What if taking a vacation could bring you valuable lessons that impact your daily life? Join us as we welcome back Sarah Hanksback, who shares her unforgettable experience in Iceland and how it reinforced the importance of finding balance between our careers, family, and personal well-being.
Discover the breathtaking landscapes of Iceland as Sarah recounts her journey with her mother and sister, touching on topics like technology's ever-changing landscape and its effects on our work and lives. Delve into the challenges and opportunities of our evolving world, discussing the future implications of artificial intelligence on the workforce and the importance of strong leadership in business operations.
Reflect with us on the power of clarity, self-care, and the importance of being present in our conversations and relationships. Learn how to incorporate insights from Sarah's adventure into your daily life, and don't miss this thought-provoking and inspiring episode.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
What if taking a vacation could bring you valuable lessons that impact your daily life? Join us as we welcome back Sarah Hanksback, who shares her unforgettable experience in Iceland and how it reinforced the importance of finding balance between our careers, family, and personal well-being.
Discover the breathtaking landscapes of Iceland as Sarah recounts her journey with her mother and sister, touching on topics like technology's ever-changing landscape and its effects on our work and lives. Delve into the challenges and opportunities of our evolving world, discussing the future implications of artificial intelligence on the workforce and the importance of strong leadership in business operations.
Reflect with us on the power of clarity, self-care, and the importance of being present in our conversations and relationships. Learn how to incorporate insights from Sarah's adventure into your daily life, and don't miss this thought-provoking and inspiring episode.
Visit us at LearningWithoutScars.org for more training solutions for Equipment Dealerships - Construction, Mining, Agriculture, Cranes, Trucks and Trailers.
We provide comprehensive online learning programs for employees starting with an individualized skills assessment to a personalized employee development program designed for their skill level.
Hello and welcome to another candid conversation. I'm really pleased today to welcome Sarah Hanksback, one of our ongoing contributors, But what's exciting today is she just got back from Iceland, So she's all bubbly about wanting to have her own restaurant and be on a farm and so two weeks hiking in Iceland and all the rest. So with that as the backdrop, welcome Sarah. You look pretty good. You're all rested.
Speaker 2:Yes, I am very rested, rested and ready to be here. It was a trip of a lifetime. I am very grateful that I was able to do this.
Speaker 1:And it was very professional.
Speaker 2:It was phenomenal. It was very special to me. This time I went with my mother and my sister. I don't know if you know this. My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, and so this was her dream vacation, and she wanted to share it with her two daughters.
Speaker 1:Has she recovered from the cancer?
Speaker 2:Yep, Yep. She's doing great And her health is great And her numbers are great.
Speaker 1:So maybe the changes in medicine being a process improvement type of person, medical has seen more advances in the last 20 years than any other aspect of our society. It's stunning what they're coming up with now. Yeah, In progress. So how is your sister younger or older?
Speaker 2:My sister is two years younger.
Speaker 1:So she had more energy than you and your mother.
Speaker 2:No, I had the most energy.
Speaker 1:Really, that's hardly surprising. What surprised you most about Iceland?
Speaker 2:I think the people were extremely surprising. I mean, you think of Europe and being an American, there's a stereotype that you're not going to be met with such open arms And I felt that the people in Iceland were extremely welcoming, very proud of their country very. I had a conversation in the airport. I stopped at Duty Free to pick up a couple mini bottles to bring back for my friend And he got out of his. You have to come back in the winter. He looked for pictures he had taken in the Northern Blights. We had like a 10 minute conversation And that's common there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i felt like on the trip. I had an opportunity to stay at farms as part of the tour And the people on the farm were extremely welcoming the one. They invited us into the barn where they were sheep being born and we got to hold baby bunnies And it was just amazing. And then, obviously, the scenery is incredible. I can't even describe how unique the terrain is And around every bend is something unique and different, and I was in awe that I could go an hour and it would look completely different and completely beautiful, like nothing I've ever seen before, and then I'd get that same experience three hours later with something different.
Speaker 1:Well, it's also very sparsely populated And a lot of it is just pure nature. It doesn't have electricity or running water, any of that stuff. So if you're out there you're going to be looking after yourself. But it's stunning. It's all volcanic lava. That's a volcano that created the island And it's in the middle of nowhere. On that We've got in the Pacific they call it the Ring of Fire, which has got more volcanoes and various fissures in the Earth Plate. And in Iceland you can go see the Nant thing. I mean, did you see the place where the plates meet? Yes, it's kind of stunning, isn't it? How big is this? You know it's amazing. So the way I introduced the blog that you wrote about the trip was that you never stopped your mind. You've got about a six point operational guide on how to take a vacation.
Speaker 2:I can't, i mean so. During the trip I recognized that I was completely joyous And I was having fun And I couldn't absorb enough of the experience, and I think I also had a fear of coming back to my life and missing out on that joy, and so it was really important for me to identify what it was that was so special and unique and make sure that I can incorporate that lesson into the life and hustle and bustle of that.
