Ep. 4 Extreme Productivity, Bob Pozen, MIT

Join Suzan and MIT'S Bob Pozen as they discuss the best ways to measure productivity in a rapidly changing world.


January 2023
ExecU Podcast
Episode 4:  Extreme Productivity with Bob Pozen, MIT 

BRIEF SUMMARY OF EPISODE

Robert C. Pozen is currently a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is a National Bestselling author for Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours and his co-authored book, Remote Inc.: How to Thrive at Work…Wherever You Are.

Bob is the former president of Fidelity Investments and executive chairman of MFS Investment Management. He is an expert who has made hundreds of appearances to companies, television audiences and leaders around the world, and is a writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the Harvard Business Review, and more around the globe.

Make sure to subscribe to the ExecU Podcast to learn from the most forward-thinking business professors about how to build a better future. 

KEY TAKEAWAY

“If you're in a knowledge-based company, is it really important how many hours you work or spend at the office? Or is it more important what results you actually achieve? I argue strongly that the key is what you achieve…what you want to do is maximize the output and the output is measured by your results. ”

Share the podcast: https://execupodcast.buzzsprout.com/share

Bob’s Website:
https://bobpozen.com/index.html

Bob’s Books:

https://www.amazon.com/Remote-Inc-Thrive-Work-Wherever/dp/0063079372

https://www.amazon.com/Extreme-Productivity-Boost-Results-Reduce/dp/0062188534

Take Bob’s Productivity Course:

https://executive.mit.edu/course/maximizing-your-personal-productivity/a056g00000URaZTAA1.html

Sponsored by Viv Higher Ed: 

https://vivhied.com/

Transcript

Robert 0:00

If you're in a knowledged based company, is it really important how many hours you work or spend at the office, or is it more important? What results you actually achieve? I argue strongly that the key is what you achieve. It's not an. Situation where you wanna maximize the input. What you wanna do is maximize the output and the output is measured by your results.

0:33

welcome to Executive the podcast. Bringing you actionable insights from faculty at the world's top business schools. I'm your host, Suzanne Brinker, and today I'm sharing a conversation with Bob Posen. He's a senior lecturer at M I T Sloan School of Management, and we will be talking about his book, extreme Productivity.

Suzan 0:52

Hi Bob. How are you? It's so great to have you on the show.

Robert 0:56

Great to be with you, SU.

Suzan 0:59

I would love to just get started with, your journey to where you are today at MIT and the career that you've had. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in the area that you work in and have worked in, and how did you get to mit?

Robert 1:14

I'm in two very different areas. I teach a course on financial innovation and I've been in the investment business for a long time. I was at Fidelity for 15 years and I became president of Fidelity when it was about 500 billion under management. And then I retired at uh, a trillion, but I flunk retirement and so I spent a few years in government positions. I was on the president Social Security Commission. I was Secretary of Economic Affairs when we had a budget crisis here in Massachusetts. And then I went back in the industry because there was a middle size company called MFS Investment Management. They got an enforcement case against them by the scc. And the s e c asked for the chairman and the president to be removed. And so a young guy became president, a young guy from within mfs, and I became chairman as an external person. And ultimately I became executive chairman and I was at MFS for seven years. And we had a tremendous run. We solved the problems that had been the source of this enforcement action, and we tripled the assets. And so I retired a second time around 2011 when I was 65 and. I had actually done quite a bit of teaching right after graduate school, and I had been an adjunct at M I t while I was at mfs, and I really liked what was going on at. MIT and I've been teaching there the last 10 years and I teach a course called UH, managing Financial Innovation, and it covers, both. Historic innovations like ETFs and index funds, some that didn't work out so well. Mortgage securitization. Now of course, we have to do something on crypto, and we also do cases on insured tech and on payment processors. So that's what I've been doing the last 10 years at N M I T. I also teach. A course on leadership and I teach a course on corporate. Go.

