How do relationships shape our lives, businesses, and legacies? Join us in a profound conversation with Ed Wallace as we unfold the intricate fabric of meaningful connections and their long-lasting impact. We draw upon the microcosm of our individual lives, sketching them as a 'dash' of about 85 years. Within this dash, we emphasize the power of relationships - the core value that will outlast us, our jobs, and our careers.
We use the lens of Max, a London taxi driver, whose exceptional customer service painted an unforgettable image in his customers' minds. We delve into the integrity of private and public business spheres and share insights on extending a 'servant's heart' to build memorable experiences. We explore the dance of balancing our energy to foster relationships and leave behind a significant legacy. To strengthen this dance, we lay down a roadmap for strategic relationship building that can revolutionize your business growth.
Our journey doesn't stop here. We also extract wisdom from the corporate world about meeting efficiency and collaboration. We discuss the golden rules of a successful meeting, the art of breaking down complex topics, and the power of consensus. As we navigate these unchartered territories, we leave you with an exercise: jot down the four digits of your birth year and ponder over – What am I here for? What's most important to me? What's my contribution going to be? Hop on the journey with us and Ed Wallace. It’s time to unlock the value of your relationships and their potential to transform your dash. Tune in, reflect, grow, and find answers.
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.
How do relationships shape our lives, businesses, and legacies? Join us in a profound conversation with Ed Wallace as we unfold the intricate fabric of meaningful connections and their long-lasting impact. We draw upon the microcosm of our individual lives, sketching them as a 'dash' of about 85 years. Within this dash, we emphasize the power of relationships - the core value that will outlast us, our jobs, and our careers.
We use the lens of Max, a London taxi driver, whose exceptional customer service painted an unforgettable image in his customers' minds. We delve into the integrity of private and public business spheres and share insights on extending a 'servant's heart' to build memorable experiences. We explore the dance of balancing our energy to foster relationships and leave behind a significant legacy. To strengthen this dance, we lay down a roadmap for strategic relationship building that can revolutionize your business growth.
Our journey doesn't stop here. We also extract wisdom from the corporate world about meeting efficiency and collaboration. We discuss the golden rules of a successful meeting, the art of breaking down complex topics, and the power of consensus. As we navigate these unchartered territories, we leave you with an exercise: jot down the four digits of your birth year and ponder over – What am I here for? What's most important to me? What's my contribution going to be? Hop on the journey with us and Ed Wallace. It’s time to unlock the value of your relationships and their potential to transform your dash. Tune in, reflect, grow, and find answers.
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.
Aloha and welcome to another candidate conversation today from the east coast of the united states. With the drum roll behind them is a gentleman by the name of Ed Waltz.
Speaker 2:I haven't seen you for a while. How are you?
Speaker 1:My friend, good to see you. You're looking great.
Speaker 2:Thank you, nice to see you, as always, broadcasting from the world headquarters there in Hawaii.
Speaker 1:How great is that I?
Speaker 2:want to be you when I grow up, Ron.
Speaker 1:Yes, I keep telling my grandkids that I'm trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up and they said you're, that's never going to happen and we can. We can cover a whole bunch of ground. I'm going to let you take us wherever you want to go. We're about the beginning, the end, of September right now, so your end is coming. We've got a whole bunch of economic circumstances going. We've got political things going. You travel North America, training, speaking to business people. What do you want to talk about?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of things we can talk about and I recently did a little minute to win at one of my little broadcasts where I talked about how do we avoid letting macroeconomic factors impact us. And I talked. I talked about Ron, you know, macroeconomic. We can't do anything about macroeconomic. We can do what we can as we can focus on microeconomic. And in the last recession I want to make sure I cite the data right 14 percent of companies actually grew at least 9 percent. So how do we become a 14 percent Right? And we were talking a little bit beforehand.
Speaker 2:I said you know, the end of the year was also the time to reflect. The year is done Right, like you're going to close what you've got if you're in sales, you're going to deliver what you need to deliver if you're in service or something You're going to make, what you need to make if you're in manufacturing. But it's really start time to reflect and think about the next year. And I always like to reflect on us as humans and not necessarily as business people. And you know I mentioned to you about our dash and you and I both know what our dash is. But I'm going to ask the audience to just consider a number for a moment and then we'll explain what that number means and that number is if you write, if you, if you create a zero on a piece of paper, put a decimal point to the right of it, put seven more zeros and the number two. So zero point, seven zeros, number two. That number on represents an 85 year lifespan over the age of the earth. Not a lot of time, right?
