Podcast appearances and mentions of jeff lyons

Jimmy has a conversation with Jon Green from Stay Green Brewing and Jeff Lyons from Endless Life Brewing in anticipation of NYC Beer week, Reflecting on their histories and Beer Flavored Beer! https://www.endlesslifebrewing.com/https://www.instagram.com/stay_green_brewing/reels/

This week STICK TO WRESTLING is joined by Jeff Lyons, and we discuss a virtual cornucopia of pro wrestling topics including: –What a Vince McMahon vs Bill Watts wrestling war might have looked like. A war between these two would have been fascinating, as McMahon's flashy, spectacle-driven product would clash with Watts' more grounded and … Continue reading Episode 343: Isn't That Duggan's Car? → The post Episode 343: Isn't That Duggan's Car? appeared first on Stick To Wrestling with John McAdam.

Thomas Quiter has been a disabilities advocate and wheelchair user for over 3 decades, he lives on a farm in upstate New York where he enjoys roaming forested hills in his robotic powerchair, and he founded the Mobility Independence Foundation to help others upgrade their mobility equipment so they too can enjoy a full and productive life. Jeff Lyons is a US Navy Veteran who repaired blackhawk helicopters onboard the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, notably during its 2011 Humanitarian Aid & Disaster Relief Mission to Japan after the 3.11.11 Earthquake and Tsunami which led to the Nuclear Meltdown at the Fukishima Nuclear Power Plant, he now serves as Chief Growth Officer for the Mobility Independence Foundation. https://themif.org/mobility-independence/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We finally dragged Jeff Lyons back to the studio to share some of his Italian Library, Krautrock, Funk, Chicago soul and Detroit garage rock goodies! Press the button to hear how it went down...  

There's a new face at the WI Farm Bureau Federation's headquarters in Madison.  Brad Uken has joined the staff as the new chief administrative officer.  Uken's no stranger to Farm Bureau though, as Stephanie Hoff found out in her first conversation with the transplant from Illinois.Ashley Huhn from the Steffes Group speaks with Pam Jahnke about a big inventory reduction sale coming up for a John Deere dealership in Wisconsin.  Paid for by the Steffes Group.The four finalists for the 2023 Leopold Conservation award have been announced and Pam Jahnke presents some of the details.It's all about details when it comes to reforming the Federal Milk Marketing Orders.  Nate Zimdars catches up with Jeff Lyons, General Manager of FarmFirst Dairy Cooperative, headquartered in Madison.  Lyons had just wrapped up testifying before USDA officials in Carmel, Indiana during the third week of the hearing.  He explains the protocol for accepting suggestions, and how he feels the process is going.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's time to take a walk down memory lane and review the wackiest and wildest loan program ever: the Paycheck Protection Program. Omar Shute of DFTC and Jeff Lyons of MBFS joined us for a topic that we couldn't fit into just one episode.IN THIS EPISODE:[00:31] Mark gives an overview of Part One.[01:35] The expectation of how long the PPP loans would last. [03:36] Jeff describes the second round of PPP loans, and Omar shares his view of Part Two of PPP loans and how technology assisted the process. [11:22] Jeff and Mark talk about the eligibility for the second round of PPP loans. [18:23] Jeff reflects on how business owners admittedly stated they didn't need the money, but it was free. [20:37] Omar suggests which industries should have received the money, and Jeff talks about the forgiveness process. [26:50] What worked well on the PPP and what didn't work. KEY TAKEAWAYS: The PPP Loan Round One wasted a lot of taxpayer dollars.By the time Round Two of PPP Loans began, institutions could make more money because they had worked out the kinks they experienced in Round One.The PPP loans are responsible for the inflation we have today.RESOURCE LINKS:Mark Ritter WebsiteDFTC Inc. WebsiteBIOGRAPHY: Omar Shute is the Senior Vice President of Commercial Services at Development Finance Training and Consulting Inc. (DFTC). In this role, he oversees commercial underwriting and participates in all the related suites of services offered by DFTC. Omar has 20 years of commercial lending experience, and his career background encompasses commercial loan origination, relationship management, commercial loan underwriting, credit administration, commercial portfolio management, policy generation, and senior leadership experience, including working with boards of directors.

It's time to take a walk down memory lane and review the wackiest and wildest loan program ever: the Paycheck Protection Program. Omar Shute of DFTC and Jeff Lyons of MBFS joined us for a topic that we couldn't fit into just one episode.IN THIS EPISODE:[02:31] Jeff and Omar introduce themselves and share their responsibilities at their respective firms. [04:24] Jeff's view of the history of PPP loans and Omar reflects on the beginning phase of PPP loans. [08:12] Mark remembers the chaos, Jeff shares his perspective and Omar talks about rules changing three times a day. [13:34] Mark and Jeff speak about the bad actors, fraud and loan farms. [19:31] Omar reflects on how the credit union prevented fraud. [21:33] Mark tells about the largest fraud case. [26:07] Jeff and Omar discuss the systems in place to make the program work. KEY TAKEAWAYS: The PPP loan program was vulnerable from the start because it was rushed, and there were no clear guidelines.The government was just asking for fraud because the regulations were so loose, and unfortunately, FinTech wasn't doing its job.The credit unions stepped up and did what was necessary to care for customers while protecting the taxpayer.RESOURCE LINKSMark Ritter WebsiteBIOGRAPHY: Omar Shute is the Senior Vice President of Commercial Services at Development Finance Training and Consulting Inc. (DFTC). In this role, he oversees commercial underwriting and participates on all the related suite of services offered by DFTC. Omar has 20 years of commercial lending experience and his career background encompasses commercial loan origination, relationship management, commercial loan underwriting, credit administration, commercial portfolio management, policy generation, and senior leadership experience including working with boards of directors.

As spring field chores continue around Wisconsin, paying respect to the size and power of that equipment is critical.  Stephanie Hoff focuses in on tractor safety training available around the state to help first time operators get prepared before they're behind the wheel. Next week dairy voices will gather together to focus on risk management tools available and revisions under the next Farm Bill.  Jeff Lyons, General Manager of FarmFirst Dairy Cooperative will be among attendees.  Stephanie Hoff finds out what he sees as priorities. Rhubarb - it's a springtime treat for a lot of Wisconsinites, but what do you know about the plant?  Charitee Seebecker talks with rhubarb grower, Kathy Bures, about plant tidbits you might not be aware of.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We'll be posting new audio episodes soon, but new videos are up on our YouTube Channel. Go check them out right now and like and subscribe.  Also, go follow us on Tik Tok before we go to war with China. Here's an episode from our six month anniversary show. To celebrate, we brought in our good friend Jeff Lyons (@usedwigs on Twitter, Junk Miles with Chip and Jeff) and quizzed him on some of our favorite facts from previous episodes. Find out if the Hatfields and McCoys really did fight over an NFT and what romantic dinner entrée makes Jeff want to vomit. 

2022! What a year! Jeff and Mark recap the highs and lows of 2022, where the industry is at now, and what they think the future will look like. Listen in to hear the current trends, the highs and lows of the year, and what they are looking forward to in 2023!  IN THIS EPISODE:[03:00] Jeff and Mark break down the past year, the good & bad. [07:40] Credit team underwriting. [12:00] Having lending conversations with business owners. [18:12] Mark and Jeff discuss the current recession. [24:19] Jeff shares his favorite parts of 2022.  KEY TAKEAWAYS: Each year will bring highs and lows, but adjusting to them and being there for your community are key in building and maintaining those good relationships with consumers.Consistency is key throughout the highs and lows. RESOURCE LINKSMark Ritter WebsiteBIO:   Jeff Lyons is the COO of MBFS and oversees several functions at MBFS such as credit, sales, and several other operational areas. Jeff joined MBFS after several years leading business lending at a New Jersey credit union but has also been a small business owner.

Aaron Santini talks to Channel 14 Chief Meteorologist Jeff Lyons about the now infamous "jackwagon" incident at the 2022 Fall Festival. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

ADT is six months old, making it the longest running podcast in history. To celebrate, we brought in our good friend Jeff Lyons (@usedwigs on Twitter, Junk Miles with Chip and Jeff) and quizzed him on some of our favorite facts from previous episodes. Find out if the Hatfields and McCoys really did fight over an NFT and what romantic dinner entrée makes Jeff want to vomit. This episode was recorded a few weeks ago, but we added a new intro to say we are matching up to $500 in donations to any abortion-related organization. Tweet your donation receipt to @ADTPod and we'll match it. We recommend abortionfunds.org, but any decent one providing care, services, legal aide, or whatever is important to you.  

