward and say, “Where do I want to go? What do I want to accomplish?”

Now a lot of times people have that aspiration. They have hope. They want to see a better future. Then comes the issue of sustainability. We say, “What do you look forward to?” “I look forward to ABCD” and you go, “I wish I could eat chocolate and lose weight.” Sometimes my hopes are just built on false realities, so that sustainability becomes an issue. In my world, with my colleague Norm Smallwood, we do a lot of things like a 360, where we assess your skills, we do coaching, we do training, we do performance reviews, and people come up with their skills they want to get better at. That’s their hope. That’s their aspiration. Then it goes, it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen.

On the first hand, you got to have hope, you got to figure out what’s the future? Where am I going? What do I want? What’s next? On the second hand, you’ve got to turn those aspirations into some very concrete actions or you create cynicism. Hope focuses on the future, not what’s been. Sustainability tries to turn those ideas into something that actually happens over time.

Patrick: Something that is a challenge right now for many organizations around the world is that growth forward-looking careers, individual development is a challenge area for many companies right now. Not only because the world of work has just significantly changed but the focus over the past, let’s say 18 months, particularly the last 12 months, has been very focused on business continuity.

Many organizations have just been focused on keeping their head above water, figuring out what this new future is going to look like. The focus on growth and what the future could be for employees has been a challenge area for organizations. How do you see organizations focusing more on empowering leaders, frontline leaders, it doesn’t even have to be frontline, any level of leadership within an organization to develop more sustainable futures for their employees?

Dave: Great question. Let me, first of all say I don’t need those magic bullets. There’s not a silver bullet. There are no magic answers. I asked people the last few weeks, as you look back to the last 12 or 18 months that you list, what’s one meta takeaway? In 9/11 and the crisis that happened around the world, there was a takeaway around relationships. Walmart at 9/11 had more wedding rings sold than ever before because everybody wanted to confirm a relationship in this threat. 2008 and ’09, the financial crisis, there was a takeaway, get out of debt, get out of debt. Individual, corporate, public debt. Both of those went away.

Before too long relationships were in the same spot, personal debt was as bad as it’s ever been around the world. What’s the single takeaway from this 2020-21 series of crises, not just the pandemic, but social justice and political weirdness I guess I can say? Some people have said it’s digitalization, it’s social responsibility. I think it’s personalization. Let me answer your question with that context. The thing that I hope we sustain and keep after this crisis is personalization at two levels.

One, care about the person. I think this has been a time when empathy and emotion has more attention than it’s ever had. Empathy, employee experience, encouragement. I think we need leaders who can demonstrate empathy in ways that we’ve never had it before. That’s part of hope. Instead of saying, “Here’s our goal,” the first question for a leader is, “How are you doing? Tell me about yourself. What’s happening?” That’s the personal side of personalization.

The other side of personalization is tailoring. I think we’re finding in this social distance pandemic world, people need to be treated very differently. The theory could be around diversity or inclusiveness but, for example, we live in a– My wife and I are obviously older. We have a home. We have three children, each of whom are married with children, and each of the three have managed this pandemic in a different way.

As a leader, is it going to be virtual work, is it going to be in-company work, it’s going to depend. We’re going to personalize. For me, my coaching to a leader is personalized. Let the emotion come out, and then tailor to what works for that individual employee. If leaders can do that, I think they give employees an experience at work that is both meaningful to them personally and tailored to their circumstance.

Patrick: This idea of leadership sustainability and you have an acronym that you have in your book that you wrote around leadership sustainability. This acronym really stood out to me because there’s, I think, so much truth in this. As leaders think about how they rally themselves and how they build for the future. I really think this acronym is great. The STARTME acronym. Can we just take a couple of minutes to go through this and tell us about how you came up with that?

