Podcasts about Conoco

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,In 1976, America celebrated 200 years of independence, democracy, and progress. Part of that celebration was the release of To Fly!, a short but powerful docudrama on the history of American flight. With To Fly!, Greg MacGillivray and his co-director Jim Freeman created one of the earliest IMAX films, bringing cinematography to new heights.After a decade of war and great social unrest, To Fly! celebrated the American identity and freedom to innovate. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with MacGillivray about filming To Fly! and its enduring message of optimism.MacGillivray has produced and directed films for over 60 years. In that time, his production company has earned two Academy Award nominations, produced five of the Top 10 highest-grossing IMAX films, and has reached over 150 million viewers.In This Episode* The thrill of watching To Fly! (1:38)* An innovative filming process (8:25)* A “you can do it” movie (19:07)* Competing views of technology (25:50)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. The thrill of watching To Fly! (1:38)What Jim and I tried to do is put as many of the involving, experiential tricks into that film as we possibly could. We wrote the film based on all of these moments that we call “IMAX moments.”Pethokoukis: The film To Fly! premiered at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, at the IMAX Theater, July 1976. Do you happen know if it was it the 4th of July or. . . ?MacGillivray: No, you know, what they did is they had the opening on the 2nd of July so that it wouldn't conflict with the gigantic bicentennial on the 4th, but it was all part of the big celebration in Washington at that moment.I saw the film in the late '70s at what was then called the Great America Amusement Park in Gurnee, Illinois. I have a very clear memory of this, of going in there, sitting down, wondering why I was sitting and going to watch a movie as opposed to being on a roller coaster or some other ride — I've recently, a couple of times, re-watched the film — and I remember the opening segment with the balloonist, which was shot in a very familiar way. I have a very clear memory because when that screen opened up and that balloon took off, my stomach dropped.It was a film as a thrill ride, and upon rewatching it — I didn't think this as a 10-year-old or 11-year-old — but what it reminded me upon rewatching was of Henry V, Lawrence Olivier, 1944, where the film begins in the Globe Theater and as the film goes on, it opens up and expands into this huge technicolor extravaganza as the English versus the French. It reminds me of that. What was your reaction the first time you saw that movie, that film of yours you made with Jim Freeman, on the big screen where you could really get the full immersive effect?It gave me goosebumps. IMAX, at that time, was kind of unknown. The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum was the fourth IMAX theater built, and very few people had seen that system unless you visited world's fairs around the world. So we knew we had something that people were going to grasp a hold of and love because, like you said, it's a combination of film, and storytelling, and a roller coaster ride. You basically give yourself away to the screen and just go with it.What Jim and I tried to do is put as many of the involving, experiential tricks into that film as we possibly could. We wrote the film based on all of these moments that we call “IMAX moments.” We tried to put as many in there as we could, including the train coming straight at you and bashing right into the camera where the audience thinks it's going to get run over. Those kinds of moments on that gigantic screen with that wonderful 10 times, 35-millimeter clarity really moved the audience and I guess that's why they used it at Great America where you saw it.You mentioned the train and I remember a story from the era of silent film and the first time people saw a train on silent film, they jumped, people jumped because they thought the train was coming at them. Then, of course, we all kind of got used to it, and this just occurred to me, that film may have been the first time in 75 years that an audience had that reaction again, like they did with first with silent film where they thought the train was going to come out of the screen to To Fly! where, once again, your previous experience looking at a visual medium was not going to help you. This was something completely different and your sense perception was totally surprised by it.Yeah, it's true. Obviously we were copying that early train shot that started the cinema way back in probably 1896 or 1898. You ended up with To Fly! . . . we knew we had an opportunity because the Air and Space Museum, we felt, was going to be a huge smash hit. Everyone was interested in space right at that moment. Everyone was interested in flying right at that moment. Basically, as soon as it opened its doors, the Air and Space Museum became the number one museum in America, and I think it even passed the Louvre that year in attendance.Our film had over a million and a half people in its first year, which was astounding! And after that year of run, every museum in the world wanted an IMAX theater. Everyone heard about it. They started out charging 50 cents admission for the 27-minute IMAX film, and halfway through the season, they got embarrassed because they were making so much money. They reduced the admission price to 25 cents and everyone was happy. The film was so fun to watch and gave you information in a poetic way through the narration. The storytelling was simple and chronological. You could follow it even if you were a 10-year-old or an 85-year-old, and people just adored the movie. They wrote letters to the editor. The Washington Post called it the best film in the last 10 years, or something like that. Anyway, it was really a heady of time for IMAX.An innovative filming process (8:25)It was one of those things where our knowledge of technology and shooting all kinds of various films prior to that that used technology, we just basically poured everything into this one movie to try to prove the system, to try to show people what IMAX could do . . .I may have just read the Washington Post review that you mentioned. It was a Washington Post review from just three or four years later, so not that long after, and in the conclusion to that piece, it said, “You come away from the film remembering the flying, the freedom of it, the glee, the exaltation. No Wonder ‘To Fly' is a national monument.” So already calling it a national monument, but it took some innovation to create that monument. This isn't just a piece of great filmmaking and great storytelling, it's a piece of technological innovation. I wonder if you could tell me about that.We've worked with the IMAX corporation, particularly Graeme Ferguson, who is gone now, but he was a filmmaker and helped us immensely. Not only guiding, because he'd made a couple of IMAX films previously that just showed at individual theaters, but was a great filmmaker and we wanted three more cameras built—there was only one camera when we began, and we needed three, actually, so we could double shoot and triple shoot different scenes that were dangerous. They did that for us in record time. Then we had to build all these kind of imaginative camera mounts. A guy named Nelson Tyler, Tyler Camera Systems in Hollywood, helped us enormously. He was a close friend and basically built an IMAX camera mount for a helicopter that we called the “monster mount.” It was so huge.The IMAX camera was big and huge on its own, so it needed this huge mount, and it carried the IMAX camera flawlessly and smoothly through the air in a helicopter so that there weren't any bumps or jarring moments so the audience would not get disturbed but they would feel like they were a bird flying. You needed that smoothness because when you're sitting up close against that beautifully detailed screen, you don't want any jerk or you're going to want to close your eyes. It's going to be too nauseating to actually watch. So we knew we had to have flawlessly smooth and beautiful aerials shot in the best light of the day, right at dawn or right at sunset. The tricks that we used, the special camera mounts, we had two different camera mounts for helicopters, one for a Learjet, one for a biplane. We even had a balloon mount that went in the helium balloon that we set up at the beginning of the film.It was one of those things where our knowledge of technology and shooting all kinds of various films prior to that that used technology, we just basically poured everything into this one movie to try to prove the system, to try to show people what IMAX could do . . . There are quiet moments in the film that are very powerful, but there's also these basic thrill moments where the camera goes off over the edge of a cliff and your stomach kind of turns upside down a little bit. Some people had to close their eyes as they were watching so they wouldn't get nauseated, but that's really what we wanted. We wanted people to experience that bigness and that beauty. Basically the theme of the movie was taking off into the air was like the opening of a new eye.Essentially, you re-understood what the world was when aviation began, when the first balloonists took off or when the first airplane, the Wright Brothers, took off, or when we went into space, the change of perspective. And obviously IMAX is the ultimate change of perspectiveWhen I watched the entire film — I've watched it a few times since on YouTube, which I think somebody ripped from a laser disc or something — maybe six months ago, I had forgotten the space sequence. This movie came out a year before Star Wars, and I was looking at that space sequence and I thought, that's pretty good. I thought that really held up excellent. As a documentary, what prepared you to do that kind of sequence? Or was that something completely different that you really had to innovate to do?I had loved 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Kubrick film, and one of the special effects supervisors was Doug Trumbull. So we called Doug and said, “Look, I want to make the sequence. It's going to be short, but it's going to pay homage to space travel and what could happen in the future.” And he guided us a little bit, showed us how to make kind of the explosions of space that he'd done in 2001 using microscopic paint, so we had to develop a camera lens that fit on the IMAX camera that could shoot just a very small area, like half an inch across, where paint in a soluble mixture could then explode. We shot it in slow motion, and then we built a Starship, kind of like a Star Wars-looking — though, as you mentioned, Star Wars had not come out yet — kind of a spaceship that we then superimposed against planets that we photographed, Jupiter and Saturn. We tried to give the feeling and the perspective that that could give us with our poetic narrator, and it worked. It kind of worked, even though it was done on a very small budget. We had $690,000 to make that movie. So we only had one SAG actor who actually got paid the regular wage, that was Peter Walker.Was that the balloonist?Yeah, he was the balloonist. And he was a stage actor, so he was perfect, because I wanted something to obviously be a little bit overblown, make your gestures kind of comically big, and he was perfect for it. But we only had enough money to pay him for one day, so we went to Vermont and put him in the balloon basket, and we shot everything in one day. We never actually shot him flying. We shot him hanging in the balloon basket and the balloon basket was hanging from a crane that was out of the picture, and so we could lift him and make him swing past us and all that stuff, and he was terrific.Then we shot the real balloon, which was a helium balloon. We got the helium from the Navy — which would've been very costly, but they donated the helium — and went to West Virginia where the forest was basically uncut and had no power lines going through it so we could duplicate 1780 or whatever the year was with our aerial shooting. And we had a guy named Kurt Snelling, who was probably the best balloonist at that particular moment, and he dressed like Peter in the same costume and piloted the balloon across. And balloons, you can't tell where they're going, they just follow the wind, and so it was a little dangerous, but we got it all done. It was about a week and a half because we had to wait for weather. So we had a lot of weather days and bad rain in West Virginia when we shot that, but we got it all done, and it looks beautiful, and it matches in with Peter pretty well.Just what you've described there, it sounds like a lot: You're going to Maine, you're in West Virginia, you're getting helium from — it sounds like there were a lot of moving parts! Was this the most ambitious thing you had done up until that point?Well, we'd worked on some feature films before, like The Towering Inferno and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and things like that, which were involved and very complicated. But yeah, it was very much the biggest production that we put together on our own, and it required us to learn how to produce in a big fashion. It was a thrill for us. Essentially, we had about 10 people working on the film in Laguna Beach, and none of them, except for maybe Jim and I, who we'd worked on feature films and complicated shoots with actors and all that, but a lot of our team hadn't. And so it was an adventure. Every day was a thrill.A “you can do it” movie (19:07). . . we were celebrating 200 years of democracy, of individual freedom, of individual inspiration, getting past obstacles, because you can do it — you have that belief that you can do it.There's a version of this podcast where we spend a half hour talking about The Towering Inferno. I just want you to know that it's very hard for me not to derail the conversation into talking about The Towering Inferno. I will not do that, but let me ask you this, the movie is about flight, it's about westward expansion, but that movie, it came out for the bicentennial, we'd gone through a tumultuous, let's say past 10 years: You had Vietnam, there's social unrest, you had Watergate. And the movie really must have just seemed like a breath of fresh air for people.As you put the movie together, and wrote it, and filmed it, did you feel like you were telling a message other than just about our connection with flight? It really seemed to me to be more than that, a movie about aspiration, and curiosity, and so forth.It was, and pretty much all of our films have been that positive spirit, “You can do it” kind of movie. Even our surfing films that we started with 20 years, maybe 10 years before To Fly!, you end up with that spirit of the human's ability to go beyond. And obviously celebrating the bicentennial and the beginning of democracy here in this country and the fact that we were celebrating 200 years of democracy, of individual freedom, of individual inspiration, getting past obstacles, because you can do it — you have that belief that you can do it.Of course, this was right there when everyone had felt, okay, we went to the moon, we did all kinds of great things. We were inventive and a lot of that spirit of invention, and curiosity, and accomplishment came from the fact that we were free as individuals to do it, to take risks. So I think To Fly! had a lot of that as part of it.But the interesting thing, I thought, was I had one meeting with Michael Collins, who was the director of the Air and Space Museum and the astronaut who circled the moon as Neil and Buzz Aldrin were on the moon walking around, and here he is, hoping that these two guys will come back to him so that the three of them can come back to Earth — but they'd never tested the blast-off from the moon's surface, and they didn't know 100 percent that it was going to work, and that was the weirdest feeling.But what Collins told me in my single meeting that I had with him, he said, “Look, I've got a half an hour for you, I'm building a museum, I've got two years to do it.” And I said, “Look, one thing I want to know is how much facts and figures do you want in this movie? We've got a little over a half an hour to do this film. The audience sits down in your theater, what do you want me to do?” And he said, “Give me fun. Give me the IMAX experience. I don't want any facts and figures. I don't want any dates. I don't want any names. I've got plenty of those everywhere else in the museum. People are going to be sick of dates and names. Give me fun, give me adventure.” And I said, “Oh gosh, we know how to do that because we started out making surfing films.” and he goes, “Do that. Make me a surfing film about aviation.” It was probably the best advice, because he said, “And I don't want to see you again for two years. Bring me back a film. I trust you. I've seen your films. Just go out and do it.” And that was probably the best management advice that I've ever received.So you weren't getting notes. I always hear about studios giving filmmakers notes. You did not get notes.The note I got was, “We love it. Put it on the screen now.” What they did do is they gave me 26 subjects. They said, “Here's the things that we think would be really cool in the movie. We know you can't use 26 things because that's like a minute per sequence, so you pick which of those 26 to stick in.” And I said, “What I'm going to do then is make it chronological so people will somewhat understand it, otherwise it's going to be confusing as heck.” And he said, “Great, you pick.” So I picked things that I knew I could do, and Jim, of course, was right there with me all the time.Then we had a wonderful advisor in Francis Thompson who at that time was an older filmmaker from New York who had done a lot of world's fair films, hadn't ever done IMAX, but he'd done triple-screen films and won an Academy Award with a film called To Be Alive! and he advised us. Graeme Ferguson, as I mentioned, advised us, but we selected the different sequences, probably ended up with 12 sequences, each of which we felt that we could handle on our meager budget.It was delightful that Conoco put up the money for the film as a public service. They wanted to be recognized in the bicentennial year, and they expected that the film was going to run for a year, and then of course today it's still running and it's going into its 50th year now. And so it's one of those things that was one of those feel-good moments of my life and feel-good moments for the Air and Space Museum, Michael Collins, for everyone involved.Competing views of technology (25:50)Our film was the feel-good, be proud to be an American and be proud to be a human being, and we're not messing up everything. There's a lot that's going right.When rewatching it, I was reminded of the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio, which also had a very famous scene of a 747 looming at the camera. While yours was a joyous scene, I think we're supposed to take away an ominous message about technology in that film. That movie was not a celebration of flight or of technology. Have you wondered why just six years after To Fly!, this other film came out and conveyed a very different message about technology and society.I love Koyaanisqatsi, and in fact, we helped work on that. We did a lot of the aerial shooting for that.I did not know that.And Godfrey Reggio is an acquaintance, a friend. We tried to actually do a movie together for the new millennium, and that would've been pretty wild.Certainly a hypnotic film, no doubt. Fantastic.Yeah. But their thesis was, yeah, technology's gotten beyond us. It's kind of controlled us in some fashions. And with the time-lapse sequences and the basic frenetic aspects of life and war and things like that. And with no narration. That film lets the audience tell the story to themselves, guided by the visuals and the technique. Our film was absolutely a 100 percent positive that the 747 that we had was the number one 747 ever built. Boeing owned it. I don't think they'd started selling them, or they were just starting to use them. Everyone was amazed by the size of this airplane, and we got to bolt our IMAX camera on the bottom of it, and then it was such a thrill to take that big 747.The guy took off from Seattle and the pilot said, “Okay, now where do you want to go?” I said, “Well, I want to find clouds. And he goes, “Well, there's some clouds over next to Illinois. We could go there,” so we go two hours towards Illinois. And I'm in a 737 that they loaned us with the IMAX camera in a brand new window that we stuck in the side of the 737, just absolutely clear as the sheet of glass, just a single pane, and the camera's right up against that piece of plexiglass and with the 40-millimeter lens, which is a 90-degree lens.So I said, “We've got to fly the 737 really close to the 747 and through clouds so that the clouds are wisping through, and so the 747 is disappearing and then appearing and then disappearing and then appear, and we have to do this right at sunset in puffy clouds, these big cumulus clouds.” And so they said, “We can do that, let's go find it!” The two guys who were piloting were both military pilots, so they were used to flying in formation and it was a delight. We shot roll, after roll, after roll and got some of those moments where that 747 comes out into light after being in the white of the cloud are just stunning. So we made the 747 look almost like a miniature plane, except for the shot from underneath where you see the big wheels coming up. So it was a really cool, and I don't know what it cost Boeing to do that, but hundreds of thousands, maybe.Another public service.But they got it back. Obviously it was a heroic moment in the film, and their beautiful plane, which went on to sell many, many copies and was their hero airplane for so many years.Yeah, sure.It was a fun deal. So in comparison to Koyaanisqatsi, our film was the exact opposite. Our film was the feel-good, be proud to be an American and be proud to be a human being, and we're not messing up everything. There's a lot that's going right.I feel like there's a gap in what we get out of Hollywood, what we get out of the media. You don't want just feel-good films. You don't want just celebrations. You want the full range of our lives and of human experience, but I feel like, Koyaanisqatsi is about being out of balance, I think we've gotten out of balance. I just don't see much out there that has the kind of aspirational message with To Fly! I'm not sure what you think. I feel like we could use more of that.Yeah, I'm hopeful that I'm going to be able to make a movie called A Beautiful Life, which is all about the same thing that I was talking about, the freedom that the individual has here in America. I was hopeful to do it for the 250th anniversary, but I'm not going to get it done by that time next year. But I want to do that movie kind of as a musical celebration of almost a “family of man” sort of movie located around the world with various cultures and positive spirit. I'm an optimist, I'm a positive person. That's the joy I get out of life. I suppose that's why Jim and I were perfect to make To Fly! We infused beauty into everything that we tried to do.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were PromisedMicro ReadsPlease check out the website or Substack app for the latest Up Wing economic, business, and tech news contained in this new edition of the newsletter. Lots of great stuff! Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

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Résultat : tout le monde a oublié qu'on avait failli vomir mardi soir… Mais attention : derrière les paillettes, c'était une boucherie. La majorité des titres dans le rouge, des obligations qui respirent seulement parce que le marché de l'emploi US fait peur, et Ray Dalio qui sort le défibrillateur pour nous annoncer l'infarctus économique.

Donald E. Pray reached many goals by graduating from Tulsa's Central High School in 1950, graduating from the University of Tulsa in 1955 with a degree in petroleum engineering, and graduating from the University of Oklahoma School of Law in 1963.The law library at the University of Oklahoma was named for him thanks to a gift from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, honoring Don Pray's service to the foundation as its first Executive Director and then as a long time-time trustee. He was a founding partner at the Pray, Walker, Jackman, Williamson & Marler law firm. Don was one of the founding Trustees of the Grace and Franklin Bernsen Foundation and has also served as a Director or Trustee of St. John Medical Center, the University of Tulsa, Philbrook Art Museum, and the Tulsa Ballet Theatre.These major accomplishments by a man who “grew up in a garage”. It has been written about Don that “his life has been rewarding, not because of what he has received, but because of what he has been able to encourage others to do.”Now you can listen to Don's interesting life story on VoicesofOklahoma.com.

The United States government created the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890 because the country was facing serious problems due to the centralization of power into the hands of oligarchs in the oil, steel, and railroad industries. Standard Oil had 91% of the market share in the oil refining industry when it was broken up in 1911, but the remnants remain in the form of Exxon Mobile, Chevron, Amaco, Conoco, Marathon, and Atlantic Richfield. U.S. Steel almost felt the wrath of the Department of Justice, but market forces intervened, and Microsoft could have been broken up in 2001 had it not been for a legal act of God. What current company is heading in that direction towards total market domination, and what could a captured American government even do to stop it from happening? Probably depends on who got campaign donations and who did not. The Octopus of Global Control Audiobook: https://amzn.to/3xu0rMm Hypocrazy Audiobook: https://amzn.to/4aogwms Website: www.Macroaggressions.io Activist Post: www.activistpost.com Sponsors: Chemical Free Body: https://www.chemicalfreebody.com Promo Code: MACRO C60 Purple Power: https://c60purplepower.com/ Promo Code: MACRO Wise Wolf Gold & Silver: www.Macroaggressions.gold LegalShield: www.DontGetPushedAround.com EMP Shield: www.EMPShield.com Promo Code: MACRO ECI Development: https://info.ecidevelopment.com/-get-to-know-us/macro-aggressions Christian Yordanov's Health Transformation Program: www.LiveLongerFormula.com Privacy Academy: https://privacyacademy.com/step/privacy-action-plan-checkout-2/?ref=5620 Brain Supreme: www.BrainSupreme.co Promo Code: MACRO Above Phone: abovephone.com/macro Promo Code: MACRO Van Man: https://vanman.shop/?ref=MACRO Promo Code: MACRO Activist Post: www.ActivistPost.com Natural Blaze: www.NaturalBlaze.com Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/macroaggressionspodcast

A graduate of the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy (now the University of Missouri–Rolla), Keith Bailey's initial degree was in mechanical engineering. His academic record was augmented several years later with a professional degree in mechanical engineering from UMR and the completion of studies at the Harvard University Program for Management Development. In 1973 Keith became an assistant to the V.P. of Operations at Williams Pipeline Company. In the succeeding years, he assumed growing responsibilities with various units of the company until he was named President in 1992. In 1994 he was named CEO and Chairman of the Board.As a dedicated supporter of the United Way, Keith has served as a Campaign Chair as well as Board Chair. His United Way involvement extended to the national level. His commitment to education resulted in his service to the University of Tulsa with two terms as Board President.Listen to Keith talk about the difficulties in getting his first job, his admiration for John Williams, and 9/11 on the podcast and website VoicesOfOklahoma.com.

ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance speaks with Bloomberg's Alix Steel at CERAWeek in Houston. They spoke about commodities prices, and how Conoco hit a 52 week low. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In the Lone Star State, we find a station and café that is similar to a building in a Disney/Pixar movie. In Amarillo, Texas, we look closer at the ten colorful Cadillacs buried in a flat open field. Lastly, we try not to touch the barbed wire sculptures at the Devil's Rope and Route 66 Museum. Ouch! Music is "McCarthy" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

About 400 miles of Route 66 runs diagonally through Oklahoma, our next state on our Route 66 trip. In Arcadia, we walk around the only wooden round barn on Route 66. Next, we take a bite of the legendary Route 66 cookies at Dairy King, in Commerce, OK. Lastly, just across the street from Dairy King, we take a few photos of a service station where supposedly Bonnie and Clyde might have stopped there for gas. Music is "McCarthy" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

We are thrilled to announce the latest episode of Energy Sector Heroes, hosted by the incredible Michelle Fraser! This week, we have the honour of featuring Paul Fursey, General Manager of the Humber Refinery for Phillips 66 and Lead Executive in the U.K.Meet Our Guest: Paul Fursey· Role: General Manager, Humber Refinery, Phillips 66· Experience: Nearly 30 years in the oil refining industryPaul began his illustrious career as a chemical engineer at the Humber Refinery for Conoco. Throughout his journey, he has taken on various roles in engineering, project development, optimization, operations, process safety, and strategy.Join us for an engaging conversation packed with industry expertise and leadership insights from one of the top executives in the energy sector.