Speaker 1:Wow, that puts it in context, doesn't it?
Speaker 2:That's, and I call that our dash and that takes the four years we were born and we're on this dash. Right now, if you're listening to this podcast, you're on your dash and our dash is not necessarily comfortable. You know, when we see, you know, a person's lifespan it's a straight line. It's really not a straight line of life. Our dash is uncomfortable. Our dash it could be like jagged lines, it could be spaces in between that line, and so I wanted to talk about meaning and connecting what we do to some kind of performance. Today, you know we're talking about topics and like, hey, it's the end of the year, let's reflect on ourselves, our lives, how we're making a difference, what's important, those kind of things. So, if you're OK, that's where we're going to go.
Speaker 1:I think that's wonderful and let me just interject a personal note In the 50 years spent that we're talking about, in the 50 years spent that I've been working when I started 1968, tough market for hiring everybody said take your time, Ronnie, you're going to be with them for the rest of your life and there's been many, many books written about generational changes and transformation. There's a lovely book by the name of the fourth, turning from a MIT professor, Peter Sange, and what we've seen in the 50 years of my lifetime is the average number of jobs in a career go from two to 10. So that dash is not static. We have the opportunity to reinvent and redevelop and recreate ourselves over time, but not a lot of people think about that. We are like you say, we are in control of the micro world, not the macro world. So it's up to us to choose how we want to respond to the world. So with that interjection, I love it, man, it's perfect.
Speaker 2:And again there's all kinds of things written about choosing happiness, all that kind of stuff. Right, and I'm a sales guy. You know we do sales training, so we're not going to get any psychology here. But I started, I heard about dashes and I put that number to it and I started thinking, wow, when I'm 85, when am I going to look back on and value the most? And it's probably not how much money I leave behind. I've never seen roof racks on a curse. Have you run? It may be that I've left my family in a better position, with me not around anymore, but like, how do I, what did I really leave that created some kind of difference with people? And it takes me back to relationships, Because that's the one thing, despite the economy, despite what's in our pocketbooks that we can control, that we have influence over. So you know, I think a dash well lived is full of relationships.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's very hard to have meaningful relationships and lasting relationships. If you think about friendships, how many people do you know that you grew up with? When did you grow up with? When did you're five years old? You know it's very few.
Speaker 2:I have one. I have one To this day. We met in. We lived in such a small town run that they combined the two grades, so first and second grade were taught in the same room. I mean, I'm not that old but you know and you really think about one of them schoolhouses, right, but in the town I lived in, the teacher taught the first graders and gave the second graders work to do. Can you imagine the chaos in that room? And then we all made it through and I met this second grader. His name is Mike and to this day we're still best friends. We've got a golf trip to Ireland planned and where I'm working part time in two weeks. My best man, I was his best man. We were each other's God, god, parent, all the all this stuff right.
Speaker 2:Lots of friends and lots of people I've known and I've got a great partner in life, my spouse, laura, and great kids.
Speaker 2:But from a friendship standpoint, outside of those kind of things, one guy and, like I said, I've trained 30,000 people. So it's difficult to build relationships that last, and you know one of the things, I got asked this just the other day with all the people we interact with virtually now, how do you build a great relationship, and my thought is, you go to this concept that I know I've shared within the past, called relational GPS. So, if I'm on, what that stands for is goals, passions and struggles, and it's something we've innovated and it's such a simple idea, ron. You've got business and personal goals, you've got causes or passions, things you care deeply about, and you've got struggles, just like everybody, business and personally. We wouldn't be human beings circling the universe at some crazy speed Thank goodness for gravity If we didn't have strokes. So how do we locate that, even in a drive by 30 minute zoom? Well, ask some questions. It's that simple the power of inquiry versus the power of presenting. So I've been presenting here for a few minutes, so why don't you ask a question?