Dave: First of all, my PhD training is, if anyone knows what this is, I’ll send them a free dinner coupon, it’s Numerical taxonomy. Nobody knows what numerical taxonomy is. What it is, taxonomy is the science of simplicity through statistics. I love to take complex stuff and make them simple. That’s been the essence of my career, of the books we’ve done. We’ve tried to say, “Pick a big messy field and simplify it.”

In leadership, my partner Norm Smallwood and I have written a lot of books. As I said before, we do a 360, we do coaching, we do training, we do appraisal, and results don’t happen. There’s a big burst. It’s like fad diets. 90% of people don’t lose diets. Those who take out a second home mortgage, 90% of those who take out the mortgage are in debt again within a year. It’s hard to sustain.

We decided to create simplicity, a taxonomy. We looked at dozens and dozens of studies, books, research about sustaining change. Then in the spirit of taxonomy or simplicity, we found seven things. I don’t know if you want me to go through it real quick, but I can do it real quick. Here’s the seven insights we found. If you’re listening to this, think in your mind of something you’d like to change either for yourself, “I’d like to be a more empathic leader”, or for your organization, “I’d like my organization to have better digital results as I do digitalization,” or for your team.

Seven things. One is simplicity. Complexity is the danger of simplicity. You can’t be good at everything. You got to be good at one or two. Keep it simple. By the way, you’re going to look at this and go. You spend a year doing this research. Duh. [chuckles] Go ahead, Patrick. You may have a comment on that bit.

Patrick: No. I think that’s– This is what people need to come back to is, “What can I connect with and remember to consistently be able to do?” I think this is brilliant.

Dave: Again, I love the idea of taxonomy, which is simplicity and simplicity is number one. What are the one or two things I should focus on? Like I said, what’s the one or two messages from the pandemic? Number two, time. We can often articulate that I’m in love with my partner, my spouse, my kids, but I haven’t spent any time with them. Your calendar reflects your values. Your leadership time shows your leadership hypocrisy. Number three, accountability.

Do I own it? Do I claim it? Is it mine? Am I personally standing up and believing it? Number four is resources. Have I found resources both in terms of insights from other people, what have other people done? Have I got resources to sustain what I do? Do I have the ability? Do I have the skills? Number five is track it. I’ve tried to lose weight without weighing and let me suggest it doesn’t work very well. There’s got to be some kind of metric. Number six is a funny word, it’s a French word, but it’s the word that works is melioration, meliorate. Melioration means am I learning? Am I improving?

One of the lessons in sustaining change is you almost never go from A to B. If I’m flying from London to Paris and drew a string from the London Heathrow to the Paris de Gaulle airport, what percent of time, and Patrick knows this better than anyone having been in the airline industry, is the plane on that string? Not very much, 5 to 10%. It goes left and right. It’s always learning. It’s always adjusting. Melioration is, yes, succeed, succeed, succeed, fail. Okay. Learn, meliorate, succeed, succeed, fail.

Number seven, which I would now put a circle around in the last year, emotion. It’s interesting to talk about that in light of personalization, but I think sometimes we try to touch people’s head with the intellect, we touch their hands and feet with the action, I think we need to touch the heart with the feeling. STARTME, simplify, time, accountability, resource, track, meliorate, and emotion. We came up with the acronym, STARTME because the metaphor is so cool. Gandhi once said or is at least attributed to have said, “All change begins from within.” If you’re going to lead others, you got to start with me. I think leadership hypocrisy is rampant where–

I was working with a leader who’s since passed away and I can share his name because it’s a fascinating story and many people may remember him if you’re old, if you’re young, just pretend that you’re old for a minute. Jack Welch was a famous leader at General Electric, the CEO of the decade. I was doing some work with him and he said, “Dave, I’m going to demand that my employees practice participative management.” Let me say that again, “I’m going to demand that they practice participative management.” I think I said, “Listen to what you just said, no. You cannot demand that they participate. You’ve got to model it. It’s got to start with you because if you demand that they participate and you don’t, you create hypocrisy.”