Suzan 3:58

I love that you say you flunked retirement because you followed that up with very clear evidence that is true. If you were to have a competition with other people about how badly you managed to retire, you would probably win it. You've done so many things since then. You, You wrote a book on extreme productivity which now maybe is explained to me by hearing that because it sounds like you're not good at not being productive. Would you agree with that?

Robert 4:23

Yeah. What happened was, I met a guy who was I think he was the senior editor, maybe the editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review. And at that time I was teaching a number of courses and I was also executive chairman of mfs. And he said, you're the only person who hands. His or her articles on time and in the word limit. And it appears that you have two jobs as opposed to most of our other authors who have one. So we wanna know what your secret sauce is. And he interviewed me and it was published in the Harvard Business Review and it went viral as these things sometimes do and as a result, He asked me to write something and a short article, which I did, and then was picked up by Harper Collins, who was interested in my writing a book. And so I wrote this book on Extreme productivity. It's a short book. You could read it in three hours. It has summaries and. it's now sold over 50,000 copies and it's been translated into 10 different languages. So if you go to Japan, there's actually a Japanese version. There's a Chinese version, Mandarin Chinese, there's a German version, Portuguese. There are even some versions that I don't, not sure exactly what the language is, but so it seems to obtain some popularity and that makes me feel good.

Suzan 6:06

I bet and it's really exciting that you're here to talk with us and our listeners about it. I'd love to know how you feel like this book might be really relevant right now as companies are trying to figure out, should we be hybrid? Should we be remote? Should we be in the office? Cuz you have this claim in the book that focusing on the results that we seek is more important than focusing on the hours we work. What does that mean in the context of companies currently trying to figure out how do we work and where and yeah, how do we measure results?

Robert 6:36

I should mention that I wrote a book a year or two ago with Alexandra Samuels on remote work and the hybrid situation, so I wrote something on that. But to answer your question directly, If you're in a knowledged based company, as probably most of your listeners are, is it really important how many hours you work or spend at the office, or is it more important? What results you actually achieve? I argue strongly that the key is what you achieve. It's not an. Situation where you wanna maximize the input. What you wanna do is maximize the output and the output is measured by your results. So when I was uh, President in Fidelity, we had a young analyst who used to come in at three in the morning and leave at 9:00 AM and people would say, oh, he's not working enough hours, or He is working these crazy hours. And my answer was, Did he have good stock picks? Was he a good analyst? And turned out he was. So I said, what the hell does it matter what hours he's working? The key is what his results are. Now, of course, You have to have some coordination of hours. So you wanna have a team, you have to have people come in occasionally on the same day and meet each other and work together. But I think what's the worst thing that's happened since the pandemic is that some companies have put, like this software. On people's computers or phones, and they're sort of monitoring exactly how many hours were you on your computer and how many hours were on your phone. That's ridiculous. The question is, what did you produce? The question is what results did you achieve? Not how many hours you were at your computer. That's really a relic of a very different era, the industrial era. There probably was a correlation between the hours you put in if you were on an assembly line and what was produced. But that's not true at all at a knowledge based economy,

Suzan 9:04

right? If the productivity directly correlates to the hours worked because there's only so much you can achieve, in five minutes versus 10 minutes versus five hours and 10 hours. But in a knowledge economy that is just not the unit that is as relevant. And I love that you brought up the software. Because that is a topic that I'm passionate about, pointing out it as a problematic trend. And most people agree with me, but I found a few people who are like, no, that's actually a really important thing to do because otherwise employees will just abuse the freedom of not being in the office.

Robert 9:35

That's exactly my. Point when I say that the people who want the software, they're worried about accountability. That's what they're worried about. They're saying, how do we know this person is actually working? How do we know he or she hasn't gone to the beach, or to these things? And my answer is, look at what they produced. That's the thing. Don't look at the number of hours.

Suzan 10:03

It's also interesting to me because if you're thinking about hiring freelancers or contract workers rather than full-time employees or part-time employees, the unit by which people typically bill is by the hour. And I wonder if you would recommend, for executives who use freelance workers to rethink that and have people bill by result or by deliverable. Is that something that you have advice companies?

