Podcasts about Map

Over the years, we've had hundreds of conversations on this podcast about what it means to build a sustainable, profitable product brand. And some of those conversations are just too juicy. They're too good to live in the archives. Today, I'm bringing one back. What you're about to hear is a short clip from a past episode. It's a topic that has stuck with me and still feels very relevant today.These throwback episodes are intentionally short and to the point because sometimes you don't need a full deep dive.All right, let's dive in.You can listen to the full episode with Danielle Coke of Oh Happy Dani here: http://prooftoproduct.com/189 Quick Links:Free Wholesale Audio SeriesFree Resources LibraryFree Email Marketing for Product MakersPTP LABSPaper CampMentioned in this episode:Take the free quiz!Map out your next 90 days here: http://prooftoproduct.com/quiz

This week on The Neurodivergent Experience, Jordan and Simon are joined by the show's in-house therapist and Mindful Mondays host Ashley Dupuy for four Reddit stories exploring therapy, parenting, disability, neurodivergence and the complicated line between support and autonomy.First, a father questions why his teenage daughter needs to continue therapy when, in his eyes, she should have already dealt with her trauma. The conversation explores why healing doesn't work to somebody else's timetable, the importance of trusting the therapeutic process, and what happens when financial concerns collide with a young person asking for help.Then, a parent wonders whether speech therapy is really worth paying for when their fast-talking nine-year-old can technically be understood. Jordan, Simon and Ashley discuss communication differences, the danger of defining support purely around whether other people find someone inconvenient, and why “there's nothing wrong with her” doesn't necessarily mean there's nothing she could benefit from support with.The third story introduces a much more complicated question: can too much support hold a neurodivergent child back? A parent declines an IEP for their six-year-old autistic daughter after feeling that her previous school was “coddling” her. The discussion looks at independence versus accommodation, learned helplessness, individualised support, parental fear about the future and why the answer doesn't have to be either support them with everything or make them cope alone. Finally, the conversation turns to a raw TrueOffMyChest post from a parent who loves her significantly disabled son but hates what their lives have become. It opens up a difficult discussion around caregiver exhaustion, grief, resentment, guilt and the uncomfortable feelings parents and carers may experience but feel they are never allowed to say aloud. Plus, Ashley introduces From Mask to Map, her new eight-week programme exploring late neurodivergent discovery, identity, masking, nervous-system regulation and finding out who you are underneath the roles you've learned to play. https://www.integrativeiom.co.uk/from-mask-to-map*The stories discussed in this episode are public Reddit posts. Titles may be shortened for readability, and all opinions expressed are those of the original posters.• AITA for telling my daughter to limit her therapy sessions• AITA for not wanting to waste money on speech therapy for my daughter• AITA for declining an IEP for my child?• My son has significant disabilities, and I hate that this is my lifeOur Sponsors:

Welcome to the Change The Map podcast, where we inspire, educate, and resource you to transform the Buddhist world through prayer and action. Join us as we explore the mystical world of Buddhism. Discover its unique challenges, meet Buddhist background followers of Jesus, and engage in strategic prayer to change the spiritual map of the Buddhist world.This month, Josh is joined by Pastor Mike Lugones, lead pastor of Life Point Church in Crestview, Florida and a longtime friend. On this episode, Mike shares his testimony of how God took an ordinary, unlikely life and turned it into something extraordinary, proof that God can use anyone willing to say yes to him.

We police and do drugs Disco Elysium - The Final Cut. Developer: ZA/UM | Publisher: ZA/UM | Initial Release: October 15th, 2019 PLAYERS: Jacob McCourt (Bluesky) Travis Colenutt (Bluesky) Katie Lesperance (Bluesky) Alex Martin SHOW NOTES: 0:00 - Intro 1:40 - Housekeeping 2:25 - Fast Pitch 4:10 - How Do You Play It 2026 - Buyer Beware! 9:20 - Explaining Disco Elysium 18:55 - Voices 22:00 - What Kind of Cop Are You? 23:15 - The Telltale Binary 28:00 - Accidental Racism 30:35 - Good Cop/Bad Cop 33:30 - Auto-Save 37:00 - The Tie & Other Clothing 45:10 - ZA/UM Mentioned 49:45 - Map & Clock 55:20 - The Hanged Man 1:00:20 - Drugs and Alcohol BLUESKY: leftbehindgameclub.bsky.social DISCORD: The Left Behind Game Club is a monthly game club podcast that focuses on positivity and community. To talk to members of the community, join our Discord server!

Most account managers wait for upsell opportunities. Mark Kosoglow and Armand Farrokh break down how great AMs create expansion pipeline by proving value, owning executive relationships, and systematically finding whitespace across their accounts.

With 88 working days left until the end of the year, how will you choose to spend your time? September can bring a 'new pencil case' feeling – a useful opportunity to reset and refocus on what matters most. In this episode, Helen and Sarah share eight questions to help you use the rest of your working year well and wisely. Exploring priorities, time, people and skills, they reflect on their own answers and the actions they're going to take as a result.