Another quick example. When our children were younger, we kept telling them to clean your room, clean your room, clean your room. Finally, at about age 10, one of our kids looked at us and said, “Dad, mom, your room’s a mess. You can’t go there.” STARTME, I love that acronym because when somebody says, “What’s leadership sustainability?” They go, “Man, I’m struggling here. Oh, STARTME. Simple, time, accountable, responsive, that’s the R, track it, meliorate, and emotion.” It’s not a perfect menu, but it’s not a bad start for where we can go.

Patrick: Like I said, I love the acronym and I agree with you about the fact that we have to look inside. To be great leaders, we have to understand ourselves first and our leadership style and be comfortable with being a leader. I think that is a challenge area right now for a lot of leaders in the workforce, especially with younger leaders, not age-wise younger, but professional experience. Leaders that may be new in their leadership career and many leaders over the past 6, 8, 12 months have all of a sudden had to be people leaders in ways that they never expected.

As you said, there’s this emotional side, this very individual leadership aspect that every manager or leader in an organization is now responsible for. Health and wellbeing has never been more important for a leader to be focused on and understand, including their own health and wellbeing, so if they’re trying to manage their own as well as trying to help navigate their teams. How do you suggest leaders approach consistency in a time of a lack of consistency when it comes to operations? Do you have any suggestions or thoughts for organizations or senior leaders that are listening to this podcast today that are just really struggling with being able to provide some consistency for their leadership teams?

Dave: Two thoughts. One is we live in a world of uncertainty. January 2020, I laid out my agenda for the year, on March 11th, for me, that was a day I was teaching an evening course at the university I got in my car I called my wife and she said, “Dave, the NBA, National Basketball Association which I follow, ended tonight,” and I’m going, “You’re joking. This is one of those TV shows that I’m supposed to now make some stupid comment on.”

No, the world ended as of March 31st. Now, pick your date wherever you were in London or in Copenhagen or wherever, that uncertainty is just rampant. Some folks are threatened by it. Some folks want to solve uncertainty. I think as leaders, we have to harness it. We’ve got to say, “I’m okay with uncertainty. I don’t know when schools might reopen. I don’t know when the shots might be available right now. I don’t know and I’m okay with that. I’m going to discover opportunity in the midst of that uncertainty.” Now, having said that, that just means that you might waffle, that’s not good.

Second point, where do I discover the opportunity? It’s not just what I know and do, it’s how what I know and do helps others know and do what they need to do better. That’s abstract. Let me try to give an example. There’s a lot of work in our field about building on your strengths. Great idea and I think it’s 50% right. Build on your strengths to strengthen others. If your strengths don’t strengthen someone else, they’re not going to be sustainable. Use your power as a leader to empower others. Where do I harness that uncertainty? Not by focusing on what I know, what I do. As a leader, the question is, who am I leading? It’d be the organization or the people or the project. What’s the outcome I want to accomplish? I want to make others better. I want the organization to be successful in the marketplace. What can I then do to use my power, my insights to deliver those outcomes?

Leadership is not about you as a leader, it’s about those that you influence. For me, that’s the North star of leadership because that one, by the way, do I change as a leader? Of course I change when my customers change because, but my North star is I’m almost always connected to those customers or stakeholders to try to build value for them. Again, use your strengths to strengthen others. Use your power to empower others. By focusing on the receiver of my leadership, I think that gives me a sense of the ability to find opportunity whenever changes occur.

I love to ask leaders or HR people, what’s your agenda right now? Oh, I’m trying to build a training program. I’m trying to change the culture. I’m trying to manage virtual work. I’m trying to deal with the future of work. I say, “Boy, that really is fun, but incomplete. Put behind that two words, so that, so, that.” Now, when I put that behind it, I’m looking at the outcome. I’m trying to build a leadership training program so that our leaders have more skills so that we are successful in the marketplace and try to change your culture so that our internal values reflect promises to our customers.