Speaker 1:Well, we did a podcast a couple of years ago on GPS. I recall now I didn't call it relationship, but goals, passions and struggles. And you're absolutely right, all of us have those things and too many of us fall victim to them rather than taking control of them. And I remember your messenger, the driver that would take you to the airport, and how he asked questions. And in the last little while, one of the podcasts we did a couple of years ago was with a lady who does the marketing in a business and she said that and I found it intriguing 10 to 15 to 20 years ago our salesmen were walking brochures. Today, with the internet, in most cases our customers know about our products better than our salespeople do, so it has to be a completely different thing. So what I've taken to doing in the last couple of years last year more prominently is anybody asked me for anything, I say yes Confuses the hell out of them. And if we don't get to a place that they asked me for something and I say yes, I asked them, how can I help?
Speaker 1:And I believe and maybe this is an entry for you again, I believe that we have a real, serious problem with work-life balance that generationally, I'm going to split our generations into 45 and 100, and 45 and above, 45 and above. We grew up being obedient. Our parents protected us don't touch the soul. If you're going to burn yourself, book votes way, you're going to hit by a car. Our teachers taught us by road. You know. You know that, and we were obedient. We went all the way through university, we got out into the workplace and we have the same type of thing. Somebody teaches us, trains us, how to do the job, show, tell, show, try, show it how. And this is what I showed you. Now you try it and then get good at it.
Speaker 1:And the Japanese culture with Kaizen is a totally different deal. We're static. We're teaching people how to do things and then letting them be on their own and make it faster with fewer mistakes. Boom, boom, boom. Japanese are trying to make it better every single time. So that's one piece of the puzzle. The second piece of the puzzle and we're quite balanced is, as pressure builds on your career, the first thing we sacrifices ourselves. We stop doing the exercises, we stop eating properly, we eat quickly on the run, blah, blah, blah. And if the pressure on the task is severe, we, our family pays the penalty.
Speaker 1:Again, the younger generation are saying, eh, not for me, see you later. So they're coming out. If I'm not learning something, I'm gone. If you're not paying attention to me, I'm gone. If I don't have the perception that my work is worthwhile, they're gone. And I think they're right. Everybody says to me Ron, this younger generation, they want to go to the corner office right away. They want to make a million bucks right away. They're a pain in the ass. I still teach, you still teach. I love the younger people and the energy they got, because I ain't got it anymore like I used to. They're right. We need to tune into that, thinking better. I do a lot of work in Europe, asia, still all over the damn place, like you and there's different approaches and different cultures and we need to start cross pollinating that so we can all start learning from each other. So there's your next entry point. What do you think of that?
Speaker 2:Well, and it goes back to what I was, what I was originally saying wherever we go, we're interacting with other humans and those humans, believe it or not, have a lot of this. They're a lot like us. And when we've introduced this relational GPS concept in, I'm going to, like I said, ireland, in Switzerland, in the Middle East, everybody seems generated. It doesn't matter what generation, it doesn't matter what demographic, it doesn't matter what culture, what beliefs, even spiritual beliefs everybody has those kinds of things. So if we could go back to our dash our dash is a series of interactions with humans for all those years Is there an opportunity in a drive by zoom to make that person's day better? It may not be something kind, you say, it might be some question. You asked them.
Speaker 2:You talked about my friend, the cab driver. So this fellow, max, he changed my whole life around. You can see it there. The London taxi. He drove around a London taxi. He's been the foundation of everything we teach because he created an experience for people in a taxi cab and people were lined up. We had to schedule weeks in advance to be with this guy in this commodity because of the experience he was creating. So whenever I talk about dashes, I'll refer people to Max's dash and even though Max is gone, his dash, the legacy of his dash, is still touching people and I think when we get to 85, I think that's what we're thinking about, right?
Speaker 1:Well, absolutely. You made a couple of references earlier. At a certain point in your life, I don't care who you are, money is not the issue, everybody will get there. London, the taxi cab drivers, max. They are unique people. They require very specific education about the city, the history etc. Before they can be licensed. Please lead forward to Uber to lift and how technology transformed an experience. It's remarkable how max we can find in Uber through the ratings that customers give and your legacy.
Speaker 1:You know I'm 77, still trying to finish off things that I said I wanted to do before I was done and I've still got miles to go before I rest. Right, let's rub your kitling. Here we go, and all of us, your children. The measure of a person to me has always been you know not who we are, but who our children are, or our grandchildren you talk about grade one and grade two of my grandmother was got a master's in 1915 and taught school her whole life, and my parents both worked. So my grandmother raised my sister and I my sister's, 27 months younger than I am. So when I was about three months, three years and six months old, my grandmother couldn't keep up with both of us. She put me in kindergarten, so I'm one of the few people on the planet that you know that failed or repeated kindergarten because I was too young.