Speaker 1:I'm considerably older than you are And I relate to exactly the same thing that you do. I like to think that our lives are split up into three pieces One piece is our career, one piece is our family and one piece is us, and this proverbial balance that we look for is to have those three things in harmony. And if you look out across the country any country a very strong proportion of the population is stuck with their career, displacing their own personal health and well-being through exercise or diet or whatever, and their family also. And we've got more and more people anymore that are right at the edge of financial disaster because of what we've seen with inflation and economic circumstances. So I'm really mindful doesn't help, by the way, but I'm really mindful about trying to manage my life. You know that extractable near IEL and looking at time chunking has made a big difference in my life. But one thing that happens to all of us and I'm sure you're in the same boat we take on way to hell too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah that's true, that's true And that's something I recognize in myself. I don't say no, and I can often see a solution to a problem really quickly And I want to go in and solve those things, and so I definitely do that, and I like to start my years with a single word to represent what I want to do differently about myself within that year And for 2023, i chose the word focus because I think that I need to do that. I think one of the lessons that I'm taking away from this trip is I feel like the time that I prioritize for myself has to be productive, because I have so many goals. So it's easy for me to ask my family to hey, i'm going to work on this thing for a couple hours And I can establish walls and get respect and things of that sort, but I don't do that for fun, and so I think figuring out how to incorporate what I love minus cooking, because they benefit from cooking, so everybody gives me space to do cooking.
Speaker 1:But your point is, Relmay, we don't organize our time, our personal time or our family time, with the same degree of vigor we do our professional time.
Speaker 2:That's right And that's wrong. That's wrong, i think in 2021, it was the beginning of 2022. And I made a shift to put my priority into my family time And it's never easy, but I think I've made a big shift there once I recognized that it was a deficit and needing to have more priority to spend time with my husband and my kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's something else. I don't know how we what. I had an epiphany, i don't know. Maybe 20 years ago I was on a cruise with my wife, and I don't know that. We'd been on cruises before, but it hadn't been as comprehensive as this one was, and I was on a treadmill looking out at the ocean, and I did that every morning for an hour, and about the second or third day I said, you know, to myself, this is the only investment you've made in yourself this year And it kind of, you know, a stark realization. I'd probably spend more time drinking scotch and I spend exercise, which isn't a bad trade off, but that's a different discussion. And so I'm back in California. Our daughter lives here, our granddaughter is taking her master's in Hawaii, my grandson was graduating from high school, like your daughter, yesterday, and they both have birthdays the end of June, beginning of July, so this is typically the time of year that we'd be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Our daughter teaches. Her last day was last Tuesday, so today is her third day of not having to get up. She still gets up at 3.30 in the morning, but that's a different thing. But her son leaves next Friday. Thursday, he's joining the Navy. Oh Well, so they go to boot camp or whatever the hell the right word is for today, and he's got 10 weeks of that starting this coming week. Wow, my daughter at one point was a personal trainer.
Speaker 2:OK.
Speaker 1:She's a cancer survivor, and so she became a bit of a fitness freak. She's a triathlete. She does Olympic style triathlons. She's a maniac.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:So she took her 17-year-old son and started training him. And so they run every morning, for every second day, five miles. They go to the gym every second day and do squats and everything else that you can imagine, and my daughter's doing all of them with him. She says, dad, i'm consuming more protein now than I did 20 years ago. Sorry, but she's She's stop because when she was teaching she didn't have time, but she didn't want to sacrifice her son's fitness for what that meant for his boot camp. So she went to school, she did her teaching. She writes poetry every morning before she goes to school. She did the exercising with Declan every morning before she went to school. And she's got a book for a family and keep the house clean and all the rest are nonsense. And so she was running out of time every day, exhausted.
Speaker 1:It's life is a treadmill that we get on and we don't challenge it. No Same thing's true when we go to work. We get into runs. I was hearing. I told you this earlier. When we hit the age of 25, our brain starts to age, it starts to atrophy, our capacity diminishes Unless we exercise our brains. Now some people are curious. Most people aren't, but if you aren't. You need to find something to get your brain moving, otherwise Alzheimer's and potions and everything are in your future, 30, 40 years from now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's we don't pay enough attention to any of those things. It's our crazy world, isn't it? The world is changing very quickly.
Speaker 2:And it's easy to find distraction and simple pleasures with things like scrolling TikTok and the instant gratification of binge watching TV. whatever I don't stuff I don't find myself doing, but I observe it a lot.