This week, Beer Sessions Radio welcomes two homeschooled brewers — Jeff Lyons from Endless Life Brewing in Brooklyn, and Jaega Wise from Wild Card Brewery in East London, who also happens to be the author of “Wild Brews.” The gang will bang out lessons on homebrewing and sour beers, before revealing the secrets to the water section of Jaega's latest book. The episode starts with Jaega's and Jeff's introduction to the homebrewing world as well as their backgrounds outside of the beer industry. While Jaega grew up in the Midland region in UK, noted for Burton-on-Trent, with a CAMRA beer festival as her first, Jeff hung out with the Beer Judge Certification Program gang in the back room of Jimmy's No. 43. Jaega also shared her unexpectedly perfect journey to beerdom, studying chemical engineering and going to water school for her previous job in water treatment. She went on to explain the keys to controlling what she considers the most underappreciated ingredient in brewing — water. The gang then goes deeper into sour beer and the history of homebrewing, with Jimmy admitting to only being able to make “the no hygiene beer” inspired by the Victorian era's Tudor. They also discuss the revival of cask beers along with the brewing scene in London, with a tiny surprise about water in Scotland and whisky distilling. Grab your headset and listen in on the secrets right now!Photo Courtesy of Jaega Wise.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Beer Sessions Radio by becoming a member!Beer Sessions Radio is Powered by Simplecast.

Hey! Did you know that it's possible to not burn bridges with people you used to do business with? Jeff used to be my broker.... But when he left eXp (explained in the episode) and I stayed, We remained friends! So here is a ridiculous episode full of incredible nuggets, lots of swear words, and real estate jargon. Enjoy! 

You can't move forward without first looking back! In today's Credit Union Conversations, Mark speaks with Jeff Lyons, COO of MBFS, about what happened in the credit union industry in 2021. Mark and Jeff discuss the most surprising statistics and major changes to the business lending portfolio. It's no surprise that COVID is still a topic of discussion and Mark and Jeff talk about how it continues to impact staffing and rising interest rates. They share their thoughts on how credit unions can thrive by focusing on repeat customers and connecting with more small businesses.

This week on Beer Sessions Jimmy is talking about homebrewing and The American Homebrewers Association with Julia Herz, executive director of The American Homebrewers Association; Ethan Cox of Community Beer Works; and Jeff Lyons of Endless Life Brewing. Julia talks about her role as being a voice and advocate for the hobby she loves. She also covers everything from the history of homebrew since Mesopotamia to the styles of beer and homebrewing popular today. Jeff talks about how homebrewing compares to working in a brewery and the unique styles of beer homebrewing helps to develop. Ethan and Jimmy talk about their all New York State beer in the works. And Ethan details New York State's rich history with hops production. Grab your homebrew, and give it a listen!Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Beer Sessions Radio by becoming a member!Beer Sessions Radio is Powered by Simplecast.

--To find out more about Jeff Lyons, you can check these links:https://www.thelyonsgroup.com/https://www.facebook.com/LyonsGroupNWIGet your free copy of the Real Estate Evolution here:bit.ly/RealEstateEvolution_GetYourBookThis book shows you the step by step of how to: Step 1: Believe in your unknown potentialStep 2: Deconstruct persuasion techniquesStep 3: Find business and get hired consistentlyStep 4: Be proactive in the relationship with your clients.Step 5: Learn and implement the exact steps to hire, train, lead, and train virtual assistants so that they can build, support, and guide a winning team to scale.And if you'd like to have a consistent and predictable income, like this page, and don't forget to join the Facebook group to network with the top agents:https://www.facebook.com/groups/thecpicommunity/

This week on Beer Sessions Radio, the summer of craft malt continues! Jimmy talks hops, malt, and more with Jeff Lyons from Endless Life Brewing in Crown Heights BK, NY; Ted Hawley from NY Craft Malt in Batavia, NY; Chad Meigs from The Bineyard Hop Growers in Cazenovia, NY; and Chris Holden from the NY Hop Guild in Elmira, NY.To kick things off, Jimmy asks Jeff what New York ingredients mean to him as a brewer. Ted chimes in with his knowledge of the quickly evolving New York malt industry, while Jimmy cracks open a beer brewed by Jeff that was made with Ted's malt and Chad's hops. Chad tells us about meeting Jeff at a “grower-meet-brewer” event in NYC and almost dropping everything to go to a Kruder and Dorfmeister concert with him. Then Chris gives us the lay of the land for the NY Hop Guild, who get their hops from New York farms on the shores of Lake Erie, through the Finger Lakes, all the way to Oneonta, and beyond.After the break, Jeff details the “beer for a year” program at Endless Life Brewing: a CSA-like membership where you can pick up a four-pack of lagers or a bottle of mixed-fermentation/sour beer once a month. Ted and Jeff chat about the importance of experimentation and feedback, and how forming local working relationships in New York helps to push their craft forward by promoting that dynamic. Chad details the ups and downs of hops in recent years, but is confident in the future of the crop. Hop Growers of NY, a group he and Chris are a part of, secured money from the state to start a hop breeding program over the next few years with the ultimate goal of growing a hop specific to NY state. Photo Courtesy of Jeff Lyons.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Beer Sessions Radio by becoming a member!Beer Sessions Radio is Powered by Simplecast.

We're celebrating our 100th episode by revisiting our top 10 most downloaded episodes from the past year. We are so grateful for the guests who have joined us and for you who take the time from your busy day to listen. We continue to work on bringing valuable content to you. And now, on to the Top 10: #86: Wikipedia for Business in 2021 with Josh Greene 2/8/21 Who knows that Wikipedia is the second most visited website in the United States? Josh Greene of The Mather Group knows and now so do you. Josh is the author of Wikipedia for Business: Supercharge Your Business and the recently-released Wikipedia for Business 2021: The Rules & Latest Developments that Businesses & Communicators Need to Know to Succeed. #81: Are You Ready to Propose? 1/4/21 No, it's not about The Bachelor. This episode covers what to include in a new business proposal or RFP reply. #89: Too Many Words 3/1/21 We PR pros love our words. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves not to overdo it. Like Coco Chanel's policy with accessories, check your writing to see if you can remove a few words and make your point more effectively. #77: PR Lessons from The Fraud Street Run with Jeff Lyons 12/7/20 Who says PR can't be fun? We had a great time talking with Jeff Lyons, co-host of the Junk Miles with Chip and Jeff, a running podcast, about the charity run inspired by that event that time at that landscaping place, not the hotel.   #84: Client Prospecting by Building Relationships 1/25/21 We say this all the time -- build relationships. Meet new people, ask for the introduction. Introduce yourself! The seed you plant today may never see the sun or it might one day be your mightiest asset. #71 PR is Not a Popularity Contest 10/26/20 This episode was inspired by the TikTok from Nathan Apodaca posted of himself skateboarding to the tune of Fleetwood Mac's “Dreams” while drinking his Ocean Spray - leading brands across the country to ask us: “That Fleetwood Mac skater guy video went viral. How can we go viral?” But we know that PR, despite what people may think, has never been a popularity contest. Public relations that works is based on sustainable strategies, community building, and investing in your customers. #88: Winfluence with Jason Falls 2/22/21 Jason is an amazing digital strategist who joined us to discuss his third book - Winfluence - taking a look at the world of influencer marketing and how to be smart about it. #83: Now What? Business Development in 2021 with Chip Griffin of the Small Agency Growth Alliance 1/18/21 We refused to allow 2021 be 2020 two-point-oh. Our friend Chip Griffin, who has successfully coached many agencies and solos on how to build their path to success through his Small Agency Growth Alliance, joined us to talk about preparing for change and creating a sustainable business. #87: Just Get Started with Kami Huyse 2/15/21 Who says there are no guarantees in life? We promise, spend time with fellow solo Kami Huyse and you will come away inspired. In this episode, she tells us to not let perfection stop us from getting started. Make sure you sign up for her Smart Social Secrets newsletter. #52: PPP Loans & The Solo PR Pro with Brent Thompson of Canon Capital Management Group 6/6/20 Brent Thompson is a CPA who guided us through the early stages of PPP loans and other life preserver funding opportunities. You can find more information about PPP loans and more at his company website, www.canoncapital.com. Do you have a favorite That Solo Life episode? Is there a topic you'd like us to cover? Let us know at www.soloprpro.com.

Episode blog post: Ten final helps toward home Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx at Monergism.com Text for Precious Remedies provided by GraceGems.org Welcome back to the Theodio Podcast. I’m your host, Dan Kassis. We’re walking though the book Precious […] The post Episode 44: Ten Final Helps toward Home appeared first on Theodio.