Speaker 1:Life's an amazing amalgam of events and you're right, it's all the people we touch. Are the people that touch us who made a different difference on our lives? How is that? And a friend of mine who's a little bit younger, but the same thing. We talk about aging and he says you know, I don't want to live with regrets, and so that you know, the focus changes, doesn't it? I want to do the right thing, I want to do what's right, I want to be effective, I want to be efficient. You know simple things. I want to be nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that private integrity right takes us to this, our public integrity. You know how does this translate into the business world? Because this is a business that you run, so we should take this what seems like soft stuff, which is not really. How do we translate that meaning we spend so much of our time at work? There's a recent study done around meetings and the average business person spends 12 working days per month in some sort of meeting. This is a meeting. Right now, you know we don't practice meetings, right, we just go from meeting to meeting. We don't have a process for real thoughts around. How about if you went into a meeting with some idea of your purpose for that meeting and then doesn't that make it create a better experience for the other person? Isn't that a way of extending or smoothing out your dash and building that relationship, rather than you know what? Like my father, bless his soul, right. He passed away when I was only about 30 years old.
Speaker 2:I always like to tell this story because I think it's really impactful. He was a dentist in a very small coal mining town in the front of his mother's row home. So it wasn't a dentist to the stars, he was a dentist to the coal miners, right. And you know he always said I'm going to retire and go fishing. I said, dad, you got to day off once a week, why don't you go fishing? I'm a kid saying this to him. Nope, I work hard, save, retire, go fishing. So when he I remember it was the spring of 1989. He went out and got himself a fishing license at K-Mart which doesn't exist anymore Big department store, right. And hey, I got my fishing license. I'm going to start fishing in November when I retire.
Speaker 2:He passed away on September 18th, right before he retired. So there has to be that so he didn't miss one of our school events, right that he was always able. But then he would go back that night and work. And I saw that and was like you know, there's got to be a way to find some sort of and we get out of balance, ron. I mean I'm sure you've gotten out of balance, I've gotten out of balance and fortunately we have good partners in life. They've helped us with that. If we don't have a great partner in life, we got to figure it out ourselves and I think it gets back to do.
Speaker 2:I have that infrastructure of people. So if you're a business person and let's say you're in sales and let's say you're not making many sales right now with a certain industry target group of customers, but you've built enough relationships in an industry that's now growing. So like we do a lot with heavy equipment. Great place to be lots of business there. But let's say heavy equipment stopped growing. The other area we do really well is in chemicals. Chemicals never seem to stop growing. I'm not saying they're good, so we have to be a little strategic about who we build these relationships with and who we learn GPS about. Because, again, we only have so many hours in a day. We're spending a lot of that time in meetings. So how do we balance all that stuff?
Speaker 1:We have a class on time management Five hours six hours, that's great. Well, the thing that meetings how many people do you know have an agenda for the meeting, have a purpose for the meeting.
Speaker 2:Ron, I'll tell you. I ask, in front of CEOs of large companies, how many of you enjoy going to meetings around the company and nobody raises their hands and that person rolls their own eyes. What all you really need is I call it a purpose statement. What am I trying to accomplish and why will the people coming to my meeting benefit by coming to my meeting? If you can't articulate that to yourself before you send an invitation out, you're not ready to have the meeting. It's that simple.
Speaker 2:It's that simple. It's respect for yourself and everybody else's time. Here's a trick, one quick trick on that too Call the meeting for 10 after the hour, because everybody's finishing a meeting on the hour. So two, 10, three, 10, nine, 10, whatever 10. And it's gonna get people's attention and the meeting five minutes early. They'll love you.
Speaker 1:They'll love you. The other thing that happens to us as people. We're social animals. We don't have good discipline on ourselves, self control. So I'm on boards still several boards and there's a distinction between board business and discussion, and meetings end going the same place. There's a difference between meeting discussions and discussions. We let things become discussions with no end and it's a failure on our part. Agree with you 100%. If you can't say what the damn purpose of the meeting is, don't call the meeting.
Speaker 2:So can I give you a four step process for a great meeting, after you figure out the purpose.
Speaker 1:Perfect.