At her first plaintiffs' trial, Charla Aldous was the lead lawyer on a team of four, with one legal assistant. The defense, oil and gas station giant Conoco, had around a dozen lawyers and 50 support staff.Plaintiffs' lawyers will want to tune into this episode of Trial Lawyers University to hear what happened next. With host Dan Ambrose, Charla, of Aldous Walker, reveals humorous, surprising, and poignant moments on her journey to winning high-profile and high-verdict cases. In addition to Conoco, she discusses victories against the Episcopal School of Dallas and Greyhound Lines. Charla also outlines her strategies for success, from voir dire to cross-examining witnesses. And when it's time to close, she shares her tactic for how plaintiffs' lawyers can empower the jury. Train and Connect with the Titans☑️ Charla Aldous | Aldous Walker LLP | LinkedIn☑️ Aldous Walker on Facebook, X, YouTube☑️ TLU VEGAS☑️ Trial Lawyers University Website☑️ TLU On Demand Instant access to live lectures, case analysis, and skills training videos☑️ TLU on X, Facebook, Instagram & LinkedIn☑️ Subscribe Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTubeEpisode SnapshotThe case that made Charla love plaintiffs' workThe defense witness that was “manna from heaven” in a $10.5M caseThe case she's most proud ofUsing John Campbell's big data approach to take down Greyhound LinesProduced and Powered by LawPodsThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Carl Quintanilla, Jim Cramer and David Faber discussed stock markets under pressure one day after the Nasdaq closed above 17,000 for the first time. Cramer explained why he's concerned about one particular group missing out on the tech sector rally. Energy M&A back in the spotlight: ConocoPhillips has agreed to buy Marathon Oil for more than $17 billion in stock. Also in focus: American Airlines takes a hit on lowered guidance and drags down shares of rival carriers, what to expect from Salesforce's quarterly results due out after Wednesday's close of trading, two retailers surge on earnings, a bank gets slapped with a "sell" rating. Squawk on the Street Disclaimer

Nasdaq: peggiore seduta dal 30 aprile; Aste Treasury 7 anni: rendimenti in rialzo e domanda scarsa; Bitcoin scende: si allontana dai 70 mila $; Conoco su Marathon Oil: maxi operazione da 22,3 mld $; BHP: addio offerta su Anglo American Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

IANR 2410 030924 Line Up 4-6pm INTERVIEWS Here's the guest line-up for Sat, Mar 9, 2024 from 4 to 6pm CST on Indo American News Radio (www.IndoAmerican-news.com), a production of Indo American News. We are on 98.7 FM and you can also listen on the masalaradio app (www.masalaradio.com) By Monday, hear the recorded show on Podcast uploaded on Spotify, Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/indo-american-news-radio-houston-tx/id1512586620 ) Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Breaker. We have 5 years of Podcasts and have had over 9,100 hits. TO SUPPORT THE SHOW, SELECT FOLLOW ON OUR FREE PODCAST CHANNEL. AND YOU'LL BE NOTIFIED WHEN OF NEW UPDATES. 4:20 pm Recent stats show that the total number of crimes in Harris County have fallen, yet there are daily reports of gunfights and people being murdered. It's up to the District Attorney's office to investigate these cases and prosecute them, so we wondered how the process works. Here to give us some background into this is HC Asst. DA Karen Barney, the chief prosecutor of the Homicide Division. 5:00 pm Mass manufacturing and merchandising cater to the growing appetite of the expanding consumer class worldwide but it has often been at the expense of the artisans who belong to cottage industries who find their incomes shrinking as their handicrafts are priced out and market share dwindle. When Tannya Singh discovered this happening in her ancestral home of New Delhi, she was prodded into action and started a company, Imroz Niwas, to tackle this issue. She joins us today to explain what she has created and its goals. 5:20 pm Cruising across the seas or a brief all-expenses paid vacation is an exciting experience for many peoples as they seek the company of their friends and family or business associates, or even like-minded groups. With eight and ten storey hotels on them and multiple entertainment venues, cruise ships have become resorts on the high seas. Rahat Sultana Kalle is among an elite group who travels 20 times and more each year. She joins us today to tell us what motivates her to cruise so often.  5:40 pm At the heyday of his engineering career with Conoco and later USAID, Bhamy Shenoy took the unusual step of retiring in order to get back to his roots in Mysore, Karnataka where he got involved with NGOs fighting corruption and to work for India's development. He and his wife Suman still visit the US often, as their three children live here. We turn to him today to tell us what its like to be a repatriated Indian and the challenges there. Also stay tuned in for news roundup, views, sports and movie reviews TO BE FEATURED ON THE SHOW, OR TO ADVERTISE, PLEASE CONTACT US AT 713-789-6397 or at indoamericannews@yahoo.com Please pick up the print edition of Indo American News which is available all across town at grocery stores. Also visit our website indoamerican-news.com which gets 70,000+ hits to track all current stories.  And remember to visit our digital archives from over 16 years.   Plus, our entire 43 years of hard copy archives are available in the Fondren Library at Rice University. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/indo-american-news-radio/support

A new week means new questions! Hope you have fun with these!Which European country's flag holds the wolrd record of being the oldest continously used national flag in the world?What is the name of the sequel to the pulitzer prize winning novel "Less"?Between which two countries was the Pig War fought on San Juan Island in 1859?What percentage of mammals are bats? We will give you 5% on either side.Bruce Springsteen's album Born in the U.S.A. has an image of Bruce Springsteen's butt in jeans and has what object in his back pocket?What is the term for 126 gallons of wine?Contuing on to this day with Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, and Conoco, what sprawling company was co-founded by John D. Rockefeller and was broken up in 1911 under the Sherman Antitrust Act?What do the letters VHS stand for?In which part of the body are the deltoid muscles?What well-known fast food comes in four shapes: the boot, the bell, the ball, and the bone (or bow-tie)?Which two countries of the Middle East both share a border with Israel and Iraq?MusicHot Swing, Fast Talkin, Bass Walker, Dances and Dames, Ambush by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Don't forget to follow us on social media:Patreon – patreon.com/quizbang – Please consider supporting us on Patreon. Check out our fun extras for patrons and help us keep this podcast going. We appreciate any level of support!Website – quizbangpod.com Check out our website, it will have all the links for social media that you need and while you're there, why not go to the contact us page and submit a question!Facebook – @quizbangpodcast – we post episode links and silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess.Instagram – Quiz Quiz Bang Bang (quizquizbangbang), we post silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess.Twitter – @quizbangpod We want to start a fun community for our fellow trivia lovers. If you hear/think of a fun or challenging trivia question, post it to our twitter feed and we will repost it so everyone can take a stab it. Come for the trivia – stay for the trivia.Ko-Fi – ko-fi.com/quizbangpod – Keep that sweet caffeine running through our body with a Ko-Fi, power us through a late night of fact checking and editing!

In addition to being one of the world's leading exploration and production companies based on both production and reserves, ConocoPhillips is the largest private wetlands owner in Louisiana. John Harrington, Director of ConocoPhillips Coastal Wetlands, and Cassidy Lejeune, DU Director of Conservation Programs, share the inspirational story of an innovative partnership that is restoring and protecting vital wetlands and migratory bird habitat in coastal Louisiana and across North America.www.ducks.org/DUPodcast

Bobby Butler joins Michael Volkov on this episode of Corruption, Crime and Compliance, to explore the evolution of compliance over 20 years. While enforcement actions sparked major progress, Bobby contends compliance is moving firmly into the realm of competitive advantage and performance multiplier. Millennials and younger generations ‘vote with their feet', demanding ethical cultures, so compliance may increasingly drive talent retention as well. Bobby Butler has over 20 years of experience building world-class ethics and compliance programs. In his early career, he investigated export control issues and quickly became passionate about compliance. Known for his persistence and commitment to finding solutions, he is a pioneer who helped elevate compliance from an ad hoc function to a strategic asset.You'll hear Michael and Bobby discuss:In the early 2000s, compliance programs were sparked by reactions to major DOJ enforcements rather than proactive investments. Companies finally dedicated ample resources when faced with "shock and awe" consequences.Bobby got his start investigating export controls issues at Conoco after unlawful server exports to Syria. He quickly became passionate about trade compliance and then FCPA compliance during the explosion of enforcements in the mid-2000s.Working at ground zero compliance teams at Vetco and Baker Hughes during monitorships gave Bobby deep experience with elements of gold standard compliance programs long before codified evaluation criteria.Bobby argues justifying significant resources without an enforcement action catalyst remains extremely challenging. Compliance fights for a seat at the table and has to insert compliance considerations into business meetings. Persistence and consistency in messaging are critical for credibility and influence as a compliance officer. Strong yet flexible personalities tend to thrive compared to introverts.Compliance has to focus on finding creative solutions to enable opportunities: frame compliance as a competitive advantage and performance multiplier.Tactics Bobby used to persuade executives include tying bonuses to compliance training completion, positioning compliance in sales materials and constant insertion into business meetings.The compliance skill set has grown into a dedicated career path with specialized education channels, not just a secondary legal role. Bobby sees government enforcements continuing to increase given complex technologies and geopolitics.KEY QUOTES“...we have to find ways for the business to grow. We've got to be sitting there at the table with them thinking of solutions. The more brain power you put at problem solving and doing it in a compliant way, that's how you build trust with people.” - Bobby Butler“And every day that goes by, when there's not a compliance issue and you can certify that controls have passed and the elements are there and you have outside counsel come in and do an assessment of your program and you continuously improve and each day goes by and you don't have an issue. Well, there's another positive impact to the investment and the return on shareholder value and more importantly, the company brand.” - Bobby Butler“...we're out there preaching the good news that compliance can be a good thing. Because at the end of the day, when the company does get in trouble, compliance sets policy, sets voluntary boundaries where the law sets mandatory boundaries.” - Bobby ButlerResourcesBobby Butler on LinkedIn

Today's guest is Braedon Hebert.    Braedon is the Co-founder of CondoWorks, an accounts payable automation platform built for property management companies (condo/HOA/commercial/residential). He is also an accountant turned entrepreneur.   Show summary:  In this episode of the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Show, Braden Hebert, co-founder of Condo Works, discusses the role of technology and automation in the property management industry. Hebert explains how Condo Works, an accounts payable automation platform, streamlines the accounts payable process for property management companies, reducing errors and saving time. He also emphasizes the need for strategic thinking when implementing technology. The discussion also covers the challenges of balancing customer needs with revenue potential, and highlights key features of the Condo Works software. -------------------------------------------------------------- [00:00:00] Intro [00:01:33] The Challenges in Property Management [00:09:29] The Importance of Technology in Scaling a Business [00:11:27] The importance of technology and automation [00:13:04] Using technology to establish escape velocity [00:18:07] Automating utility downloading and invoice approval -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Braedon:  Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/braedonhebert/   Web: www.condoworks.co   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Braedon Hebert (00:00:00) - So part of our technology will automatically download all those all those types of utility invoices then extract the data. So to eliminate any sort of data entry required then it can be approved and paid.   Intro (00:00:15) - Welcome to the how to Scale Commercial Real Estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.   Sam Wilson (00:00:28) - Braden Hebert is the co-founder of Condo Works, which is an accounts payable automation platform built for property management companies. Braden is also an accountant turned entrepreneur. Braden, welcome to the show.   Braedon Hebert (00:00:40) - Yes. Thanks, Sam. Glad to be here.   Sam Wilson (00:00:42) - Absolutely. The pleasure is mine. Braden. There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90s or less. Can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?   Braedon Hebert (00:00:52) - So as you alluded to, my I got my start as an accountant working for one of the big accounting firms, then went to a big company. But I entered the the startup and tech world about a decade ago in that role.   Braedon Hebert (00:01:05) - And that's where I met my current co-founder, who's the who was the chief technology officer of that first company. And so my path was was in the startup tech world in those finance roles. I went through some acquisition acquisitions throughout that, but wanted to take the leap into the the early stage incubation stage of a company and joined him as a as a co-founder of Condor Works.   Sam Wilson (00:01:33) - That's really cool. What is the what is the opportunity that you guys see? I guess you know, one, the startup tech world is highly competitive. And, you know, I can't imagine jumping into that. That's something that kudos to you guys, you know, for being willing to take those those risks I think that's really cool. But what's the opportunity that you guys see in what you're doing right now. And why is now the time to do it?   Braedon Hebert (00:01:58) - So maybe I'll go back to the to the very beginning. So one of the things that my, my co-founder did, in addition to helping build and develop companies, is he also became the treasurer on his condo board.   Braedon Hebert (00:02:10) - And that's where he saw firsthand some of the the challenges that face property management companies when it comes to processing and paying their bills. So there's there's a high invoice volume. There's multiple stakeholders plus complexity, not from the accounting side, but operationally, if you're trying to keep track of discrete financial records across all of your properties, the the accuracy and routing and recording of those invoices is critical. But but complex because paired with those challenges, it's also an industry that has been slower to adopt some of the more modern technological solutions. And so, for example, he was signing hundreds of checks every month. He was seeing vendors taking six months to get paid. And, you know, when you calculate the internal cost to the property management companies, it can cost 15 to $20 per per invoice just to pay that. So he said, well, this is awful. Ben being the tech guy he is, he said there's there must be a better way and I'm going to build it. And so that's that's how calendar works was born.   Braedon Hebert (00:03:17) - And it was. And we see that that pain that still exists across across many property management companies.   Sam Wilson (00:03:23) - Got it. No, that's really interesting. How does this differ. And forgive my ignorance here because I neither run a tech startup. I don't run a accounts payable automation platform. And um, yeah, anyway, forget what else, I don't run. But anyway, all of those being said. When it comes to accounts payable. In my mind, I think, gosh, I mean, it seems like you could just get ACH set up out of your various bank accounts, you receive your invoices, you ACH or vendors, and off you go. Why is it not so simple?   Braedon Hebert (00:03:56) - So I would I would back up. You know, paying it can sometimes be the easy part. It's it's the, the full cycle being receiving or getting the invoices than having it properly approved, entering that information into the accounting system. So recording that invoice and then and then issuing payment. So you know our platform handles that end to end with with tech and automation built in throughout that process.   Braedon Hebert (00:04:26) - So I'll you know, one of our my favorite examples is is a utility bill. So you know, gas power, water even, you know, the telecom bills. Um, either they're they're coming in the mail a couple of weeks later, then you're rushing to pay them, or someone has to spend time logging in and clicking, downloading, download, invoice, download, invoice downloading. So we we know some of our customers were spending days just doing that. So part of our technology will automatically download all those all those types of utility invoices then extract the data. So to eliminate any sort of data entry required then it can be approved and paid. And so a lot of that upfront work in terms of just handling the invoices can be eliminated, which once you get to a certain scale, you know, some some of our customers are processing thousands, 10,000 invoices a month. And so that that can really add up, uh, across the team.   Sam Wilson (00:05:26) - And the opportunity for.   Sam Wilson (00:05:29) - Error.   Sam Wilson (00:05:30) - I mean, just becomes magnified where it's like, did we get that utility invoice that's emailed, actually paid, and did it get logged properly? And we're counting on, which is just crazy in 2023, we're still counting on human touch on some of those things where it's like.   Sam Wilson (00:05:48) - And so no, I see what you're saying. And that makes a lot of sense, especially for property management companies that are handling, like you said, you know, thousands potentially of invoices a month and going, gosh, is this is this being properly logged? I mean, even for us at just the handful of facilities that we own it, we're trying to put those processes in place where it's like, hey, this is. The is that paid this month, I don't know. So there are some similar meetings we were having just recently were like, is that okay? No, this needs to be a system like very, very tight knit system. Maybe we're not saying.   Braedon Hebert (00:06:16) - Hey Sam, our lights went out. What happened? Oh, shoot. That that invoice that I guess we didn't get it didn't forgot to pay it. And. Yeah, that's the worst that can happen.   Sam Wilson (00:06:27) - Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You get a disconnect notice and you're like, how do we. And which we haven't had a disconnect notice.   Sam Wilson (00:06:33) - But I'm just thinking worst case like you're saying like lights went out or you get a disconnect. How is this happening. And I can see.   Braedon Hebert (00:06:38) - How it happens. That was a theoretical example of course.   Sam Wilson (00:06:41) - Right, right. Luckily it has not happened to us. But that is I mean, I could see it very easily happening accidentally or it's like we don't know how we missed that. So that's that's really cool. Can you tell me we talked about this a little bit before we kicked off the show? You use the word condo more broadly maybe than what I would say here in the States. Can you define really kind of the the broader scale of the product that you guys are developing in the, in the what condo means?   Braedon Hebert (00:07:09) - Yeah. So yeah, I had said our current branding gives away a bit of our origin. So maybe if I say the word aboot or process or process, I'll also give away my Canadian roots. So we got our start in Ontario. In Canada where we're condo is kind of the catch all term for a HOA or community or association.   Braedon Hebert (00:07:32) - And that's that's where we got our start. And that was the the branding and the website that was that we've been developing. But our goal more broadly is to be is to be a solution for, for all types of, of property management companies. So whether it's the condo HOA association as well as commercial residential. And I was actually looking up our customer roster. We have a senior lifestyle management company in the Tennessee area as well. So it's it's you know, the the challenges are similar. And it's from a branding. It's something that's on the on the strategic table for us. But yeah, thank thanks for bringing that up. Uh, just to be able to help. Yeah. Broaden the conversation and to help to clarify that.   Sam Wilson (00:08:18) - Right. Right. Because I mean, your product could very easily be deployed across industrial facilities or industrial property managers to multifamily property managers to, I mean, anybody that's managing a large portfolio of assets that, like you said, you know, has has an incredible accounts, payroll.   Sam Wilson (00:08:35) - Or accounts payable. Excuse me. If I could speak today, you know, invoices coming in. You need to have that product where you can reasonably take those in, make sure they get paid, and then do it again without without making sure that there's a manual process to keep track of that. So, Braden, one of the things that you said in the onboarding question, I always asked us and again, for those of you that listen, what's a fun fact or surprising view in one of the views that you put in there, Braden, was that tell me a company's tech stack, and I can tell you the growth rate. I think that's really, really interesting. What does that mean?   Braedon Hebert (00:09:08) - I. Yeah. Like the the question prompted. Trying to be a bit controversial or edgy but so we've. You know in building this company and talking to hundreds or property management companies, you start to see different patterns. And as a, as a business, it's in you know, real estate in general is often it's is quite local.   Braedon Hebert (00:09:29) - And there are, you know, there are companies that's, that's that's their focus. That's that's where they want to go. But there's others that I call it a bit. I use the term escape velocity for those that are able to, to, to build a company that expands. Into a wider geographic area. And so there's there's a, you know, in property management specifically, there's there's their startup costs, although the switching costs are low. So it's really it's relatively easy to create your own. If you're a property manager, you get four properties. You can you can exist as a standalone business. But those that obtain the escape velocity are the ones that, that, that, that have that extra is that whether it's ambition or operational excellence, to be able to, to grow and specifically think manage people is a huge part of that. Beyond, you know, beyond their local area, beyond the, the, the, the greater metropolitan areas that they ran into to, to, to to grow into a much, much bigger footprint.   Braedon Hebert (00:10:31) - Um, and so I and I the other pattern is that the, the use of technology is a common characteristic of those companies that are able to obtain that escape velocity. So operationally they have to be be sold. They the managing of people is is a huge part of that. But the being able to adapt and and effectively use with the modern technological tools that exist can really help those companies to, to, to grow at a higher rate than, than others who, who aren't necessarily doing that.   Sam Wilson (00:11:10) - I think that's a really insightful observation. It's not something I would have thought about, but what are some of the things, I guess, that as as you see those various companies that are willing to embrace technology, willing to embrace automation, like.   Sam Wilson (00:11:27) - What.   Sam Wilson (00:11:27) - Does that say about them? Because there's more to it than just, hey, I like technology and automation. There's something about their mindset. And their approach.   Braedon Hebert (00:11:37) - Is, yeah, it's not chasing the new shiny thing, but it is a it is a mindset that exists that they're thinking about how to how to improve their business.   Braedon Hebert (00:11:48) - So they're they're not chasing the, you know, every the everyday fires. They're able to elevate it and think strategically. So, you know, it's not about, hey, we're it's not just, hey, we're we have these cool tech toys. It's it's they're thinking strategically about how to just effectively manage their business. And, you know, the the tech they use is a part of that. But it is a common pattern that we've observed amongst those companies that do seem to have a have a higher growth rate than others that aren't there.   Sam Wilson (00:12:18) - Yeah. No, I think that's, that's that's really insightful. And you said not putting out fires because it takes time. I mean, it takes time to think through. Yeah. There's automations. There's there's there's technology out there. But implementing it is a discipline I think. I know at least it is for me. Maybe I'm not that bright and I'm certainly not tech savvy. And so for me, it's harder to be like, okay, how are we going to use this tool effectively in our business? And then how does it act? Or how can we structure it such that it solves problems without creating a whole pile of new ones that now is now just more work? And so I think that's but figuring those things out to where you're getting beyond the day to day, like, okay, hey, this is how this technology solves problems and saves us time and money is really, really cool.   Sam Wilson (00:13:04) - What how did how do you view that as it pertains to your business? Like what are what are you guys currently doing to use tech to establish or get that escape velocity that you need?   Braedon Hebert (00:13:19) - Yes. Yeah. It's it's. So I, we had a meeting with our or some of our investors last night and they, we're also guilty of that as well in that being able to focus on your current customers and you want to provide a good, good level of service for them and a really good experience. And that can often trump, you know, you know, Trump thinking about, okay, this is this is I need I need time to work on the business. So I was working in the business, working on the business and carving that out. And that's where one of the benefits of of having, you know, whether it's a board of advisors or your business, business groups that you may be in is is it does act as a forcing function for you to, to to think about the business and how to how to improve it.   Braedon Hebert (00:14:08) - Um, for, for tech, one of the benefits of being a tech company is that we can build a lot of our own, our own solutions, right, to help that. So we we've we got our start in in about late 2019 and we've seen it growing across Canada, United States, different different types of property management companies. But we've managed to do so and and multiply the footprint of the company without multiplying the amount of people that we need to support that customer base. And so that's that's having a discipline from a product development standpoint, not to just focus on new features or the shiny things for us are being, you know, new things for us develop. It's also being able to focus on, you know, how do we make our system as efficient. That not only helps us, but it does also help our customers in that they're they they have less, less questions. And there's there's things that make it easier for them. So it does come down to to discipline though, at the end of the day, to, to force yourself to take that step back.   Sam Wilson (00:15:10) - It is hard. It is absolutely hard. We in the in our laundry facility business, you know, we use software inside of that and it's interesting to watch and it's newer, not completely new, but they're still constantly solving problems. And there's even, you know, there's even forums where we can put in feature requests where it's like, hey, you know, we'd love to see, you know, XYZ on our point of sale or whatever, you know, whatever the the feature is. And I would think for you guys, that same thing probably is true where people are constantly saying, hey, what's, you know, can we have this feature? Can we add that? Can we add this? How do you prioritize those in what's maybe a problem that you guys are actively internally trying to solve that you haven't solved yet?   Braedon Hebert (00:15:53) - The prioritization question is is tough because everybody has their. Yeah has has. Yeah that's what they want. So you have to balance. One is is this a is this a one off for this one customer.   Braedon Hebert (00:16:08) - Some of them are are louder than others. And so you have to consider is this broadly applicable. Will feature customers find this attractive. And also you have to also wait that as to the revenue potential as well. And so we've had some of our as we've grown we've gotten bigger customers that have have have pushed us in a good way to develop the features that they, as a bigger company, need for their scale. And so that's that's been, you know, how we have prioritized those, those features and. Terms of what's on our on our roadmap. The some of the ones that I'm, I'm personally most excited about is like is to help. There's a lot of similarities and applicability be going from, you know, HOA or communities to commercial and residential. Um, there are certain nuances to, you know, outside of the HOA space that that do differ. And so it's it's there are certain features that would be very well received by certain. Potential customers that we've had conversations with in the, in the commercial space, um, for example, or even in, in rather than being third party managers, you're an asset manager where you own everything versus in the space, you're managing independent hoa's.   Braedon Hebert (00:17:39) - And so, um, being able to, to achieve that vision, the more broad of of being able to cater to property management more broadly, um, building off of that, that HOA Association condo, um, base.   Sam Wilson (00:17:54) - Got it. That's really, really cool. All right. Last and final question for you is what's something about your software or your solution maybe that I haven't asked that you would want to make sure that we cover.   Braedon Hebert (00:18:07) - Well, we spoke about the the automated utility downloading, which is is one of those eye catching features as boring as it sounds. Um, yeah. But everyone, even personally, everyone hates dealing with their utility bills. So if we can automate that, that's that's something that that people really, really enjoy. I there's if I can say to you, so what if if, if, if you're if your current operations include handling paper whether that's receiving invoices on paper, having a cabinet that you store everything in or signing, signing paper checks, you know if that can if you can envision that going away.   Braedon Hebert (00:18:53) - That's that's yeah. Especially when we talk to owners, oftentimes they're the ones who sign the checks. And it's like, okay, what happens if you go on vacation? Well, you know, I signed a bunch before I leave and then I have a huge stack when I come back. Okay. Well, you know, the the the conveyor belt doesn't have to stop running. Uh, in those, in those scenarios. Um, so that's one and I think the other one that in the larger scales is, is being able to really configure, um, who needs to approve what invoice. And so it's reducing a lot of the noise, but also automating how who needs to approve what invoice and when and enforcing that. So one, it reduces work, but also it helps enhance internal controls to make sure that invoices are being properly, properly screened. So that's that's we're getting a little deep there. But that's know that's the stuff that we care about though.   Sam Wilson (00:19:43) - Those are huge pain points that you're solving for though especially that invoice.   Sam Wilson (00:19:49) - I mean, at least that one that invoice approval speaks to me where it's like, you know, as we grow, I go, my gosh, you know, I don't want to be in front of every invoice that comes through the door and have to be the one that signs off on like, oh, yeah, okay. You know, whatever it is we're say we're. Redoing a facility the paving contractor sends there. Like, I mean, there should be a way to and again, maybe that's just a, you know, small example that doesn't doesn't apply. But I think there's you're touching on some things that everyone thinks about and is trying to figure out a way to solve. So that's very, very cool. Braden, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today. I certainly enjoyed it. It was great learning about what you guys do, how you do it, and the opportunity you guys see in the market right now. And it sounds like it's being very well received.   Sam Wilson (00:20:34) - So this has been a blast having you on today. If our listeners want to get in touch with you and learn more about you or your product, what's the best way to do that?   Braedon Hebert (00:20:41) - So our website is Conoco. So not not.com but.co. And so that's that's our website. And then our we're most active on LinkedIn which where you can find me on there as well as as Conda works on LinkedIn.   Sam Wilson (00:20:59) - Fantastic. We'll make sure you include that there in the show notes. Braden, thank you again for your time today. This was certainly a blast. I do appreciate it.   Braedon Hebert (00:21:06) - Okay. Thank you. Sam.   Sam Wilson (00:21:07) - Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories.   Sam Wilson (00:21:28) - So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.