Robert 10:27

Yes, no, I've talked to, there are accounting firms and law firms and consulting firms are billed by the hour. But when you think about it, it creates a perverse incentive. You mean the longer it takes you to do a project, the more you get paid. And if you take a really long time, then you'll get paid a lot, even though your client thinks that's terrible. So I've encouraged. Companies in those fields to experiment with project based compensation. And so they get paid if they complete the project, they get paid if they hit certain deliverables, not whether they put in the hours. Otherwise you're encouraging them to work slowly and that's

Suzan 11:16

crazy. Makes total sense. It is very thought-provoking though, because I do believe that's still more standard the hourly of billing and paying than the project based system.

Robert 11:28

Yeah, that's because hours are easy to measure and they have this. I would say facade appeal of being very relevant, but they really aren't. Yes, it's much harder to construct compensation system based on deliverables or project metrics or KPIs, but that's actually a much more relevant. System. So if you wanna encourage the right behavior, then you ought spend the time up front to get a compensation system that's really responsive to those issues.

Suzan 12:06

In the book you define personal productivity as the quantity and quality of your results in achieving your own objectives. Does that concept tend to intuitively click with people when you talk with executives, when you work with companies at mit? Or is that something that people need to learn and fully understand?

Robert 12:29

I think it it, it has a lot of appeal to people because, I'm not telling them what their objective should be. I'm not defining that for them. People have a broad range of objectives, and I'm not trying to say, do it. This is the right objective, or that is the right objective because they're so different. So I think once people understand that they really like that, that we're defining productivity in terms of what you. Is important to you? So when I teach courses and when I coach people, executives on productivity, we start off by trying to understand what are their goals and what are their priorities. And then we need to make them productive in achieving those goals and those priorities, not something that I came up with. It's something they came up with. And what's surprising is that for most executives that I work with, they spend over half their time on priorities that aren't in their top three or four. They're essentially somebody else's priority. And you ask them, how come you're not spending more time on what you define as your top priorities? And that's what we try to work to try to focus on that.

Suzan 14:02

That is interesting to me. As someone who really likes autonomy, it's music to my ears. Is there often a tension between what an executive might define as their own objective or what the company defines as the objective for that executive? Is that something tricky to work?

Robert 14:17

That can be tricky. Hopefully you have, as you get higher up in the organization, you have better alignment between what the senior executives are trying to do and the organization, and obviously what the senior executives do and what all executives do. Can't disregard what the organization's priorities are. And sometimes I say, One of your priorities should be to help your boss accomplish what your boss thinks are his or her priorities. But I think that's something to be worked out. You want to have as part of your top priorities, the organization or your team's priorities, but you also have your own priorities in terms of your own career development and your own advancement. But we wanna try to have an alignment as best as we can.

15:16

executive. The podcast is sponsored by ViiV Higher Education, a full service marketing agency and enrollment strategy consulting firm for colleges and universities. ViiV is passionate about executive education and lifelong learning. Today's episode is brought to you in collaboration with M I T Executive educat.

Robert 15:35

Yeah.

Suzan 15:36

I just had a really good conversation. Someone at NYU Stern and Weisberg, who studies and teaches inclusive leadership, and she said that a really good leader helps someone define their objectives, not just around the company's goals, but around their own career objectives as well, and helps them integrate the two. And it seems like that's relevant here as well in terms of measuring productivity. Ideally, you create a win-win between the organization's goals and your own.

Robert 16:04

Yes, I would agree totally. And I think any good manager or leader will sit down with their direct reports at least once a year and discuss their career development, what they have as career priorities and try to help them

Suzan 16:20

achieve them. Yeah. So I think you've impressed everyone who's listening with your career. Journey. And then this anecdote about somebody approaching you and saying, you have two jobs, and yet you meet every deadline, every word count that you're ever given. And that inspired the book on extreme productivity. So I think we all want to hear your secret sauce. How can leaders organize their daily routine and weekly and monthly, whatever routine to achieve extreme productivity?