Speaker 1:Well, we grew up, my generation grew up and I'm going to call a generation 20 years and it's more than one generation between you and I, but I'm going to say it's one generation, my generation. we had weekly TV shows that we watched MASH, as an example, every week it's on, seinfeld, every week it's on, or various days of our lives during the day, and things like that. So we all got conditioned to that kind of brainwashing on. this is what you do Tuesday night. Yeah, you know, you got cheers, you got right, that's your evening. So now cable TV is dying.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's a metaphor now for business. Why did cable TV die? Because it stayed with that model and it didn't look to modify it. Here comes Netflix. They were the first ones. Actually, it was Blockbuster and we've had a bunch of iterations, but it was change in technology, change in thinking, change in delivery, change in customer service, change in tools that are available to people, which is in all aspects of our lives cell phones, a good example 10 years. So now you've got binge watching on Netflix or on Amazon Prime.
Speaker 1:Or on Hulu, or on Slang or on Clue or 3D or And on and on we go to. Now, all of a sudden, we're having this fight across our entertainment, personal entertainment piece, and at the same time, here comes Bezos and Musk with low altitude satellite coverage which is going to make our streaming instantaneously. Yeah, so what happens to AT&T spectrum frontier in those books?
Speaker 2:Don't need them anymore And everybody doesn't like spectrums customer service as it is.
Speaker 1:Well, it's true, we've got spectrum here in California, we have it in Hawaii, and I'm not happy with either of them because my data speeds aren't good enough. So, when you were on vacation, what were the iterations? what were the things you wrote about in your blog that we put up that you? What were those steps?
Speaker 2:Well, the first one is all about preparation. My sister is a tiny little thing and she gets cold very easily, and so she was obsessed with making sure that she had hats, jackets, and every conversation we had was about what are you going to pack? What are you going to pack? I tend to pack last minute. I'm not. I often forget things, and I decided to actually get my act together and make an inventory of what I had and shop for what I needed and create a list. I wasn't. I was expecting the temperatures to be what they were in Iceland, because you can see that What I didn't expect was the wind, and it's brutal, but I didn't care because I had waterproof pants and I had a windbreaker and I had a snow hat, and if I had been cold, i probably wouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did I had made snow pants?
Speaker 1:Was your sister warm enough?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And your mother, yep. Ok, so the preparation that you, it actually helped you that piece.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:What else in your preparation helped you?
Speaker 2:Well, I downsize my laptop.
Speaker 1:I hate to tell you, but it's about time. Yeah, I know. You know what you can do on a tablet today, what you used to be able to do on a mainframe. Yeah, It's What was my mind.
Speaker 2:I can't believe how long I slept my, because when I purchased my other laptop, my criteria was I need something that's going to compile code, because at the time I thought I'm going to become a software developer. If I am going to create a software startup, i need to, and I don't want to go find funding. I'm going to have to do it all myself. And so I bought basically the same size as a gaming computer, which I don't need at all.
Speaker 1:Well, what you've found is software development has changed just as radically as hard work has changed.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I learned how to find other people that already know how to do it. Well, it's not just that, but coding today.
Speaker 1:You know, I took computer science in the 60s at university, So I learned how to code assembler and Fortran and cobalt and all that crap. And it is crap. It's iterative. It defines every damn position on a print page, Yeah. And the machines today? you can basically just talk English to them, Oh sure, And it writes code. Yeah, I was in school, Sarah. What they said was the clerks of tomorrow are the programmers of today, And it's pretty much turned out to be true, like a long number of years ago actually.
Speaker 2:Well, that's, i mean. Part of the reason why I wanted to build software company in the first place is because once I recognized the modern web front end development capabilities and you can literally like if you want a table that has sorting capability and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you just have to put in a package into your code and then you write a few lines of code and now you have all this capability And companies are still charging millions of dollars for software when you can build it so cheap and it can run so cheap. That's why I want to build a software company. Disrupt those guys, because it's absurd that you're making people pay so much money. And it probably costs a lot of money because they designed these systems 20 years ago, but to do it today it's not expensive And it's In the capital goods industry.
Speaker 1:We've got JD Edwards, oracle, microsoft, sap, infor, xap. The two private guys now are merged, so they're now over a billion dollars. There's a bunch of little guys, but all of those big ones are doing the same thing, and a friend of mine coined this. What all we've done is we've taken our processes. We've gone from paper to glass. We took a form, we put that template on the screen. So instead of writing on the form, now we type on the screen.
Speaker 2:Which is slower, by the way.
Speaker 1:Of course it is. And the CardEx. This is where I started. I know a lot of people that's. They don't know what it is in many cases. But we had three, two cabinets and in many cases three cabinets, tall Women, because they're much more detailed, better at detail than men are. Plus men would go crazy trying to do this thing, sliding up and down noting on cards. So we knew instantly what the availability was out in the warehouse versus. We had to wait two weeks for the piece of paper to come back to tell us what was there. And so and today you can write dealer data processing.
Speaker 1:At Catechlor in 1968, 65, put together the first, to my knowledge, data center that took forms from their distribution. But we would send part sales documents, work orders. All that crap would go down to Peoria. It would be punched into a computer, run through a batch report. The report was sent back to us. We double checked, made corrections, sent it back and then the final came forward. Took probably a week excuse me, a month to six weeks to get that whole process done. So our data accuracy went from being instantaneously looking at the card to six weeks old.