Deux bases militaires américaines en Syrie ont été attaquées, a rapporté la chaîne de télévision libanaise Al Mayadeen, proche de l'Iran, une attaque de missiles contre la base de Conoco, dans la campagne de la région septentrionale de Deir al-Zor. Ces attaques n'ont pas été confirmées officiellement.

What did the teenage tornado say to his parents?  Nothing. He just stormed off. Today we are discussing the Twister Museum in Wakita, Oklahoma. Housed in the location office of the movie, this unique museum contains information and video on the making of "Twister" in Wakita. Visitors will find the original "Dorothy 1" from the movie, plus behind-the-scenes videos taken during the filming of the 1996 movie. See some of the debris used in the film from lamp posts to a bank door. You can find autographed photos and items signed by star Bill Paxton. Pick up a souvenir from the small gift shop featuring T-shirts, hats, stuffed cows and other items to commemorate your visit. Wakita is a town in Grant County, Oklahoma, and is notable as a location in the 1996 feature film Twister. Before the town's founding in 1898, there was a dispute over the right to name the town. The town's postmaster, and the owner of the first general store, and the town's first postmaster, believed it should be named Whiteville. Local Deputy U.S. Marshall Herbert John Green motioned for the town be named after a Cherokee chief of local significance named Wakita. Green and other local settlers wanted to name the town in the chief's honor because of a protective spell cast by the chief's tribe to protect the area around the town, between Crooked Creek and Pond Creek, from tornadoes for 100 years. On May 10, 2010, numerous tornadoes touched down in Grant County, causing significant damage near the Wakita area. However, the town itself was not destroyed. Wakita was the setting of a 1984 television commercial about DuPont's subsidiary Conoco using seismograph technology to search for oil. It was aired during the 1984 World Series. The voice over starts with, "Nothing much changes in Wakita, Oklahoma." News Story from KFOR. Tinker Air Force Base is a major United States Air Force base, with tenant U.S. Navy and other Department of Defense missions, located in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, surrounded by Del City, Oklahoma City, and Midwest City. Check out the sponsor of our Show, Bravado Wireless. Subscribe to the Only in OK Show. #TravelOK #onlyinokshow #Oklahoma #MadeinOklahoma #oklaproud #podcast #okherewego #traveloklahoma

Norm Silver has officially retired from performing with the “Allstars” but will continue to manage and guide the group for the forseeable future.  Norm continues to work as a professional actor, and has co-starred on television in: The Perry Mason Series, Father Dowling Mysteries, and Diagnosis Murder.  He was also featured in the network mini-series Asteroid. Norm's distinctive voice can be heard representing numerous regional and national clients such as: McDonald's, Metro Ford, The Denver Post and Burger King and for web clients; Jackson Annuities and Conoco. 

Norm Silver has officially retired from performing with the “Allstars” but will continue to manage and guide the group for the forseeable future.  Norm continues to work as a professional actor, and has co-starred on television in: The Perry Mason Series, Father Dowling Mysteries, and Diagnosis Murder.  He was also featured in the network mini-series Asteroid. Norm's distinctive voice can be heard representing numerous regional and national clients such as: McDonald's, Metro Ford, The Denver Post and Burger King and for web clients; Jackson Annuities and Conoco. 

Eigentlich wollte er es nie tun - in Alaska nach Öl bohren lassen. Doch letzte Woche kündigte Präsident Biden an, er wolle das so genannte Willow-Projekt für Bohrungen am Polarkreis vorantreiben. Die Ölindustrie und Alaskas Politiker sind begeistert - Umweltaktivisten dagegen sind mehr als wütend und enttäuscht. Warum hat Biden plötzlich eines seiner zentralen Wahl-Versprechen gebrochen? Könnte es auch damit zu tun haben, dass er im Vorfeld der nächsten Präsidentschaftswahlen mehr Wählerinnen und Wähler der Mitte ködern möchte? Schließlich sind Umwelt-Themen nicht der einzige Bereich, in dem Biden den Kurs zu wechseln scheint. Was bedeuten all diese „Anpassungen“ - und wohin führen sie das Land?Credits:Theme Music:  Reha Omayer, HamburgFind us on:Facebook: AmerikaUebersetztTwitter: @AUbersetztContact us:amerikauebersetzt@gmail.com

The Willow Project sounds tranquil, but then a cemetery is also tranquil. This project will permit fossil fuel expansion on PUBLIC lands. When we consider this fossil fuel expansion in conjunction with the sorry state of our railroads, we have a formula for disaster. Next we have our East Palestine Watch Report. The East Palestine Bomb Train is merely one of far too many--"Bomb Trains." Furthermore, the levels of carncinogenic chemicals in East Palestine resulting from the derailment are astronomical. In addition, we have politicians who actively blocked newer safety regulations in return for campaign "contributions," aka active influence peddling.  Both stories trace back these environmental crimes to corporate greed. This is our big story.  We will also have our 'Jackass of the Week' feature and a new feature, namely our Deplorables Watch List of Infamy, followed by final thoughts.  Come join me.  Jeanine  

"From a Board Perspective: Managing Change, Climate, Inflation, Technology, Capital Markets" J. Mike Stice at API OKC monthly luncheon as our guest speaker touching on various oil and gas topics. Mike worked 27 years with Conoco in a variety of Midstream Gas, Global LNG, and Commercial roles, followed by 7 years as CEO for Access Midstream. He is formerly the Dean at OU's College of Earth and Energy. His current positions are Director at Marathon, Senior Advisor to Project Canary, Senior Advisor to Longview Fusion Energy, and Chairman of Spartan Energy. He is also an amazing speaker, lecturer, advisor for other influential global think tanks, impressive leader, and oil and gas energy advocate. #api #petroleum #oilgas #energy #management #leadership #investing #esg #environment #sustainability

Kent shares something the CEO of Conoco told him about the difference in graduates from Texas, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech.

Crow Reservation in Montana-locations and people interviewed. JAMES LINK FOR FIRST NATION FOODS BUSINESS https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=111807328420357&set=a.111805821753841&type=3&mibextid=YsHG2a He is creating a natural and nutritious fruit leather brand. PETER SANTANELLO'S CROW RESERVATION VIDEO https://youtu.be/LON6eGikrKk CROW MONTANA RESERVATION- Apsaalooke/ Beeloga- “Children of the Large Beak Bird” (name of the Crow people). Peter Santenello, Robin (father), James (main interview and tour, son, near age 18, recently graduated high school and to attend Montana State University, married to his wife Angela). (Hardin, MT used to be half of Crow reservation, surveyors moved the borders, there is an IGA grocery). Bighorn River, Crow Agency- shows the flag. Old tribal building burned down. Skatepark. Montana State University is Crow Country. Lodge Grass is an area with a grocery store. Buddy Burger- on the reservation, the speaker and his aunt's old houses were across the street from there in Crow Agency area. Apsaalooke Trading Post- mini mart, trades and pawning. Crow Fairgrounds- where Crow Fair is held the 3rd wk of August ea year. Watering hole for swimming and watering horses. Church. Apsaalooke Nights Casino. The old casino failed. Hospital-“Crow/ Northern Cheyenne Indian Hospital, Crow Agency, Montana”- only hires Residents no full-time long term doctors and some residents may not be the best quality. Conoco, Crow tribal gas station. River Crow Trading Post. The Big Horn Mountains is a mountain range in Crow Country where sun sets west behind them. JAMES LINK FOR FIRST NATION FOODS BUSINESS https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=111807328420357&set=a.111805821753841&type=3&mibextid=YsHG2a He is creating a natural and nutritious fruit leather brand. PETER SANTANELLO'S CROW RESERVATION VIDEO https://youtu.be/LON6eGikrKk --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Recorded on August 17, 2022 https://youtu.be/Lj2beKVovRw Episode 57 of the PetroNerds podcast is another heavy hitting jam packed episode. Araron Hunter with ConocoPhillips returns - this time as the Vice President of the Delaware Basin. Trisha Curtis, CEO of PetroNerds and Aaron Hunter, Vice President of the Delaware Basin for ConocoPhillips, talk shop on all things Delaware Basin, Conoco earnings calls, technology trends, formation targeting, natural gas, LNG, red hot prices and inflation, and net net zero pledges. WTI is $87.02, Brent $92.58, Henry Hub $9.24, Dutch TTF $67.59, 30 Year Mortgage 5.48%, and 10 Year Yield 2.90%. They discuss frac and technological growth and efficiency, inflation, and Conoco's triple mandate and energy security. Another not to miss PetroNerds podcast episode!

Well it's election day and we've got a few headlines that we'll go over before diving into it with Brad Keithley from Alaskans for Sustainable Budgets for the Weekly Top 3. Today's topics include: Bill Walker's "for the children" smokescreen; a bit of fiscal clarity from the courts; and a lesson from Conoco's Q2 earnings report. Then in hour two we'll pick it up with Chris Story who will give us our weekly PMA uplift.

In recognition of Cow Appreciate Day, we walk through the history of when cattle first arrived in North America to present day.  Dr. Scott Schaake with Kansas State University is my guest as we discuss the history of our Cattle Industry and some of the landmark events or eras of time that impacted our industry… one of those events being about a Charolais Crossbred Steer that went by the name of Conoco. #workingranchmagazine #workingranchnation #justinmills.wyocowboy #ranchlife #ranching #dayweather #weather #beef #cows #livestock #cattle #kstate #history #cowappreciationday

Arvada. Population: Brian. Well Oiled Date Night. There are FOUR Hobbits. What things do you like about Vegas? Mowing a lawn with a fully exposed John Deere. Thunder Jacket is my Ac/DC cover band. Johnny Helmets. Just Salt The Earth. Dude, you've got Adele. They made small talk very small talk. Red Flag Means Someone Barfed. The kart company needs better matchmaking. Conoco: the Funniest Gas Station. He can draw my women any time. 31 Flavors of Omicron with Bobby and more on this episode of The Morning Stream.

Arvada. Population: Brian. Well Oiled Date Night. There are FOUR Hobbits. What things do you like about Vegas? Mowing a lawn with a fully exposed John Deere. Thunder Jacket is my Ac/DC cover band. Johnny Helmets. Just Salt The Earth. Dude, you've got Adele. They made small talk very small talk. Red Flag Means Someone Barfed. The kart company needs better matchmaking. Conoco: the Funniest Gas Station. He can draw my women any time. 31 Flavors of Omicron with Bobby and more on this episode of The Morning Stream.

Brought to you on the Oil and Gas Global Network, the largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. This episode is made possible by IBM. Don't forget to ask a question for our next First Friday Q&A. You ask the questions and we answer them. Have a question? Click here to ask. This week Mark and Paige cover  News articles Egypt, Equatorial Guinea Discuss Petroleum Cooperation https://egyptoil-gas.com/news/egypt-equatorial-guinea-discuss-petroleum-cooperation/ Texas RRC Turns to AI https://www.rigzone.com/news/texas_rrc_turns_to_ai-26-may-2022-169125-article/ API announces new executive leadership positions https://worldoil.com/news/2022/6/7/api-announces-new-executive-leadership-positions/ EU Sanctions on Russia Oil Will Sustain Inflationary Pressures https://www.rigzone.com/news/eu_sanctions_on_russia_oil_will_sustain_inflationary_pressures-08-jun-2022-169253-article/ Why Saudi Arabia Isn't Giving Up On Its Russian Oil Alliance https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/Why-Saudi-Arabia-Isnt-Giving-Up-On-Its-Russian-Oil-Alliance.html Ukraine To Halt Coal, Oil, Gas Exports Ahead Of Critical Winter https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Ukraine-To-Halt-Coal-Oil-Gas-Exports-Ahead-Of-Critical-Winter.html Major Lithium Producer Could Shut German Plant Over EU Rule https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Major-Lithium-Producer-Could-Shut-German-Plant-Over-EU-Rule.html Oil Majors Are Lining Up for the Next Great South American Oil Boom https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Majors-Are-Lining-Up-For-The-Next-Great-South-American-Oil-Boom.html Qatar picks Exxon, Total, Shell, Conoco for mega-LNG expansion - sources https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/qatar-picks-exxon-total-mega-lng-expansion-project-sources-2022-06-07/ This Week in Petroleum History https://aoghs.org/this-week-in-petroleum-history/may-30-2022/ Weekly Rig Count https://rigcount.bakerhughes.com/rig-count-overview LinkedIn Company Page, Group, and Street Team Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oggn/ Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8343544 Street Team: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12458373/ Get Mark's Monthly Events Email http://eepurl.com/JKtZ1 First Friday Q&A https://oggn.com/podcasts/oil-and-gas-this-week/   The Weekly Rig Count by Baker Hughes https://rigcount.bakerhughes.com/rig-count-overview  More from OGGN ...PodcastsLinkedIn GroupLinkedIn Company PageGet notified about industry events     Paige Wilson LinkedInMark LaCour Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn

Brought to you on the Oil and Gas Global Network, the largest and most listened to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. This episode is made possible by IBM. Don't forget to ask a question for our next First Friday Q&A. You ask the questions and we answer them. Have a question? Click here to ask. This week Mark and Paige cover  News articles Egypt, Equatorial Guinea Discuss Petroleum Cooperation https://egyptoil-gas.com/news/egypt-equatorial-guinea-discuss-petroleum-cooperation/ Texas RRC Turns to AI https://www.rigzone.com/news/texas_rrc_turns_to_ai-26-may-2022-169125-article/ API announces new executive leadership positions https://worldoil.com/news/2022/6/7/api-announces-new-executive-leadership-positions/ EU Sanctions on Russia Oil Will Sustain Inflationary Pressures https://www.rigzone.com/news/eu_sanctions_on_russia_oil_will_sustain_inflationary_pressures-08-jun-2022-169253-article/ Why Saudi Arabia Isn't Giving Up On Its Russian Oil Alliance https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/Why-Saudi-Arabia-Isnt-Giving-Up-On-Its-Russian-Oil-Alliance.html Ukraine To Halt Coal, Oil, Gas Exports Ahead Of Critical Winter https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Ukraine-To-Halt-Coal-Oil-Gas-Exports-Ahead-Of-Critical-Winter.html Major Lithium Producer Could Shut German Plant Over EU Rule https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Major-Lithium-Producer-Could-Shut-German-Plant-Over-EU-Rule.html Oil Majors Are Lining Up for the Next Great South American Oil Boom https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Majors-Are-Lining-Up-For-The-Next-Great-South-American-Oil-Boom.html Qatar picks Exxon, Total, Shell, Conoco for mega-LNG expansion – sources https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/qatar-picks-exxon-total-mega-lng-expansion-project-sources-2022-06-07/ This Week in Petroleum History https://aoghs.org/this-week-in-petroleum-history/may-30-2022/ Weekly Rig Count https://rigcount.bakerhughes.com/rig-count-overview LinkedIn Company Page, Group, and Street Team Company: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oggn/ Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8343544 Street Team: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/12458373/ Get Mark's Monthly Events Email http://eepurl.com/JKtZ1 First Friday Q&A https://oggn.com/podcasts/oil-and-gas-this-week/   The Weekly Rig Count by Baker Hughes https://rigcount.bakerhughes.com/rig-count-overview  More from OGGN …PodcastsLinkedIn GroupLinkedIn Company PageGet notified about industry events     Paige Wilson LinkedIn Mark LaCour Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | modalpoint

Del founded Esparza in 2000 to provide strategic marketing, advertising, and business solutions to a broad range of national public and private clients. A native of Albuquerque, Del acquired his marketing expertise at companies including IBM, DuPont, and Conoco. Dr. Mills Cox is a multicultural market researcher and founder and principal of Inclusive Market Research Group, LLC. Her previous work examined media representations of communities of color and Black female representation in the media, specifically examining audience engagement. Her current research includes qualitative focus groups, giving insight into multicultural consumer markets. As a Black American consumer insight expert, Dr. Mills Cox provides cultural insight and direction for market strategy and planning. Dr. Mills Cox is also a Communications faculty member at Central New Mexico Community College (CNM) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She also served as an Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator at Norfolk State University (Norfolk, VA) in the Mass Communications and Journalism department. In this role, she taught communications courses, supervised the graduate program and its students, in addition to coordinating the program's logistics. As Graduate Program Coordinator, Dr. Mills Cox assisted with developing new course offerings and initiated new curriculum development. What you will learn about in this episode: What genuinely inclusive market research looks like, how it is conducted, and why it is invaluable for businesses in every industry How the COVID-19 pandemic and the countless social justice movements that have gained momentum over the past few years have left a lasting impact on consumer behavior What recent shifts in consumer behavior mean for businesses, brands, and the expectations held by their audiences Why it is crucial for brands to align their values with their audiences,' and how they can do so with integrity, responsibility, and authenticity The best way for brands to communicate their commitment to social responsibility with their audiences while keeping themselves accountable How brands should react if and when they take a misstep, and how the right reactions can not only repair but STRENGTHEN your consumer relationships Which brands are currently leading social progress through their commitment to inclusivity and diversity — and what the rest of us can learn from them Resources: Del Esparza: Website: https://esparza.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/del-esparza-8b49781/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/esparza-advertising/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/esparzaadvertising/ Twitter: https://www.facebook.com/esparzaadvertising/ Dr. Brandale Mills Cox: Website: https://drbrandalemills.com/ https://www.inclusivemarketresearchgroup.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandale-mills-cox-ph-d-327751b/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/inclusive-market-research-group/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inclusivemrg/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/InclusiveMRG

Don Washington, a partner in the Jones Walker law firm, joined Discover Lafayette to share his life and career journey as well as his dedication to public service. Based out of Jones Walker's Lafayette office, Don Washington specializes in corporate compliance and white-collar defense. A native of Sulphur Springs, Texas, Don has led an exemplary career in the military, the oil and gas industry as an engineer and attorney for Conoco, as a litigator at Jones Walker, in public service, and as a volunteer in our community. Growing up in the small town of Sulphur Springs that Don refers to as "a Norman Rockwell" type of town, he was a member of the Future Farmers of America and even had the opportunity to judge livestock shows. Math and science were his favorite topics and he was encouraged by his family to reach for the stars. He ended up at West Point studying and graduating in Aerospace Engineering after a random comment by a high school classmate who said he was going to apply to the Naval Academy. Don recalled, "I just announced very proudly that I was going to apply to West Point! I did and I got in. Those were the days as they say." "I believe very strongly in our country. I believe in the Constitution. I believe that our nation is exceptional. I've been to places around the planet where our nation is looked upon with high regard. For example, I took a trip to Nepal as U. S. Attorney to speak on our American criminal justice system and compare it with Nepal's, a nation of antiquity where Buddha walked 5000 plus years ago. Here we are, a 200-year old republic, and we talked to them about things they wanted to know about us because of our success. They wanted to expand their horizons." After West Point, Don joined the Army and served as an Air Defense Artillery Officer where he trained in tactical strategies, how to shoot down aircraft, and control air space over battlegrounds. Working with gun systems and missiles, Don served during the time of the Cold War when the Soviet Union was a real threat as was China. "The Soviet military had 50,000 tanks at the Iron Curtain and the U. S. had 5000....the U. S. always had superior equipment." After military service, Don worked with Conoco in Houston. Wanting to further his education, he attended South Texan College of Law at night, all while traveling on behalf of Conoco to sell its natural gas. South Texan College of Law is recognized by many as the "Harvard of the South" and was set up for high achievers who work as they obtain their Juris doctorate. He moved to Lafayette while working for Conoco and since then has called Lafayette home. Don was appointed to serve as U. S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana by George W. Bush one week after 9/11. Then U. S. Attorney General John Ashcroft made sure that all appointees understood the gravity of the situation and that terrorists did exist in the U. S. Don spent two years rooting out plotters of terrorist activities, including those involving Wadih El Hage, a graduate of USL who was aligned with Osama bin Laden and who plotted the bombing of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He served until 2010. He also led federal investigations and trial teams to prosecute cases involving criminal and civil violations of federal law.   Don recently returned to Jones Walker after serving as the director of the United States Marshals Service. He was appointed by President Donald Trump and served from 2019 to 2021. During his service, he oversaw nearly 5,500 US marshals, deputy marshalls, criminal investigators, detention enforcement officers, and administrative staff. His time of service included having to navigate the COVID pandemic as well as civil unrest that erupted after George Floyd was killed in May of 2020. Don Washington is a great believer in the U. S. Constitution and a prosecutor at heart. Yet, he believes that everyone deserves the best criminal defense possible.

For the next few weeks I will be doing a Throwback Tuesdays/Thursdays where I re-release old episodes from the archives. So don't worry if you have heard it already as a 'New episodes' will continue to come out on Sundays. The idea is to get some of the old episodes heard as they have very little downloads from the first season, compared to newer episodes.~~~ We are joined by Charles in Georgia, and he is an ex-Martial artist, stuntman and videographer that worked in the motion picture industry with people like the legendary Chuck Norris. He is also an information technology professional, with over 41 years of computer experience, he's worked over 60 professional IT-related contracts. His clients include the CIA, the FBI, Defence Security Services, DISA, the Library of Congress, the Treasury Department, NATO, the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, Microsoft, Shell, Amoco, Conoco, Haliburton, Brown and Root, Cox Enterprises, GE, and numerous others. Charles has been an occasional contactee since his first close encounter in October of 1980. He will be sharing this experience and many others tonight. Charles Mike Beaver's Website:https://profoundstates.comMore information on this episode on the podcast website:https://ufochroniclespodcast.com/ep-83-profound-states/Want to share your encounter on the show? Email: UFOChronicles@gmail.com Podcast Merchandise:https://www.teepublic.com/user/ufo-chronicles-podcast Help Support UFO CHRONICLES Podcast by becoming a Patron:www.patreon.com/UFOChroniclespodcastThank you for listening!Please leave a review if you enjoy the show, and everyone that leaves a rating and review on Apple Podcasts will get a shout out on the following show.