Show notes Episode blog post: Six facts about the devil and his schemes Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx at Monergism.com Text for Precious Remedies provided by GraceGems.org Welcome back to the Theodio Podcast, I’m your host Dan Kassis. We’re […] The post Episode 43: Know Your Enemy appeared first on Theodio.

How do you measure the performance of people whose achievements are hard to measure? Building on the work of Harold Fethe, Jeff Lyons founded MindSolve, a company that developed a technology which made employee evaluations more accurate and more reliable. The company did well and was sold, and Jeff made the challenging transition from founder to employee. A self-described “nerd,” Jeff as a kid used to secretly reprogram Tandy computers at the Radio Shack in the Jacksonville mall. He said “not a lot of planning was involved” in his career, “it was more “just being open to stuff and people who say, ‘come solve this problem for me.” *This episode was originally released on August 14, 2019.* TRANSCRIPT: Intro (00:01): Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida, the museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles (00:38): I’m going to call HR if you work for any size company, that sentence has the appeal of I’m going to tell your mom, but it turns out HR has a fun, sexy side. I’m your host, Richard Miles and today we will be talking about how much fun it is with Jeff Lyons, founder of a company called MindSolve and currently the Senior Vice President of Global Professional Services at Sum Total, welcome to the show, Jeff. Jeff Lyons (01:00): Thanks, Richard. Excited to be here. Richard Miles (01:02): So Jeff, when I look up fun and sexy in the dictionary, there’s a picture of you, right? Jeff Lyons (01:05): Definitely. And HR as well. Richard Miles (01:08): I also forgot to mention actually the pinnacle of your professional career has been serving as a board member on the Cade Museum, right? It’s pretty much downhill from here. Jeff Lyons (01:16): Yes, thank you. Richard Miles (01:17): And normally we’re talking about topics that are unfamiliar to a lot of people, advanced medical technologies, engineering marvels, that sort of stuff. Today, we’ll be talking about something that actually most people understand pretty well, performance evaluations, training skills management, but let’s talk about first of all, how those things in an organization can be a problem or at least what was the problem you saw in organizational process and what was the solution that you came up with? Jeff Lyons (01:43): So the first thing I should say is that the core technology that MindSolve took to market was not something that I came up with or, or that the folks at MindSolve really came up with. It was the brainchild of a guy named Harold Fethy who ran the HR function at a pharmaceutical research firm in Palo Alto. And so what was interesting was the problem, there was a unique, because he’s trying to do performance assessment with a company full of PhDs that are going to argue with any kind of measurement model or metric or calculation you can put in front of them. Richard Miles (02:12): What year are we talking about Jeff roughly? Jeff Lyons (02:14): This was 95, 96. Um, so sort of just prior to the founding of MindSolve, and so it was an idea that Harold had, and then we help develop the technology and then licensed to take that to market. Richard Miles (02:25): So what is the problem in principle that you were trying to solve? Jeff Lyons (02:29): So the main problem is how do we evaluate employee performance in a way that’s relevant and in a way that has a lot of quality in the data where you can make solid decisions on it, but in a way that’s also easy. Performance appraisal, as you said, everybody’s familiar with it, universally, everybody hates it. It doesn’t matter what you do. You’re never the popular guy walking into the building when it’s performance, appraisal time. But I think we actually did come up with a way to make it pretty sexy and pretty easy and at Aliza because they had a very high bar for data quality and for a robust measurement metric behind everything that was challenging to do in a way that was fun and easy. And Harold had an idea of doing a visual ranking. And I hope talking with my hands on the podcast that comes through, you could describe this to our listeners, but a way of doing just a very simple drag and drop stack ranking on a screen and took Aliza from a process that had very high data quality and was well-respected, but was miserable and onerous and people would do over the weekend with a case of beer and complain about it to something that people were finishing very quickly on time. Not only felt good about the validity, but it was easy to do, and that helped also make it well received. And so that translated very well to a broader audience, that wasn’t a company full of PhDs. And that’s what helped grow the company. Richard Miles (03:45): Instead of a long series of questions, for instance, like, is this employee good at X, Y, and Z, it would be more of a graphical interface or? Jeff Lyons (03:53): Exactly. So what else it was coming from was an idea called paired comparison, which has a lot of data validity. And you build up a data model by comparing A to B and then B to C and then C to A, and kind of making these one by one paired comparisons. And so the psychometrics behind that are great, but people are pretty skeptical and it’s a hugely painful exercise. Normal performance appraisal looks at every employee one at a time. And you just do like a one to five ranking on a bunch of questions and people try to make it better by asking more questions. And there’s a lot of counterintuitive stuff. You get better data up until about eight or nine factors or questions after that, your data quality drops way, way off. The more questions you ask because people get tired of it and they just start Christmas treeing. So this was a way, instead of doing each employee one at a time, we would take your whole team, put them on screen and say, let’s talk about communication skill, put your best communicator at the top, worst communicater at the bottom, kind of rank people in there. And then we’ll look at decision making and self management. And we ended up with about five criteria for most employees. And I think we added two or three extra for managers. So it was very simple, very fast, but we did a lot of work to look at the data quality and we ended up with very, very good decision quality coming out of the exercise. Richard Miles (05:05): That’s fascinating. I wish they had had that when I was in the federal government, which is probably the worst possible example for performance evaluations. But I remember in the army, they had a problem with the officer evaluations and that there were really only two types of officer evaluations. One, your the next Dwight D. Eisenhower and you should be promoted immediately. And the other one is you’re basically a trader to your country and you should be taken out shot. There’s nothing in between. And then the way the army saw that problem is it sounds like something similar. What they started doing is they started putting, I think they called it a diamond and it was after you’d gone through all this verbiage of how wonderful this person was. You were forced to say, well, this person is among the top 5% of officers I’ve ever commanded and so on. And the second and third tier, but then they would add a reality check and that you could then check what your average was. So you kind of knew that this raider was full of it because he gave everybody top diamond or whatever. It’s something like that. Is this something similar in principle to where you’re sort of forcing an accountability so that you can’t just go on and on about somebody’s qualities without comparing them to something? That that kind of it in principle? Jeff Lyons (06:10): You’ve hit on a lot of really, really dense stuff. There’s a lot of psychometrics wrapped up in what you just said. So the first is, yeah, if you evaluate people on a 10 point scale, you might have one person who rates his employees, all eights, nines, and tens, and then you have another person, especially in a room full of PhDs. Who’s just much more critical. Nobody’s perfect. And he rates all his employees five, six, seven, right? So the best guys getting a seven versus the best guy getting a nine. And when you want to make a decision across a broad organization, that’s not really fair. So the first thing that we did was we had to normalize that data. So, you essentially come up with a percentile. So what’s my number one compared to your number one. And we were doing multi-raider assessments. So it wasn’t just a manager evaluation.There were peer evaluations, direct reports would evaluate managers. And so you ended up with a lot of different perspectives about a single person’s performance and backing up for a second. When we took the data, we worked with a couple of really great people on the data model. And one of them, they had the advantage of being in Palo Alto is one of Harold’s close friends is a guy named Brad Ephron who was head of Stanford statistics department at the time, and a MacArthur fellow studying small datasets statistics, which is exactly what we had, right? So we’ve got not classic statistics, but five or six or seven ratings about an individual from a lot of different people. So he worked with us to say first normalize the data average that, and what we found was the absolute rating matters, right? A 3 out of 10 is not as good as a 9 out of 10, but the relative does as well. And what, having multiple people on screen at the same time does use your thinking, not just about what is decision making, but you’re thinking, how does Richard make decisions? And I can benchmark that against how does Jeff make decisions? And it helps me as a evaluator ground, something in reality and make better decisions. And there’s also an element of fairness to it. And then you mentioned kind of this idea that we would call like a forced distribution. Like if everybody fits into a bell curve, you can’t have all tens, you can’t have all ones. Where we ended up after lots of trial and error and back and forth and working with people is that it would be invalid to look at a large group of folks and not make decisions about who you’re starting five are, and who’s going to be cut from the team, right? You’ve got to be able to make those hard decisions in any organization. And it’s difficult because people say, well, we only hire A’s, everybody’s an A, but then you can’t get anything done if you’re not able to make those decisions, but we would not force a ranking. You could tie people, you didn’t necessarily have to fit percentages into those sections of the diamond, but you also couldn’t be flat. And what we would do is provide reports back to show where there wasn’t good differentiation in the ratings and go ask the question and you will get situations where we put our starting five all with this manager. So they’re all going to get high ratings or vice versa, but it was pretty rare. And you could look at the data and at least ask the question of, are we making a good, valid decision? Richard Miles (08:57): So you started out trying to solve the problem, or at least make more efficient performance evaluations, but then the company MindSolve that you originally founded, started doing other things, right? Like skills training and other types of management process. Can you describe, or the evolution from going to the performance evaluations to the other function. Jeff Lyons (09:14): Yeah, absolutely. What got us into more things was that we licensed that technology back from the company we built it for and started selling it to other companies. And what happens, I think this is true of almost any startup situation is if you go in and you help someone solve problems, they turn out to have a lot of problems and are struggled to solve them. And so they end up giving you more work. So if you look in HR, there’s a bunch of different functions. There’s performance, appraisal, there’s compensation, succession planning, learning, and development. And so you do good work here and they say, well, now we want to push that data into our comp process. For example, we use Excel spreadsheets, it’s miserable. We need to automate it. Can you help us automate that and just tie it right in that was the first sort of adjacent space we went into and then kind of worked our way around the wheel of HR. As customers started asking us to do more stuff. So we really grew in a direction dictated by our customers or requested by our customers. Richard Miles (10:07): Is there an optimal size of company that’s sort of like your ideal client for whom this is the most useful? Is it relatively small companies that for them you’re taking a huge burden in terms of HR off of their shoulders, or is this ideal for our company of say a thousand employees or more? Jeff Lyons (10:24): I think there’s a better ROI larger. And we used to talk about, if you’ve got 10 employees, you can kind of sit around a table and do this. Richard Miles (10:31): And rank them one through 10. Jeff Lyons (10:32): Yeah, it’s pretty straight forward, and everybody knows everybody. And the value of automation is greater when there, the data gets so big, you just can’t manage it. Compensation is a great example. People would send Excel spreadsheets out to every manager in the company, pull those back together, copy paste. It was a huge just labor problem. If you only have a few dozen employees, anything about maybe a hundred and fewer, is pretty easy to do, above that it gets very difficult. Richard Miles (10:58): And so some guy or gal spend their entire day just trying to figure out what everyone should get paid. Jeff Lyons (11:02): Yes. Every case that they’re tested around for everybody versus real time, everybody’s kind of in the same data. Richard Miles (11:10): Now, you have had as an entrepreneur being in that field, sort of one of those experiences that is both, I guess, a Mark of success, but also a challenge. And that is a company that you helped found, MindSolve became acquired by another company or sold. And then you became an employee for that company. So you’re making the transition from being the top guy to being a guy who probably has to fix a lot more your own coffee and that sort of stuff, right? So tell us, what’s that like mentally or professionally, how do you make that transition from being the person who started something to being the person who is at work. Jeff Lyons (11:41): I feel like I should lay down on a couch for this part of this session, that you’re, there’s a lot of scar tissue, your brain, Richard Miles (11:47): I just started my clock. I am billing you for this job. Jeff