Speaker 2:Well, that's gonna be very different in six weeks.
Speaker 1:So about demotivating every damn employee with the arrival of a computer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I believe it.
Speaker 1:It was unbelievable.
Speaker 2:When we put in a quality system. We used a purchased quality management system. I mean they're still the biggest player in the market. Well, they weren't the biggest player then. Now they're probably the biggest player in the market, and it was a CEO-driven initiative. So it was. We had the sticks necessary to make the implementation happen. But I actually had an engineer tell me that I wait until my manager yells at me to do my work in this system because I hate it so much. And when you have that level of demotivation, that's how much cycle are you wasting your business process because people don't wanna use the software?
Speaker 1:Yeah, i used to. I used to. It was a bit of a throwaway. I can't motivate anybody. You either. Come self-motivated. I can't give it to you. I can demotivate all of you, any of you, easily, and why leadership tends to do that. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 1:It's so That's the only his books, and you know that I reference him a lot, but his three signs of a miserable job Anonymity is the first one that your company doesn't know anything about you. Yeah, what the hell kind of people are we working with that? they don't know each other. Are we not talking with each other? Irrelevance they don't understand where their job fits into the overall process And what the hell's the matter with the boss or the leader or something that is explaining. here's where it goes here. who's depending on you? that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, a measurability, and this is the one that gets me the most Blue collar production type jobs. they know what kind of a job they did today. They know how many widgets they made or didn't make or whatever. how many errors White collar we've never paid any attention to that. And you know. performance reviews it's all an opinion. I remember a piece four and six weeks ago, with interest rates going up and inflation being what it is and bread of a recession coming out, the Wall Street Journal had a front page article that started on the front page that companies are going back to performance reviews to find out who to let go. That's not why you have a performance review.
Speaker 2:No, you have a performance review So you can talk about. Well, my favorite part of it is really understanding career path. Yep, How can I? help you get better, i love that Yep. What's your next step and who do we need to like? who do we need to network with to get there? What kind of skills do you need to develop? I love those conversations for that reason.
Speaker 1:I still do that a lot with the job I've had a lot with a lot of people.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of people don't know.
Speaker 1:You know my grandson's 17,. He's going into the Navy. I told you that. But he wanted to take astrophysics. It would have been 250 grand for four years at the University of Purdue. Where he got accepted And he said that's the most funny, i can't afford that. So he joined the Navy. So he's going to get his education paid for by the Navy, which is cool. That's good thinking.
Speaker 2:And we need people to be in the Navy.
Speaker 1:So that's great. Yeah, so he's going into what's called the Nuke program, which is a very exclusive club, but apparently there was only two people selected this year in the United States to go into the Nuke program. He's one of them.
Speaker 2:Awesome.
Speaker 1:And I, you know, i said to him I don't believe that because you're not that special.
Speaker 2:Did you get to see?
Speaker 1:that This is grandfather talking to grandson right, And he said yes, I am.
Speaker 2:So he said the world changed on.
Speaker 1:July the 5th or whatever it was, July the 1st of 2005, because I was born and it's everything's about me. Dad, You know, you've got to understand that That's true. What was the second thing on your list?
Speaker 2:I be silly and have fun. I think I really didn't care about anything other than if I wanted to see what was around the corner, i ran to get there. You know, there was. We pulled over because some of the people were from Australia and they hadn't seen snow and there was snow on the ground And my sister and I made snow angels and we showed them what they were And it just didn't matter. It was no fun, took the priority and being silly and trying to get there And I was like I don't want to be a child, i think.
Speaker 1:So think back to the office setting. Think back to your GE days. It's not unprofessional to hear laughter in a business, in an office. It's not unprofessional. Yet So many people keep your head down, be quiet, don't let anybody know you're here And you said drive me crazy, come on, have fun. Yeah, you know there were three things. One of my first consulting clients he was a cancer survivor in his early 30s. He lost one of his legs And you know he could have rolled over and got upset and angry about the whole damn thing And my daughter called him the what, the what was? there was a TV show where the guy could get the $6 million man except she called him a $6 man And he was all sweaty.
Speaker 1:That was the icky part of it. But this kid said every single day you have to make money, You have to make, have fun. And then this one is the one that got me You have to be effective. He didn't say efficient, He said effective. And I said okay, fine, I understand the fun, I understand the money. But what do you mean by effective? He said you have to concentrate on doing the right things, Not doing things right, doing the right things. That's profound And I think I think that's an interesting twist as well, because I don't know that we always do the right things.
Speaker 2:And that's got many tentacles to it too. I mean, when you think right, obviously integrity comes to mind And I think I'd act with integrity, make choices that way. But it's also how, prioritizing your time You mentioned earlier it might have been before our conversation here about balancing or having your life in. You have your career, you have your family and then you have yourself, and the right thing might be to take time for yourself.