For the next few weeks I will be doing a Throwback Tuesdays/Thursdays where I re-release old episodes from the archives. So don't worry if you have heard it already as a 'New episodes' will continue to come out on Sundays. The idea is to get some of the old episodes heard as they have very little downloads from the first season, compared to newer episodes.~~~ We are joined by Charles in Georgia, and he is an ex-Martial artist, stuntman and videographer that worked in the motion picture industry with people like the legendary Chuck Norris. He is also an information technology professional, with over 41 years of computer experience, he's worked over 60 professional IT-related contracts. His clients include the CIA, the FBI, Defence Security Services, DISA, the Library of Congress, the Treasury Department, NATO, the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, Microsoft, Shell, Amoco, Conoco, Haliburton, Brown and Root, Cox Enterprises, GE, and numerous others. Charles has been an occasional contactee since his first close encounter in October of 1980. He will be sharing this experience and many others tonight. Charles Mike Beaver's Website:https://profoundstates.comMore information on this episode on the podcast website:https://ufochroniclespodcast.com/ep-83-profound-states/Want to share your encounter on the show? Email: UFOChronicles@gmail.com Podcast Merchandise:https://www.teepublic.com/user/ufo-chronicles-podcast Help Support UFO CHRONICLES Podcast by becoming a Patron:www.patreon.com/UFOChroniclespodcastThank you for listening!Please leave a review if you enjoy the show, and everyone that leaves a rating and review on Apple Podcasts will get a shout out on the following show.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:01:39 - An update on Facebook, now Meta, since our last discussion in June 2021.11:53 - Oakmarks process to finding and vetting stock ideas.31:58 - How they think about diversification once they're highly allocated in a certain sector.35:02 - An overview of some of Oakmarks top positions, including their heavy weighting in Alphabet.46:26 - Buffett's recent position in Nubank and how it compares to Oakmarks positions in Ally and Fiserv.58:29 - A forecast of Oil and how EOG and Conoco will follow.And a whole lot more!*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.BOOKS AND RESOURCES:Oakmark Funds Website.Trey Lockerbie Twitter.Preston, Trey & Stig's tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool.New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs.Learn more about how you can get started investing in some of the best cash flow markets today with Rent to Retirement.Push your team to do their best work with Monday.com Work OS. Start your free two-week trial today.Get access to some of the most sought-after real estate in the U.S. with Crowdstreet.Find Pros & Fair Pricing for Any Home Project for Free with Angi.Invest in the $1.7 trillion art market with Masterworks.io. Use promo code WSB to skip the waitlist.Confidently take control of your online world without worrying about viruses, phishing attacks, ransomware, hacking attempts, and other cybercrimes with Avast One.Buy your own Bitcoin mining machines and host them with Blockware Solutions.Provide future financial protection to the people who matter most to you with the help of TD Term Life Insurance.See the all-new 2022 Lexus NX and discover everything it was designed to do for you. Welcome to the next level.Canada's #1 employee benefits plan for small businesses! The Chambers Plan evolves with the way you work and live while keeping the rates stable. Opt for the simple, stable, and smart choice for your business.Live local in Melbourne and enjoy $0 Stamp Duty*!Be part of the solution by investing in companies that are actively engaged in integrating ESG practices with Desjardins.Protect your online activity TODAY with ExpressVPN, the VPN rated #1 by CNET and Wired, and get an extra 3 months FREE on a one-year package.Eat clean 24/7, with fresh—never frozen—prepared meals that are so delicious with Factor. Use code wsb120 to get $120 off over your first 5 weeks of meals.Reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient, daily nutrition. Athletic Greens is going to give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase.Take advantage of a free mortgage review and learn about custom loans that can save you big money with American Financing.Yieldstreet allows you to invest beyond the stock market with an evolving marketplace of alternative investments. Create your account today.The interval fund, a breakthrough innovation. Only at Mackenzie.Get the most from your bitcoin while holding your own keys with Unchained Capital. Begin the concierge onboarding process on their site. At the checkout, get $50 off with the promo code FUNDAMENTALS.Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here.Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors.HELP US OUT!Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Thanks for coming back for another episode of The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast. Powered by Shakepay - use our referral code and receive $30 CAD on your first deposit of $100 CAD. Shakepay is the service we use to buy Bitcoin, and there isn't an easier way to orange pill your pals! This week: Canadian Inflation Mess Conoco Phillips is in Crypto Task Force BIGG moves HIVE Quarterly BTCC Inflows Legal Tender? Gensler Drags His Feet And Much More. As always, leave us some feedback on Apple Podcasts - your ratings and reviews help the show grow - or reach out to Joey and Len on Twitter, leave us a note on our Reddit posts, or drop a comment on our YouTube channel. We appreciate all the support and feedback, and hope you'll come back for more! Later! _______________________________________ Help the Show - Use One of Our Referral Codes or Buy Some Merch! The CBP Merch Store Ledn.io - https://platform.ledn.io/join/71ff9f01aa9f06a2910f627bf2832639 Sign up and take a Ledn loan and get $25 for free! Wealthsimple Trade – Receive the cash value of a stock when you sign up using our link! https://my.wealthsimple.com/app/public/trade-referral-signup?code=WVLSJQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/canadian-bitcoiners/message

Engineer/rapper Ghost &  Namic engineer/ producer young prodigy's stops by the Smoking with JoeThunder podcast with Elvis Freshleee bgood dispensary and Dj Cyn These 2 guys are only 20 yeas old and all ready killing the game.  Ghost engineer , singer , and rapper  has over 100 track with some of Colorado's finest Trev Rich, Nayyy Renee , Big Grit , and Pepper just to name a few.   Ghost has several projects coming soon Ghost Pepper with Big Fine Pep, he also has a project dropping soon with Young Namic.   Young Namic is already a super producer, rapper and Engineer.   Young Namic has dropped several videos , and produced tracks like STG by Nay Renee and Conoco by Big Grit f/ Sauce Walka

Customer Obsession with Charlie Herrin In this episode of the CrossLead podcast, host David Silverman speaks with Charlie Herrin, President of the Technology, Product, Xperience organization within Comcast Cable. They focus on the leader's role in creating a compelling vision and building a narrative in support of it. Charlie talks about his obsession with the customer and how technology can meaningfully improve a customer's life. He also discusses his personal routines and leadership development philosophy as well as his approach to leading change at scale and how you measure progress.“For me, innovation is not feature matching. Innovation is making someone's life better.” – Charlie Herrin [14:26]“People need to have purpose in what they're doing and it's not just a job. It's not just working on technology. It's not just writing code or creating a design. You're doing it for an end goal.” – Charlie Herrin [18:59]“The role of the leader is to lead and to model the behavior they want to see.” – Charlie Herrin [22:47] Resources A Walk Across America by Peter JenkinsCenter For Creative LeadershipTeam of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris FussellThe Outsiders : Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike Want to discuss some of these topics directly with Dave? Join the CrossLead LinkedIn Group. Episode Transcript DaveWelcome to the CrossLead podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman at CrossLead. We exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimum performance. In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Charlie Herrin. Charlie serves as the president of the Technology Product Experience Organization within Comcast Cable.When I first met Charlie in 2015, he had just transitioned to the role of leading the customer experience division. He knew the team tasked with the largest NPS implementation in North America at the time. In today’s episode, we focus on the leader’s role in creating a compelling vision and building a narrative in support of it. We talk about his obsession with a customer and how technology can meaningfully improve a customer’s life. Charlie discusses his personal routines and leadership development philosophy. We talk about his approach to leading change at scale and how you measure progress. A proud father, husband, outdoorsman, an amateur photographer. Charlie’s humility and empathetic leadership style makes him a truly world class leader. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoy the conversation that I have with my friend and mentor Charlie Herrin.Good morning, good afternoon, welcome to the CrossLead podcast. Today, we’re joined with Charlie Herrin, who serves as the president of technology product experience for Comcast Cable. Today we’re going to talk about leadership and we’re going to go back and talk about the leadership development from Charlie’s perspective over his career. So, Charlie, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate you being here now.CharlieThank you. David, it’s good to be here and appreciate it.DaveSo let’s, let’s go through your life journey and example of leadership, but take me back to where you grew up in, and some of those are formative early experiences in your life.CharlieI grew up in a town called Ponca City, Oklahoma. My dad was a chemist and Conoco had their big R&D facility there. So it was a good town to grow up in a lot of opportunities for kids. Oklahoma was, you know, like most kids, I was sort of bored of where I grew up. I was really, really focused on backpacking and camping.I had read a book called Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, and it really, I just woke me up to the idea of outdoors because my dad is not an outdoorsman.DaveHow old were you when you read that book?CharlieI was 13 and 13. It’s actually I read the National Geographic articles. That he wrote first and then. And then read the book. But you know, that got me into scouting, which I joined largely because they were going backpacking. In New Mexico, and I wanted to do that. And my other passion was soccer. I play a lot of soccer. I was I’m old enough to remember it was actually the first time they had. Started in my city. So I was like on the first team.But I spent a lot of time doing that. And so I was always outside. And when I went to college, which was at the University of Washington, it was largely to go to the Pacific Northwest again. I had this kind of bug for being in the outdoors, and I just wanted to to be someplace where I could experience a lot of adventure that way. Toyed with soccer at the University of Washington, but they’re far better than I am. So I did not go down that path.DaveSo when you got to when you got to Washington University. Talk about, you know, what was your major? I know you were an economics major, but talk about how that sort of shaped you from a from a leadership perspective.CharlieYeah, I went in to college thinking I’d be a history major and kind of pre-law kind of thing and was a pretty good writer. And that’s sort of what I was drawn to. But I ended up taking some economics classes and microeconomics classes. And I was just fascinated by the idea of. Evaluating how consumers make decisions, which is essentially what the, you know, that’s essentially what microeconomics is. Again, I just loved it. And so I kind of really leaned in. But I think from an early point in my life, I was fascinated with the idea of what consumers wanted and how they evaluated their options. And and I think that has served me well. I actually think as I got into the product game. And and consumer experience game and things like that. Is give me a lens that I think a lot of people just don’t use or maybe think about as a first lens. And that’s always my first lens is, you know, how would this benefit me as. A consumer and how would this benefit my family as a consumer? How would this benefit, you know, consumers in my community? And so it was a really formative for me.DaveYeah, it’s amazing that your college major actually was relevant to your job. So I was an oceanography major in college and other than the fact that I like to surf and I was a navy seal. There wasn’t a lot of overlap there.So the fact that you actually took core lessons from that and were able to apply it to to your to your world is pretty remarkable. You come out of university. And what was your first job out of college?CharlieWell, my first job, actually, I thought I was still going to do pre-law. I had taken the LSAT and done extremely well and kind of was off to going to go to law school. Just on a whim I interviewed at Andersen within was Andersen Consulting, its Accenture now. I remember that I took the interview because I was really tired of eating 19 cent boxes of macaroni. I was really, really living on the edge in terms of finances, and I thought, Well, you know, my assets are good for five years and I’ll just go to this interview. But I didn’t really care because I’ve been accepted to law school. And so I just. Sort of answered. However, I wanted to answer.It was a little bit like that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza sort of says the opposite of everything he thinks he should say. And it works for him, and it worked for me. They call me back and said, You hired the guy we hired. And so I went into Accenture Anderson at the time as a developer because that’s how they started everyone.You know, it’s interesting to me, but I found out pretty. Quickly I was in a great developer, but when I was really good. At was requirements and interfacing with with the clients. And again, I think that sensitivity to what they really wanted and needed and being able to add value there. That’s really what drove me. And so I was there for the typical two years and then hired on at McCaw Cellular. Which was the client I was working at. It was exciting. It was an exciting time.DaveAnd when was this, roughly?CharlieWell, this would have been about 94, I heard. OK. Yeah, yeah. What I loved about it was, I don’t know if you guys remember, but you know, in the early, early days of mobile. It was seen as a huge luxury and car phones and the big Motorola brick phones and the average consumer was sort of on to it yet.But I remember in employee orientation there, they showed a video where they told the story about what people really want. And how important communication is and how how important mobility is. Sort of the nomad. They kind of pinned it into, you. Know, we love travel, we love kind of moving around. It got me to really think about an inspiring vision about what you’re doing and how you’re sort of aligning to Age-Old truths about what people have always wanted. It opened up for me the idea of narratives. I mean, I could keep going. I mean, AT&T ended up buying us that I again was able to start to craft why that was good for them, how that can bring mobility really to the mainstream and got to work on some really interesting projects to to do that.It also showed me some things I didn’t. Want to ever do, which is like gigantic meetings. I remember going with b four of us and like 50 others. At the end of the introduction, the introductions alone would take half an hour. But but that got me to really start to understand teamwork and bringing together lots of different disciplines.And I was there for a few years and then I then I came to Comcast.DaveThen you came to Comcast. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Why did you come to Comcast? What brought you there?CharlieWell, I mean, like, like a lot of people that have been fortunate in their career, I had some great mentors. And one of the mentors I had was a guy named David, and he had come from a McCaw cellular at AT&T and had come over to what at the time was Comcast Cellular business. They ended up selling part of that off. And he went to had the broadband business, and he called me up and he said, You know, you should come over here. It’s just like mobile. You know, mobile was in the beginning seen as a luxury, but.I really think this can can impact people’s lives. And so that’s that’s what really. Got me over again. Just this notion of technology. Improving people’s lives. It’s really been a constant theme in my career.DaveYeah, you’ve been at sort of the vanguard for that in some massive spaces, so what year was it that you went over to Comcast that like late nineties, early 2000?CharlieYeah, it was a 96.DaveAnd so broadband internet was it was just sort of appearing on the yeah, on the landscape.CharlieYeah, it really was. And, you know, we didn’t have it at the time. There was no self install option we had was one of the people on the team that were that were driving that project. It was early, early days. No retail to speak of certainly wasn’t mainstream. So again, a lot of that playbook that we had in mobile could be applied to to to this technology and this value proposition for customers.DaveSo you get to Comcast, what’s your first job when you, once you’re there?CharlieBut my first job was business development, I think director of business development you know, at the time, the cable companies had a venture with together. With this group called. At Home, and it was in the heyday of the internet. The first heyday of the. Internet, I should say. And so it was a lot about you know, establishing relationships and things like that but when at home faced financial difficulties and ultimately disbanded.I was given the task of trying to figure out what our portal was going to be. Email, all of that because I’d had some coding background at Accenture, you know, as a business development that you do a lot of those kinds of things. So we decided to go it alone and stood up our own portal and email, and it was really hard. But that’s ultimately what became. The seed for what became a lot of our interactive properties and and ultimately our product development teams and approach was that interactive group.DaveAwesome. So who is your competition then when you were going to what was it? That was it the Microsoft and Google of the world?CharlieOr, you know, it was AOL, you know, they were huge.I remember, I remember, you know. You know, why are we trying to do this? Let’s just do a deal with AOL and be done and I’m like, you know, look, we’re installing this stuff. It’s a great touchpoint for our customers. Let’s, let’s hold on to it and see what we can do, and sure enough. You know, we could compete there and we won by focusing on what we were trying to do, which was connect up homes and connect people to a vastly bigger world through broadband internet. And it was a little less about, you know, being the portal. It was, it was, you know.Sure, we had one, and we made money on it and things like that. But the real focus. Was just connecting this home, and then we started to put services on top of our portal like. Video and flash players and things like that that were really exciting. That gave us a lot of confidence to go kind of further into the interactive space.DaveAnd then from Biz Dev, what was your next stop in your career?CharlieLet me think. Well, I mean, it became product, essentially. You know, I was running the product. Yeah, it was, you know, running Comcast portal and interactive properties. And, you know, the features that went along with them, which at that time were things like email and personal web pages and stuff like that. And then that evolved into. You know, are you working on the TV products and working on the Infinity Home products and things like that? But it was it was definitely start to run product teams and user experience teams.DaveI think when I met you, you just come out of having run the Xfinity program, which at the time was the most successful product that Comcast had launched, both from an experience standpoint and just from a technology innovation standpoint. Maybe maybe talk about that experience and how that sort of shaped everything you’ve done since.CharlieYeah, I think, you know, when we decided to redefine television and really put the experience and delivery up in the cloud, which we call our X1 experience.I did not start that. That was already started by some really smart folks. But what I did do as I was brought in, we put a new UI on it and we spent a lot of time trying to solve, you know, the discovery and content and put that in quotes that customers have, which is there’s so much on how do I really kind of get to it quickly? How do we make it really welcome and an advanced sort of experience versus what existed before? And so I did run that product team and to your point, that was really successful. You know, I still think it’s one of the better UIs out there, and we really did it by focusing on the content itself and our Mission. Our mission was, A: to put a TV in every pocket, so we focused a lot on the streaming and, and mobile pieces.It was B: to get you to your content that you want faster. And so we spent time on search and discovery and different ways to do that. Whether it’s, you know, rotten tomato listings or whether it’s we had some really cool ways of searching, and then adding things like the voice remote ultimately was sort of the last thing that I was I was involved with.And also looking at that screen as kind of more than what’s on TV like, you can use that screen to, you know, see your security cameras, you can use that screen to interact with customer care, and that’s still something I believe strongly in. We’ll keep, we’ll keep doing that.But the focus and the mission that I gave the team was literally and we headed it at the beginning of every meeting. This slide was like, we’re here to change people’s lives and we’re here to to implement our version of innovation. And for me, innovation is not feature matching. Innovation is making someone’s life better. It can be complex technology that does that. Or it could be something as simple as, you know, sticky coats. But the focus is, you know, making life better and that the job of a good product person.I used to tell this story. My youngest bet you’ve met, Mave.She was four or five and she was opening this present, you know, excited like a kid always is. And she said, I never knew I always wanted this. And I thought it was proof that that’s exactly what a good product person should be doing. And so this idea that we’re constantly trying to figure out ways of making someone excited about what they’re using and have them to start to think like. I can’t imagine my life without this, like, what did I do before? It’s just such a… it was such a, It still gets me super excited just thinking about it. And so and so that is my passion and spent a lot of time there and, nd based on that success. They said, Hey, we have another problem for you, which is the customer experience piece that we’ve been trying to turn around for a while. Could you come in and and Focus on that? And I remember when I first got that gig, lots of things. First of all, that’s where I met CrossLead and you. But I remember getting a lot of questions like, Well, look, you’re not the customer care guy. Like, you don’t have customer service experience. Why are you in this role, right? And my point of view was. Well, customer service is what happens when the experience breaks. So we’re going to go fix the experience which is in the product. It’s in the sales journey, it’s in all of those things. And how do we make those things better so that customer service is reserved for this truly important times when you need it?And look, we’ve got a lot. We’ve got a lot to go for sure. But we made good progress. And what attracted me to that opportunity with Neil Smith, who brought it to me was it was really the chance to change our influencer culture. I wouldn’t say change because I think that the Comcast has always been really focused on customers and wanting to to do right by them. But it was a chance to influence a culture so that you could put some of the metrics around customer experience a little more, you know, in the decision making, in the business. And so that was really, I view that as sort of my experience with sort of culture and bringing people along together, like how do you bring, you know, tens of thousands of people along on this journey and get them to think about it similarly and value the same things? And then recently, I’ve been back in the product world looking back in the product.DaveYeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a remarkable story I remember. I remember the first time I came downstairs on a weekend when I told my kids they could go watch a show and I just sort of marveled at how they navigate it to a show and I’m like, My son can’t read into that voice remote. Was like, I think I was hacking the system by just talking into it. And he was like, Yep, that got me to the the picture. I wanted and then was able to click and much to my horror. I was like, Wow, you know, he’s now fully exposed to the whole world pretty quickly. So to the extent that you want your product to work for a five year old like mission accomplished, that was pretty, pretty remarkable.Go back to the vision statement. I think that’s really I think that’s a really interesting point to dig out on a lot of times, you know? You know, part of the role of the leader is to inspire people towards a new vision. The fact I’d love to hear more how you think about the repetitiveness, how often you to do that, to sort of actually unlock that capability set for an organization?CharlieYeah, I think what I learned was a lot of us, I think, make the mistake we put. We we put effort into these mission statements. Maybe you see them once or twice a year. You know, you couldn’t walk around the halls of those companies and ask them with what the mission statement is, what they’re there to do. Why are they there? And here’s similar things you’d hear very, very different things. I don’t know if you always hear the exact same thing. But I learned that pretty early on, Jim Barksdale was the president at McCaw Cellular, and he brought a lot of things from his time at FedEx. In terms of how you shape culture. And I just remember being struck by how everyone embraced it because they used it all the time because they saw it was in front of them all the time.And so when I was really trying to build out a product culture at Comcast. The idea that people need to have purpose in what they’re doing and it’s not just a job, it’s not just working on technology, it’s not just writing code or creating a design. You’re doing it for an end goal, and having an inspirational end goal is A: important so that everyone’s excited about what they’re doing. And B: is something I learned from from you guys. Having a common mission. And a common understanding allows you to make better decisions down in the trenches and within the teams. And so that to me, was was was really important. And what I found is you just can’t do it once in a while. You literally have to repeat it all the time, which is like all my own hands. Yeah, all the time. You can’t say it enough. And so I’ve taken that to heart and really think if you’re going to try to build a different culture, really get people to live up to your mission, they have to see it constantly. It can’t just be at the budget time or on a poster in the break room. You really need to sort of reinforce it and show that you’re living it and show that you’re excited about it.DaveYeah, no. 100%. If you think about the probably the most influential leadership lesson from from these last couple of experiences at Comcast, maybe tell a story around it that really helps, helps, helps the audience personalize it. If you could.CharlieI probably should have thought about this a little more. I mean, there’s so many. I’m the kind of person that thinks about these moments, and I just dwell on them all the time. I will say one thing I learned about what two things one is I was in my early forties because before I really am in my early fifties now, before I really realized that leadership was a discipline, you could practice and try different hats on. I assumed prior to that the people were either natural leaders or they weren’t.And yeah, and so I went through some leadership courses and Center for Creative Leadership was one. And I realized, you know, it’s. It’s it’s a lot about what you’re saying to the team, how you’re listening to the team. It’s a lot about communications and you should try some things.And so I forced myself in these all hands to try to be a better speaker to try to, you know, I tried a lot of different things. And so that’s one: one is that, you know, I came to realize that leadership was something that you could practice and you should look to others, read books about it and etc. I just it wasn’t in my sort of DNA at that time. It is now. And one of the there’ve been so many great leaders that I’ve worked for, but one that stuck with me because he was very different was Neil Smith, and what I remember from him was sort of just an unwavering courage and optimism about the mission and just extreme focus.But done in a way that was very friendly and collegial and collaborative. I remember when he offered me this role. He said, I think this is going to be a lot of fun. It’s also going to be really hard. And so, you know, I’m thinking to myself, OK, Neal. He’s a seal, former seal. So if he says something’s going to be hard, it’s going to be really hard. But that got me excited. And I remember that.DaveWhat do you mean by hard Neal? I wonder if we have the same scale for what that means.CharlieExactly. But I remember the look in his eyes that he’s genuinely jazzed about it, and that was the moment I flipped as like, OK, I’m all it. And so.DaveThat’s great.CharlieLeadership vision or leadership principle, I learned from that and, there were others, obviously great, great mentors. I’ve had the fortune to work for. But I just took that to heart and said you know what? The role of a leader is to lead and to model the behavior they want to see. And I think he did that really well. And so it doesn’t serve a leader. Well to sort of get down or get exasperated or, you know, they really got to show that. They are excited about what they’re doing and confident that it can be done. And so that’s one lesson I’ve definitely taken, I take it to heart.DaveTalk to me about your personal habits, like how you sort of set yourself up for your day, for a week, for your month, for your for your year. Are there specific things that you do that are so unique to you that may be perceived as quirky?CharlieNo, I would say, yeah, I do have a bit of a habit of it’s quirky now, but it’s it’s what I don’t have is, I think, what I aspire or aspire to.Which is sort of you probably wake up early and work out really hard and get your day going. I do that in spurts. And actually during this pandemic, I’ve been pretty good. So my day typically starts at five or earlier. I sleep less as I get older. But and I’m not a kind of guy that can get up right away at work. I’m just not. And so the one habit that I do have, which my wife teases me about, she calls it puttering around. But you know, I get my coffee. I read some email and I always I always read the news or watch the news, BBC or something like that or NBC.For me, it’s just having an hour and a half of quiet time to kind of think about the day. And actually a lot of the stuff I think about. I process emails and stuff like that but a lot of this stuff I think about is what we’ve talked about a little here today, which is like, how am I going to sort of. You know, support the narrative I’m telling in the meetings that I have today? You know, where where are there opportunities to influence, you know, towards the mission of what we’re trying to do?It’s a bit of a reminder of really what I’m all about and what I’m here to do I love that. And then, you know, it’s awesome. And then, you know, I have during, especially during Kovner, because I’m not an early morning workout person. I did start blocking seven to eight to work out, and so I’ve been pretty good about that, but other than that, I do have a lot of like quirky habits or. I find a lot of quirky habits, but not on a daily basis But now and then, I’m a big fan. Like, I’ve got four kids and in the evening, you know, try to get as much done. During the day so that I can have some time with them. You know, we’re big, big family dinner, people.DaveOh, that’s great. That’s great. If you go back to your early days as a as a scout and I know, I know you’re very successful, you went on to to to get your Eagle Eagle Scout badge. Maybe talk about what was like one of the core takeaways that you still live today from from those experiences is as a child.CharlieYou know, I would think, well, first of all, I was again very focused on the camping aspects of being a scout. So to me, it was it was about getting a bunch of skills that I wasn’t going to be able to get from from my dad. And know I would say. And I went on. My son is an Eagle Scout. I went on to help with his troop. I would say what I took from it was a notion of civic responsibility and just just the idea of. You know, doing things for your community I did not. And we’ve talked a lot about it. I did not go on to serve in the forces or anything like that, which has been a minor regret of mine but I do. Feel like as a, as a person in society, we we owe something to the community.And I think that scouting experience fostered that and then I would say as an adult leader in the scouts when my son was in it, when I was amazed by is just how accomplished and. Thoughtful these young men and women can be. And the potential is so much greater than I. Think we give kids credit for. And so I was I was.Truly inspired by the accomplishments of some of these, you know, 16, 17, 15 year olds in terms of what they knew about.DaveYou know.CharlieEverything you know, they just attacked it and with such a curious mind. And so that was that was really inspiring to me.DaveYeah, it’s awesome. I mean, obviously, the hope he prepared peace plays and it sounds like he’d do that every morning. I love the fact that you connect. You take the time to be thoughtful about your day in looking at the various interactions you’re going to have and saying, All right, how do I take that, that vision and weave that into these meetings? That’s that’s that’s that’s extremely thoughtful, makes a ton of sense and probably a practice that everybody could probably apply.CharlieI think you can take that into sort of your your your goals, too. Again, I’m a big believer in keeping track and keeping score. And so every quarter when it I say my goals were how my grading myself and I, you know, send that to my boss. And one, it helps the scope creep. It helps to remind your boss. What you said you were going to do. And two, it keeps you honest and it makes you a person of your word and transparency. Look, I’m not. I’m not getting this a goal done.CharlieAnd for these reasons, but I think it’s important to constantly revisit what you’re where you’re trying to do.DaveYou talked earlier or we’ve talked earlier about, you know, the importance of teams and sort of your your sort of development around those concepts specifically in this role because I think it was it was interesting. I think to be good for the audience to hear kind of unique is that position because you weren’t really in charge of anything, right? But you had influence over sort of everything. And so you really had to work in that distributed almost team of teams and time. Maybe maybe talk a bit more about, you know, some of the key things you took away from trying to drive a transformation from a centralized resource with a very strong incumbency in that, you know, and the respective silos and disciplines of the organization?CharlieYeah. And to me, that was a really fun moment, actually. And I’m not. Saying that’s just because I’m on a CrossLead podcast. But as you know, the story was you guys had given me the. Galleys of team of teams to read, and I was always away on a vacation and so I had this role and I had some ideas of things I wanted to do the piece that I hadn’t figured out as like, how am I really going to get all of these different disciplines to to chase the same vision and figure out how to do that?And in reading that book. I was so excited, like I wanted to leave vacation right away because for me, it unlocked the idea. That you can create a shared consciousness in greater context around a mission with some pretty simple communication tools.Some simple sort of team decision making tools and so that was an, you know, you were there. As we launched. You know what we called the forum, which was our sort of our company once a week meeting where we invited everyone to participate. And what it taught me was the context is so critical to the teams making decisions and it can turn things from adversarial. Into sort of pure alignment with just understanding a little more context and that’s that’s something I’m really driving.As I focus on teamwork now. Very smart folks on the team are very focused on their area of the business, not coming together regularly to understand other people’s parts of the business. This notion of a quarterly business reviews where everyone sits in and again, I pull those lessons from from CSX that. If you really want to give people the license to do what you want them to ultimately do, you need to give them full context and a very clear mission that we all agree on. And once that happens, magic because, you know, it just starts running itself. That’s what I learned. You know, one of the things that I chose, why I chose. The NPS system to implement was not sure. The score is important and the question is important. But to me, there were two. Factors that were the most important that I wanted to kind of get into the culture one was the idea of.Following up with customers calling them, you know, getting more feedback from them and using that rich, rich data to wine solve their problems, but then start to really look at it at a.DaveIt initiated their own priorities.CharlieYeah, I mean, I think it’s really easy to to look at machine data and believe your own data. You can’t argue. People’s perception because that’s what they have, you know, and so that’s important to have their perception is as a measure or marker of where they are with your brand. The other component and the most. Exciting component was this notion of Ian, the employee NPS about what you’re doing. And what you do in that process. You use. Surface, you have them surface at a very local level issues that are keeping. Them from accomplishing the mission. When you address them. And what I liked about NPS is it put everyone at a senior leadership team. On notice and accountable for solving those problems.They have to to, you know, because we elevate them, we track them we make sure everyone knows them.And it’s basically an insurance policy to make sure you’re listening to your to your employees because they know what to do. They want to do right and they know how to solve the problem, and you’ve got to sort of listen to them. Yeah.And so that was that was really important. And I think the whole stakes. Journey also taught me just the importance of, you know, your frontline workers in terms of listening to their ideas and trying to make their job easier so they can do the job that you want them to do, which is take care of the customer. And that, to me, is. More important than any kind of score is. That we have a system now and when I walk I guess I haven’t walked through the halls in a while, but when I used to walk through the halls. The things that made me the most proud about that. Whole period of my career was hearing. People in meetings talking about in peace as part of their decision making or product feature or whatever, and it’s in every single meeting, in every single function, you know, legal, finance. Billing and that to me was OK. It’s part of our DNA, is part of our culture. That’s the most proud thing I have of that whole period.DaveYeah, that’s a great example of culture change right there. You know, being on a sort of management and it’s hard to quantify culture, oftentimes it’s sort of like oxygen. You don’t really notice it until it’s missing, right? When you get that, when you get those insights just by walking around. We used to call it troop in the line, right? You go out and they’re in their foxholes, in the front lines and just sort of hear what the men and women are talking about. And and when you hear them repeating back narratives that you’re trying to push at the top, you feel you feel great.CharlieYeah.DaveWho say it’s not important who I am and what you’re saying. And that’s great. It’s awesome. OK? As you think about. So I mean, that’s a good segue way into the last year and a half have been incredibly challenging for a lot of people. And I know, you know, specifically the work environment I’d love to hear, you know, specifically how you guys have sort of dealt with the pandemic and and how you’re thinking about your team and Asia as it sort of return to work opportunities, startups and how you’re thinking about best practice coming out of that?CharlieWell, the first thing is we’ve always placed. Employee safety as a as a super high priority. So that is guided everything for us. And so early on, you know, it was like, All right, how do we keep our employees. Safe and. Still try to. Accomplish the things we want to do as a business and get customers hooked up to, you know, because now they’re even more focused on on staying connected. So one of the things I’m really proud of is we moved, you know. Tens of thousands of employees to work from home within 60 days. And we did it in a secure way with a scalable VPN and a lot of creative technologists and just hard elbow grease to get that done. And with with the idea that we can make them productive and happy at home.And not place them in harm’s way by having them come in to sort of open floor plan call centers and things like that. So that I think going in, we didn’t know how easy or hard. Well, we knew it’s gonna be hard. We didn’t know how successful we were going to be, but we were very successful. And I think the employees reflected. That terms. We love that you’re focused on us, that you’re focused on our safety and health. And then talking about doing.Doing a good job and as a as an employee. And I just think that that was. Such a proud moment for us to be able to do that. The other the other one was, you know, again, some the network performed really well amidst a huge surge in traffic, and we were able to deploy some really smart technology and AI into our network to to make sure that it continued to do that.And so I think it showed us that preparing your core. Assets and applying technology in a smart way, you know, for these unexpected moments is just so critical. So we learned that about ourselves as we think about. Coming back to the office. You know, first of all, working remotely. And using the software we use as Microsoft Teams. Just I think it surprised everyone. We how good it was in terms of being able to. Accomplish our goals, launch products remotely, you know, gather as a team to to make decisions, and it’s just really positive experience.And so as we come back into the office because we do feel like, you know. The collaboration and co-location and things like that are very important will be. Will understand how to be more flexible. But I think what it’s. Taught us is the importance of distributed locations. How do you include, you know, your, your development centers. In. India or Israel or Denver and really bring the teams together? That’s been a lesson we’ve learned. But I think as we go back, we are looking forward to getting. Back and being together and driving those that teamwork. But we’ll have some tools, some extra tools. To be even more connected and even more flexible, and we need to be.DaveAwesome. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I was having this conversation with some, some other executives recently as they think about navigating this. And I think a lot of a lot of people, specifically, they’re in a position to make decisions around this are sort of wrestling with, is it back to five days or is it only going to be a hybrid or whatever else? And you know, my my thought is once people learn a new skill and learn new muscle like they’re never going to go back to exactly the way it was just going to have an expanded toolkit to do stuff. And I still think the most effective form of communication is in person face to face. Yeah. So for those you know, those really, you know, high, impactful sessions that are needed, just they’re still going to be a requirement to do that. But I think we’ve all learned that there’s the ability to sort of operate, like you said, in a distributed manner, be effective going back to, you know, the team, a team story for a second. You know, we we set up our physical infrastructure around the globe realizing that the majority of the people that need to be involved in the night’s operation. We’re not going to be physically present, not because of some pandemic, just because of. Right, right. The laws of physics and distribute. So we actually designed our spaces with that in mind, meaning like we knew that most of our conversation was going to be have to be in a virtual setting and the people in the room were important, but you know, it was trying to. Index to make sure they were inclusive was what I love about what I love about how teams and when you go to fully virtual is not everybody has the same experience because they’re through a common platform coming back to some hybrid model where you’re going to, you’re probably going to have a scenario where. You got some people in the room and other people out of the room, but you still got to get the same thing done. It’ll be interesting to see how people people sort of navigate that, but that was like, you know, a critical insight because it was just a constraint that existed for us. So it wasn’t an option to get it the other way.CharlieYeah, I think two things. one is we’re also sort of retooling our rooms for this notion of a more inclusive environment with remote workers, whether they’re individually promoting or. Or, as I mentioned, one of our dev locations that. The key one of the things that we’re doing, which. Is the key thing that I think everyone feels like they really missed was especially on engineering side, it was this kind of whiteboarding. I think that virtual whiteboard. Is just as hard. As you get your whiteboard there. So one of the things we’re doing is. Setting up cameras on the whiteboards and we’ll see. How we’re going to how that goes. And we’re going to we’re going to start going In some of us just to test it out here and a little bit.But I do think I think the second thing is, I think all of. The participants of a meeting are going to be a lot more in tune with the fact that there are remote folks. Prior to COVID, we had have all these sort. Of we try to have these rules of, Hey. If you’ve got someone remote, don’t forget to ask them their opinion. You know, we had these, you know, don’t close that meeting without asking anyone on the phone, you know, their thoughts. That kind of thing, because we were trying to reinforce this notion of, don’t forget. And I think. That will be a problem anymore. So I’m looking forward to.That better, better team cohesion. But it is going to be, you know, we don’t know yet. We’re going to learn. Our way through it. Like, think most like most of your companies?DaveAwesome. So to last question. first of all, what are you guys working on now? Like, what are your top, you know, key priorities and you know, on your own leadership development, like what do you what do you kind of like focusing on are finding the time to read or think about now?CharlieWell, as I as I set up the structure, it’s really trying to figure out how do I drive more contextual, better alignment with the teams, including some of our stakeholder partners? That’s like not a new problem, but it’s I’m sure that we are persistent or that you’ve always got to work on and you can always get better at. And I think it doesn’t get better without a very. sIntentional way of doing it. So I’m looking at some training to help with that.You know, I think, you know, a lot of that. We did a lot. Of listening sessions with our DNI efforts. Listening sessions are actually part of NPS. We call them huddles. So some of the training I’m looking at. Is how to have conversations. How do you have really honest, hard conversations, but not in an adversarial way? And there’s. There’s some good. Material out there, so I’m going to be kind of focused on that. And then the second thing we’re focused on is how do we really set our. Ourselves up for the future of what the home is going to be and spending a lot of time really looking at really, really where customers are going to want home? How are they going to?What kinds of entertainment are they going to want and getting. Back to some some strategies? One of the things I’m interested in doing.Is is driving sort of a ten year strategy cycle within the group. A lot of companies will do five year plans or three year plans. And how do you sort of have a rolling ten year kind of plan on on again?Less about the finances, but more about where.Consumer trends are going to be and how do we really make sure that we’re applying our innovation and our resources in a smart way to make sure that those are seen and worked into our products in a real way?So those are sort of the two big.Sort of new cultural things I’m working on.And then other than that, we’re going to keep driving.Connecting homes, you know, and people, whether it’s some of the mobile products we’re launching now.Or.We’re going all broadband and some of our new forms of entertainment, you know, it’s just it’s a busy, busy world as you as, you know, lots of product changes. But it’s.Exciting. And so, you know, continuing.To focus on what we want to do and not kind of chasing what others are doing is always about.Also making sure that you’re staying true to what you think you can build as is key to me.DaveThat’s great. That’s great. What’s the most recent like book you’ve read or the movie you’ve seen or show you’ve watched or something? That’s that you found interesting that maybe the audience could benefit from?CharlieYou know, I was trying to look at I was trying to look up the title of this book I read, I will get it to you. But it was really about.Successful leaders and CEOs.And how they thought about.Capital allocation.Again, I apologize. I can’t think of the title I need to look at because.DaveThe main theme in a couple of months. The main thing was, look here eight CEOs. And they were some of the most successful CEOs in history. And they may not have been the high flying ones you’ve heard of. But they really return shareholder value because they thought constantly about how they were allocating capital and just sort of the thought process that they went through and I think that is increasingly. Something that I’m certainly spending more time thinking about as well because you do, you have to shut down. Some things to start new with new things, and that’s hard. But you know, the people that either through instinct or. In this case, you know, just really good studying of where things are going. They’ve been able to make those those choices. So I apologize. I don’t have the name of the book, but all I know.Is we’ll make sure we capture it in there and in the of notes. That’s awesome, though. It’s awesome, and I think it makes a ton of sense, you know, thinking about prioritization and how you make some decisions about, you know, at the local level.But then at the more strategic level where you’re at, it really comes down to where are you going to make that capital wise and in bringing out the right process that’s actually driving that ten year vision you’re talking about is is. Really important. Try. Thanks so much for taking time with us today. We really appreciate it was awesome having you on the CrossLead podcast. Any final thoughts or comments?CharlieNo. Again, I appreciate and honored that you asked me to participate. I’ve learned so much from listening to others. Talk about their experiences. Certainly learned a lot from you.Just how hopeful can be helpful to someone again. The notion of high performing teams and how you organize that is is, to your point, it’s a persistent problem. So I think you’re doing good work and it’s critical.DaveIf the listeners want to learn more about you or follow you. Is there even a way to do that given your own position? Yeah, people are going to love this question.CharlieYeah. And honestly, you know, I’m not active on the social media platforms, so I think you probably just need to look for. I know that, you know, I’ve got some some of my keynotes out there. You can watch them. And, you know, once COVID kind of gets better and we’re traveling more, I’m sure I’ll be. I’ll be doing some conferences and things like that.DaveAwesome. All right. Well, thank you, Charli.e. I really appreciate you spending time with us today.CharlieLikewise. Thank you.Daveone more thing before we finish the episode, the CrossLead podcast is produced by the team at Truth Work Media. I want to make this the best leadership podcast available, so I would love to get your feedback. Our goal this season is to have authentic conversations with special operators, business leaders and thought leaders on the topics of leadership and agility. If you have any feedback, suggested topics or leaders that you want to hear from these, email me at contact@crosslead.com. If you found this episode interesting. Please share it with a friend and drop us a rating until next time. Thank you for joining.