Robert 16:48

I begin, as I said, By asking people to write down their objectives, their goals, and get in order of priorities. So the first thing we need to do is to start with goal setting and priority delineation. I usually try to do that based on the year, the upcoming year, and then we need to try to integrate. Those goals and those priorities into your weekly and daily agenda. So for instance, if you have delineated all of your top priorities and you get a request for a meeting, then you can say what's the agenda for this meeting? And if you find that the agenda has nothing to do, With your top priorities, you can say I'm not gonna go to that meeting because it's not really important for me. The other thing that I suggest in my book and in the classes I teach is what I call a two-sided schedule, where you have your appointments on one side, but on the other side you write down what you wanna accomplish at those appointments. I don't want you to go to a meeting or be on a phone call for an hour or two hours, and at the end you're not clear what exactly did you get out of this. So I want you to write down. Next to every appointment, every meeting, every phone call you have, what you hope to achieve from that. And if you can't figure out anything to write down, then maybe you ought to not do that, because that suggests that's not really important to you.

Suzan 18:40

So saying no is a big piece to both of those things, right? Is having

Robert 18:44

absolutely really clear, objective, saying no relative to your priorities. Do you think that

Suzan 18:52

that's possible in most organizations for executives to have that level of ability to

Robert 18:58

say no? I think it's a, it's a reasonable question. So if you get invited to meetings, The first thing to do is to ask for an agenda. Half the time they'll never send you an agenda, and then you don't have to go to those meetings. The other half, they send you an agenda and it's totally out of something that you're involved with. So you say, gee, it sounds like a great meeting. But actually I'm not the right person. Joe or Sally is the right person. Or you can say, this is really not something that I'm working on at all. I think you ought to try to speak to somebody in a different part of the organization. Having said that, there are certain meetings, especially meetings called by your boss, you might have to go to, even if you think they're not the most important, but you wanna try to keep those to a minimum.

Suzan 19:52

That makes sense. And then it sounds like you. Managed your schedule successfully around your objectives, and then found some pockets of time that you could deploy towards your priorities. How would you spend, let's say you have two or three hours of uninterrupted time at your desk on any given day, how do you make sure that you use those hours towards your top priorities?

Robert 20:15

I would suggest to people the night before that they compose a. And it'd be a two part list. One is the list of the things that you really have to get done that day, and then the other is what I call the nice to haves. So if you have two hours free a. Then you can work on the things that you've listed the night before, this thing that must be done that day and get them done. And I'm a great believer, by the way, in keeping an hour free in the morning and an hour free in the afternoon so that you can work on your top priorities or sometimes emerg. Personal or professional come about. So you need that sort of rubber in your schedule.

Suzan 21:04

Sure. Yeah, that makes total sense. If I put myself in the shoes of, this is my own life, right? If I free my time up so I can work on priorities, I now get constantly interrupted by emails and slack messages and teams messages, and all the different instant messaging apps that I have on my phone and on my desktop. I'm assuming you're not a fan. Letting that happen that you would actually recommend turning those off during the productive hours?

Robert 21:29

I would, and I would suggest that you, what I call, chunk your messages. So maybe you look at them once an hour, once every hour and a half. Some people have said you ought to have a whole Friday without messages, or, no messages after three o'clock. I think those are very arbitrary rules and in most organizations they're not workable. But and you can't really wait in a lot of organizations 10 hours to answer a customer email on the other hand. If you let yourself, you'll be doing, you'll be looking at your email every five or six minutes, and that's what most people do, so they don't have time for much else. But if you can chunk your messages, look at them every hour or an hour and a half, that's the most effective approach.

Suzan 22:24

I can attest to that, right? That if you don't put those boundaries in place, you will spend your entire day responding to messages. And I'm happy to hear that's what you recommend in terms of chunking them, because our team does that and I think we are all better off for it. I have another question along the same lines too, because as the lines between home and work are becoming increasingly blurred, people aren't always working from their office, they're not always working during traditional business hours. How can leaders balance. their priorities across all domains of their lives.