Lyons (11:51): Well, first I’ll correct. You going a bigger organization was nice because then you actually had people who would help with administrative stuff. At a small startup we were making our own coffee, we would draw straws on who got to clean the bathroom. You know, the biggest thing though, was the change in the level of control that you have. That was hard. But I think as we got closer to our acquisition, I was really becoming aware of our limitations, which is a really polished way of saying I had no clue what I was doing. And so we had kind of maxed out what we could do with the organization. We needed more funding. We had bootstrapped the organization, meaning just grown out of revenue. We weren’t burning through a ton of VC money, but we also a couple of guys straight out of college who had no idea about enterprise software. And so we really didn’t know how to sell well. And we had kind of maxed out the organic growth model. So I was actually very excited about talking to people who I thought knew how to run an air quotes, real company. There were definitely a lot of frustrations. Things move so much slower. I was not very politically astute at MindSolve our, our decision making model was yell at each other until somebody gave up and that did not serve me well as part of a bigger organization. And then I came to find out that, Richard Miles (12:58): So you’re really a consultant is what you’re telling me. You just tell other people to yell at you. And it sounds like a title of a great book or, you know, yell until you win right? Jeff Lyons (13:06): It’s probably a best seller, but it’s not a very good model. I’ve gotten definitely better models since then. But no, I think we definitely learned a lot post acquisition about the corporate world, how to sell to that world. Surprisingly, there were a lot of things we lucked into doing better at MindSolve. Then we’re done at the big publicly traded company that we went into. And we found that after a few years, that company was acquired by a private equity firm who was extremely focused on operational efficiency. And we looked at massive changes to how we approached management. So that was a big learning curve. Richard Miles (13:39): One thing that a lot of people talk about is AI, artificial intelligence and it’s going to take everyone’s job, right? Is this a sector loosely described as you, you weren’t consultants, but basically you are helping businesses do their business better, and by making the HR process across the board more efficient, is this something that you could write into a code, right? Where basically you’ve now got an automated way to swart and judge employees and give them training and so on. So is this in any way going to be, or is it already being affected by AI? Jeff Lyons (14:10): It is, at some total and it’s Skillsoft we have AI built into our code now and I think it’s an amazing tool. I think it can help you, but I don’t see it really replacing management judgment strategy, things like that. A good example is we use AI to look at, what do I know about you? What do I know about folks who are similar? And we can recommend, for example, developmental training, that’s better for you than if you just did a random search and found 200 courses on management communication. We’ll find the one that’s most relevant to you, almost like an Amazon matching, but there’s limits to that. As you know, you go into Amazon and you’ve bought a bathtub. Amazon thinks you want to buy five more bathtubs in the next week. It makes no sense, right? So there are those kinds limitations. Richard Miles (14:52): I stop at three bathtubs. I never buy that forth bathtub.So we’re not at a point where you ask Alexa what the weather is and she says, Jeff you’re fired, right? We’re not there yet right? Jeff Lyons (15:02): I don’t think so. And I think there’s cultural hurdles to that as well. People want a human safety net on that stuff. I think the technology can get you closer to a small set of decisions with good data to help you make a decision. But I think unless it’s just sort of a repeatable cookie cutter, kind of a problem, I don’t see AI solving a what’s best for the company. Richard Miles (15:23): And it seems to be the consensus on AI is that it will take away some jobs, but it really just helps people do their existing job better because it cuts out some of that mundane data gathering, I guess, or sorting. Right? Jeff Lyons (15:34): You know, I think people never ask the question of what new jobs is AI going to create. Right. And people think, Oh, well it’s just coding AI. It’s not that at all. What we saw with our technology is HR is spending 90% of their time on tactical logistical, moving data around not really adding value stuff. And when we can automate that, it frees up their time to do interesting things right? Drive the strategy of the business, which then creates more work and more growth and all of that. We never really downsized HR because we automated part of what they did. We freed up their time to add more value, to do more things. Richard Miles (16:06): So Jeff, now we sort of shift to the best part of the show and the one most likely to get subpoenaed in a few years. And that is what were you like as a kid, where you smart, curious, are you just someone whose parents drop them off at the mall as fast as they could, you know? And your a Jacksonville boy as well, so tell us a little bit about growing up in Jacksonville. What were you like? What did you do? That sort of thing? Jeff Lyons (16:25): I was a nerd that kind of sums up most of it. Richard Miles (16:28): It’s amazing how many Radio Cade guests describe themselves as nerds, it’s gotta be over 90%. So we’re doing something wrong here. I don’t know. Jeff Lyons (16:33): You’re definitely hiring to a profile. Look that just cuts out about 20 minutes of description right? Um, I was not at all athletic, I was super uncoordinated. I liked to do a lot of different creative stuff, all the normal nerd things in terms of reading and movies and watching Star Trek and I never really got big into the Star Trek versus Star Wars debate. I was more of, we can like everybody, Richard Miles (16:58): We can all get along here, we can. Jeff Lyons (17:00): Yeah, exactly, always did well in school to spite myself. I never applied myself at all until I got to college. Richard Miles (17:07): So you’re a little bit younger than I am. What was the cutting edge technology when you were say in ninth grade, what was the thing that everyone was talking about? Can you remember, or that you just had to have. Jeff Lyons (17:17): This is horrible. What we used to do was go to the Radio Shack in the mall and they would have their Tandy computer sitting out there and you could walk up and immediately just interrupt it and write little basic programs to scroll words at random, across the screen and do stupid stuff like that. Richard Miles (17:30): So Radio Shack, Tandy computers, maybe you are as old as I am. You just look, younger. Jeff Lyons (17:36): Keyboard built right into the monitor. You know, that kind of thing. I mean, that was just when Atari was coming out and Kaliko Vision and, and television and all that stuff. So that was kind of the hot stuff we wanted with just the home video games. We would spend all our time at the mall, arcade, Richard Miles (17:52): Re-programming. Okay. Was there a certain point in your childhood or later in high school where the idea of going into business of some sort of, kind of entrepreneur appealed to you? Or did you think about it? Did you have your own business? Did you know lawn business or whatever in high school, or did that come later? Jeff Lyons (18:07): I always worked. I was cutting yards when I was young. I worked through high school at a shoe store. That’s a nice embarrassing podcast we can save for later time. But I was never, I need to go start a business or dream of being an entrepreneur. It was more, I needed money. Richard Miles (18:22): So it’s a fine motivator. It works for a lot of people. Jeff Lyons (18:27): It went from, you know, wanting to be able to play video games at the mall to wanting to buy beer. There are always staples of life that I needed. No, it was more about that. And I think that’s one thing that served me well, it’s always had a decent work ethic. I was never afraid of working late. Richard Miles (18:41): Now you come from a family of engineers. Correct? Your father is a civil engineer. Right? And you have a couple of siblings that are engineers? Jeff Lyons (18:47): I have an older brother who yeah designs subdivisions. Richard Miles (18:51): Alright. But your degree was in, what? Was it software engineering? Jeff Lyons (18:55): No, my degree was in mechanical engineering. So back to your question of wanting to start a business, now, I thought I’d go into engineering and I used that approximately zero days after graduation. Richard Miles (19:07): So you graduate your mechanical engineering degree and what did you do? Jeff Lyons (19:09): Well, I was working part time for some folks in Gainesville doing software development. That’s what got me into software and then when, Richard Miles (19:15): Again, what year are we talking about here? Jeff Lyons (19:17): I started working with them in 90 and I graduated in 94. Richard Miles (19:22): So software was still kind of in its infancy in terms of, Jeff Lyons (19:25): Very much so.Yeah. I mean, we were writing really rudimentary code, but also doing really neat stuff. We doing three dimensional models and walkthroughs of, of hotel ballrooms, really, really neat stuff. And when I graduated, we had been developing some software that we decided to take to market. So that was kind of the first startup pre MindSolve, which was a big failure, but fun. And so I had this offer to come be employee number two, working out of a defunct dentist office in Gainesville. And my other offer was a company that was in the fortune one at the time. And so, uh, those were the two ends of the bell curve. And I said, well, I’ll go give this a shot. And if it doesn’t work out after a year, I can go back to being an engineer. And I did that these little one year, i’ll just give it one more year for quite a while and that led to today, basically. Yeah, so that was the last time I got a job was straight out of college. Richard Miles (20:17): Okay. Well, I hope you’ve worked on your resume recently. Jeff Lyons (20:21): Yeah. There was not a lot of planning involved or this was not a, this is what I want to do with my life. There was a lot of being open to stuff and working really hard and people going, Hey, come solve this problem for me. Richard Miles (20:31): Well, so that’s kind of a nice segue into my next question is asking you your words of wisdom and maybe you don’t have any words of wisdom, Jeff, I don’t know, but most people do or they make it up on the spot, but let’s say you magically encounter that the 22 year old version of Jeff Lyons, probably in the arcade at the video games, what would you say? What would you tell him aside from always wipe off the fingerprints, what would you say to that person? Jeff Lyons (20:53): You know, it’s really funny, I’m really of two minds of it because I think I’ve had a really fun life. I think it’s been really rewarding and I’ve liked the journey, but there’s a big part of me saying, don’t do what I did. I mean, we made like every mistake you can make. I was very lucky to have great mentors and advisors early on, right? Even though one of my co-founders, Dan and I were sort of straight out of college. Our third co-founder was a guy who had been an entrepreneur for a long time, was able to give us great advice was a very calming influence on, on a couple idiots, straight out of school. So I did have that, but I still think, just get more advice of people who had done it. There was no real startup community. And in Gainesville, um, as you said, software and the technology, Richard Miles (21:32): There wasn’t a startup community until like 2006 or 2007? You waited a long while. Jeff Lyons (21:35): This was before the.com boom. I mean, there was no model. And so we were just kinda making it up as we went along and our story is great and it sounds fun and everything until you realize that we had a competitor of similar size that we had better technology, but they knew how to sell things and were connected and invested. Right? And that company later sold to SAP for $4 billion. So I probably would have preferred to run that company. Um, all things being equal so, Richard Miles (22:05): Well then you wouldn’t be in a booth with me, it’d be on your private jet somewhere. So lets just be honest here right. Jeff Lyons (22:10): So we probably tried to do things too much on a shoe string. I think being well-funded especially now is even more important. So that’s a pretty easy lesson to share is don’t be afraid to give up a little bit of control to people. You’d benefit from them having a little bit of control and who can bring a lot of funding and not suffocate the business. Richard Miles (22:28): Well, it’s interesting because you hear a lot from other people saying, give up control, any control at your peril and don’t take any money because they’ll take over and so on. But it’s interesting counterpoint that that may limit a lot of what you can actually do. You don’t have the resources. Jeff Lyons (22:43): Yeah. Very much. And I’ve seen the downside of that as well. The other thing I’d say is more on a personal level versus a professional for me coming out of engineering school and just being a very technical oriented type of a person we joked around before about kind of the communication style and the debate style that decisions got made. But in reality, it took me about 10 years to realize that other people have feelings and that most people don’t enjoy vigorous debate as much as I do. And that I think held me back from being an effective leader for a long time. So to somebody who can recognize that handicap in themselves, paying more attention to the people side versus the technical side will serve you very well. Richard Miles (23:25): Well, Jeff, my invoice for counseling is already hit probably about a thousand dollars here. So I’m going to have to wrap this up, but Jeff Lyons author of the soon to be written book yell until you get what you want. Jeff, thanks very much for coming on to Radio Cade, wish you all the best in your professional career. And I look forward to having you back on the show. Jeff Lyons (23:43): Richard, it was a lot of fun. Thank you. Richard Miles (23:45): I’m Richard Miles. Outro (23:46): Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and vendor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song featuring violinist, Jacob Lawson and special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.