Speaker 1:Well, just get up and go for a walk.
Speaker 2:Yeah, instead of what's the right, we are programmed to have a routine and we are programmed to do the things on the checklist, and maybe the right thing to do is to throw it out for a little bit.
Speaker 1:We're walking right through that right now. With the pandemic, we had a lot of people working from home. Yeah, Now we're seeing the pressure to get back to the office. Well, if we were able to work from home or somewhere other than the office for the last two and a half years, why is it important to go back to the office? I can understand. Maybe a day a week, two days a week or something. I like that. Why do you have to be back in the office all the time?
Speaker 1:You know, We get again fat, dumb and happy, right, we get comfortable with how this thing I have one boss say to me. an owner of a business said I don't know what they're doing when they're not here. I said okay, are you? you don't think they're working? He said well, i don't know. And I said sure, you do. You know what happened and done their computer. Oh, i don't know how to do that. Oh, okay, so that's fine. And then the second thing I said well, if you don't think they're working, that means you don't trust them, right, yeah, oh, i trust them. I trust them when I see them.
Speaker 2:That's not trust.
Speaker 1:So my daughter, who's a teacher. the first year of the pandemic they had the teachers go to the school to conduct virtual learning instead of being able to do it from their home. Hmm, talk about lack of trust.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's shocking.
Speaker 1:Everything. It blew my mind. They changed their mind after 36 months, but you know these. So having fun is an important prescription, but you got to find a way to have fun, because unless we allocate time to it, i don't think we're gonna do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i agree, and I think too though it goes back to your comment about the workplace I think there's ways to interject fun into work And I think those moments of fun can alleviate stress. They can give you something to keep going until you have that time carved out to prioritize fun, fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, one of the mentors that I was looking up to and he was the president of the company and he was a very normal person, with the exception of the fact that he fired me half a dozen times, but he had a way with people. You know, i keep seeing this all the time where people first. We forget that eyeball to eyeball is really what goes on. Customer services created by two people. And it isn't the owner. No, it can be somebody in the back door of the warehouse, at the shipping dock, it could be a cook in the kitchen, could be, it doesn't matter. It's whoever touches the customer and serves the customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know it's okay. So that's two out of the list. What was three?
Speaker 2:To be present.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:To be present.
Speaker 1:Did you pick that up or do you believe that? Where did you go that from?
Speaker 2:So well, originally I took a leadership class GE. When it was, i don't know, they created a class specifically for women, a leadership training, because they were trying to like, equal the playing field and women think differently And we tend to, you know, beat ourselves up and we tend to think about all of the things. Anyway, it was a class specific on that and the takeaway I had was be present And it was. I definitely identified that I had a tendency to when I'm in a conversation with somebody or I'm in a meeting, i'm thinking about other things And I still catch myself doing that especially.
Speaker 1:We all do.
Speaker 2:With my kids like they're talking, talking, talking. I'm thinking about everything else I got to do and worry about.
Speaker 1:There was a video, probably 30 years ago now, called Fish. That was from a store, a fishmonger, in the Pike Place Marketplace in downtown Seattle.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And it's famous And one of the four rules was be there And that's exactly be present. And you know, we all go in and out of the conversation because our minds are, they're moving too quick for what's happening around us. So our kids, our wives or husbands, our coworkers, friends in a bar, wherever the hell you are, you're going in and out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Educators have found. I used to give 45, 75 and 90 minute lectures And it was, you know sage. On the stage you're talking and there's a couple hundred people there, or 500 people, or 50 people, whatever the hell it is. They found in learning that, if I can break it into 10 minute blocks approximately, with tablets, laptops, phones, the professor now puts a question up on the screen, wait 60 seconds, it gets an answer. Real life feedback of how they're paying attention or not, and statistically there's been enough of this. They found retention and learning has gone up by 50% by doing that. That's the same thing as chunking time, isn't it? Yeah, so we did that in all of our classes eight minute to 15 minute blocks with a quiz And, remarkably, when we started this, it's months now, but when we started it, the first quiz questions a third to a half would get it right. The second then we have between 40 and 60 segments in a class.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:The second one, they got between half and two thirds, and the third one and on, was 90% or higher, because they knew what the deal was. They were expecting it, yeah, and they paid attention more.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So in the classroom I used to you know I'd be asking questions all the time. That's my checkpoint. Yeah, So it wasn't a 75 or 40, and I had small enough classes typically that I could do that with Maximum.
Speaker 2:And you've got other students too in your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but the other. Even for women it's a different presentation than for men, for youth it's a different presentation than for age. It's remarkable. So the be there or be present, it really requires discipline and focus.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because we do go elsewhere. I've heard that from my daughter, you know, and I used to see this all the time to people, because you get into a discussion and if you notice this, you can notice in their eyes they've left you. Oh sure, right. So when I see that and people that have been in the classroom with you, with me, will tell you this has always happened, somebody in the class is going to get embarrassed. What did I just say? And I'm right in their face. They have no idea. And they have no idea. I said you weren't paying attention, were you? You were trying to think about what you were going to say back to me in this discussion, which a lot of us do. Don't do it. Yeah, it's hard to change that, sarah, it really is. It's really hard, yeah, and if you don't focus, you're dead meat. And if you focus guess what? You get tired. You get tired, so you need more breaks. Yeah, you know it's a big circle. So that's three. What was four?