In part two of this episode of the podcast, Tom and Phil are back with Mike Cougevan, Vice President of Martindale Consultants. They're talking about worker's compensation rates, employees benefits, vehicle rates, and loading and unloading rates. They discuss the purpose of these remaining economic factors and the issues that using them can solve for operators in the industry.Highlights:1:28 Worker's Compensation Rates5:20 Employee Benefits13:26 What can be charged for different types of employees16:24 Vehicle rates21:46 Loading and unloading ratesAbout Mike Cougevan :Mike began his Martindale career in 1994 and is a Vice President of the firm. He provides senior leadership, expertly manages clients' joint venture audit and other projects, and shares his extensive industry experience and knowledge to train Martindale employees. Mike also provides expert witness and litigation support and has been accepted and designated as an expert in numerous State courts and in Federal court. Mike previously worked for Conoco (now ConocoPhillips) for 13 years in various positions, including financial analysis, joint interest accounting, internal reviews, managing non-operated properties, negotiation of agreements, and settlements of joint interest and revenue audits and disputes.Connect with Mike:Website | LinkedInAbout SherWare, Inc.If you're enjoying this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and share with a friend! We also love ratings and reviews on Apple podcasts.SherWare creates software to simplify your accounting needs so you have more time to do the things that matter. We serve independent oil and gas operators, accountants and investors with a platform to manage their distributions and joint-interest billings on a platform -- and we're the only software on the market that can integrate with your QuickBooks company.Click here to watch a demo of the software in action right now.About COPAS:COPAS provides expertise for the oil and gas industry through the development of Model Form Accounting Procedures, publications, and education. We are a forum for the active exchange of ideas which result in innovative business and accounting solutions.Find a society near you.www.copas.org

On the first episode of Season Two of the podcast, Tom and Phil are joined by Mike Cougevan, Vice President of Martindale Consultants. In part one of this two part episode, they're talking about overhead adjustments and audit per diem rates. They discuss the purpose of these two factors, when they should be used, and the changes that have occurred with both factors over the years.Highlights:1:41 Approaching 40 years in the industry3:32 The various COPAS economic factors and why they exist5:00 What is overhead adjustment?9:35 What happens if operators don't adjust their overhead? 12:58 Accounting Guideline 2317:12 Audit per diem rate and what it's used for19:26 Why overhead adjustments and audit per diem rates are no longer adjusted using the same percentage rateAbout Mike Cougevan :Mike began his Martindale career in 1994 and is a Vice President of the firm. He provides senior leadership, expertly manages clients' joint venture audit and other projects, and shares his extensive industry experience and knowledge to train Martindale employees. Mike also provides expert witness and litigation support and been accepted and designated as an expert in numerous State courts and in Federal court. Mike previously worked for Conoco (now ConocoPhillips) for 13 years in various positions, including financial analysis, joint interest accounting, internal reviews, managing non-operated properties, negotiation of agreements, and settlements of joint interest and revenue audits and disputes.Connect with Mike:Website | LinkedInAbout SherWare, Inc.If you're enjoying this episode, please subscribe to our podcast and share with a friend! We also love ratings and reviews on Apple podcasts.SherWare creates software to simplify your accounting needs so you have more time to do the things that matter. We serve independent oil and gas operators, accountants and investors with a platform to manage their distributions and joint-interest billings on a platform -- and we're the only software on the market that can integrate with your QuickBooks company.Click here to watch a demo of the software in action right now.About COPAS:COPAS provides expertise for the oil and gas industry through the development of Model Form Accounting Procedures, publications, and education. We are a forum for the active exchange of ideas which result in innovative business and accounting solutions.Find a society near you.www.copas.org