I’m trying to change a performance management system so that investors have more confidence in the discipline we bring to making things happen. I love that question because it begins to focus me less on what I know and do and more on what others get from what I know and do. I’m hoping that listeners will get one or two little ideas from those discussion points.

Patrick: The, so that, is excellent because it keeps honing things down to really what the outcomes and goals are. That is an area that people, I think, are also struggling with right now is building a strategy for an unknown future. The world of work has always had an element of unknown, I mean, that’s just the way how life is. However, I think that the past couple of years, we had some really great momentum and there was a lot moving forward with focusing on different generations in the workforce, understanding how the different generations are motivated, and then this last year has overturned the apple cart.

In some ways, some very good things have come out of that, some very good focus areas, but this leadership continuity, this leadership strategy moving forward, how we’re building the next generation of leaders, it’s just a tough area right now to think about how do we build a strategy for three years down the road where organizations have been thinking about a month down the road. I think that’s a substantial change that businesses have to make in 2021. What do you think about that?

Dave: Totally agree. Again, I love what you just said. Change is not new. I mean, good grief, look at the ’60s. I have a colleague I’ve just met who lived in San Francisco in the ’70s and ’80s, there was a weird world of change. Look at London in the ’70s and ’80s. I mean, we’ve always experienced change. I think where we’re getting more conscious of is how do we, again, I like the word around uncertainty or using that word to integrate change literature. How do we harness it? How do we harness it? Not just describe it, not just recognize it, not manage it. That manage is that, we’re going to manage it away. There’s not going to be any.

I think one of the things that we do as leaders is, and I’m going to use a metaphor of a pioneer, when pioneers, whatever heritage you come from, whatever country you’re in, a pioneer doesn’t go to a destination, they go to a direction. In the United States, pioneers went from East to West. They were going to California. They didn’t have an address. I’m going to Castro street in San Francisco. They had a direction. What do we call that today? We call that aspiration. We call it purpose. We call it mission or vision, whatever word you want to use, organizations need a mission.

They need a purpose. They need a vision that’s based on values because that’s where pioneers are headed. I like that. I think that’s so critical. What are the aspirations? What are the values? What is the purpose that we’re about as an organization? Always focused on customers outside in. Number two, they then, pioneers, took daily actions. I’m going to go A, B, C, D. Those are my daily steps to get to that direction or that outcome. Guess what? D is a cul-de-sac, it’s a dead end. I go ABCD. I got to go back to C. Then I went to EF. I got to go back to C. Then I go to G H I J. It’s this movement of experimentation and agility is the buzzword today, one of them constantly learning as we head in that direction.

Now, again, the direction is clear. Purpose-driven organizations have more success than non-purpose. That’s not new, but that’s a great insight. Then I began to say, “What are my steps today? How do I fold my aspirations into my daily actions?” Knowing that I’m going to have to revise those daily actions, ABCD, oh C, A, B, C, D, C, E, F back to C, D. Again, I have that visual in my mind. I hope leaders get it. To a leader, I’d say, what’s your aspiration? What’s your legacy? Where are you headed personally? What’s your brand? What do you want to be known for? Good. What are you going to do today to try to make that happen? Good. What worked, what didn’t? This worked well.

By the way, here’s an insight. If you try the same thing two or three times and it doesn’t work, quit doing that because it’s not helping you get to where you’re going. Try something else. Oh, okay. Don’t feel bad. That’s part of learning. Hope is the direction where we’re going. Actions are the steps we take. Now number two, I think, and I keep giving two answers to every question. I think we’re seeing a shift from leader as an individual to leadership as an organizational capability. What does that mean? Lots of companies. I just mentioned Jack Welch, they are iconic leaders, and you see them in today’s world. You see the iconic leaders who get all the attention, either political, business, or economic. I think we’re discovering today that leadership is a distributed capability. That we need leaders at all levels of the company. I’d love to do a test. If there’s five levels of leadership in a company divide 100 points where the most critical leadership is. Some do an upside-down pyramid. They say, “Oh, it’s at the top 50%, then it winnows down.” Some do a pyramid, oh, leadership is at the bottom. I think they’re both wrong. I think it’s 20, 20, 20, 20, 20. Every leadership role has a purpose and if not, get rid of the role. I mean, if they’re not creating. I think these distributed leaders matter and in the work Norm Smallwood and I have done, we’ve said leaders matter no question. We love individual leaders. Leadership matters even more.