Speaker 2:Get outside.
Speaker 1:There you go. So how do you do that from the office?
Speaker 2:Well, i think walking meetings is an option. I think, especially if you're in a meeting where you don't necessarily have to talk a lot or you don't need to be active on your computer, maybe you're listening to other people That's a great opportunity to put in your headset or put in your AirPods or whatever and walk during the meeting. I've actually had an intern He was an athlete And we would go on walking one-on-ones And that was a great way to connect and also get outside. I think during the pandemic, when it first started, i didn't leave my house for probably two months And I definitely fell into a rut that I love being outside, i love hiking, i love I grew up fishing And doing all of the things kayaking, i've got, oh man, canoeing, i loved all that stuff And I just find myself trapped inside. And that kind of leads into the last one too.
Speaker 1:So again, let me use that as a platform From the industrial revolution, when we moved from the farm to the city, when we moved from when we moved to steam engines. Typically it takes a generation for a technological change to bite, to truly be in place. That's not true anymore. It's like Moore's law was every 12 months, 18 months, now it's down to six. Things are changing so quickly. Why don't we have a situation where we can get up from a lot of the tech companies have this, most businesses don't where we can get up and go outside for a walk and still be working?
Speaker 1:Yeah, just flush your head. Get rid of whatever that noise is there. Get out of it, because you get into ruts and traps, don't we?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's just so beneficial to breathe fresh air. And it didn't matter. I was in wind, that was. You felt like you were going to blow over, but I still felt great. You know, i didn't have any knee pain.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I grew up as a runner and I don't run anymore, primarily because it hurts my knees too much. And I found myself running in Iceland and I had no pain.
Speaker 1:But you weren't running on concrete. No, no, i do, running, i do.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it was just weird Yeah.
Speaker 1:My body is not built for running. My legs are too long, my waist is too short, so I can't run. My daughter laughs at me. She's a runner. I look like a gazelle.
Speaker 2:Let's go for a run, dad.
Speaker 1:But I can swim for hours And it's just boring. You have no company. Your head's in the water. You know who am I going to talk to, so you got to play with yourself in here, you know. So it's a different thing, but I don't know that the let me call it three years of the pandemic gave enough of us enough time to reevaluate how we wanted to conduct our lives, whether it's work or home, but it gave us an opportunity to think about it. Sure did, and today there's less than 50% of the people working. I think this was in the United States a couple of weeks ago. I saw 48% of the people are still working from home, i believe it. It's pretty stunning. Yeah, and there was a fifth, i don't remember what it was, though.
Speaker 2:Prioritize what you love. And what is?
Speaker 1:it? What is it that you love?
Speaker 2:I love adventure, i love, i love you, i love you.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? Your love adventure.
Speaker 2:I love to experience things I've never experienced before. I love to see what's around the corner. I think this is true in business and this is true in life. You know, when we were talking about a data lake at GE, like yes, that's what I want to go do, play in the data lake, because it's new and exciting, and learn and experience. And I'm not satisfied with routine And so like, for me, getting outside, used to me going out, and I have a three, you know two mile loop and I have a three mile loop and depending on how far I want to walk is what I do. That's not that fun. I mean, i've listened to podcasts. Why I do it, so I get some stimulation from that standpoint. But this past weekend, my husband and I, for anniversary, i found new hikes. We went on to, you know, i paid the $10 for the app on my phone And we found new hikes and they were great and it was awesome.
Speaker 1:So the other question there is why do I have to listen to a podcast when I'm walking?
Speaker 2:What I liked, because it's fun learning, because I can accomplish two things at once.
Speaker 1:There we go. How does that fit with being there or being present?
Speaker 2:It doesn't. That's my point.
Speaker 1:My wife and I, you know we go for walks but it's pretty hot here during the day still, so we have to get up at six or six thirty and it's still low seventies, so that's pleasant. So we go out walking. She says you've got your phone. I said I need that to open the door. She said this has gotten crazy Because we control our thermostat. That our life with the phone right.
Speaker 1:My mom's test was everything we're doing is against that brief present or prior advice, things that are important to you. Yeah, you know, it's really, really interesting.
Speaker 2:I don't need to wait to do the things until I feel like I've been. I get a reward because I've accomplished something. I think that's probably sums it all up right Like I can go have fun today because I want to. I don't need to wait until I finish this or I have accomplished this. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 1:So you're going to act on that?
Speaker 2:Sure am, i'm trying. It's hard, man. It's so easy to fall back into. It is hard, it is incredibly hard.