The pandemic caused us all to readjust our values and focus on what truly matters. It also forced us to alter how we communicate and innovate.In this special episode of Prism, Dan Harden moderates a discussion with founders Fred Bould and Caroline Flagiello on how we can use the lessons from this experience to create an exciting new era of Design. The panel reveals:How to make the most of our newly realigned values, the work-life blur, and virtual creative collaborationsWays to implement the new design thinking that's emerged which values experiences, quality of life, and purposeThe ideal vision of Design and the roadmap needed to get thereListen in on their perspectives on how we can all find design nirvana.GuestsCaroline Flagiello, founder of Akin, is an innovation expert with two decades of experience leading teams and designing for every kind of organization, from nascent startups to high profile Fortune 500 companies, in industries ranging from consumer electronics to fashion to food and beverage.Fred Bould, founder of Bould Design, has collaborated with leading innovators such as Nest Labs, GoPro and Roku. Their work has met with both commercial and critical success. Recognition includes numerous IDEA, Core77, D&AD, and Red Dot Awards, as well as the Cooper Hewitt and SF MOMA Permanent Collection. Bould's design solutions are noted for usability, simplicity, and elegance.This episode of Prism was originally recorded as a live Whipsaw virtual event on July 28, 2021.Episode TranscriptDan Harden 0:07Hello and welcome to Prism. Prism is a design oriented podcast hosted by me Dan harden, like a glass prism that reveals the color hidden inside white light. This podcast will reveal the inside story behind innovation, especially the people that make it happen. My aim is to uncover each guest unique point of view, their insights, their methods, or their own secret motivator, perhaps that fuels their creative genius.Okay, hello, and welcome to finding design Nirvana. I'm Dan Harden. Whipsaw's Founder, CEO and Principal Designer and with me are Caroline Flagiello and Fred Bould. We're here to discuss how we can evolve from this somewhat dark time that we find ourselves in. We've experienced something truly extraordinary in the last Well, now what year and a half, and it's still going on. But how can we evolve from that time that we have all experienced into a better we'll call it designed to future. That's why we call this finding design Nirvana. We think we should be learning from these tough times in order to advance design to a higher Well, maybe even more ideal state, if that's possible. That's what we wanted to investigate with this discussion. Tonight, we'll talk about the lessons we have learned from the pandemic that can help us re examine how we think about design, especially in terms of what design should be focused on where the opportunities lie to innovate, and how design should or can be practiced. So without further ado, let's meet our panelists, Caroline, Fred. Fred is the Founder and Design Director of Bould design, Bould, has collaborated with great companies such as nest labs, GoPro, Roku, and many, many others. They've won lots of Design Awards. They've got worked at the Cooper Hewitt and SF MoMA. They're designed many of you know it. They're designed as noted for simplicity, elegance, and a focus on usability. They always do great work can always count on Fred and his company. I met Fred in the 80s when we both worked at Henry Dreyfus associates. And we've been great friends ever since. Good to see you, Fred.Fred Bould 2:21Great to see you. Carolyn. Good to see you. Yeah. My first got to know Dan, when I was an intern at Henry Dreyfus associates. And Dan was one of the young hotshot designers there that everybody looked up to. So it's, it's really, it's really gratifying to find myself here, you know, 100 years later. We're working in close proximity to Dan and, and his elk. So this is great.Dan Harden 2:52Thanks for joining Fred. My other guest is Carolyn Flagella. Carolyn is Founder and CEO of Akon a firm she founded in 2015. Caroline is an innovation expert with two decades of experience leading teams and designing for every kind of organization from Little startups to high profile Fortune 500 companies. She also worked at Pentagram and IDEO, and I've known Caroline for over 25 years. She helped me chair the National idsa conference in 2002. I still can't thank you enough for that, Carolyn. And you may have also seen Caroline on the CBS series, California by design. Welcome, Caroline. Thank you for joining.Caroline Flagiello 3:33Oh, thank you for having me. Yes. And good to see Fred. Um, yeah, Dan, when I first met you, it was at the MoMA. And it was during an idsa Awards event. And you were President of Frog at the time. And I was like, Oh, that's Dan. And so, you were you know, you were the god. Oh, well, I was still, you know, starting off in my career. So anyway, it was a long time ago, but you were still the god.Dan Harden 4:05Oh, my God. Okay, we did not practice Believe me this.Okay, so let's, let's get into our discussion, but thank you. So, let's start out kind of broad. Alright, so this crazy pandemic that we've been through, I mean, it has rocked us all to the core in so many ways. But let's talk briefly about its impact on work, especially, like, How were your practices impacted? And how did you adjust? Did you survive obviously, or how did you thrive?Fred Bould 4:41Carolyn, you want to take?Caroline Flagiello 4:44Sure, so, um, when I started Akon seven years ago, it was relational based consultancy. So basically, our goal is to have long term key clients and reduce that churn and spend And I also thought that there was a different way to be able to create a consultancy that didn't look like the consultancies that we've all you know, and love and work for, and thought that we could leverage global talent in different ways. So I leveraged a distributed teams, as well as our core team. And so like, our practices really haven't changed. But what we did is we really honed the ability to connect in hybrid ways and connect through video, you know, seven years ago, and that, you know, being able to access global talent is just really important. And I think, really, we've seen the the fruits of that, through hybrid work, quite honestly. And I think organizations are really realizing the power of accessing global talent and that way. But in terms of our practice, we're continuing to thrive in this hybridized environment. Now, others who see the power of that are really appreciating and understanding that, and our clients are getting even more comfortable with that now that it's become more of the norm. So we haven't changed so much in the way that we have practiced, but I everyone around us has. So that's been really nice, because now it's elevating all of us.Fred Bould 6:30Yeah. I guess I, my experience, I'll be really honest, I was, even though at the beginning of my, when I first started Bould design. I worked actually worked from my house for several years. And, and even despite that, I was kind of To be honest, I was a work from home skeptic, I really was I felt like, you know, it's, how are we going to review mockups, and, you know, share sketches and things like that. And, but then when I kind of saw it coming, but I have a brother who lives in Shenzhen, so I've been talking to him about, you know, he was on lockdown, months, months before we were and it was still in question whether it was going to sort of make its way here and you know, what the, what the depth would be and so on. But at some point, I turned to my partners, and I said, Hey, we need to get set up for this. And, you know, we got our we got our system set up so that people could take computers, we'd all be connected and be able to connect to the server and whatnot. And, and sure enough, about two weeks after we did that we you know, the word came down that everybody had to be work from home. And I wasn't, I didn't have a lot of anxiety, even though I was kind of a work from home skeptic, I kind of said, Well, you know, we don't really have a choice. So let's, let's, let's do this. And, you know, 24 hours later, we were set up, you know, 16 people working from 16 different places around the Bay Area. And it worked fine. It was I, you know, I can't say I was surprised because we're, we're very good communicators, and we're well organized. So I think that that that helped us. But it it went pretty well. I think some of our some of our clients saw things go quiet on on their side, you know, in terms of sales, because I think people were, you know, hesitant to go out and buy things when they didn't really know whether they would have jobs or not. I'm talking about the the general population, whether they would have jobs and whether they would be getting paychecks and things like that. But you know, I think when the government stepped in and said, Okay, we're going to, we're going to give people money and people felt reassured and they said, okay, you know, there, somebody, somebody has our backs. And so a lot of our clients have done extraordinarily well. You know, we have clients that are involved with, you know, streaming entertainment, well, guess what, when people can go out, guess what they do? networking equipment, sick, things like that all became very important. So it's actually it's been a pretty good year. And I think we've we've learned an awful lot about the boundaries of what works, you know, for work.Dan Harden 9:29Yeah, it sounds like you've adjusted. I know. Personally speaking, I would agree with you. I've always been a wfh work from home skeptic right when when I would get an email as an employer, you don't want to see wfh, I'm down I'm going to be working for like, Yeah, right. But you know what? My team blew me away. They're so effective. I mean, I never would have guessed that this was possible. But but it does take adjustment and adjust. We did and not only survived, but I think we're thriving more than ever because of it, we learned a lot about one another. Partly because we're all on this equalizing grid like we are right now. And people that didn't work together before, you know, especially the certain engineers and designers or the UX team working with engineers, they get to hear one another's problems and issues. And it's, it's really created a lot of empathy and understanding among individuals in the company. But I can't tell you like, you know, like that first week, when it all came down, this pandemic is going to be such a big problem. I can tell you in one week, we lost three clients. It was like 10% of our business in one week. But you know, this is like, Royal Caribbean, like everyone's like, No, no, I'm not getting on a cruise ship. So you know, they call they're like, stop all work. Some of the gaming industry stop all work. There were a few clients like that it was kind of alarming, I must say.Caroline Flagiello 10:58Yeah, I think a lot of clients gave pause. Right. And they did it, whether it was a couple weeks, or a couple months, you know, we all paused quite frankly, we didn't know we were stuck at home, literally couldn't move. Right. And we didn't know what the virus was doing. A very scary information was coming every day. We were it was social unrest. I mean, we had some major things all happen at once. So I think it was a lot as humans to take in. But Dan, I love what you mentioned about humans, because we saw each other's humanity. I think as as work has changed, our work has completely changed forever, right? We have seen each other's humanity in ways that we've never thought were professional, or we've redefined professionalism for ourselves now.Dan Harden 11:49wOkay, but what does that mean, when it comes to real effective virtual collaboration, because collaboration, you know, it's just it was a buzzword 10 years ago, you have to collaborate, build your team. And we're, we're all used to doing that, you know, in jam rooms, or war rooms, whatever you want to call them. But what about virtual collaboration? And the creative fields? Where are the challenges that you guys have found? And how have you overcome that? Do you think it works?Fred Bould 12:17Yeah, I mean, it's funny, because we looked at things like, you know, like getting tablets and stuff that we could sketch on, and things like that. But then after not too long, we ended up just basically saying, you know, here like this, and, you know, flashing sketches up on, on on the camera, and then on the other side, people go click, and they capture it. And then we'd have these, like, documents, these, like, you know, shared documents running all the time in the background. And it I guess, it was a little bit ad hoc, but it was effective, you know, like, we'd have like a Google present, you know, document going that we would just throw stuff into, we'd like take pictures of sketches and throw them in there or cap, you know, do you know, screen captures and stuff like that. And we kind of got pretty fluid, it was a little bit, you know, a little bit Herky jerky at first. And I have to say, at the end of the day, I would be I would be exhausted. Because you, you know, when you're having a conversation with somebody face to face, you're taking in all this information cues, you know, all sorts of things that are absent when, you know, you're talking to people on little boxes. And so your brains kind of working in overdrive to fill in, you know, to, you know, pull out all the information to camp. And so I would, you know, I enjoyed work, but I have to admit, at the end of the day, I'd be like, wow, I need to go stick my head in a bucket of cold water.Dan Harden 13:58That was such a surprise that that that condition ones mindset after day, it feels like more work even though it sounds like it should be less right working from videowall to design is so social, you know, that's why I was worried about it working in this manner. Because you learn so much through nuance, you know, the subtle look on somebody's face when you see our concept that may not quite resonate with someone, it's enough of a signal to tell you Oh, maybe I should work harder on that detail.Fred Bould 14:28So we're even like the curve of a line on a whiteboard sketch. You don't need it. It can you people will look at it. You can say yeah, it's sort of it accelerates here. And it's harder to do that like this.Caroline Flagiello 14:45It definitely is. But I do think with tools like Miro and like you said screen capture and being able to you know, draw either virtually or you know, I am being able to post you get really fluid. And I think what's really interesting is that we haven't ever leverage the power of video in the way that we have recently, right? Like, we have all these tools. And we've talked about the future of work and what it looks like. But the pandemic accelerated all of these tools in our toolbox. And honestly, like our mirror has been a lifesaver. We like Nero vs mirror roll. But you know, obviously, there's, they're both there. Because our clients are now being able to jump in the boards with us see, the process, it doesn't have to be the tidhar that we've, you know, used throughout our careers, and they get to see the workings we collaborate a lot easier. And then from a design perspective, we get to populate what we want to and then what's great is you can turn those into pages, so you can make those into a presentation. But, but like the design piece of it, like when you're designing physical products, yes, I mean, that's probably the more challenging component of design. But when you're designing systems, culture, change, you know, all of those things, that's a lot easier within the virtual environment. But I do think that we're honing our skills and being able to read each other.Dan Harden 16:18True, there's a really great question that just came in, where do you go for your creative inspiration when you're stuck in your house?Caroline Flagiello 16:24That is a good one.Fred Bould 16:25For me, it's about it's about asking questions. I obviously I want to know, the environment that I'm that I'm operating in. But I think for us, you know, we just looked really closely at who you're designing for, you know, what the what the newest nuances are the function of the the device that you're developing? And, and and prototype.Dan Harden 16:49So, yeah, I would even I would add that design for me is, yes, there's a physicality to it. But even more so I think design is more of a mental construct, requires seeing, observing, feeling sensing, while simultaneously thinking and solving pragmatic problems. And sometimes there's a benefit to having environmental context. In other words, getting out and seeing the world. Yes, sometimes those acts are benefited by having people around you being in a studio. Of course, I missed that. But I can always jump on video as a medium, it kind of replaces that in person. In order to get those juices flowing. And get creative with whatever is around, you might have one one of our designers, he didn't have any polyurethane foam, and he couldn't get in his car to go find polyurethane foam because the stores were closed. So he used aluminum foil to create this, the Hand tool thing I was like what in the world is this pile of aluminum foil, but I'll be darned the shape was there. The idea was there, the ergonomics were there. It was it was really cool to see that. So get creative with whatever is around you. The most important thing is to just stay creative, no matter where you are. I mean, if you're stuck in a little village and in Vietnam, and you get a design idea, figure out with what's around you to whatever you need to do, do it.Caroline Flagiello 18:23I think that that we our creativity has been pushed to new limits, right? How you get access to content, where you search for content, and spread, you aren't stuck in your home, maybe you can go out with a mask. We definitely have done that we literally do are designing this cooler for camping. And I had the design team Meet me at the campsite. So we ended up camping over the weekend. And we were designing in context. Which, you know, normally you visit and then you leave, but we were literally designing and context as a team. So I think you just get creative about how you do things. But I feel like in that creativity, it's opened up new processes for us and new ways of gleaning inspiration and and inspiration from a material standpoint. Like if you think about sustainability, I think we're thinking about what are those materials out there that we can have access to you start making phone calls, you get stuff shipped to you I have boxes coming multiple times a day, write to our studios so we can see the latest, the greatest get get your hands on stuff. So hybrid work does not replace physical touch physical experience is just how you do it. And this process does take longer. That's the other thing. I will say that does design in general has taken longer during COVIDDan Harden 19:52It has that something's longer something faster because you have the tools to make certain decisions like right now. With your client, you know, we're drawing online in video and showing concept literally real time. So there is there is some odd benefit. So considering that the process has certainly changed, did the type of work that were coming into your companies change it certainly did it whipsaw I mean, we got way more health care, work, protection work. Certainly a lot of home goods, because people aren't spending money, you know, their budget allocations going more toward material things that will help them in their home versus getting on an airplane and flying somewhere. And also service design. But where have you guys seen the the uptick and different kinds of work?Fred Bould 20:46I just want to go back to the collaboration thing, because just for one second, because I would actually venture a guess. And like, if I go into the room next door and say, Tell me the truth. Did you guys like the fact that you were kind of, you know, for long periods of time, you were kind of on your own, you had more independence, you had time to think you could try things that maybe wouldn't try when you were in the studio, you know, that there was just a little bit more, I'm guessing that a lot of designers probably felt more independence. And that was probably, you know, liberating and refreshing. I mean, we tried, you know, trying to give designers space, but you know, their schedules and meetings and stuff like that, but I'm venture I'd venture to guess I'd say a lot of designers felt like it was.Dan Harden 21:37I would agree with you, Fred, I might even venture to say that the creative people. Well, you're either more creative when you are very relaxed and your zone, not pressured. Or, or under extreme anxiety. Like I've got a deadline tomorrow morning, Daniel, I got to figure this out. Now, you know, I find that I'm either in one of those two extremes, or I'm very, very heady and kind of like trying to reach my subconscious for solutions on the one hand, and the pandemic has been good for that actually come up with some wild ideas, just like sitting around in my sweatpants. I don't wear a sweat pants, but we don't need to discuss what I wear. So yeah, that's it's really interesting. I think there is an upside to it.Fred Bould 22:27To answer your question, we saw a continuation of what we were what we were saying before, but we did, we did pick up some medical and we actually, one client was COVID, a COVID related project, it was this disinfecting device for commercial spaces. And you know, that had to happen really fast. So we started, you know, we started the project in June last summer, and they were like, yep, we want to be shipping in October. So that's June, July, August, September. That's four months, including design for manufacturing and everything.Unknown Speaker 23:09Well, yeah.Caroline Flagiello 23:11I mean, our work stays pretty consistent. I mean, we're purpose driven and the work that we take on. But what was interesting was the focus is shifted to even more culture, more, the future of so I'm a big futurist, we love the future of tight projects. And the future of work was one that we've worked on in many different sectors, within industry, within governments, and thinking about what it means to reinvent work for ourselves, and or embrace this new way of working because we're in a working Cultural Revolution right now. Where big companies are, like, you know, come back to work, or else and workers are saying or else, right? And so, we need to be flexible. And because we started realizing what's really important to us as humans, we started reevaluating our own values around life work, and it's not work life balance, it's actually work life fluidity. And those boundaries between work and home, they were already starting to shift with, you know, Fridays off or, you know, flex Fridays, etc. But no, it's actually very different now. And so being able to, as designers think about how we're able to incorporate that fluidity in a way that really services people, their heart, their their soul, and feeds us in a different way. We were missing our family, we're missing the life with our heads down work ethic that we have all experienced. And so that's the kind of work that we started seeing more of as well as transitions. What does it mean to transition Thinking about as a culture and as a human, as you go through these transitions? How, what support do you have? What models do you have out there? And, you know, what is your ecosystem? What's your network? And who are the people that thrive in transitions and don't? And so that that's the kind of deeper human work that we started getting into over the course of the pandemic.Dan Harden 25:23Very cool. You know, one, one thing in addition to that, I've also seen that the pandemic has acted like an accelerant for certain businesses and technologies, for example, we're starting to see way more interest in different kinds of precision medicine, or very specific solutions around healthcare. Partly because the technologies are realizing that that's where the answers are, if you look at, you know, what Pfizer and moderna had to go through to create that, that vaccine. And of course, all of this relates to design because we have to ultimately package these solutions and present them in a way they're palpable and understandable intuitive to those end users that that we want to have consumed these products. So we're starting to see way more AI driven diagnostics, lots of biology plus electronics, netting products that are very weird and wild, something like we did recently for this company called Conoco just really unusual things. And the pandemic is, it's been like this, this catalyst in some way good. Some people are like, well, the heck with it, let's do this.Fred Bould 26:34Yeah. There was a doctor at the National Health Service in England, who said that they've seen 20 years of innovation in two weeks. And I, I experienced it myself, I had a pinched nerve in my neck from doing stupid things. And so my doctor said, Well, do you want to do PT on zoom? And again, I was skeptical, but I said, Yeah, sure, that sounds great. Let's do that. And it worked. It was a little bit, you know, was a little bit odd. But it, it worked. You know, here I am three months later, and no more pinched nerve than I, you know, other than seeing the physical therapist online, I'm sure it made their job much harder. Because they couldn't, you know, like bend my neck and say, Hey, Did that hurt, or things like that. But I think we've seen a tremendous amount of innovation in a very short time. And I think that it's opened people's eyes to opportunities for new types of products and services.Dan Harden 27:41Yeah, it is a plus. I think that, you know, when things get tough, people have a tendency to really reassess what they want out of life, and start to think about things like quality of life being more important than quantity of life. And this is, this is really where I want to move the conversation is, it sounds to me, you know, all three of us are experiencing the same kinds of changes in our companies. There is more of an emphasis on quality of life and health care and home centric design. But will it stick? I want it to stick, because it seems like people are being a little bit more sensible. I think quality of life and quality of design go together like peanut butter and jelly. I mean, they work well together. So but but we all live in a wild world, and everybody's trying to make more money, and they're, you know, the traffic's coming back. And are we gonna fall back into these patterns? How can we make it stick in the foreseeable future?Caroline Flagiello 28:38Well, I think one of the things that we are missing, and we're seeing this in our, we've been auditing Silicon Valley companies and honestly, nationally as well. And what's missing is that friction, that friction and that need that, that innovate helps innovators and creatives Spark, and if we don't get back to that level of Spark, which comes from interacting with each other, and or, you know, seeing things and being inspired, you know, like going to see us For example, when person brought up how CES was important to kind of Spark. She used the word envy, but I don't I don't know if it's envy, but like just Spark, you know, that that creative, Uh, huh. Like I want to get in the mix, we will start seeing a push for the lack of comfort, you know, in the home so that we can get to that creative spark. So that's one of the things that we need to think about how do we create that spark or keep that spark going, and we're also posting on a lot of our relationships that we had pre pandemic. So starting a project with a client that you've never met in person and or teammates that maybe you have new hires that just started really hard to do. If you haven't met in person, a lot of projects are failing, all around and every company with teams that haven't met in person. So how do we keep it going in terms of that balance and and honoring what people are feeling like they're missing? But then how do you just keep that that creativity, that hunger alive? haven't figured that out yet?Dan Harden 30:32What do you think, Fred, about that?Fred Bould 30:36I think that there was a lot of friction to enough friction to start a lot of a lot of different fires. So I, you know, I think likeCaroline Flagiello 30:48creative friction, versus like, destructive fire affection.Fred Bould 30:53Yeah, no, I, I think that the, I think that the pandemic, just really, I mean, for me, personally, it, it definitely helped me kind of realign, I feel like there's, you know, within the studio, there's just, I think there's a lot more empathy for everybody. And I think that when people are more empathic than they, they, they're more attentive to each other's needs, and they're kinder to each other. And I think that plays into design, I really, I think that helps you know, us, you know, when we're because we're always sometimes we're the uses of things that we're designing, but a lot of the times where we have to imagine and so I think that when you're more empathic, it's easier to imagine, you know, and you go that extra mile to make create a better experience.Dan Harden 31:42But Fred, how do we make this the tangible benefits that we just heard? And I think there are more unforeseen dividends, right, that have happened from this pandemic? I mean, it's, it's been held for a lot of people, let's face it, not to mention that the disgraceful loss of life, but how do we make some of these, these these good things stick?Fred Bould 32:04I think they'll stick because it's a value shift, the underlying, you know, like, he talked about, you know, mass flow, I think the shape of the pyramid of the base has changed, and what what people are, are going to support and tolerate, it has changed. And so, you know, they're some of the biggest companies in the world, you know, come back and said, Okay, here's what we're gonna do. And people have said, No, I don't think so. I'm not doing that. What else do you have? And so I do think that there, there's a shift and that that employees feel and understand that they have more power. And so and I think that, you know, whoa, whoa, to the, the organization that doesn't take that on board, you can, you can go and pick up the Economist magazine and read, you know, dozens of articles about this kind of thing. Things have things have changed, and things have shifted, and I don't I don't, you know, I feel like it's a, you know, the toothpaste has come out of the tube. We're not you can't put it back in.Dan Harden 33:24Yeah, like, I really, I agree, I hope that some of these, these benefits that we're talking about, really, really do stick, I think it's incumbent upon us designers to make sure that we we do we do carry a new kind of torch, and that we are strong and persuasive, and making sure that we're offering good sound meaningful, truthful solutions to the clients and be brave stand up and just, you know, proclaim what innovation means to you. That's okay. I think there's, I think the big message here is, it's okay. Make your Proclamation. Everybody is we're in this time now.Fred Bould 34:03Yeah. I also kind of wonder, like, so, you know, as a work from home skeptic, you know, I was proven wrong. And I think that, that kind of has emboldened people to say, Okay, well, what other things that I held to be true, are also incorrect. And so I see, I see my designer is asking questions like, well, do we really have to do it that way? Or, you know, is, you know, why is that a sacred cow? Why can't we change that? So? I don't know. I think that I think there's I think there's a shift going on.Caroline Flagiello 34:44Right. Well, I do think as I mentioned before, the idea of work fluidity, that you we as designers need to design tools and experiences that allow work fluidity, so that we are It's not flexibility. And this is the difference. So and I stumbled across this Aha, you know, thinking about the future of work, that it isn't about either or, it's about that we are working in our cars, at the cafe, at home with our teams that are home office back, you know, hopping on a plane working on a plane, like work happens everywhere. And while we may have thought about that, we still think about it as binary work from home, right? Well, actually, it's not just from home. So work fluidity needs to happen as our devices pick up from one area to another, you know, content, our access to content, our access to people, we need to think about that even more, because honestly, our tools are still very limited in what they can do and how they support idea generation collaboration. Well, it's great that we have what we have now, they're really still very, very limited. So I think, to keep it going and moving forward, we need to reinvent our tools for creation, collaboration, communication, and start thinking about other dimensions. So we're even playing around with VR, right, and collaborating conducting meetings, we have, we are just on the precipice of an amazing time, if we choose to take it, our muscle memory is so strong to the way it used to be or normal, I think that we may be missing a big opportunity in advancing how we create, how we work, how we think, how we transmit ideas. And so VR is the real untapped dimension, quite frankly, on how we can collaborate together and start bridging some of those arenas. But I don't want to diminish, you know, the, the in person power because we as human animals can communicate and transmit energy that you just don't get anywhere else. So we need to not forget that, obviously, in person is hugely valuable. But I don't want to miss out on all of the other dimensions that we haven't really tapped fully.I think designers intrinsically, are so good at that. Because many of us are crafts persons, artists, musicians. And it allows you to have this, this touch point with your own humanity. And it's often that that element of that designers bring is sometimes sidelined by big business and managers and CEOs that maybe value the bottom line more than an individual's big idea. So if it's allowed us to bring out more of our humanity, that's, that's awesome. I love that perspective. Carolyn, do you think it's do you think,Fred Bould 38:02you know, like, great tools, right, we have zoom and Google Hangouts, we have all these other things. And when we first you know, I think that the people who develop them were sort of like, Oh, crap, we have like, you know, 500 times, number of people using this now. And I think that they really, they probably, you know, people generally, like, I'm very thankful to be able to talk to people like this. But in fact, the software could be better. You know, it could be easier to use, it could be more flexible, it could allow us to share more easily. And so I'm, I'm guessing that there's this sort of unseen groundswell of people out there going, Wow, there's a lot of opportunity for making this a lot better. And so I think that when you say, how are we going to do it? I think it's probably happening, you know, you know, out there in Silicon Valley and across across the world, people are probably imagining great new ways for collaborating.Dan Harden 39:18To do you think this pandemic in both of your opinions has made us especially designers, has it made us more accountable? Is it going to make us more responsible? Will it prompt us to really think about the essence of a problem and how to how to really go about solving it that might additionally be very sustainable in every way, not just environmentally sustainable?Caroline Flagiello 39:44For sure. I mean, honestly, at the beginning of the epidemic last year, I was on a panel where scientists were talking about from the UK we're talking about you think this viruses bad wait till the Climate change hits you, and you're worried about being in the home now. Just wait. And it's in years, not in 10 years, it's in a couple years. And I honestly, you know, we've heard climate change. And it honestly, it doesn't stick with you, as much as when this scientist was talking, it scared the bejesus out of me. And ironically, from that, that conference to when clicked, you know, client work started picking up again, it was all about sustainability more than ever before. And, and it really gives you pause about, and especially as design leaders, being able to say, Hey, wait a minute, I don't know if that deserves to exist, this product that you want to create, like, let's prove, why does that deserve to exist. And I don't know if I want to partake in creating that thing. And I think also when we think about sustainability, for the product, its lifecycle. And the onus that we have as designers, not just in sustainability, but in the creation of things, or services or experiences, just because I think we really have a lot more power and being able to redirect a refocus. And also be able to shift and build a business case for maybe something that's an alternative that actually has much more positive outcomes. And that process of development as well as much more positive. So in that, though, I will say as designers, it is crucial for us to get up on many different manufacturing techniques out there for let's say sustainability, because I don't think that we have in our toolbox, enough sustainable knowledge to really design effectively, cradle to grave. and beyond. I just thought why don't just think I know. And I think it behooves all of us to really get deep into what this looks like. And sustainability, not just in physical product, but and the whole cycle of our experience, from product services, culture, everything needs to be sustainable. We worked on a program years ago around human resilience, human resilience as part of sustainability, right? And thinking about how we're able to tap into ourselves to be sustainable, which also mirrors back into a earlier point that you made down around. How is this changed us? Like how were we more sustainable as humans in the condition that we're in right now, but also sustainability and the products, as I mentioned, and the services that we design? Yes, we do have greater responsibility than ever before, because we've seen the effects.Dan Harden 42:55Yeah, I also see this, there's has been for the last 50 years, this relentless Corporate Drive to make more money through design. And honestly, I know I do design for a living, but that kind of motivation simply does not inspire me. I mean, my my definition, and the pandemic has really driven this home is of my definition of prosperity is totally the opposite. And like a lot of designers, I mean, I think we have to value meaning over money and outcome for users of our income for corporations. I think growth of cultural value is more important than growth of shareholder value. I think we have to somehow through the means that you just mentioned Caroline, keep pushing for these, these values that are more sustainable, and more holistic definition of what sustainability even is. And I think that's our big challenge. I mean, Fred, I know you because I've known you for a long time. I know so wholeheartedly, you would you would believe in that or tell me maybe that you don't? What do you thinkFred Bould 44:10I i've always I've always been frustrated by the, in order to see real change in sustainability. You have to have a change in you know, it's like steering a supertanker. They are like we've we've gone out many, many times and looked at you know, different types of material that are more ecola more environmentally sound. And they're always these these nice things, but I think it's things are slowly changing, because people are starting to understand, well, you know, I can still do well, by doing good and, you know, at some point, something's going to happen. It's like I've always said with With consumer electronics, if you go and look at the reviews, or you'll get what's selling the best, it's not like something selling 40. And this one's 40%, this one's 30%. And this one's 20%. This one's 10. It's like this one's 90%, because it's the best. And then this one is 6%, because it's cheaper, and then this one selling 3%, because it's really, really cheap. I think we have to get to that situation with, with sustainability, where we can go out and there there are options for you know, for materials and systems that are better. And that we can and that there we can be they can be deployed on a massive scale, not Nish. I'm not talking about, you know, making lamps out of orange peels. I'm talking. Go Go look on the scene, it's there. But no, I'm talking about like, really, really meaningful ways of doing things like, you know, at the at the Tokyo Olympics, they made the they made the beds out of cardboard. Okay, that's awesome. Why, you know, I would it be okay, sleeping on a cardboard bed? You know, I don't I don't, it doesn't, it doesn't need to weigh 600 pounds. You know, I? So I think that there's, there's two things, there's the systems, the infrastructure, and then there's our limited ways of thinking about them.Caroline Flagiello 46:33Right? Well, I wanted to ask, so we're working on sustainable running shoes right now. And it's interesting when you start investigating, like in the running shoe category, you know, all these proclamations, right, from big companies that we all know and love and have worked for around their sustainable shoe. But you know, there's a lot of carbon credits that they're buying, right? And as does he mean, you know, it's kind of cheating, right? It's not, it's not really being sustainable, or using an ecologically sourced material, but it's still last forever. As designers, you know, how now I'm taking your role dance, as designers. How do you feel about pushing back in that arena? Like, what would you work on a project where you knew the client was buying carbon credits, and, you know, basically buying their way into sustainability? Or, you know, how does that fit with you guys?Dan Harden 47:36I think as long as you are able to make the positive change that you should be as a designer, then the means in which that occurs, providing the ends is a good result, some benevolence, some benefit to the end user that I'm okay.Caroline Flagiello 47:52Yeah, it's kind of interesting, because, you know, our client isn't necessarily advocating for that. But it was just the investigation out there seeing the greenwashing if you will, and it doesn't sit well with us, we're like, Huh, if you're really willing to make a change, we're there for you. Right, we're gonna take it, we're gonna see this through. But if you're, it's a marketing ploy. We're not really that interested in engaging?Dan Harden 48:20Oh, I misunderstood your question. And then I hate anything disingenuous. So you know, we and we are often every design firm will you'll pick these moments when you have to ask yourself, should we be doing this? You know, we'd turn one down this morning, a client that wanted to work with us, and we're just like, no. And, yeah, you're those are hard decisions sometimes, because they're, they're often not black and white. Right?Fred Bould 48:47You know, I think you have to ask yourself, okay, is this is this supertanker? Do they want to make a turn? Or do they just want you to, you know, get on the deck and cheer them on? And I think that if you can, if you can make even even an incremental positive impact than it, then it then it's worth doing, because there's definitely somebody else out there who won't care and will just say, yeah, sure, we'll do that. So, you know, if you can, if you can get in there and and even make, you know, like, if we could, if we could get a client to just make a change in their packaging, to go from say, you know, a plastic insert to a compostable insert, you know, from go from like a styrene, or something like that, which is horrible to, to, you know, an egg crate or something like that. Then it's, you know, these these things are, they're all incremental, but they're, I think they're meaningful.Caroline Flagiello 49:53Yeah, and that's a really good point, right, like, increments do add up, they do stack up It is important. And I think to answer the circle back down with your question around responsibility. I do always we're all saying that yes, we do have responsibility to bring up these really hard questions. And then also to guide the process to guide the process towards a better answer are utilizing things that they've already used but a new way. And that's where doesn't always have to be reinvention. Right. It could be rejiggering of an existing system, but just optimized in a way that actually improves exponentially over time. So I just want to circle back.Dan Harden 50:38Yeah, good. Very, very good point. If there's ever a time that we have the IRS, you know, in the C suite, or clients, it's probably now because with all of this change, we're seeing, I mean, whether it's social change, climate change, changes in the Delta variant. I mean, there's just so much that we're dealing with right, it's hard to cope. designers are good at coalescing solutions, at culling from what we see in the world into some form of betterment. I think that spells when there's so much change going on, that spells opportunity to me, change occurs, and very difficult times and very positive times. So I think that's what we're seeing here. And it is our moment to do exactly what you're just saying. So this is this is awesome. we've, we've covered so many interesting things. There have been so many incredible questions coming in. So there are so many here on our list. I'm going to just hand select one or two or three, maybe let's see if we can get through them. These are real time. Let's see. Work From Home is made everyone worked more than ever. And where to guess that end is blurred the line between work and home life? What's your plan for returning to a healthy balance of work and rest for your employees?Fred Bould 52:21Well, we're actually we track that pretty closely, we actually we actually go to people and say, we think you're working too much can what can we do to help you balance your workload? Because I mean, we know that when, when people are working too much, the actual productivity goes down, their happiness goes down. And, you know, the work just isn't as good. There's, there's definitely, you know, there's a limit to how much you should work. And we, we we actually be reviewed that every Monday, we look at how much people the leadership team here looks at it and says, Okay, well, everybody's good, you know, sort of like everyone's somewhere around 40 hours. If somebody is above, then we'll go and talk to them and say, Okay, well, how can we help balance your load? It's, it's super, it's super important that people have known this for for ages to there's, you know, somebody works 70 hours, 70 hours a week is not doing a good job for a number of those hours.Caroline Flagiello 53:35Right. Right. I think also, you know, not capping vacation time, I think, what's been really interesting is, you know, people don't tend to abuse that. I mean, some people can, but if you take the time that you need, and expect everyone to be responsible adults, obviously tracking what's going on, you're able to flex and people are happier, as you had mentioned, Fred. You know, I think also, at least for us, like Gone are the days of, I need to see you working in, you know, your desk, 40 hours plus a week, if I don't see you working, then you're really not productive, right? I think, being able to understand that work in life, if they're going to be more fluid, they're going to happen. And you know, what's interesting is that you need to also take care of your wellness. And we are big advocates of that meaning like, Hey, I just need to take a little bit of time to go for a walk or, you know, I you know, at certain time I'm taking this Pilates class or you know, you know, what have you or I want to take a painting class, and it's, you know, started it this time in the evening. That that says it being able to be fluid, but also you can't abuse it, right. So trying to find that that fluid line, and we've been pretty successful in doing because everyone has that drive to do well, I mean, that's we're hungry, if you're a hungry designer who needs to create and innovate, that's great, but then you have rest time, otherwise, you will never replenish. And when you go, go, go, which is what I think as a society we've been doing, but as designers, if you do not give yourself that downtime, you are an empty husk, empty husk and you will not be able to give your best give your all it's why great ideas come in the shower, right? You need that experience during the day, to be able to and it's daily, to be able to do that. And I think with the way that we've been working, and how easy it is to get on video. I mean, I have to admit, I have not myself been very good. At the end of the day, like I just told my husband, also a designer, I'm like, you know, at the end of today, we're running out of here screaming and going to go get dinner, we call it purple dinner, because we eat in our car, but um, you know, mobile dinner and myrin. So, you know, whatever that is, you need to find that joy,Dan Harden 56:23I would agree that also design it's it's one of these professions where you're so informed by the things that you're not necessarily at the moment thinking about or trying to solve, you know, it's, it's, it's the subtle observation you made about an individual in a conversation that somehow informed the way you're thinking about a design problem a year from now. It all goes in, it all goes in, and then it's your job as a designer to sort of readily access it when you need it the most. And, and apply it and sometimes walking around in your sweatpants. A that's all of a sudden you use career something you see something. Yeah, that's all. So here's my final question for you too. What does design Nirvana mean to you, you know, society as gone through something. And as designers, if we're to learn anything from this, we should be able to carry our profession forward in some way to elevate what we do to advance it to bring it to a higher state of existence. I mean, that's kind of what Nirvana is. But is there such a thing as designer about a will the world really benefit from design? And if so, how? How can we move our, our society you know, we went from an industrial society to a creative one, where are we going now? And what is design Nirvana?Caroline Flagiello 57:55So I will say, for me, I have, personally this mix of futurist with light. And I. So think that we are in this age of technology, and design, much like fashion, where it's hope future, it's in your face, we are we're tethered to our products were tethered to our phones, were tethered to our technology. I think for me, design Nirvana would be that technology recedes into our environment more than it ever has. And we call upon it when we need it. But we need to be able to get back to our humanity in a way that I don't think that we have, and it's why home family, and you know, family values, all these things have resurfaced, when you have a very serious question of life or death, right? And for me, I would love to see technology recede into our walls more recede into our environments more, like I said, and populate, you know, when when we need it, and then it recedes back again. And so for me, if we can as designers almost get over ourselves, and the flashiness of look at the cool thing I just made or the cool system I just designed, and be like, wow, and then it just goes away. That to me would be Nirvana.Fred Bould 59:27I would say for, for me does design Nirvana is and we were talking about this recently, is just meaningful, meaningful, hard to solve problems. Because I think that that's, you know, that's, that's what makes work interesting is to have have a hard problem that that needs to be solved, to work for clients that recognize and value our Our efforts and are supportive of the process that we go through. And I, I would say we have that in our clients are generally very, very supportive of what we do and how we do things. And then, you know, to be to be working with a team of a team of experts, people who are super engaged, and, and really engrossed in love what they're doing. I think that's what that's what makes the the studio special is that there's this, this just sort of, kind of, sort of unspoken understanding amongst everybody that, you know, that we're, you know, what we're doing is, is, is, is challenging, but but fun. And, you know, and we all grow, sort of engaged as a group and supportive of each other as individuals.Dan Harden 1:01:01Awesome. You know, I think we're out of time. And it's a shame because we have received so many questions. There's got to be a way well, you can find all three of us online. Sorry to have just volunteered your more time Carolinian friend. But if you wanted to ask any of us individually, any questions I know, I'd be open answer a few questions. And I'm dan@whipsaw.com. And you can certainly follow us at whipsaw design. I just want to thank everybody for tuning in. It's always a pleasure to do this kind of thing. We do have to just stay connected. What we're trying to do is really just keep our community together and have stimulating conversations like this with really cool people like Caroline and Fred. So thanks, everybody. Huge. Thanks, Caroline. Fred, wonderful. As always seeing you guys and good night.Caroline Flagiello 1:02:00For you, Dan. So good to see you, Fred, too. Thank you for havingFred Bould 1:02:04likewise and thank you to which song for organizing this. I know a lot of work went into it. I appreciate everybody on the team for making it happen.Caroline Flagiello 1:02:14Yes, great job team. Right,Dan Harden 1:02:15that good set. Yeah. Great. Thanks to my team. Alright. Goodbye, everybody. Thanks a lot. Thank you for listening to prism, follow us on whipsaw.com or your favorite streaming platform. And we'll be back with more thought provoking episodes soon. prism is hosted by Dan Harden, Principal designer and CEO of Whipsaw, produced by Gabrielle Whelan and Isabella Glenn, mix in sound design by Eric New See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Join the discussion on Facebook!Full Transcript:Jonathan:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin podcast where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey.Jonathan:Now a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advise. This is not paid task or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors, we are not your CPA's, this is two CPA's talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand. Another thing that you need to know is that if you enjoyed today's content, join us on the Facebook group. We've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us on the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there.Jonathan:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering around our topics of discussion to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. If you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word Tooth and Coin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's Tooth and Coin, all one word, no spaces to 33444, reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group as well as add you to the list to be able to send you those resources when they're available. If they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well.Jonathan:Onto today's episode, hope you enjoy it. Hey there ambitious dentists, today on the Tooth and Coin podcast we're going to be talking about the number one most exciting thing in dentistry which is fraud. Everyone's afraid of it, everyone hates it, everyone hears this happening and thinks that it may happen to them. I've seen numbers from really smart people say that something like one out of every three, to one out of every two dentists will at some point in their career, be embezzled upon. It's a staggeringly high number of dentists may actually be effected by this in their practice. I get a lot of questions and a lot of confusion about, "Why does this happen? How does it happen? Is a CPA firm going to help me with this problem in my life?" And things like that.Jonathan:The answer is not... it's a nuanced answer like so many things are, it's not a one size fits all. Today's discussion we're going to be talking about the problem that is embezzlement in dental practices and I've already kind of highlighted what the problem is, people they can steal your money. To highlight that problem I'm going to be asking Joseph, Joseph has actually lectured on this topic before and then we're going to turn the tables around and Joseph's going to talk to me about in terms of the CPA firm helps with this problem inside of our clients and what our perspective is and how we view our service for our clients when it comes to this really nasty thing inside of not just dental practices, but all small businesses.Jonathan:Again, the main problem is that a lot of people are going to be embezzled upon, dental practices for some reason tend to be targeted a lot for embezzlement. Joseph, why don't you tell us why does fraud occur in small business, especially to dentists.Joseph:That number that you just spit out, that's nuts. I don't know that I've heard that. Somewhere between 30 to 50% of dentists get embezzled upon during their career. I guess if you look at the average dentist, we're talking about 30 plus years, we're talking most of them are going to own their own shop or at least the ones that are listening to our podcast are going to own their own shop at some point. I guess when you put it out that long, I guess that increases the odds. The Small Business Administration talks about the percentage of businesses that fail. Maybe dentists are so high because they're such a great business to be in and they've got such longevity with them, I don't know.Joseph:Man, that's a crazy stat for sure.Jonathan:It really is. I think the reason that is is because there's a lot of different forms of embezzlement, there's literally someone stealing tons and tons of money, and then there's people that are stealing supplies. Embezzlement has... or stealing hours even, just putting too many hours down compared to what they worked for. You may be one of those 50% but it may be that somebody padded hours for three months before you fired them. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen.Jonathan:Yeah, it's a big number and something you've got to be aware of. You've got to be on top of.Joseph:That'll wake you up in the morning. If you're listening to our podcast bright early in the morning, that should wake you up and get your attention.Jonathan:Oh yeah.Joseph:Jonathon, as CPA's we are specifically trained to think a certain way and you may think that this is right, you may think that this is wrong, but one of the things that they've just kind of ingrained in our brain is that everyone's going to steal from you given the right set of circumstances. That's kind of the way we're trained to think is, "How do we think about it in terms of those specific pieces?" Kind of the tried and true piece that we always point to in the CPA world is what's referred to as the fraud triangle. Do you remember the fraud triangle? Have you talked about the fraud triangle since you took the CPA exam?Joseph:Did you wake up in the morning, you're like, "Hey April, what's going on babe? Let's talk about the fraud triangle."Jonathan:The triangle that I usually refer to is the cheat, fast and quality, is that triangle. I don't usually talk about this triangle, the fraud triangle. Talk to me about the fraud triangle.Joseph:There's three sides to the fraud triangle, right? That's why we use a triangle, three sides. We've got three different pieces to fraud. The first part of the fraud triangle, and it doesn't really go in any specific order, but one of them is incentive. "Do I have an incentive to commit fraud?" I'm going to use your example. If I go and I pad my hours, in other words if I go out and I say, "I didn't work eight hours today, I worked eight and a half," but I actually only worked like seven in a half. That's padding my hours and I'm going to have a direct incentive from that.Joseph:Kind of the higher levels of financial management there is the incentive that if our PNL numbers look better, I'm going to get a higher bonus. If my overhead percentage stays under a point, then I'm going to get some sort of financial incentive. Incentive's the first piece of the fraud triangle, anything else that you might think of in the dental world that would be part of an incentive for fraud? Do we have any... I would imagine some of them. Go ahead.Jonathan:Yeah, there are tons of incentives for fraud in this world. There's tons of incentives for people to... really the main incentive that people have inside the dental world is usually just money. That's the incentive for people to try and take it. They want more money. Whether it's money that they deserve or not, that's what they are typically wanting.Joseph:Got it. Maybe you have a new patient bonus to where if you have X amount of new patients that are out there, and if you get those new patients numbers, that may be the incentive that somebody goes and then creates a new patient inside of the software, or something silly like that. Incentives the first piece of the fraud triangle.Joseph:The second piece of the fraud triangle is opportunity. Opportunity is probably the one that is easiest to understand so if I am working the front desk and somebody pays in cash and they give me $80 worth of cash. I have the opportunity to stick that cash right inside my pocket. I was just looking at some financials for one of our clients that has multiple employees that have the corporate credit card. If you're walking around with the corporate credit card in your wallet as an employee or team member of a dental practice, then you are presented every single day with the opportunity to whip that card out at wherever you want to and do that. Opportunity's the second piece.Joseph:The third piece that is I think the more psychological piece that's out there, is what's called rational. The rational basically is a way for our mind to justify that what I'm doing is okay. It may go something like this, "Well Mr and Mrs dentist is just doing so well, they're making all this money. I see all of these deposits come through. They pay me a pittance, I'm making minimum wage or not nearly enough." I've just rationalized in my head that it's okay to take money, to pad hours, to swipe the corporate credit card, to take any form of all these different pieces that are out there.Joseph:That's the three pieces of the fraud triangle that we were trained upon way back when inside of CPA land. Opportunity, incentive and then rational. What one kind of sticks out for you Jonathon?Jonathan:It's almost always opportunity to me is what it seems like to me in terms of why this happens. When it happens in this industry, I guess is a better way for me to say it. Usually it seems to be opportunity. Someone perceives a weakness in, this is CPA talk, internal controls which for everyone that's listening, internal controls are effectively like, "Hey, nobody's looking over my shoulder when I'm doing this, and I can just take that money if I want to. If you've ever seen Office Space, it's whenever they do the thing, they have this computer program that rounds it to the next penny and they're like, "No ones looking at this. All we have to do is round this fraction of a penny up and then put it into a different bank account and literally no one will ever figure it out because it's literally we're talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions. We're talking about a hundredth of a penny per transaction. That transaction will never be looked at or flagged so that money will just be in this bank account."Jonathan:It's opportunity is what typically happens in dental practices, is they think that, "Hey, I'm the only one who writes the checks. I'm the one who receives the inventory. I'm the one who pays the bill. I'm the one who signs the check. I'm the one who receives the patients money. I'm the one who enters it into the practice management software. I'm the one who takes it to the bank." There's no one really looking over their shoulder. Opportunity, usually to me I think is the first path towards... into the dental space of it, is they realize, "Hey, there's a little bit of an opportunity there."Jonathan:I'm fully, fully, fully, fully not going to downplay the fact that there's some type of motivation typically that makes them look for those types of things, but in dental practices, those opportunities seem to arise a lot. I think that's just due to the nature of it being in a smaller business. In your time as a CFO, did you ever have any moments there was the opportunity for fraud at your old place that you could... obviously if it's something that you're not allowed to talk about, don't talk about it but is there anything that you can think of that you've ran into in your career when it comes to fraud?Joseph:I think there are certainly things that as a CFO controller, as a business owner, there are certain steps that you take to try to prevent fraud. One of the things that you were just mentioning there was the same person that's opening the mail is making the deposits and entering stuff into the patient management software. One of the things that we talk about is an accounting term is segregation of duties. You don't want to have the same person that's doing all of those things.Joseph:One of the things that we had to always make sure was that every time a patient came in the door, it was a documented patient encounter that went into the patient management software. What that's going to do is that's going to generate the opportunity to create the coding for that specific encounter. What was the procedure that was done? What was the product that was delivered? Once that whole thing starts, then that really is a good catch about a bunch of different things.Joseph:If somebody came in for a pair of compression hose that were $80, that gets entered into the patient management software, that's then going to give them... they're going to have to pay the $80 because it wasn't covered by insurance. When you think about it in terms of that it's like, okay, if this $80 invoice gets generated, if the patient pays cash and the person that's taking the payment, the front desk person or the clinician or whoever it is, takes that $80 and puts it in their pocket rather than in the company deposit, what's going to happen is because it's in the patient management software, an invoice is going to get generated. Then the patient is going to go ahead and get a bill the next month. If you got a bill for something you already paid for Jonathon, what would be your first thought and what would you do next?Jonathan:If I got a bill for something I already paid for I'd say, "Hey, they've not processed your payment, we need to call the vendor and see what's going on."Joseph:Yeah. Not that that happened regularly, but that was just one specific piece that we had in place. I think the other stuff, I think that probably every CFO's big nightmare or controllers big nightmare is these company credit cards that are out there. Credit card companies make it really, really easy for you once you have a business credit card to order additional card holders and additional probably. I was always real hesitant to have somebody get added to the company credit card because it just creates this opportunity and if you take the opportunity and you take the rational, it may be one of those things where somebody's got the corporate credit card and it's time for them to go out to the lake and go fishing this weekend, and they just whip the company credit card out and fill their bass boat up with fuel on the company.Joseph:That's going to look like a charge to Exxon or Shell or Conoco, whoever it is, it's not going to be one of those things. Obviously if you've got somebody that's looking at all that stuff, they say, "Well typically the gas charge is $25, and all the sudden here's an $85 charge on Friday afternoon to Conoco," that may raise a red flag. I think that kind of goes back into the other piece of it is that if you do have a company credit card and you do have people that have those, you need to be reviewing those charges every single month. I don't want you to get carried away and review it daily and think that everybody's stealing from you but you definitely need to give it the old eyeball test.Joseph:Jonathon, I don't know if you're familiar with the formal term of eyeball test, but I was talking to a client about this the other day, I was like, "Man, you need to give it the eyeball test." He's like, "What's that?" I said, "Well, you just kind of take a look at it and see if things look out of whack." What I just mentioned is if typically your gas is $25, $30, $32 and then you have an $85 charge, that doesn't pass the eyeball test. That's something that you need to look into.Joseph:The other thing is that you've got... the IRS requires that you have documentation for every single thing that you're claiming as a business expense. If you've got these credit cards that are out running around, you've got to have some sort of system to collect the receipts and to document that and to say why it was an ordinary necessary business expense. If it comes under scrutiny, that's what the IRS is going to say. I was told by an IRS agent that whenever they presented proof that this was an ordinary necessary business expense, they pulled out the credit card statement and said, "Well, see right here it says Exxon Mobil $24," and they said, "A charge on a credit card statement is not enough documentation to prove that it's an ordinary necessary business expense.Joseph:Those are a couple of things that jump out. Having multiple people having dual controls and segregation of duties, those are big things. Making sure that every patient encounter is entered into your patient management software. One thing I was talking to a client about the other day was one of the things, if I'm sitting back in my CPA brain and I'm trying to invent ways to create fraud, is to review your adjustments report. Let's say, go back to this $80 compression hose, let's say that that patient comes in and they pay $80 and the person that's working the front gets really, really smart and they say, "Oh, we'll just put a patient credit adjust for $80," which means that that patient won't receive a bill and it'll show up as they had actually paid but the cash didn't make it to the company bank account.Joseph:That's something else that's out there. You need to be reviewing your adjustment reports. What would you think on adjustment reports? Is that something that we recommend that they do daily or weekly or monthly? What are your thoughts on those adjustment reports? We made our software so easy to just write balances off, I think somebody with some authority needs to be looking at those. What are your thoughts on that?Jonathan:There's a few. I don't know if it would be called an adjustment in whatever practice management software our clients are using, whether it be [inaudible 00:17:55] or [inaudible 00:17:56] dental, or soften, or whatever it is that they use. They all have the ability to do those types of things. One of the big dangers that a lot of these practice management softwares have 10 ways to do the same thing and really only one of them may be the right way. It will work on the surface but if you were to dig back the reason for doing it in a certain way, usually there's a reason you do it one of those 10 ways for whatever it was you were doing, and a lot of practices use practice management software incorrectly.Jonathan:One of the reasons we typically recommend having an office manager consultant person be able to come in and teach you how to do those the right way so that you are making sure everything goes in their correctly. In terms of the adjustment piece, yeah absolutely. One of the things that I tell people in regards to one of the best ways they can help prevent fraud, is to have a very solid end of day process in their practice. What I tell them is when I was in high school and college, I worked for what doesn't exist anymore, but a video rental store...[crosstalk 00:19:05]Joseph:You're dating yourself there.Jonathan:At the end of every night we had a countdown... yeah. At the end of every night we had to count down the registers which meant that you open the register, you printed out a report from the little software that was done in MS-DOS or some type of shell station. You print out this report, it comes out in that really big wide paper, it said, "This register had this much in cash. This much in checks, and these much in credit card payments go through this register." We had four registers and you had to countdown each register and make sure that every dollar was accounted for that went through that system.Jonathan:Then you had to, if it was cash you had to tie it up or put a rubber band around the cash and you had to put the checks, you had to have a ten key register printed out of that. You had all the credit card receipts, it's done together as well and you had to have it attached to that piece of paper that got printed out from that report and it had to go into the managers box every night.Jonathan:That was the first time I ever encountered something like this where you'd have two managers and they'd enter in an adjustment in a different way. Eventually one of those managers got in trouble because they weren't doing it the way that it needed to be done in order for the register at the end of the night to be accurately counting everything whenever it did the month end. It was one of those things where it worked for the day, but eventually it messed something up in the calculations down the road that that person didn't see until the manager was trying to do the month end closes and things like that.Jonathan:I tell people, one of the best things you can have in your small practice, because let's face it, a lot of people can't do segregation of duties. There's two people working in the front office and one of those might be the dentist in some of our practices. There's not much that they can do so what they do is it all gets housed under one persons hat. End of day process is really important and one of the things we tell the dentist they need to do everyday, or that we've heard from practice management consultants that are office people, have said that, "Have the dentist look at their day report everyday. Their day sheet and look at literally everything that came through the practice just to make sure that it makes sense."Jonathan:One of the things they said is to make sure that there's no adjustments to any patient accounts. There shouldn't be adjustments or deletions from patient accounts because if they're doing that then they've likely done something incorrectly. The way that it was explained to me, and again it depends on how your practice management softwares set up or whatever it is, is that there should be credits to accounts or there should be charges to accounts and then there should be write offs to accounts. There really shouldn't be adjustments to services after they've already been done unless there's a very valid reason. For example, "We accidentally billed this person for porcelain crown when it was a gold crown, so we had to take the porcelain crown off and add the gold crown charge in."Jonathan:There has to be a very specific reason, there should be an indication by each of those things done in that day sheet that you get that is a part of this. This is one of the things I also heard that you do whenever you're in a larger practice as well, if you're an associate for a larger practice you should be looking at your day sheet to make sure that you got credit for everything that you did that day. You didn't get put to the wrong provider, or you didn't... if you did something it actually got put onto the fee schedule so you actually got paid for it, so that the charge went to the patient account.Jonathan:That's something that I was told needs to be done on a daily basis as a part of that day end close process. That's one thing is the day sheet. The other thing is from the end of the day close, you should have what I mentioned for the video store rental place, you should have something from the practice management software saying, "We had this much in cash come in today, we had this much in checks come in today, we had this much in credit cards come in today." That should be tied together and there should be source documents there. There should be things showing you that those numbers are actually what happened.Jonathan:It gets a little bit complex in dental because you have all these insurance payments come in through electronic transactions. We get a letter in saying, "Hey, we're going to deposit this money into your account on the 24th of the month," and then it does get deposited on the 24th but it doesn't hit your bank account until the 25th. It's kind of hard to see how that happens because you enter it, you get that letter in a week in advance so the person in the front might be entering that notice into the system the week of when they get the letter, rather than the day it went into the account or even the day that it registered in the account.Jonathan:There's some complexities that can happen right there. Another really, really good reason to have a really good office manager type consultant, a person that we recommend a lot is Sandy Pardue, she's out of Louisiana. She's really, really great. There's also other programs out there that can help you with this if you're not familiar with how to do this. There are people that can help with this type of process and get this really set up strong for your office. Really important to have that. Really important to have that. That is not something that our office does. We are not practice management consultants.Jonathan:If you tell us what is happening in terms of the flow of the accounting dollars and cents that are coming into your office everyday, we can give you just a general understanding if we think that that's... where your areas of risk might be but that's really more of an informal feedback discussion between us than being a part of the service that we get paid for from our role as a CPA.Joseph:Interestingly enough, I'm sure that you get this all the time on sales calls but CPA's, we generally don't catch fraud. It's not something that's really a part of what it is that we do. I think the number one way that fraud is caught is by accident and not by something else. What are your thoughts Jonathon? As you get a chance to explain to clients what our role as CPA's is and fraud, what's a message that you're telling them as you kind of get that question, "Oh you guys are going to audit my books and catch fraud, right?" What's your message and what's your thoughts on the CPA's role in fraud?Jonathan:It's a really common misconception and I know that there are people out there that probably propagate that misconception in terms of CPA's that will say, "Oh yeah, we're going to catch that." The AICPA, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants which for the dentists listening, that is like the American Dental Association for you guys. AICPA is the ADA for CPA's basically. The AICPA is very, very specific in how we as CPA's are to view ourselves in terms of audit, or in terms of fraud. That is basically to say that we're not here to catch fraud, that's not really our job. There are people that are CPA's that try to catch fraud, or to even be slightly more specific, they help track down how fraud was occurred after it's been discovered. Those are called forensic accountants.Jonathan:In general, fraudulent activity, there are very few services that CPA's offer that are actually designed to catch fraud. The most in depth service that CPA's offer small business, it's called an audit. There's actually a prescribed engagement called an audit under the AICPA guidelines and that audit even in that, it states in the engagement letter, or in the opinion letter that our services, even if we're doing an audit which is the most in depth thing, they're going to go top to bottom on your internal controls, and your processes and things like that. That audit will even say, "This is not meant to catch fraud." It's really just more to view how strong your internal controls are that could potentially lead to fraud.Jonathan:If they're very weak or if they're very strong, and as well as to give you an overall understanding of how your business operations are running from a business standpoint. That's the purpose of an audit. Even in the most in depth engagement, under the AICPA guidelines, it's still not designed to catch fraud. A CPA that's engaged with you to help with your tax compliance, tax planning, tax rejections, accounting services, management reports, things like that, those services are far, far, far, far less in depth than an audit would be. They are definitely not designed to catch fraud as well.Jonathan:The way that I tell people is that, "Has our firm caught fraud before? Yes, we have." We've seen credit card payments go into vendors that didn't exist. Someone had not in the office, gotten credit card information, was paying for stuff. We've seen... you and I were talking about this before, we had a client just this last weekend had a check that was written from their... this office was in California and the check was cashed in Florida with a different check number, different everything, it just happened to have their routing and account number on it. It's a $20,000 check that got cashed all the way across the country, it was just somebody had fraudulently found their information and put it down and made a fake check, and cashed this check for $20,000.Jonathan:That would be an example of something that our services are not designed to catch a fraud. One of the things that we do, is we ask our clients if we see a transaction that we don't know who the vendor is or who the payee is say, "Hey, what is this $20,000 for?" That would be an example of something that we would... I can't say that we would catch that as being fraud because what could have happened is we could ask the client, "Hey, who is Shelly Franklin and why did you write her a $20,000 check?" If for whatever reason the client had a mental lapse and just never replied to the email or said, "That was for equipment," maybe they paid Henry Shrine $20,000 and they just didn't connect the dots of being two different vendor names, then we would never know. That wouldn't change.Jonathan:That's a big example. $20,000 is a big number amount. What if it had been a $50 check? What if it had been an $80 check or something, a much smaller amount? The way our service is designed, if we don't know who the vendor is and there's no memo, there's nothing in the memo saying what it was for, then even on a smaller item like that we would ask the client who the vendor was and what the purpose was, but I know there's a lot of CPA firms out there that would just be like, "We'll just put that to contract labor. We'll put it to patient refunds," or something like that and just be done with it.Jonathan:Ours is specifically designed to ask that question the way that we do our stuff, but it's not designed to catch fraud, it's designed for us to ask questions about things that we aren't aware of. None of our services are designed to catch fraud, but it doesn't hurt to have somebody that is really familiar with the dental industry to know who the vendors are, to know, "Hey, Align Technology is a lab and A-L-I-G-N-E is not that same company." We need to make sure if a check gets written to A-L-I-G-N-E that we're going to ask, "Who is this person? Who is this vendor?" So you have that second set of eyes just kind of looking over those types of things.Jonathan:We do help. I interviewed multiple years back, and I've had dinner with him, really nice guy David Harris, he owns a company called Prosperident, it's the number one company in probably the world in finding embezzlement inside of dental practices. They help catch hundreds of people a year that have embezzled in dental practices, they're really, really good. He's a CPA, he's a CFE, he's all these things. He has way more letters behind his name then I'd ever care to have. I asked him I was like, "Hey, how can..." this was whenever we were starting the company I was like, "How can we help with this process of combating embezzlement in our practices?"Jonathan:He said, "Jonathon, we help out hundreds of practices a year catch embezzlement or to put these people behind bars if we can, or make them pay. Maybe one percent of the people that we find, the CPA ever even caught a sniffle of what they were doing." He said, "It's just because the services are not designed that way." It's a big misconception out there guys, but I want you to be certain to understand that just because you have a dental CPA does not mean you're fraud proof or you are embezzlement proof. It could mean that you have a little bit of help in someone else kind of keeping an eye on things for you, but at the end of the day, like Joseph had illustrated saying, "Hey, they used the company credit card for gas in the boat rather than gas in the car," if we asked the employee, "Usually it's a $30 gas charge, this time it was a $60 gas charge." And they say, "It was because I usually fill up when I'm at a half tank and this time I filled up... gas was expensive this week." Or, "Yeah, I ended up buying some stuff in the store," or something like that.Jonathan:We're not going to be able to tell if they're lying or not. We weren't' there. We're not going to go and put a dipstick into their gas tank and make sure that they're telling the truth about how much gas they got. You wouldn't want us to do that type of thing either because it would take us so much time you'd be paying us so much money to do that type of work that it would be a negative value consequence to you. It'd be a negative return on your dollars for doing that.Jonathan:To kind of recap that, we try to keep the episodes to 30 minutes length, the problem is a lot of dentists will get embezzlement done in some way. It occurs because of the triangle of fraud which was opportunity... tell me what they were. Opportunity...Joseph:Opportunity's one, incentive is one, like I'm incentivized to create fraudulent transactions, and then rational. "Poor little old me, I don't make enough money. I'm trying to feed my babies, I've got whatever reason, I'm trying to feed my cats. I don't have enough money because this penny pinching dentist doesn't pay me enough money." So the rational. Opportunity, incentive, and rational. The fraud triangle.Jonathan:Yeah, exactly. Those are the things you have to be watching out for. Your CPA can be helpful in this but they're not designed to be the person protecting you bar none from embezzlement. The only person who's going to be able to do that at the end of the day is going to be your internal controls in your practice, and yourself as the business owner. You're going to have to keep an open eye on what's happening. I don't want anybody out there to all the sudden start thinking that the girl in the front is this international person of mystery that's a spy that's going to be stealing all of your money. The way that you have to go about this is you need to have a lot of trust in the people that you hire, or else you hopefully wouldn't have hired them in the first place. You've got to have verification. You've got to have some tests that you'll put into place over time. Make sure that you have a super solid office set up to where you have a solid close. Make sure that you have a way that you're processing your payments to your vendors in a smart way.Jonathan:Don't give the person who's writing the checks a stamp to write your checks with. Don't...[crosstalk 00:34:58]Joseph:Signature stamps.Jonathan:Yeah. Exactly.Joseph:No, don't do that.Jonathan:Don't do that. Make sure that the person who's receiving the inventory is tying those inventories to... or having whatever's coming in also be verified so that you're getting what you're supposed to be getting, you're getting what you paid for. Make sure that your day sheets don't have too many adjustments on them. If they do have adjustments make sure they're totally verified. Make sure that you have a solid deposit set up going. There's a lot of things that you've got to have, make sure they're solid and strong and then the most important thing probably I would say to do at the end of all that is to randomly test those systems.Jonathan:Test them once a quarter will probably be fine, just pick five transactions to randomly test once a quarter, and you will probably be fine. Then outside of that look for weird behaviors from your employees. One of the more common ones that people talk about is there's that office manager that just they do everything, without them the system would fall over. Even the dentist doesn't know what she does. She's always the first one there and she's always the last one to leave, she never takes a vacation. If she does, she's really, really anxious about who's doing what in the office. That's kind of the tell tale sign of someone who has opportunity because they're the only person who knows what's going on. Doesn't mean that they're going to do it, but that is kind of the tell tale sign.Jonathan:Also, look at spending patterns, if you're paying your office manager $40, 50, 60,000 a year, and they always have a new vehicle and maybe they don't have a spouse or something like that, keep your eyes open on that. And keep an eye on your numbers, make sure that your ratios make sense. If they don't sometimes that can lead to it. This has been the episode on fraud, opportunities, how the CPA helps you and the misconceptions surrounding that, and a whole lot of information in the 36 minutes.Jonathan:Joseph, is there anything else that you wanted to state in terms of this topic?Joseph:Don't let your deposits have cash back on them. That's another one. That's a pretty simple step that you can take at the bank, that's one of the things I tell brand new practice owners. If you're not going to be the one taking the deposit to the bank, don't allow it to have cash back. "Oh, $10,000 deposits worth of checks and I get $8,000 back in cash." That's one thing I meant to mention earlier that I didn't. No cash back on deposits, set your accounts up that way.Jonathan:That's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one. Just as a quick story time in this one, I had an attorney call me and he was like, "Hey, we have a client that..." their controller was writing hot checks or something like that, the person that was inside of the business and they were doing something similar to that. They were like, "The CPA didn't catch it. The business owner took them 12 months to figure it out and the person who was doing it was sending the money overseas." The person ended up leaving the country before they realized what had happened.Jonathan:That's a really good example of after doing all the recording and stuff, there's also that step of getting it to the bank. That's definitely a real thing. Anyway, all right guys, we will see you next time on the Tooth and Coin podcast. This has been one about fraud, if you have any stories about fraud or any types of interesting situations that have happened with that, make sure to share it inside of the Facebook group and to share it with the community. We'd love to be able to hear more about it. We will see you guys next time.Joseph:Bye guys.Jonathan:That's it for today guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country and we'd love to be able to have the discussion about how we can help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people who are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty.Jonathan:I would love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services. And if you enjoyed today's episode, again go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the long term.Jonathan:Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444, reply with your email address, we'll send you instructions to the Facebook group, we'll send you the resources when they're available, and we will see you next week. 