How do we distribute leadership at every level of the organization? That’s the other work that we’re trying to do.

Patrick: You just talked about that work that you’re talking around leadership and distributed leadership in the organization. What is next for you as far as research? What areas do you think you’ll be looking into over the next year or so? What’s interesting for you?

Dave: I’m going to ask you first because this is so fun. Patrick, you’ve done how many of these Peakon broadcasts these Be More series? How many have you done?

Patrick: Quite a few. I don’t know the exact number.

Dave: By the way, nobody’s counting. What’s a message you’ve heard in the past? I love meta messages. What’s the one message from this pandemic? For me, personalization. What’s something you’ve heard in the past year or six months that just jumps out at you and say, wow, that’s one of those little things. It’s a nugget that I’m going to hold on to.

Patrick: I think the fact that 70% of the workforce in the next three years are going to be millennials or Gen Z. That really stood out to me because if I think about five generations in the workforce today, a significant amount will be retiring over the next couple of years. I feel that the millennial generation and the Gen Z generation are going to have very different expectations and I’ll use the word demands. I don’t use that in a negative way. I think that the next generation of workforce, which is coming very fast, is going to just have different expectations of organizations.

If they don’t start focusing now on how they’re going to meet those expectations, the workforce, I think is going to be incredibly competitive in about three years, and the, “war for talent” that everybody has talked about over the past couple of years, I think is going to be so much more relevant in three years than what we’re experiencing right now.

Dave: Boy, look at what you just did. That was so brilliant. You looked back to the podcast you’ve heard, you distilled out all of that information, 70% of the workforce is going to be in a different place. Again, whatever label you put on it, Gen X, Gen Z and then you looked forward. I love that. That’s the message of hope. You look back to what’s been, you look forward to what the implications for creating the future might be. Your message is how do we give organizations and leaders hope given what the history tells us? I love that one.

One of my favorite books, by the way, it’s like, which is your favorite child. You can’t answer that all the books are favorites, but obviously, leadership sustainability was one. We did a book, and it’s favorite because I did it with my wife who’s an incredibly gifted psychologist about why people work. I think you’re picking that up with baby boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z. We did that about 10 years ago. I’m just commenting on your comment because it really reinforces for me. What is it we as leaders or through our institutions as organizations need to give our employees. We’ve boiled it down in simplicity to three things: believe, become and belong.

Believe. Do I give my employees a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning? I think Gen X, Gen Z purpose and meaning is going to be as important or more so than ever. I don’t want just a paycheck. I want meaning. Believe, become. Do we give people a growth mindset? Do we give people an opportunity to learn and to grow and to develop and to be more than they were? Then belong, affiliation. Do we give people a community? I like those three Bs. I think as a leader, look at your organization that you shape. Are you helping employees believe, become and belong? As an employee, is this organization giving me?

People talk today about the employee experience. Well, what is it? Believe, become and belong. Is it giving me those things? Thank you. I really appreciate that. That’s not where I’m thinking. Although that’s one of the things. I hope I’m eclectic in my thinking. I love to learn. Let me tell you the problem I’m seeing. I got online today and I went online and I saw Ted Talks. I see Zoom calls like this one. I see podcasts. I am simply overwhelmed. There is so much noise out there of all the cool things I could do, and we just listed a bunch today.

As a leader or as a human resource person, or as an employee, how do I separate signals from noise? How do I decide which of all those things I know I could do, which one should I do?