Speaker 1:You know the whole routine of work is. You know it's a four letter word deliberately And as we've evolved as a society, we still have leaders that are checking on everything that we do. We still have leaders that are making sure we're in the office that we're attending, we're not late, we're not sick, yeah. So here comes artificial intelligence. A lot of people are getting nervous about it, right, and Mike Rose said an interesting thing the other day If you're not working with your hands and you're not building something now, that could be software, it could be a host, whatever, 50% of the American workforce will be replaced by robots or artificial intelligence.
Speaker 1:Okay, so my little P brain says we got about 180 million people working in America. 90 million people won't have jobs, so that might be. Brain goes a little further, says okay, we spend hundreds of trillions of dollars on technology. What have we spent on sociology, like, what are we going to do with that 90 million people if they don't have jobs? Are they going to go to school? What are we going to do with them? Who's going to pay them? What does society look like then? right?
Speaker 2:Expand dollars.
Speaker 1:Down another track with another of our contributors, Ed Gordon. He wrote a book called Future Jobs a long time ago, early 2000s, And he said by 2030, half of the workforce in America will not have the skills to be employable. Different track, different source, different perspective, different foundation, same principle. So maybe 2030 is too early, but 2040 for sure That'll be true. So what are your children going to do? Because that's going to be the life that they live with.
Speaker 2:Well, they need to either learn skills that require your hands, or they need to learn how to adopt, embrace and be the evolution of what's changing.
Speaker 1:So find something that your passion they're both that you can monetize. That might be delivering newspapers Why not? It's fine. It's fine. I'm amazed here because we have the ice cream man. he'll still here, goes around with the ice cream, with the bells and the umbrellas and all the rest, and stops in the neighborhood. The kids come running out, they buy their ice cream, they go back and everything's and he still does it 110 degrees. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Isn't it?
Speaker 1:though, do you count? It's the same two or three guys. They obviously are making enough money. They obviously enjoy it. Right. What's the enjoyment? It's seeing kids.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing. Right, it's said yes, there's a lot of personal reward for seeing people happy. Yeah, it's not the truth. Ice cream. Who doesn't get happy when they get ice cream?
Speaker 1:I make my own and that's disgusting because it is so rich. Oh, tomorrow I'm making salty caramel gelato.
Speaker 2:Oh yum, That sounds delicious It is.
Speaker 1:It's delicious, you're welcome. Come on over The other part of all of that. I'm in Moscow with a guy who's a manager and he's got an MBA, and I asked him if you could change anything to make your job better for you. What would you do? He says don't ask that question, just tell me what you want me to do. There's a different perspective. Under communism All of the things that we talk about you go on for vacation, you make a list, you do your job and you're saying you're going to become a master black belt shortly. Yes, that's no mean accomplishment, congratulations, thank you.
Speaker 2:It's about 150% of the projects that I needed to mentor, because that's easy for me. I love mentoring. I love learning how to apply the tools. I think the last requirement was to complete my own project but to write it up. I do projects all the time. I approach every challenge with a problem-solving mindset and I'm often using tools from the Lean Six Sigma toolkit at some point in a project. But I finally just committed to it. It was one of my goals for this year to finally get the certification. I have the project write up complete. I've already reviewed it. I just have to. There's like a workflow step. I have to wait for it to get forward. Progress enough in the workflow, then I'll submit and that'll be done.
Speaker 1:We have the same thing on every class. We have to put a learning outcomes page One of the people that are taking this, expecting, needing, wanting to get out of it. It causes you to do things the right way, do the right things. It's simple. That's industrial engineering and it's been around 200 years.
Speaker 2:We just call it a different thing and we've got different ways of playing with it now because we've got better tools today, At the quality conference that I attended, the ASQ conference, one of the lectures talked about integrating data science and machine learning into the Six Sigma process. I've got a background in both. The fact that it didn't occur to me to use machine learning in the analysis phase is ridiculous, but it was so simple.
Speaker 1:That's the traps we're in, Sarah.
Speaker 2:All of us. That's why you need to count them.
Speaker 1:We get comfortable with a certain deal. One of the things Steve Clegg, who does a lot of data analytics using artificial intelligence a very intelligent guy, we were both swimmers younger He said one of the things that was really telling to me and also to me was my coach could get me to move my hand two inches in one direction and it made a four second difference in 100 yards. To know the subject matter that well as the athlete or Steve, as we didn't know it because we don't see the whole picture You're in a project. I don't like using the term project anymore. I call them engagements because the project has a beginning and an end and engagement is never ending. I get a project and I'm going to call that level one. There's always a level two or three or four or five. There's never level one. That's the end.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Level one is the new beginning. Yeah, all of the tools that we see today. I try hard and I don't succeed. But I try and look at all of the new stuff and see if it applies to me. Then I ask my daughter if it applies to me and I ask an IT guy that I trust and know a long time if it's something I should do. But always are they in agreement with me where I say, no, that's not. Oh, that is important, dad, or that is important, ron, and that forces me to rethink things. So, putting data analytics together in the research side, it's only sensible. The argument that you and I used to have, or not argument, but a discussion in database data analytics, the quality of data has always been the biggest bugaboo, hasn't it? Yeah, who owns that piece of data? The old days of database management? who owns that data element? Who's the one that can make changes that nobody else can make, right? So we'll have that damn discipline. Nope, nope. You got miles of work to do, kid, before you can rest.