How do you measure the performance of people whose achievements are hard to measure? Building on the work of Harold Fethe, Jeff Lyons founded MindSolve, a company that developed a technology which made employee evaluations more accurate and more reliable. The company did well and was sold, and Jeff made the challenging transition from founder to employee. A self-described “nerd,” Jeff as a kid used to secretly reprogram Tandy computers at the Radio Shack in the Jacksonville mall. He said “not a lot of planning was involved” in his career, “it was more “just being open to stuff and people who say, ‘come solve this problem for me." *This episode is a re-release.*

Show notes Episode blog post: What does the Bible say about false teachers? Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx at Monergism.com Text for Precious Remedies provided by GraceGems.org What’s the big deal about false teachers? Why should we learn to […] The post Episode 42: How to Avoid False Teachers appeared first on Theodio.

Show notes: Episode blog post: How great the Father s love: How to stop worrying and love your election Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx at Monergism.com Text for Precious Remedies provided by GraceGems.org Why pursue a relationship with Christ if he […] The post Episode 41: The One Thing You Must Do appeared first on Theodio.

Show notes: Episode blog post: Come, ye sinners: Jesus is willing to save Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx at Monergism.com Text for Precious Remedies provided by GraceGems.org Welcome back to the Theodio Podcast, I’m your host Dan Kassis. We’re […] The post Episode 40: Does Jesus Really Want Me? appeared first on Theodio.

Show notes: Episode blog post: Man of sorrows: Why feelings aren’t required for faith Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx at Monergism.com Text for Precious Remedies provided by GraceGems.org Sorrow is not a prerequisite for salvation. Learn why you shouldn t […] The post Episode 39: I’m Sorry, So Sorry appeared first on Theodio.

Show notes: Episode blog post: Worthy is the Lamb: The one measure that matters to God “Is He Worthy?” by Andrew Peterson: Spotify | Apple Music | Youtube Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx at Monergism.com Text […] The post Episode 38: Who Is Worthy? appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode An introduction to chapter 6 of Precious Remedies The parable of the hidden treasure The relevant segment of our audiobook Notes from the blog Show notes Episode blog post: Mighty to save: How Jesus out-loves your sin Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity […] The post Episode 37: How Jesus Out-Loves Your Sin appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode A review of chapters 2-4 A breakdown of how Thomas Brooks lays out chapter 5 A relevant comparison to Star Wars This episode’s audiobook segment, from chapter 5 Show notes Episode blog post: Unity: The indispensable quality of an unconquerable church Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story […] The post Episode 36: The Church United appeared first on Theodio.