Our field of organization in HR has been enamored with benchmarking. How am I doing versus somebody else or best practice? What’s Amazon doing? What’s Unilever doing? I think those are both old. I would rather say, don’t go be as good as Amazon. Don’t be as good as Unilever. Be as good as you should be. That metaphor of all those things I should do or could do, what should I do?

We created what we call guidance. We’ve identified 37 initiatives in the human capital world. By the way, we’re adding to it. We had 36 until two weeks ago, we added a 37th. We know we don’t have it perfect. Then we’ve asked the question. For example, some might be, I hire talent. I do payroll for talent. I manage employee experience in leadership. I build a leadership brand by defining investing in leaders in organization. I build agility. I change my culture. I do collaboration. In HR, I restructure my HR department. We have 37 of those suckers, whatever you want to call those suckers, their initiatives. Where should I focus?

In the next 12 months, my company will spend 1% to 2% of its revenue, that’s our estimate, on initiatives in those 37 areas. We’re trying to help people get guidance about what works for me. Don’t look at what Unilever does. They’re doing great stuff for them. Don’t look at what Amazon or Google or Facebook is doing, or Tencent in China. What works for me? We’ve put together, again, in the spirit of simplicity, a guidance system, www.rbl.ai. By the way, you made a mistake. You asked me what I’m interested in. I’m so excited about this big messy world. How do I help one of you listen? Where should I focus?

You can take a short assessment, it takes about 12 minutes and it will tell you where you should focus so that you get the results you care about. That’s what I’m interested in. That’s the question, it sounds like a fairly simple question. Where do I focus to get the results I’m interested in? It’s actually a pretty complicated problem because you got a whole raft of initiatives. You’ve got a whole set of outcomes. How do I know where in that matrix of outcomes by initiatives I should focus my energy and my attention. That’s what we’re trying to solve for.

Patrick: Dave, we’re coming to the end of the conversation. I could talk with you for hours and I’m sure we would continue to have amazing conversation. First off, I just want to say thank you for your insight, your perspective, and really clear conversation around how leaders can take a look at sustainability, your perspective on the future, moving that concept of hope to sustainable outcomes, and for your wealth of knowledge.

It’s incredibly impressive how much you’ve accomplished over the past 40 years, your books. What’s the title of your most recent book, Dave?

Dave: I’ve written a lot of books. I’m going to actually go to a different place. I discovered I like posting on LinkedIn. It takes a year to write a book, it takes a year to produce a book and by the time it’s out, your two-year-old ideas are out of date. I’m posting every Tuesday on LinkedIn.

Patrick: That’s perfect.

Dave: The words are not perfect, the vocabulary is bad, there may even be typos, but I’m thinking move quick and so I go on LinkedIn, pretty easy.

Patrick: That’s perfect. One of my favorite LinkedIn posts was one that you posted just a couple of weeks ago on how to move from hope to sustainable results in 2021. You have quite a few articles on LinkedIn over a hundred articles, it looks like.

Dave: I post every Tuesday.

Patrick: That’s perfect.

Dave: New stuff every Tuesday, by the way, that’s been a challenge because I don’t have that many new ideas. I don’t want to recycle, there’s too much of that in our field. I’m constantly listening and I have a page of notes from our conversation of things. I had to think about that. Would that be something that might be useful to post? I like the Gen X, Gen Z issue that you’ve raised and reinforcing that. That might be a very nice post. Someday, Patrick, we should post together. If you ever want to-

Patrick: I would love that.

Dave: -if you ever want to write something up. We’ll post it. The good news about LinkedIn is you don’t have to go through six layers of editing and the bad news is you find out quickly if anyone likes it or not.

Patrick: That is very true. That is the world we live in. I graciously would accept that. We will continue that conversation and post something, co-author something for a LinkedIn article. Dave, again, thank you for spending some time with me today. I know the audience is going to love it and thank you again for your passion and the work that you do.

Dave: Patrick, thank you and may I just say Be More. What a great line Be More.

Patrick: Thank you. I love it as well. Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.

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