Podcast: The Drill Down - Exploring Oil and Gas Topics (LS 26 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: The Digital Oilfield with Tony Edwards of Stepchange GlobalPub date: 2017-05-18In this episode, we welcome Tony Edwards to the podcast. Join us for this discussion on the digital oilfield, part of our Digital Oilfield podcast series. Remember, our listeners get $400 off the registration price (use code EKT400) to the Upstream Intelligence Data Driven Production Conference. It’s happening in Houston on July 6-7. Click here to learn more! About Tony Edwards Tony is a recognized expert in the application of Digital Oilfield Technologies in the oil and gas industry. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the oil and gas industry, in leading companies such as BP and BG. His core discipline is in operations management, including 5 years offshore and 3 years as Operations Manager on major Oil and Gas projects. In this episode of Drill Down, we discuss Tony’s background in the digital oilfield and current trends and opportunities in this growing space. Relevant Links: Stepchange Global Upstream Intelligence Tony Edwards on Linkedin Digital Oilfield Podcast Series: We put together this series of podcasts in conjunction with Upstream Intelligence to bring our listeners up to speed with the latest trends influencing the digital oilfield. Upstream Intelligence Data Driven Production Conference with Louis Vye The Digital Oilfield with Tony Edwards of Stepchange Global Innovations in the Digital Oilfield with Joe Perino Data Driven Production with Jim Crompton Timestamps: [1:00] Tony Edwards’ background – The field of the future [2:45] Mining vs Upstream – comparison and commonalities [3:45] What sparked an interest in the digital oilfield [7:00] Breaking down silos – colocating multi-disciplinary teams [9:10] Integrating teams and technology – impact on production platforms [12:30] Onshore & Shale Digital Oilfield – from the low cost ecosystem model to a low cost / smart hybrid [16:00] Last thoughts – Opportunity in greed-field operations to drop cost and CAPEX through digital oilfield implementations Transcript: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Drill Down with Marty Stetzer. This podcast is part of our EKTI, oil and gas learning network, and brought to you jointly today with Upstream Intelligence in the UK. Upstream Intelligence is the foremost provider of business intelligence and analysis for the upstream oil and gas community. They’re devoted to providing unique industry insight to drive efficiencies, reduce cost, and maximize production capabilities. Today our topic is data driven production. With an estimated global value of 31 billion dollars by 2020, the digital oilfield is the oil and gas industry’s hotbed of innovation, including big data analytics in the industrial internet of things, or IOT. Today I’ll be speaking with Tony Edwards, an industry veteran. This is our first podcast with Tony, an expert in this field. We are really happy to have his input on this new and important part of the upstream business. Tony, welcome. Thanks Marty. It’s great to be here. As we start, can you give our listeners your background? Yes. I joined BP as a young graduate in the late 1980’s and progressed on a pretty general career in oil and gas, mainly in petroleum and production engineering, some time in RND. Then I really ended up in operations management, and ended up working in North Sea, Southern North Sea, and as offshore as an OIM, and as an operations manager in Baku. Then my career took a bit of a shift and in 2003 I was asked to join a new program that was called field of the future, which was BP’s version of digital oilfield, and so I was part of the original team that set up the entire concept inside BP on how we were going to use real time data and information to make forms improvement inside our upstream operations. From there I moved to BG Group in 2006 and set up there a digital oilfield program from scratch, and I did that for three to four years. Then in 2009 I joined Stepchange Global and decided to do this on the outside in a consultancy firm, and we’ve been advising oil and gas companies and indeed mining companies on how to implement digital oilfield and integrated operations around the globe. Tony, that’s interesting. I didn’t realize in addition to the upstream side of the business, the mining folks are interested. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, we’ve seen that there’s an awful lot in common in oil and gas and mining in general. They’re both extractive industries, they’ve both got extended value chains in many cases, you know not kind of, an upstream or mine piece, some sort of delivery system, pipelines or rail, and then some sort of export business. If you look at it, their model is actually pretty close to some of our core operations like LNG. They’ve also got a lot in similar in the fact that they often have siloed organization. They have all the same sort of organizational people challenges of getting people to do things a different way, so we find that a lot of what we learned in oil and gas is ported over pretty easily into mining sector. We’ve done work with mining companies on iron ore mines in Australia, copper mines in Chile, and more recently on a brand new potash mine in Canada. Tony again, thanks for being part of this effort. You mentioned earlier and I understand your primary focus is the organizational impact of some of these new technologies. What in your career or in your consulting side kind of sparked your interest in this piece of the puzzle? Well I think if we dial back to the early days of digital oilfield and integrated operations when many of the big companies were kicking off with concept . There was BP, Shell, Statoil, Conoco in Norway, and in the national oil companies in particular, Saudi Aramco. We were all trying to understand what the dimensions were of this big new thing, where we can have real time data and information coming off of our assets, coming off our platforms, and it being available for use in the office, and available to experts in the office, and what were we going to do with it? Of course the initial focus was very much around, “We need to get the data.” So, how do we capture the data, how do we store the data, how do we transmit the data. Of course one of the big breakthroughs was the advent of high bandwidth communications, particularly in areas like the North Sea where fiber was laid very early on. So we could get that data, but then it was very much about, what do we do with the data? Initially the push was to get these IT data and information systems in place, and then we went through a phase of building rooms, collaborative rooms. We worked out pretty quickly that you needed teams to look at the data, or analyze the data, and look at opportunities in that data, and then convey those to the guys in the field who were going to do something different. Early on the focus was on the technology in the rooms, and we very quickly worked out that if you took the, “If we build it, they will come,” approach, they basically did. We then switched this around to thinking about it as technology-enabled transformation, and how do you change the … How do you get the people on board. Literally say, a technician or an operator offshore or onshore he’s been doing something the same for 20 years, how do you get them to do something different? Because now we’ve got data and information which can inform where they need to be at any one time. We needed to look at the processes, so when you look at process work flow, they were generally geographically constrained around a platform or a site. Now we’re saying actually we can have people looking at the data, and the process could be done remote. So how does that change? Then also the organizational alignment, how do we organize ourselves to take value from having this data and information? We quickly understood that just having the data and information was just not good enough. We needed to think of it in much broader terms, and certainly companies like BP, and Statoil, and others started thinking about this is a transformation program, or continuous program rather than a technology program. Tony, you mentioned earlier the challenge of the silos, which in our consulting and in our training programs we’re still seeing. Was there any way that this helped break down some of the silos by having disciplines, look at problems, or different ways of even setting up the remote operation centers with multi disciplines? Did that help, breaking down the silo side? Yes it did, and what we found as well is if you wanted to do something like production optimization; and you wanted to be able to optimize a molecule of oil and gas from the reservoir to an export point wherever that happened to be, and of course in gas that could be a very long value chain, in an offshore oil platform might be shorter. But whenever you looked at it, it spanned reservoir, petroleum, production engineering, facilities engineering, operations, pipelines, and maybe even commercial. We found that once you started having this real time data and information, a traditional siloed organization that was meeting-based just wasn’t fast enough, wasn’t agile enough, so we started moving towards this idea of multi disciplined delivery teams. So you would co-locate a production optimization … You would form a production optimization team, which was the co-location of representative from reservoir, petroleum, production, operations, facilities, pipeline, commercial in a room, and then they would work as a natural team to deliver the  field optimization. So that was an example. Another example would be around facilities, discipline, engineering, so instead of having mechanical, electrical, instrument automation all being separate, again we would co-locate representatives from each of those disciplines together in a room just to support the guys in the field in a non siloed, fully integrated way, if that makes sense. It does. Were there impacts say, on the production platforms as well? You mentioned the remote operation centers, and we’ve seen examples of that in our visits to some major clients, but what about on the production facilities themselves? Were there some benefits there? Absolutely. I think the one thing you haven’t got to forget about is what’s at the other end, if you know what I mean. It’s a bit like the idea of if you’re the only person in the world with the mobile telephone, well it’s actually not very useful. What we’ve seen is that if you have a collaborative environment in your office, then very much you need to have the ability for your teams in the field to collaborate as well, so that could be either by mobile working devices, which are now becoming much more available.  It was a difficult thing to implement 10 years ago although it was done in a few locations, or it was actually we need to mirror the fact that we’ve got a production optimization team in the office with some sort of team in the field. Typically we would then co-locate a production engineer and some of the production team in a room on the offshore platform, and we would have always-on video, always-on data and information exchange between the two. We see this very much as an organizational alignment, so some of the dimensions that you can think about are integrating across the silos is one dimension, and you most often do that in the office, but you want to do it in the field as well if you can. Also you’re integrating between the operational location, offshore platform or gas hub, land based operation, and your office, so you’re integrating between the field and your office. That’s one of the other big barriers. Of course there’s the big divide between sub surface and surface disciplines you want to integrate across there. The other one we see is a key dimension for integration in this approach is time. So we advocate what we call a time slice organization, where we co-locate people around the time scale of the work that they do, so typically the guys in these collaborative in environments are doing short term support work, and they’re the point of focus for the guys in the field. The guys in the field always know who they got to go to, and the guys in the office, in the collaborative environment, they’re almost triaging the issues as they come in, and they’ve got complete asset awareness, or situational awareness of what’s going in the field at the same time. It just streamlines all of those communication processes. The guys involved understand what’s going on, understand what the priorities for the day. The result of that is enhanced production, enhanced recovery –  free from unplanned events, the better implementation of maintenance practices because you’re being supported remotely by your experts in the office. There’s a whole bunch of value you can get once you put the ability to collaborate and share data in place between an operational site and an office location. Tony, we’ve talked about offshore. Is there any analogy, or any operators using these same concepts of techniques in onshore? Especially in the shale plays that you’re familiar with, where we’re drilling hundreds of wells, and it’s more like a mechanical production operation than it is like a classic drill and complete operation. Are you seeing anyone using it in the onshore side of the business as well as the offshore? Yeah, absolutely. We’re seeing a lot of effort in the onshore side, and we’ve done work with coal bed methane operators in Australia, for instance. The big coal bed methane to LNG assets in Queensland, of which there are three, all of them have gone down this route, and two of them have actually remotely controlling all of their wells and gas facilities from the center of Brisbane, would you believe. They pushed this concept really quite a long way and we’ve been involved in the forefront of this with them in Australia. We’ve seen certainly SAGD operations in the tar sands are really beginning to embrace this in Canada. In terms of shale, oil and shale gas, typically that model has been what I would call a low cost ecosystem model, so it runs very well because one, it’s been low cost, and two, the ecosystem of companies are there to deliver this in a very efficient manner. But we are beginning to see the emergence of what I would call a low cost, smart hybrid, where I think those operators are beginning to see just being low cost, especially in the current environment, it runs out of steam in terms of giving you the value you need, and you now need to go more towards a smart approach. We’ve been working with one operator in Pennsylvania, and typically the traditional mode of operation would be to send an operator to look at a well every day, and in fact the local legislation says you have to visit this well every week to look for leaks, would you believe. The whole idea of sending a person into a gas production system to look for leaks is not something I would advocate at all. We should have instrumentation to do that sort of thing. But we’re working with this operator, and we’re pushing it, we’re trying to push it to the point where we visit the well once every three months. That is going to mean that we have to challenge the legislation, but I think we can put the senses and the monitoring, the surveillance, in real time in place to make that case pretty easily. So yes, we are beginning to see shale gas, shale oil do this and indeed a number of the kind of independent land based operators, and we’re working with a few at the moment. I think it has been somewhat slower uptake in that area just because the model they’ve had, it has been different to what you might think of as a big offshore oil operation, or even a big land-based complex operation. Tony, this is terrific. I know you and I could keep this up all, but I think the insights that you’ve given our listeners on the impacts of these new systems on organization, minimum manning, and production efficiencies, and especially the relationship between mainstream oil and gas and mining, and coal bed methane, which was completely not in my radar, will be extremely valuable. Is there anything that you would like to say to wrap up to our folks, if they want to seek more information on these topics? Yes. Just one thing I would say is that historically we’ve been doing a lot of work in brownfield operations, but there’s  absolute huge opportunity in greenfields. If you take what we’ve learned in brownfields and you translate that into green- fields, we absolutely believe that we can drop operational costs significantly, and by significantly I mean 50 to 70 or 80 percent. We can also reduce capex as well, and we’ve done a number of studies on new greenfield projects where we’ve been working with this idea of radical minimum manning, and trying to inject that into the project concept up stream. So I think that’s going to be the next big thing in terms of where we go, so more automation, less manning, more safer operations because we have less people, so that’s fundamentally where I think we’re going to be heading. If people are interested in hearing more about this, or seeing more about this please go to our website. I work for Stepchange Global, which is an independent oil and gas consultancy specializing in digital oilfield and integrated operations, and our website is www.stepchangeglobal.com. I’ll be at the conference in a couple of weeks time, it would be great to see people there, so if you want to have a chat on anything I’ve been talking about please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Thanks again Tony, I look forward to meeting you when you’re in Houston, and folks who would like to learn more about the basics of the important oil and gas industry, be sure to check out our free Oil 101 series at www.ektinteractive.com. Thanks everyone for listening. The post The Digital Oilfield with Tony Edwards of Stepchange Global appeared first on EKT Interactive.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Marty Stetzer, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Jon and Matt relive their glory days with Springfield/Kansas City icon Billy Smith. (Slugworth; Dirtnap; Season To Risk; Roman Numerals; CONOCO...) The guy is prolific....and a lot of fun! So glad for the chance to catch up! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/undetermined-podcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/undetermined-podcast/support