Do you know the common mistakes agents make on social media? How about which type of content to post and when to post it?Do you really know if you're creating the right posts at the right time? Jeff Lyons wants to teach you social media mistakes that agents make and how to avoid them.

This week on Beer Sessions Radio, Jimmy is covering one of the best weeks of the year, NYC Beer Week! For the first part of the show, Jimmy welcomes Ann Reilly from the NYC Brewers Guild; Jim Betz from Coney Island Brewery in Brooklyn, NY; and Jeff Lyons from Endless Life Brewing in Brooklyn, NY. Then in the second half, Jimmy catches up with Kat Telesca and Vic Pitula from Coney Island Brewery; Meg Rickerson from Someday Bar NYC in Brooklyn, NY; and Fee Doyle from Beer Witch in Brooklyn, NY. Ann starts the conversation by highlighting the beer boxes created by the NYC Brewers Guild, both as a way to celebrate beer week and also share NYC beer with customers outside of the city. Jim gets everyone excited about the special beer Coney Island Brewing is featuring in a beer box, and also explains how they are supporting the NYC Hospitality Alliance. Ann then offers us an update on the state of NYC craft beer, and Jeff highlights a couple of special moments from the past year. The second part of the show is all about the women. Opening her own bar just seven months before Covid-19 hit, Meg explains how the pandemic was a real crash course in bar ownership, forcing her to master everything from staple guns to small business loans. She also recently founded Save NYC Bars as a method to communicate the ripple effect that the pandemic has caused throughout the entire community. The gang all agrees that the history of beer is closely tied to women, and Kat, Vic, and Fee all chime in with interesting stories about the connection between beer, women, and witches. Finally, we hear about some exciting new beers and favorites, and Meg shouts out a special beer that supports lesbian-run bars, which is another underrepresented community that is struggling in the beer scene.Photo Courtesy of Ann Reilly.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support Beer Sessions Radio by becoming a member!Beer Sessions Radio is Powered by Simplecast.

In this episode A story that illustrates today’s lesson The relevant segment of our audiobook Notes from the blog Show notes Episode blog post: Perspective: See the struggle for holiness through a gospel lens Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against […] The post Episode 35: The Struggle for Holiness appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode An encouragement about your emotions The relevant segment of our audiobook Notes from the blog Show notes Episode blog post: Failure: Learn how to overcome persistent sin Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s Devices by John Hendryx […] The post Episode 34: Fail, Repent, Repeat appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode An encouragement about your emotions The relevant segment of our audiobook Notes from the blog Show notes Episode blog post: What do I do when my feelings don’t match my faith? Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against […] The post Episode 33: Faith vs. Feelings appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode A reminder to subscribe to our newsletter Some thoughts about the differences between saving grace and restraining grace A longer-than-usual segment from chapter 4 of our audiobook Notes from the blog Show notes Episode blog post: What is true grace? Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original […] The post Episode 30: What We Talk About When We Talk About Grace appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode of Three Point Stance Magazine, Brandon Rush and Jeff Lyons react to the Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs, set the table for Sunday's AFC & NFC Championship games, and predict who will be playing in Super Bowl LV. Plus news about Tennessee firing Jeremy Pruitt.

Today we have a special guest panel here to share 4 real estate marketing tips for 2021. Amy Izzo, Jeff Lyons, and Lani Fisher discuss the things you should absolutely be focusing on right now.

In this episode of Three Point Stance Magazine, Brandon Rush and Jeff Lyons react to Alabama's blowout win over Ohio State in the College Football Playoff National Championship Game, SUPER Wild Card Weekend in the NFL, the Eagles and Bears coaching decisions, and Urban Meyer landing in Jacksonville.

In this episode A reminder to subscribe to our newsletter Another impression! A segment from chapter 4 of our audiobook Notes from the blog Show notes Episode blog post: Faith: an inconceivable reality Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at Light & Story Original music: Makeup and Vanity Set Kindle version of Precious Remedies against Satan s […] The post Episode 28: Blessed Assurance appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode of Three Point Stance Magazine, Brandon Rush and Jeff Lyons react to Black Monday firings, look ahead to SUPER Wild Card Weekend in the NFL, Monday nights National Championship game between Alabama and Ohio State, plus other bits and pieces of news from around the world of football.

In this episode: Happy 2021! A reminder to subscribe to our newsletter A review of chapters 1-3 The story of the paralytic by the pool at Bethesda The first segment from chapter 4 of our audiobook Show notes Episode blog post: Do you want to be healed? Podcast introduction: Yabo Obien Logo design: Jeff Lyons at […] The post Episode 27: Renewing Your Mind appeared first on Theodio.

In this episode of Gamblipod from Three Point Stance Magazine, Brandon Rush, Jeff Lyons, and The Fat Jack are ready to break down their favorite plays of the week, and launch this weekends 3-Teamer. If you want to make money betting the games all season long, you need to be signed up with The Fat Jack! Over twenty years in the business, helping you learn discipline in your wagering, and help you join that 3% of sports bettors who actually win money year-in and year-out. Call 1-800-298-1383 or the easiest way, go to FatJackSports.com, pick the length of the package you want, and win! *PLUS* As a listener of this show, if you use promo code FJ10 at sign up, you'll get 10% off ANY package.

In this episode of Three Point Stance Magazine, Brandon Rush and Jeff Lyons talk about the week that was, and set the table for this weekends action including the College Football Playoff Semi-Finals, Week 17 of the NFL, which coaches are getting fired on Monday, and more! This episode is presented by Drizly. Don't miss any of the action by making a beer run, get beer, wine, liquor, and supplies delivered to your door in under an hour.

Today's host Brandon Grass went from a high school dropout to starting his own cleaning business, to becoming a top agent in Canada. How did Brandon become so successful? It wasn't overnight - it was by taking consistent action every single day. In this huddle, Brandon shows us how he became successful through some very important strategies.

More online writing classes from Jeff: writers.comResources for writers: goodstorycompany.comPodcast: goodstorypodcast.comEditing services: marykole.comFind your critique partner: critcollective.com