Robert 22:57

Wow. That's a very big question. But how you achieve work life balance. But I would say if you move. Toward a results based system with what I call success metrics. So that means that you and your boss have agreed that here at the end of the week or the month or the project, you're gonna produce certain deliverables. So in my view that one of the many virtues of. And there are lots of virtues is that you clarify between you and your boss what actually you need to get done. And another big virtue is you can do those, get those deliverables done at the any time and place and manner in which you want to, because from your boss's point of view, you're the deliverables that you're gonna produce. At the end of the project or the end of the week. And so it frees you up because you haven't told your boss that you're gonna work any particular hour. You haven't told your boss you're gonna work at a particular location. You've told your boss that you're gonna produce these deliverables, and it's that autonomy. And flexibility, which is the key to work life balance. I've interviewed a lot of people and in general, people are not adverse to working long hours, but they want to work them when it suits their personal schedule, and the only way to do that is to move. A rigid our system into a deliverables or results system. Once you have that, those success metrics, those deliverables, then you have all, then you have a lot of flexibility as to exactly when and where and how you do it. As long as you'll produce those liberals, that's what counts.

Suzan 25:06

Music to my ears again. Can you also share maybe a story about how a leader has taken lessons from your book or your leadership course at MIT and transformed as a result of those lessons, their career and their organization?

Robert 25:20

If we talk about individual leaders, I've coached a lot of senior executives and the biggest problem they have is delegation. Most of them have been quite successful and they're used to being very hands on at getting a lot of stuff done. But once they get higher and higher an organization, That becomes infeasible. They can't just keep doing everything. They have to learn to delegate. So I've been, I've had a number of executives who transformed their life literally by, by sitting down with them and saying, I'm now forcing you to give. Two or three functions that you're doing now that are time consuming and they don't actually need you. They could be done by somebody else. And when people do that, it's transformative because all of a sudden, instead of working, 15 hours a day, they realize that they basically. What we call, put it in the monkey on their back and they never gave it over to anybody else. But it takes a lot of work to move. From being a control freak to being a good delegator. And that's something that I feel I've been successful with a number of executives in terms of organizations. I think, I've worked with CEOs who say they want everybody back in the office five days a week. And I'm saying to them, that's crazy. You don't wanna do that and let's figure out. What makes sense here? What's the optimal design of the hybrid? Let's think about which things you really need the group to be in person with. Let's define them. And in most cases, it turns out to be something that can be accomplished in two or three days, but you gotta think rigorously and hard about what those. Functions are, and then organize people's schedule. And if you're really good at it, I've helped companies get into a rotation where they have half the employees coming in, on certain days and half on the other days. So that's a win-win for everybody. You're, You're having people come in and do the things that really require. Them to work together, brainstorming, creativity, coordination, and then they're having time at home to do work that requires extensive concentration. And as an added bonus you can cut the real estate you need in half because you don't need to have everybody there every day. It's, How should I put it? It's a big challenge to work with people, perhaps in an older generation who view the situation as if people aren't coming to the office every day, then they're worried that they're basically screwing off. And so we need to overcome that.

Suzan 28:34

Yeah, and it goes back to that exact point that you made around measuring results via inputs versus output. And another thing that I overhear all the time, you and I both are in the Boston area and we know how bad Boston area traffic is and how much time people are just wasting on their commute. And it makes them really mad when they go to the office and they feel like they were less productive than they would've been at home because they would've had more time and they also would've had fewer distractions. And it can't be good for retention.

Robert 29:05

Yeah, no, I think that's true though. We wanna be careful not to go totally in the other direction. There are roughly half the jobs in the US have to be done in person. A lot of us don't think about them because they're in manufacturing or in agriculture or in. Serving people in a restaurant, but the other half can be done partially at home and partially in the office. But there are a lot of good reasons for people to get together. So we don't want to say never get together. They ever come in the office. What we wanna do is have a very rigorous process by which we define what things need to be done together and what things can be done at home.