Speaker 2:And you've got like you'll have the same data in different systems and it's defined differently. It can't even be harmonized Like That drives me crazy.
Speaker 1:You know and I can I can list three or four dealers right now that do that. They have multiple software packages that have common data elements that treat them differently or updated differently and they don't talk to each other. Yep Drives me crazy.
Speaker 2:There's no reason for that anymore. Most software companies will publish APIs and that's you know. That's how you talk, how systems talk to each other.
Speaker 1:And APIs are simple.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, in the old days in computer back in the sixties, we used that our programs had to be four to eight K max And it was always a call. So you do iterations. Step A set the step C. Here's the entrance, here's the exit. Here's the entrance, here's the exit. Here's the data element changes. I mean it's fundamental as hell, but it's been true since the beginning of time And it's still true, i don't care how advanced technology is.
Speaker 2:It's still logic, It's still sequence. So when are you going back To Iceland? Well, I, my next planned trip will be when my son turns 18, I want to convince him that's where he wants to go.
Speaker 1:So my, he's 12. Well, that's six years. That's too long.
Speaker 2:Oh, I agree, But I like I've got that set in my head. I'm definitely taking him to Iceland.
Speaker 1:Does he know?
Speaker 2:I told him that a few times, but he's 12. So and he's a busy 12. He's the kid I grew up with, right Like he. You know what did he today's, the first day off from school. What did he do? Him and his friend rode their bikes for I don't know how many miles they went, but they were gone for five hours, and I gave him 10 bucks and I said well, make sure while you're out, get some ice cream, like and they had a ball with that, didn't they?
Speaker 2:Oh sure, i don't know where all the places he went. He always calls me. He's like I feel like it could easily become a helicopter parent, but I know for him freedom is very important to him. Like that is one of the most freedom and friends, like he wants to be able to go places and do things. And so I've had to learn to let go and to trust, and we have a great understanding of what I expect in return for that trust, which is call me, let me know what's going on. And he never skips a beat there. He calls me to hey, mom, i'm going to ride my bike over to my friend's house across the street. Like it's, it's good, but that that's something that I had to learn how to let go and And give.
Speaker 1:One of the reasons that that's difficult is a lot of us view that as being abdication, not trust. I'm abdicating my responsibility of being a parent by letting them have the freedom to come up to their own decisions. It's a great book about six, 40 years ago, something called the fifth turning Okay, by a professor from MIT, and that a turning is a generation And Peter. It'll come to me before the author And a point in there that I found really interesting parent to child is a competition. You're trying to impose on them rules for their safety and wellbeing And at a certain age they start pushing back, saying you don't know, jack, yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:Grandparent, grandchild is totally different. It's all love, and I was. I had one grandparent that was alive, but I was blessed to be raised by her. Multi parents work. So up until the age of four, i think, maybe a little younger. She was my daytime parent, so my sister's two years, 26 months younger, and when she was mobile, all of a sudden granny had a hard time keeping up with two kids because I was running everywhere. So she convinced a school to let me go to kindergarten at the age of three.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:Obviously, i failed kindergarten. I repeated it because I was too young.
Speaker 2:You were too young Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I, you know I could say I wasn't smart enough to. that would work just as well. But my grandmother, I can't believe that she had the hood spa go to a school and convince the principal that her 30 year old grandson deserved to be there and he better take them. But part of the expression that's leadership in it. It is, You know, as usual, this has been a wonderful conversation. I'm so glad you enjoyed Iceland. I did too. I didn't get as broad a base as you did. I didn't stay at firms, but I love the place every minute of it.
Speaker 2:It's amazing.
Speaker 1:It's really unique. I can't wait to go to Greenland when it's spring. Any closing comments, sir?
Speaker 2:No, i think. I mean it goes back to like really getting clarity around what's the most important things to you and then making sure you're carving out space to, to grant yourself those gifts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And clarity is a word that I like a lot of, because I don't think we have a lot of clarity on much that we see anymore. Everything's very murky in a whole bunch of directions. Well, i'm glad you're back. I'm glad that we chatted. Thank you very much. I look forward to the next blog, and you know, we've got to constantly evaluate how we do everything, because we've got tools today that we never dreamt of. Yeah, it's just phenomenal. So thank you, sarah, for your attention and your comments and input. Thank you everybody who's listened to this candid conversation. I hope you'll join us again at the next one. Aloha, thank you, thank you.