Feel free to reach out with any questions or comments at info@theenergyweekly.com. Have a great week, thanks again. We always appreciate positive reviews if you listen via Apple Podcast, but the best way you can help us grow is to send the podcast to friends, family and coworkers. Thanks for tuning in this week, here is a breakdown of what we talked about this week with links to each headline so you can research further. Articles and Sources Headline #1 - California Frac Ban https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-19/california-bans-high-pressure-steam-oil-wells-reviews-fracking https://www.conservation.ca.gov/index/Pages/News/California-Establishes-Moratorium-on-High-Pressure-Extraction.aspx Headline #2 - Conoco's Investor Release + CVX https://hrcpdocctr.conocophillips.com/Documents/AIM.pdf Headline #3 - Aramco IPO Update https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/saudi-aramco-pitches-abu-dhabi-investors-troubled-ipo-191125162511233.html Headline #4 - Majors divesting $27bn https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Big-Oil-majors-looking-to-sell-27-billion-in-14842981.php Headline #5 - US approves 4 LNG export projects https://www.ferc.gov/media/news-releases/2019/2019-4/11-21-19-C-1.asp#.XdyNyehKiUk

On this episode, we're joined by Archie W. Dunham. Archie is chairman emeritus of Chesapeake Energy, the second largest natural gas producer in the United States and the retired chairman of the board of ConocoPhillips. He was instrumental in orchestrating Conoco's IPO separation from DuPont in 1998, the largest in U.S. history at the time, and in negotiating the merger of equals between Conoco Inc. and Phillips in 2001 which created the third largest energy company in America and the fifth largest in the world. In 1998, Dunham was recognized by the World Affairs Council as Houston's International Citizen of the Year and inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. The most meaningful award he has ever received was being named Houston's Father of the Year in 1998. In addition to giving extravagantly to other worthy causes and organizations, the Dunhams have also been tremendously generous to Houston Baptist University which has resulted in various landmarks within the campus named in their honor that attest to their strong Christian faith and values, including the Dunham College of Business, Dunham Field, the Linda and Archie Dunham Theater and the Dunham Bible Museum. It's safe to say that the Christianity in Business Podcast may not exist if it wasn't for Archie and Linda Dunham. Christianity in Business is the show that helps Christian business leaders to integrate biblical values into business. | Entrepreneurship | Marketing | Nonprofit | Church | Author | Startups | Marketplace | Ministry | Business as Mission | Faith and Work | Faith | Success | Leadership | www.ChristianityInBusiness.com