Speaker 2:It's real simple. First step is get the group talking first. Yep, so you're starting the meeting off and some new people are joining. Introduce them or ask them a question or have somebody update you on what happens, but stop talking as the meeting leader. Second, now the next three steps. Just repeat. They're so simple. First one is introduce meeting topic. So Ron is gonna talk about parts and service today. He gets 20 minutes right. Then the group talks about it for 10 minutes. That's the next step Topic dialogue. What did we agree to and commit to? That's how you process a meeting topic and then you do it again for the next topic and if Ron is running late, he's got to borrow time from Ed, the next topic leader, or Ron's done. It's really and it's such an easy cadence, but no one does it. No one, unless we work with them.
Speaker 1:No one really does it. I have a thing I call five things Same deal. I pose the question and they tell me and I've got three categories. Give me five things. We're gonna put them up on the screen, whatever the heck it is. Give me five things that if you could wave a wand and change about your job, that would impact on your personal life. That's subject one. Subject two Give me five and no dialogue, just write it down. Number two five things that are a pain in the butt to do. No dialogue, finish that. Next thing five things that you would do for the company to make the job more effective. Five things.
Speaker 1:So, then we're finished and that might take nine, 10 to 15 minutes. We go back to the first list. We got a group of people. We start writing it up. So we've got common language. We move from one group to the next group, to the next group and we look back reflectively and say this point is on all three lists.
Speaker 1:Why hasn't it been fixed? Why hasn't it been done? Who's responsible for that? Now, all of a sudden, we're not talking about theory anymore. It's not me making a presentation anymore. They're talking to each other about what the hell's standing in the way of getting this thing done Exactly. And then I take them to meetings or things. You need three points. Everybody has to understand what we're trying to do. Then the part that normally fails is everybody has to agree that what we're trying to do is the right thing to do, and we've got to have a fight about that, because everybody's going to have different perspectives in life. Once we've got that done and we have a majority, it might not be a unanimous but then we'll be committed to it, and everybody that leaves the room, that's us.
Speaker 1:I don't care if you are the most vociferous opponent to that point or not. You've got to have voted nine to one. You're done. This is what we're doing, and that makes life easy too.
Speaker 2:And with the person we voted against it. We want to try to find a way to get them to consent to it. Right To say okay, I can support it. I wasn't what I wanted to do, but I'm for the betterment of the greater good, I can consent to that.
Speaker 1:I always thought consensus is we don't necessarily agree, but when we leave, we support it Exactly, and that's an important point to add, Because not every oh damn it, I'm going to submarine that sucker. Why is it jerks that always comes up with the good ideas, Right?
Speaker 2:right. When they leave the room it's like, well, you know what, I agree to it in there, but guess what? I'm going to do everything I can to slow things down, Kind of like governments do. That's a great story, but that's another topic. We won't do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a great story about Lewis Gerstner. When he took over IBM, leaving the consulting business, he had his first meeting of all his direct reports. They chatted, introduced each other and then he got serious. He said okay, who are your top three customers? There's about 15 people in the room. He got through three. Nobody was able to name them. He called the meeting and said we'll meet again in a week's time and such and such, and I want you to bring me the top three. They did what do you do next? He took those lists of customers and left. He went and visited every single one of those customers before he came back and then he called them together and they started talking about what the customers needed and wanted. And I think we've lost this. Customer service has gotten so bad in America. People say it sucks, they've stopped complaining. And if you became a customer service person, a relationship person, if you liked people, it shows and it'll make a difference. People.
Speaker 2:Wow, I'm gonna do that again, I always thought the best training or learning for someone going into sales, customer service, account management, heart and service counter branch manager would be a job serving tables or bartender job. I always thought those positions prepare you for the unknown. Oh, the guy's stake got burned or they got the drinks wrong. I can't get the coffee out fast enough. Those are all the things that in interacting with someone who's actually paying money and expecting a nice experience. So I always thought, hey, if you wanna go into those positions, I did all that stuff. But I think the whole idea when we see good service, we were like shock by yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I'll ask a question.
Speaker 2:I'll ask a question and maybe I'm teaching a leadership class and a customer program and I'll say write down the name of a company that puts people before their processes. I get two companies.