Harold Fethe is the inventor of the Visual 360 Interface, a software tool to make rating employees more accurate and faster than traditional methods. Employees get to pick five colleagues who then rank the rated employees according to how they perform compared to other colleagues. Harold, an anthropologist by training, is also an accomplished jazz guitarist. “I use music analogies all the time,” he says. “Music is a phenomenon that has teamwork, underlying patterns with which you have to be competent, aesthetic decisions, and fairness.” TRANSCRIPT: Intro: 0:01 Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We’ll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we’ll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles: 0:37 Measuring employee performance. It’s hard to do, or is it? I’m your host Richard Miles and today on Radio Cade , I’ll be talking to Harold Fethe who has great experience in S and P 500 companies, also a founding principle at MindSolve Technologies and the inventor of the Visual 360 Interface. Welcome to the show Harold. Harold Fethe: 0:55 Thank you. Good to see you. Richard Miles: 0:57 So Harold , for a long time, listeners who have listened to every single one of the episodes, some of them may say, Hey, I’ve heard this before. And so I should mention to our listeners that this in fact is a companion episode to my interview last August with Jeff Lyons , another founding member of MindSolve. And I’m sure your accounts won’t vary by one I owe it to Harold. You’re going to completely corroborate each other’s stories. Harold Fethe: 1:21 Jeff and I can argue about whether it’s a nice day. Richard Miles: 1:24 He said you could provide an alibi. He didn’t, you can say what that was in reference to. Harold Fethe: 1:28 I love Jeff, we couldn’t be better buddies. And thank you for that tee up. Richard Miles: 1:31 So I encourage our listeners to go back and listen to that episode. It was a fun conversation August of 2019, entitled “Better Employee Evaluations” with Jeff Lyons . And if you don’t like this episode, you’re just not a lot of fun . I can’t really help you as a listener, but anyway, Harold, let’s get right into it. And let’s start by talking about your invention of the Visual 360 Interface. If I were a brand new employee at your company or one of your former companies, and you were trying to explain it to me, what does it do? And how does it make your life and my life easier? Harold Fethe: 2:00 Okay. So I’m going to speak to you that way. So I’m going to say, Richard, you just got here and you’re going to be working closely with people. And when it comes time to do the performance measurement, you’ll pick five or so people who work closely with you to evaluate your performance and you will be chosen by some people and you will evaluate their performance. And this is how we gather a consensus view because we’re a very teamwork, dependent teamwork oriented organization. If people aren’t collaborating faster than the competition, we’re in trouble. And so this is how we make our performance measurement harmonious with the culture and with the mission. And you get a chance to make input to people that you work with and they get a chance to make input about you. Richard Miles: 2:45 Harold, let me clarify for a second . I think I got that, but if I’m a brand new employee, do I get to pick any five people or do you give me guidelines on who are those five people? Harold Fethe: 2:54 You pick your five people and the safety valve. Cause that really was a good question is that your supervisor gets a look at your list and then they get a couple of edits. If they feel that the emphasizing something or emphasizing something too much. We didn’t see a lot of editing in the years in which we ran this system. And so it felt really fair and it served its purpose pretty well to have a check view by the supervisor, but a free choice by the employee themselves. Richard Miles: 3:21 It’s a little bit like jury selection, a peremptory challenge, right? The prosecutor can threat that jury out. So let’s get a handle on the timeframe. This was developed in the? Harold Fethe: 3:29 It was developed in the late 1990s and MindSolve, ran with that as our primary product offering through about 2006, when Sum Total acquired the company and took Jeff and Dan with them. Richard Miles: 3:42 It’s a piece of software, right? So this is not a paper exercise? Harold Fethe: 3:46 Every employee had a best top or laptop computer in the company. And you would just go in your email and you would get a link and you click on that link and you would open up to your rating session. And what you would see on the screen would be the characteristic on which you were evaluating your colleague. So I’ll take a real one, results. What were this person’s results in the last year? And the app would deal you four or five names, one at a time. And all you need to do was hang that name up on the left margin at the height of performance that you thought that person did. And then you get the next name and you put that person in comparison to the scale, but also in comparison to the other person’s performance. And that brings in a fairness element because most people don’t want to hurt another person. When they’re asked to evaluate, it’s an unnatural chore to ask people to do, but balancing that is they feel a need to be fair. And so when you see five of your colleagues all on screen at the same time, you really want to be fair to the ones who honestly are doing the best job you’ve got kind of like this wish to be lenient and help everybody. And then you’ve got this fairness thing saying, yeah, but I just really know that these people’s performance levels are not the same on this characteristic of results or on this characteristic of decision quality on this characteristic of problem solving. And that’s how it all comes along and gives people a sense of ownership. Richard Miles: 5:11 And internal accountability, I imagine. Right? Cause like you said, you can’t just say, all my colleagues are great in every way. It forces you to make some trade offs. Harold Fethe: 5:18 One particular group tried that. That’s called a rating circle. By the way, they figure it out. They say , we’ll all just give each other 25’s, which is the highest possible score. You know what you just did. You put everybody at the 50th percentile and it’s a dead ringer when we got those things back in HR, I just go, Hey listen, Mr. Area Director. I don’t think you’re really in the spirit of this. I see what you did, but we got no information and you’re still, Richard Miles: 5:43 Hurting the people probably . Harold Fethe: 5:44 Yeah, that’s right. Richard Miles: 5:45 So by the way you describe it here , I’m guessing this works best for companies if at least a certain size, right? If, cause he only got like four employees and this wouldn’t really make sense. Right? Harold Fethe: 5:55 Yes of course that’s right. It was driven the complexity of the company’s mission because we had a thousand employees or so, but we had five different technologies each with three or four candidate drug products in development. That’s a lot of complexity and the teamwork and collaboration goes logarithmic to that. And so we just needed help sorting out in this very complex network of endeavor and you had to go close to the person, that’s the best way to get the best information. Richard Miles: 6:24 This is something I told Jeff on the podcast with him. I started my career with the army, not a small organization right? And they had officer evaluations. They ran into this difficulty because over time it was traditional written paper evaluation. What are their strengths? And what are their achievements, all that sort of stuff. Of course over time, there really was only one. Well mostly one type of evaluation. This person is the next George Patton and immediately promote them and they’re ready to storm the beaches. Occasionally it’s like this person’s next Benedict Arnold. They should be, you know , escorted out . But most of them were like, they’re fine. So the army figured out this is not doing anybody any favors. And they came up and I remember it very clearly after you filled out all this stuff at the very end, obviously somebody thought we’re going to put a rating pyramid on here. And it forced everyone to say, this is the top 5% of officers I’ve ever worked with and so on and so on, but even better when a step further. And this is obviously what is motivating your system is that you could keep track of the rating of a rating officer so that if he gave every single officer top 5%, They’d say like, Harold Fethe: 7:26 You’re not fulfilling the assignment we gave you to distribute your scores . Richard Miles: 7:30 I always thought that was a brilliant system. I’m glad that somebody turned this into an actual, Harold Fethe: 7:34 Yeah. And that’s called forced ranking. Proportional ranking. And this did it, but with a visual interface, because when people are trying to describe comparisons, they talk with their hands all the time and up is always better. And so we said, let’s just put the names. This is what I thought would get rid of all the complexity of the predecessor. And when we started getting good statisticians, looking at it, we saw that we had plenty of data to provide reliability. And so it was just easier. And I’ll mention when we did the first test of this screen design, we hold people for comments. And most common thing I heard is it took me about a fifth of the amount of time because it’s so intuitive. People go slowly when they don’t trust the interface. And , and one of my favorite of all time career highlights was when someone said this thing is as easy and intuitive to use as a refrigerator. Richard Miles: 8:24 That’s great feedback. One of the things we talked a lot about on the show is how do you get great ideas to market? And then as you know, and most inventors entrepreneurs know most good ideas do not sell themselves. Somebody has to be out there making the pitch to investors. And so on. Tell us the circumstances of how did you take the Vision 360 Interface idea and translate that into a company were you working at a larger company? Were you on your own. I mean, you had a lot of different experiences. Harold Fethe: 8:53 I was at an S and P 500 with a thousand employees, very highly profitable. And we had a CEO change and the performance appraisal method that was ranking, the old CEO kinda got grumpy about it. And I thought, okay, part of the complaint was it’s so tedious and takes a lot of time. So I thought if we’re going to keep this method, which is very rigorous about figuring out who’s doing a better job, we’re going to have to make it a lot easier for people to work with. So I designed the interface and I had a little chili cook off between our own internal IT department and Jeff and Dan and Charles who flew out to California to bid on the job. And our internal IT department was just finding every reason in the world why this programming task was not traditional. They didn’t like it. They were too busy. HR didn’t have high priority. And Jeff and Dan and Charles were just all over. It’s like, yes, we can do everything you’re asking us for. And we’ll show you how to get a whole lot more internal controls and things like that into it. And they had just reprogrammed a lot of their stuff for bank quality programming. And Dan had the intellectual courage to say, we need to do everything that we have up to the quality of a bank ATM that we just learned how to do. And so they rewrote all their code. I’m going , that’s all the integrity you could ever ask for. And so that’s how it got written in the first place, just for AUSA , which was this little thousand person company. We ran it for a couple of years. Jeff and Dan graduated, Jeff Lyons and Dan Buccabell, I’m sorry. Yeah, they were Charles Stedham was the founder and Jeff and Dan were his interns who were graduating. And he had said, if you guys want to go off into the job market, I’m not going to try to hold you back. But if you want to start a company together, I’ll get with you and we’ll figure out how to keep working together and do a venture. So all this was in the timing that they had this contract programming job from me. And they started looking at various, according to Dan anyway, who made the pitch to me, they started looking at various options to go into a software business. And they thought that this app that they had designed for AUSA and its crew of persnickety, highly scientifically literate, numerous