Suzan 29:51

Bob, you've done so much in your career and you've worked. So many different executives. You've had leadership roles teaching at MIT for 10 years. If there's still anything that kind of keeps you up at night where you're like, this is a problem that I haven't cracked, this is a research challenge that I still really wanna see through.

Robert 30:12

There are lots of problems that we haven't cracked, that's for sure. And I think what we were just talking about is how do you define the optimal design for the hybrid? That's something that we're still in process. I think we understand the general parameters, meaning we need to look at this first of all, by team. You can't have one role for the whole organization, most organizations are a conglomeration of teams. There can be a financial team, an IT team, a marketing team, customer service, and they're doing very different things. So we have to understand exactly what they're doing and make sure that the functions that need to be done as a group are being done in the office and the functions that don't need to be done as a group where there's the. The synergy of the group isn't important, can be done at the done at home. And I think that's an ongoing research project and we're just touching the surface now. I think Covid threw us into this and we just, We didn't really do things systematically, we just did whatever we could. Now we're having a chance to think through that and that's the really big research project. As we go forward now and we are, leases are rolling off so we have a chance to rethink this. Exactly. How are we gonna do this? I strongly advocate. That we do this by team, led by the team leader and that we have different schedules for different teams, but every organization is different and this is the process they have to go through. So it

Suzan 32:07

sounds like that is very much top of mind with the executives and organizations you're working with at this time.

Robert 32:14

Because they're all now, they were at the point where nobody came in because of Covid and now they have to make decisions. Some organizations, people are saying, we never want to come in, and in other organizations the CEO is saying, you've gotta come in every day, so this is what we gotta work out.

Suzan 32:36

That is a fascinating thing to have to work out with multiple different organizations and different teams with different requirements and goals more general than just within that specific challenge. What advice would you give current or emerging leaders who are hoping to make you know, a big impact on their organizations and advance their careers?

Robert 32:55

The first thing I would say is when you get these jobs, initially, you ought spend the first six year to 90 days on a listening tour. You bet you ought go and talk to your employees and hear their concerns and hear what they have to say. I have this. concept that I put forth in the book of a rebuttable hypothesis. So you can have some ideas of your own as to what needs to be done, but they should be rebuttable. The sense that if you try them out on people they don't think they're very good, then you ought to go a different way. So that's the first. That you need to do that. The second thing is you gotta realize what your own weaknesses are. Nobody has all the skills and all the traits of a great leader, so you might be a really good finance person. But you've had no experience in marketing. Or conversely, you might be a great marketeer, but you haven't spent a lot of time in budgets. So I preach the idea of complementary, find people in your, and put them in your team that have complementary skills to don't just find people that look like you. That's a big mistake. And then third of all, what I've been preaching. To, define a set of success metrics and get everybody in an organization to do that, move away from ours and move to success metrics, and try to do that by team, as I've elaborated before.

Suzan 34:40

Thank you. And when you think about the executive education learning environment at MIT Sloan, within MIT executive education, what do you think makes it unique? What's the secret sauce at MIT that you can't get anywhere else?

Robert 34:53

I think the most important thing is you have a lot of really pathbreaking minds at mit. Of course lots of universities and people who are smart and hardworking, but there probably have been more new companies coming out of mit. Any other place in the world. I'm very involved with the MIT Entrepreneurial Center, which is doing a great job of letting summer interns undergraduates try out being entrepreneurs. And then we have a program in the summer for graduate students in which they put together business plans and then they have a demo date. And this energy that you have for new idea, And new adventures. It's so strong at mit. And last thing I'll say, this is. When you look at some new ventures, they're what I call mix and match. They're taking existing information and they're putting it together in a more convenient way and delivering it in a more accessible way. That's great. But when you look at the really pathbreaking changes, they have an engineering component. They're more than just mix and match. Somebody has really come up with some new process. Some new way to do that. And that's what you see at MIT a lot. We now have just formed in the last year an AI college, which is composed of five or six different disciplines. And you know, AI is sort of a buzzword. Everyone says, oh, we're doing a die. But the question is, what exactly are they doing? And it's this interdisciplinary. We're really going to push the frontiers of AI and really come up with something new. So I think that's what's really exciting about mit, the intellectual energy, the entrepreneurial bit, and the fact that we're combining the hard sciences, the biochemistry, the engineering with a lot of interesting entrepreneurial ideas.