Speaker 2:when I'm in the States, I get two companies Chick-fil-A and Amazon yep because the returns are so easy and they and and people cannot, and I, you get out lot, but think about that. Diverse groups of people in a room, that's as far as they can go, so that tells you. So when the plumber calls me back of the three that I called, I'm hiring him no matter what, because he actually called me back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now you write about customer service.
Speaker 2:It's tough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those examples are perfect. We used to use a Harvard case study For a company called service master, yes, which is a janitorial service company Yep, and they do hospitals and schools all across the country and the chairman of the company said that he looked for people that had a servant's heart. And what you say about the, the waitress of waiter. Whenever I'm in a dealership or you student this dealership, all the time we go up to dinner we go to something like red Robin or Chick-fil-A didn't exist in those days, but you know I'll be looking around. All these young people my daughter was one of them too who are serving. They're making more money than our starting salary at a dealership for these people and they're learning customer service. They're showing me customer service every I said why don't we hire these people? You know, train them to do what we, why don't we? They got attitude, they got interpersonal skills. They're wonderful. Hey, we miss a whole bunch of boats in Walking past, people with preconceived notions about what the job requires and it totally.
Speaker 2:One of my best customers is from the Netherlands and her name is Emma, and Emma is in charge of global training of. She's a global leader for learning and development. For a met a medical prox couple and they, emma got hired when she was a bartender in a pub in England by three of the executives who had just happened to go in there To get a pank, or whatever you call it be. After their meeting and they watched her and they said Do you have a degree? Or she had no degree and she's now pretty much running global training for a five billion dollar company. Who cares about the degree?
Speaker 2:If you look, if you're great with people and and and amazing facilitator, great at relationships and the other thing all here because we're still talking about our dash relationships Well, I'm an engineer or I'm gonna come a CPA in recovery, but most CPAs don't necessarily come off like I do. What do I do? And I'll say well, you can still think about relationships from a process standpoint. You've got to find something in common with law. Ask them some questions oh, I can do that. And then, when you do things together, make sure you're on time, make sure you deliver what you said. Oh, I can do that. And when you're meeting with him, be prepared for the meet Well, I can do that. And and try to help him yeah, I can do all those things. Well, why does being an engineer get in the way of you building a good relationship?
Speaker 1:That's just what the other we do when we're working with anybody Exactly. The other side of that is who the hell knows, at 16 or 18 or 20, what they want to do, right? So what I? You know, I went to university around 16 only because of my birthday, not because of my brains because you started kindergarten.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and, and you know I'm I'm there with my father. He want he was an engineering technician, so he wanted me to be an engineer and the last thing as a kid I'm gonna do is what my father wants me to do. So I took mathematics and physics. Two years later, because of my athletic background, two years later, I'm teaching at a Crosstown University. I thought it'd be cool to create this program for the school. They knew me, I knew them Because that's the girls in bathing suits. So I'm teaching, I'm providing Education, teaching techniques for coaches of aquatic sports, water ballet, competitive swimming, water polo, etc. And I was the first one at the university to put this stuff together and it's very basic things, but it's all fundamentals.
Speaker 1:I Play piano and a bar instead of the serving bar or a table, and you get the same damn thing. I played organ in church. We're a. We're a combination of a whole bunch of things. So I say to people now, and Go to your local high school, higher kids that are juniors or seniors in high school, bring them in Saturdays, holidays, see if you like them, see if they like us, if they're one year away from graduating undergraduate or graduate.
Speaker 1:We've had programs at dealerships. I'd get 12 to 18 kids people One year before graduation. They'd come and I'd have them for four months. So we did this to. Whoever was the youngest manager led those people. I was the youngest manager. So the first month I put them in the warehouse floor picking and receiving parts. I'd lose a quarter of them. They didn't want to work that hard. It's dirty work, it's sweaty work. I don't like that Boom. One of the dealerships that I did this in or was doing it in had been doing it for maybe 15 years before I got there. More than 50 stores, every branch manager, every parts manager, every service manager, most of the equipment salesman and product support salesman had all come into the company that way, tell me what that does to your culture.
Speaker 2:It creates your culture doesn't ever baby. You don't have to dictate the culture. It creates itself. And I and I think that's everybody goes. Well, we have to have a cultural shift. Here we have.