demanding employees was a good entry into the marketplace of performance measurement. So they asked if we would do a licensing deal and God bless our entrepreneurial CEO. I went to my Friday executive meeting and said, here’s what we want to do. I would like one day a month, which is 5% of my time to do this, in addition to running the human resources function for the company. And he said, go for it. And I said, okay, I’ll come back in three or four months and let you know how it’s going. And he said, no, just go do it. You could not ask for more than that out of your CEO. And so we did Richard Miles: 11:39 Harold, did you have a software background at this point? Is that, Harold Fethe: 11:41 No, no I’m an anthropology by training. Richard Miles: 11:45 Okay. I was going to say, so what made you think, or what gave you the courage, I guess, to decide that this was the thing to do? You’re basically, Harold Fethe: 11:54 I’m very intellectually arrogant . I really spent a lot of time hanging out with cognitive stuff. How do you intake information? What do you do with it and how do people confuse themselves? Okay. And studying other cultures and how their worldview affects performance on westernized tests and all of the disconnects in that variety of, Richard Miles: 12:17 So you’re really more of an expert in performance evaluation, testing, human psychology. That was yours , right ? Harold Fethe: 12:22 Yes. That was it. Richard Miles: 12:23 So you weren’t a tech guy? Harold Fethe: 12:25 I wrote one simple little program when I was a lab tech. That’s it. Richard Miles: 12:28 And so tell me then about the life of MindSolve was the name of the company that you jointly formed. What happened to MindSolve? What was the duration of that? Harold Fethe: 12:36 Well, we wrote up a licensing agreement and I spent one day a month with the MindSolve guys and they went out and started marketing this to other companies. And the first companies tended to be in Silicon Valley. We had Netflix as a client. We had Protein Design Labs, which is the source of a lot of Genentech’s products. They were a client. We had the Foxwood Casinos and things like that. We had some marquee clients in the early going and Dan figured out that we were in like 180 of the countries of the world with Raiders giving feedback to people elsewhere in the world about their performance, even though they weren’t co-located, they worked together. So that company just grew organically. When we got a few seed crystals from referrals, just as the thing that was originally designed to be for an executive bonus program. And the executive said, this is a good system. I want it for my department. And we didn’t even really have to sell it in the beginning in the company because they’d seen it. And they were much happier with their bonus allocation methods and they wanted it for their own departments. And all we had to do is a little cleanup at the end because it actually kind of sold itself from seeing a cycle of it versus that executive bonus meeting. People would spend all day and they’d come back and they’d be ready to quit. The company. These vice presidents had been so acrimonious. We just fixed it the first time they did it with the comparison based rating. They were back by 10:30 in the morning. And nobody was mad, Richard Miles: 14:02 So MindSolve started with, it sounds like about four or five employees, how large did it get? Harold Fethe: 14:06 It, got to maybe 50 employees when Sum Total acquired us. Richard Miles: 14:10 And did you find being the top dog or one of the top dogs, right? Was that a different experience than being the HR guy? Did you see things differently in terms of managing, evaluating, employees ? Harold Fethe: 14:21 I didn’t come up an HR track. They asked me to start and found an HR department, but I never thought of myself that way. In the first place I kept telling my CEO, I’m a general manager and I’m happy to hold this HR position and help be the guardian of the culture. That’s what they told me my job was. But if you got more stuff, I’m up for it. So I never really experienced it as a change because I was used to making management and I was used to coaching all the managers on their management decisions. And so, no, it really wasn’t a qualitative shift or quantitative either actually. Richard Miles: 14:52 So Harold, like a lot of creative people, you actually have at least one second life. And that is as a jazz guitarist. That’s the one I know about, you know , very accomplished jazz guitarist with at least one album to your name that I know of it, you probably have more. You’ve also played with a lot of great musicians over the last few years here in Florida and elsewhere. And I’m guessing that running a tech company is exactly like playing guitar in a dimly lit bar, right? I mean, there’s basically not a real difference or are there similarities? What are the differences ? Harold Fethe: 15:22 That’s a good question. I love that question. I used music analogies in my management development with people reporting to me and elsewhere in the company all the time, because music is a phenomenon that has teamwork. It has underlying patterns with which you have to be competent. It has individual skills with which you have to be competent to stay in that particular level with your band. It has vague problems. Like what is a good solo that’s musical that moves along that keeps you in sync with the band. It has aesthetic decisions and it’s got fairness involved in the teamwork. So really truly it’s another one of those things where it sounds different, but the process I would go through to get to a good answer felt pretty comparable to me. Richard Miles: 16:10 I listened to a podcast a while back the subject of the podcast was essentially how computers are not necessarily computers, but the fact that you can have perfect time on recordings. Some musicians really didn’t like, because they said, and I don’t know if I fully understood the concept. They said, actually, there’s something one of them called lived time. And what the musician meant by that is there’s no such thing as perfect time what the band is playing, that’s the time. But what I took from that, I thought it was a great paradigm because in real life, right, you are constantly adjusting to somebody else’s speed. And in a very literal sense, as a musician, you’re listening, they’re listening to you. And the speed of the piece ends up being what everyone else adjusted to. It’s not a perfect time, right? Harold Fethe: 16:51 That is a great observation. I’ll recommend to you. A man named Rick Beato has stuff on YouTube for free. He’s a fine musician. He took a track from a Justin Bieber album. That was an automated computerized drum track that he sinked up with one of the most soulful drummers Bernard Purdie Purdie. And he allows you to hear just the drum track from the Bieber album, with the same rhythmic pattern. And then you hear Bernard and you listen to Bieber and yes, there is no mistake cause then computer. And then it clicks over to Purdie and he starts squirming around in your seat and Patting and your foot. And all of a sudden the music got you and carried you somewhere. And that’s, Richard Miles: 17:32 Right. Cause it’s more an expression of the soul, you know , it’s not , not a computer . Yeah . Tell me a little bit about the music world. You’re probably a little bit like me and a lot of people don’t know what the hell you do, right? Because you do a lot of different things. And so you can have it lots of different worlds. So people aren’t quite sure is this guy, an inventor, is he a musician? Is he an entrepreneur as well ? So you go to a different place as a musician? Harold Fethe: 17:56 Well, I had to write a third person autobiography where you interview yourself. When I started with fretboard journal, a guitar magazine, and I thought, okay, this is my chance to say something ornery about this whole subject. And so I put in my own behalf, he believes that lack of focus is the key to a happy life. So with that thought, I write songs now I never did until 2011. And then I got one plate on car talk because I grew up in a used car lot with my dad. And I wrote music for a Lord, Byron poem, a 12 line poem from 1819. And it put me in a mood that went with the sort of harmony that Duke Ellington and Harry Warren and those great melancholy Balladeers of the mid 20th century were able to do. And I thought I can build a landing strip in 2019 for this 1819 poem. I bet you, it was sounded like it all should go together. That was an interesting project. It took me three months and about four passes to get it all to work well, once I realized that Lord Byron was the boss and the melody had to serve Lord Byron’s lyric and the harmony had to serve the melody. I was trying all things in parallel in the beginning. And once I got it straight, I’m happy with it. And I’m often not happy with stuff I do, but that was fun. I play gigs in the downtown San Jose jazz scene. I do experimental stuff with a music major, a woman singer and guitarist. And we do all kinds of repertoire that we almost hardly ever disagree. So the great thing about music is there are so many things you can hang out with and they all kind of cross fertilize one another. And as long as you’re practicing and able to execute on your instrument, it all informs the process of being a musician. Richard Miles: 19:35 So Harold inventors and entrepreneurs and creative people often tend to have very interesting backgrounds, very interesting childhoods. And I can’t let escape the fact that you said you grew up on a car lot with your dad. So I sense there’s a story behind that. So why don’t you elaborate on that? What was life like for you as a kid? Where were you raised? What were your parents like? Harold Fethe: 19:54 I was raised in Jacksonville, Florida. My father went through a process of being a rebellious kid who got drafted into World War II, who went through a screening test and went straight to officer’s school cause he had high native intellect and he came home and was a very devoted, creative, inventive, father. And he had a handful with me because if they had ADD tests, I would have cleared the bar by three feet. I just was highly distractible , but he kept me focused to deal with the school system. And I did score high on standardized tests and I was the youngest kid ever to win the spelling bee in the fourth grade, I beat fourth graders, fifth graders, sixth graders, seventh graders. And I never lost again. And I aged out of the system. So Harold is a nerdy name, but I thought, well, maybe I can tote the load as this. And so I just kind of identified with being a nerd and my dad got a kick out of it. And I loved hanging around, down on the used car lot because it was real life. It was people making decisions and the salesman or trying to get the person to make an impulsive decision and a person doesn’t know what to do. And there’s all kinds of humor about the contest. And I also wanted to write a song from the car salesman’s point of view. Cause everybody has all kind of jabs and elbows for the used car sales when they’ve dealt with who were nasty people and some of them are, but some of them are just good natured guys who can get you off the fence on the day. They’d rather you get off the fence instead of giving you another three weeks to buy it from somebody else. I mean, really, I can’t even begin to say where it begins and ends my father’s interest and patience in getting this kid, keep me off the guardrail , show me the fun of work and keep me working on something. Richard Miles: 21:32 Great story, Harold. And you are really a creative person. I’ve seen a lot of creative folks on this show, but you’re sort of on the 10 of 10 scale, we didn’t even get a chance to talk about the movies that are the documentaries have been involved with. And I think that can easily be a whole nother show about some very good musicians in Florida and elsewhere, but thanks very much for coming on Radio Cade . Harold Fethe: 21:52 Thanks for the invitation. I love the Cade operation and I’m happy to help anytime I can. Richard Miles: 21:56 Thank you. For Radio Cade, Richard Miles signing off. Outro: 22:00 Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews, podcasts are recorded at Heartwood, Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak. The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy columns and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.

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