Suzan 37:10

Yeah. And good for MIT that you flunked retirement and that they have access to you as part of all that. I think when a lot of people hear executive education, they immediately think of an MBA or an executive MBA and don't necessarily realize that they're also just single courses that they could take. They don't have to always. Invest in a full degree, but they can improve themselves with access to the world's most renowned faculty members at really good business schools. So is there any specific course or mini program or certificate at MIT that you think would be really good to know about for executives listening to this?

Robert 37:43

You won't be surprised to know that. I think my course, my executive ed course, which is called Maximizing Your Personal Productivity, is a great course. We do it in person now in two days and we really cover a lot of the subjects we've been talking about. Goal setting, delegation structure in your day. We talk about the constraints on your productivity. Things like perfectionism procrastination. We talk about lots of things and then we help people have skills. We do exercises and presentations, formal speaking, reading how to read more effectively, and we also. At the end talk a lot about leading teams and this whole idea of success metrics and how you can promote work life balance. We have a very specific discussion about how you deal with your boss and because as one great management guru said is you don't have to love your boss. You don't even have to like your boss, but you need to manage your boss. So that's our mantra. So we think it's a great course. We've been teaching him for three or four years. Joined in the course by a few real stars, my co-author Alexandra Samuels and Ben Shields, who's a social media expert. So it's good. And and we have, we learn a lot. We have good time.

Suzan 39:20

It does sound like a blast and two days, nobody can argue with that. It's not going to take weeks, months, years to, to finish that really meaningful opportunity.

Robert 39:29

Yeah. And that and we, it's very practical. We don't, this is not a lecture series. We have lots of practical exercises, lots of participation, and at the end of these two days, we make everybody in the course stand up and say, what are you gonna change? About your behavior going forward in light of this course. We wanna make sure that everybody takes away something where they're really changing it. Not just a theory. Not a concept. Something where they gonna say, I'm gonna go back to my office, back to my office, and I'm gonna change this or that. It's a

Suzan 40:08

pledge really. Yes.

Robert 40:10

we don't, It's not legally enforceable, but it's morally enforceable, if

Suzan 40:15

what I mean. It's meaningful when you pledge it in front of people that have probably become quick friends over the course of that experience. It's,

Robert 40:23

it's a bit of peer

Suzan 40:24

pressure. I love it. My last question, which I ask everyone in a nutshell, what does leadership mean to you?

Robert 40:31

I believe that leadership has three main parts. First is you've got to formulate a strategy for your organization in light of the fact that there's so many different changes in your industry and the world. So you've got to have a strategy and you've got to update it as things change in the world. Second of all, you've gotta hire the right people and create an effective organization to implement that. And third of all, you've gotta communicate. I always say it's like leadership is in real estate we say location, and leadership. I say communicate. Communicate and communicate. You've gotta have the strategy, your strategy and your organization. You've gotta communicate. To your people as to why this strategy is really important. They want to feel that their life is meaningful. They don't wanna feel like they're just coming in and putting in some hours. They want to feel that they're part of a larger strategy, and they want to feel like you have. Organized so that these things can get done. So those are the three things. Strategy, effective organization, and communication.

Suzan 41:57

Brilliant. Well, It's been an absolute honor to have you on the show. Really appreciate all your insights, your time sharing it with us, and you can't wait to share this episode with the world.

Robert 42:08

Thank you for having me and I'd appreciate your thoughtful questions and hopefully a lot of people will listen to your podcast.

Suzan 42:17

Thank you, Bob.

42:20

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