Speaker 2:I'm like, well, look at the people that work here and and they're your culture. You can't dictate, you can't design. You can have a collaborative culture, but people have to collaborate. You can have a cross-functional culture. People have to be able to work on teams. You can. You can put all those things in place, but if you haven't provided the skills which I know you do an awful lot of that stuff. We're learning without scores and all the great programs you have, and now you're in universities and everything If you can't provide the skills, then you know are they? Are they? Do you have the right processes? We talked about processes fail, not people. In my mind and and you know, to this day, two companies always come up when I hear about process. I'll get an occasional boutique or something that we don't even know who they are. But that's very personal to personal answer like, okay, but we'll go there sometime, right?
Speaker 1:well, Just think about your two examples Amazon and I don't know. At least 20 years ago they were not here. Today they're the largest retailer in the world. That wasn't by fluke, and if you think about how Bezos went forward on it, he refused to make money. He lost money. For the first eight or ten years Wall Street was going crazy.
Speaker 1:I think longer. Yeah, and you know I, I I've been using Amazon since day one because I do a lot of books and all the rest that stuff. But the thing that struck me as I'm listening to you talk is the world is moving to internet, computer-based training, not because of necessarily a failure of the education system. But I wonder how many teachers actually operate like you. Do you respond? I'd like to say that we do Socratic teaching. I don't give anybody answers. I ask them questions, wanting them to come to their own conclusion. I think you do the same thing, but that requires a skill on your part to be able to adapt and understand what the heck they need, as opposed to what the professor wants to preach. I call the front of the class guy a sage on the stage and that's passe.
Speaker 2:Well, there's one university class I teach. I tell them right off the bat that's a master's level class. I say, number one, you all get A's if you do these four things and they're like this on the screen Like y'all get A's. I said I've never not given an A in 12 years now, except if you don't do these things, or when you make the classes, you engage during the classes, you take something and use it every week and come back and tell me what you use and when you get to your final paper.
Speaker 2:I don't care about grammar, I don't care about citations, because number one, I don't know how to correct citations. I care about and what they're doing is they're working on relationships through the class business relationship. I care about what you did to launch, advance or sustain that relationship. That's what I care about. And I think the three questions I ask I call it ask, ask, ask. Let's say you said something. I should ask you why or how come, and then you're going to talk some more. My second question in active listening. I call this active listening. My definition of active listening is can you tell me more? We're going to probably tell me more about your business, if you're a business owner, like you are, or if I'm trying to engage you to buy our products and services and you're going to talk more and more, then I'm going to say is there anything else? And those three little questions will create a pause in your pitch, a pause in your request for budget. Whatever it is you're looking for with your significant other, maybe engage and ask them some questions.
Speaker 1:It's funny, but I used to come back after teaching selling classes two in a week and we'd be sitting down having a glass of wine and we'd be chatting back and forth and Merle will ask a question of me and I'd flip it and give her a question back. I do this a couple times. She looked at me. She says running, you're not working now.
Speaker 2:Don't do that to me. I get that all the time. That doesn't work with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know the whole thing is. You're absolutely right, it's relationships. So what, you've got a busy schedule, I got a busy schedule. I'd like to schedule something in the holiday period, after Thanksgiving, somewhere where things settled down a little bit more, and do another of these and then pursue a couple of other things that we can do. But thank you so much for your time. Both of us are squeezed always with time. So would you have any closing comment that you'd like to talk about relative to the dash or any we've wanted all over?
Speaker 2:Sure, and no, thank you for having me, and it's the honor of being with you whenever we talk and we talk less offline than we did previously. I remember in my car driving home I'm trying to learn this industry and you picked right up and you told me everything I needed to know, so I cannot thank you enough. I'll do anything to help you grow a learning without scars. As a parting thought, let's go back to what we started with Maybe write down the four numbers of the year you were born, the year and then put a dash and then maybe ask yourself a couple of questions what am I here for? What's most important to me and what's my contribution going to be? Ask yourself those three questions. You're going to intermix business and life and everything, and I guarantee you you're going to get a little deeper insight into this continuum that we're all on right now. And I think that the key is am I working with the right people, maybe the right people to really create a great dash? So I hope that helps.
Speaker 1:It really does. I hope those of you that are listening to us have enjoyed this conversation as much as I have with Ed Wallace, and we're going to do this again, and I hope that you are going to tune into another Canada conversation in the near future, mahalo.
Speaker 2:Holiday special. Coming up around Mahalo, there you go, holiday special.