This week, learn how John evaluates the current multifamily market and decides whether to buy, sell, or hold. John opens with the question he hears most often from investors in the current portfolio: what is the outlook, and where does the firm stand as a buyer or a seller today? John explains what has changed. Higher interest rates raised the cost of capital and made it harder to find deals that pencil, while higher savings rates gave investors a low risk alternative that did not exist a few years ago. He walks through the framework he uses in response: separate what you cannot control from what you can, start with operations and the value add upside still available, then weigh that against the runway left on the loan. He also makes the case for thinking like a trader of assets, explains why leverage determines who wins a trade, and shares why he believes multifamily fundamentals remain healthy despite the short term pressure in the market.     Make sure to download our free guide, 7 Questions Every Passive Investor Should Ask, here.     Key Takeaways Stop spending energy on variables you cannot control Evaluate every deal individually before making portfolio decisions Weigh the value add upside still available against the time left on the loan Never put yourself in a position where you are forced to sell Treat assets as trades and know where your leverage sits Expect forced sellers over the next 12 to 18 months to create buying opportunities     Topics What Investors Are Asking Right Now Investors want to know the outlook and whether the firm is buying or selling Most deals in the portfolio are cash flowing, though not at past distribution levels Why the Market Has Changed Higher interest rates raised the cost of capital and thinned the pool of deals that pencil High yield savings accounts now pay a decent return for far less risk Investors are more cautious after deals that did not perform as projected Focus on What You Can Control John tracks the economy, the Treasury, and the value of the dollar without fixating on them Interest rates in 2027 and election driven policy changes sit outside any operator's control Awareness informs the projection; energy goes toward internal execution Operations Come First Every deal gets reviewed individually for performance, cash flow, and remaining upside If rents can still be pushed and demand is strong, keep executing the business plan Once the value add is captured, the deal moves into a second phase Loan Term Drives the Exit Decision A short runway with the value already captured points toward selling sooner A longer runway with upside remaining supports holding the asset Most deals fall between those two cases and require weighing both factors Selling on Your Terms John is a seller at the right price but wants to stay in control of the timing He expects some operators to be forced to sell over the next 12 to 18 months Groups already exiting at a loss will create opportunities for prepared buyers Why Multifamily Fundamentals Remain Healthy Population growth and the housing shortage have not gone away New construction starts have tapered off after several heavy supply years Midwest markets such as Cincinnati saw smaller swings in both directions The Trade Mindset Brokers talk about assets trading, and John applies the same framing as an investor The mindset centers on a clear business plan and a defined exit instead of an indefinite hold John compares the approach to running a sports team as a general manager Leverage Wins Trades Owning an asset other buyers want is what creates leverage Anyone forced to offload a deal rarely gets the number they wanted Positioning for competition, demand, and a strong story protects value at exit Reading Market Sentiment What buyers are willing to pay matters more than John's own view of value The firm buys when the business plan works and the price makes sense Evaluation is continuous, not a position set in stone      

Today's conversation is about building a business that truly evolves alongside your life and also having the courage to reinvent yourself more than once along the way. I'm joined by one of my clients, Melissa Hyatt. She is an artist, a surface pattern designer, and an entrepreneur.Before launching her own product brand, Melissa spent more than 2 decades designing textiles, wallpaper, home decor, and licensed products for major brands in New York. She eventually served as the design director for Waverly Fabrics. Today, she brings all of that industry experience and knowledge into her own business where she creates stationery, watercolor art, and beautifully created watercolor kits that are helping more people reconnect with their creativity. In this episode, Melissa shares how her career evolved from the corporate design world to entrepreneurship, why she intentionally built multiple revenue streams in her business, and how one unexpected setback became kind of the catalyst for creating a business that's more resilient and also more fulfilling for her. We also dive into her wildly successful watercolor kits, the product development process behind them, and how following her curiosity has opened doors that she never really expected.I really love Melissa's perspective on experimentation, perseverance, and creating products that create a meaningful impact in people's lives. If you've ever wondered whether it's too late to pivot or launch something new or reinvent your business, I think you will find so much encouragement in today's conversation.Today's episode is brought to you by our Is Wholesale Right for You workshop. Wholesale is not the only way to make money selling your products. Selling in bulk to retail stores that order multiple times a year instead of relying on one-off direct-to-consumer sales— yes please! Whether you are brand new to wholesale or you've hit a sales plateau, this free 25-minute on-demand workshop will give you actionable steps that you can take to strengthen your wholesale sales and marketing right away. SIGN UPYou can view full show notes and more at http://prooftoproduct.com/458 Quick Links:Free Wholesale Audio SeriesFree Resources LibraryFree Email Marketing for Product MakersPTP LABSPaper CampMentioned in this episode:Take the free quiz!Map out your next 90 days here: http://prooftoproduct.com/quiz

Taking inspiration from the Disney Map, Jen and Pete noodle on what their own mind maps might look like, and how they might be created in the first place. Specifically, in this episode Jen and Pete talk about: What is the Disney Map? How might seemingly disparate projects actually be related? What does the 30,000 foot map look like for Pete and Jen? And what about the sea level map? More from us in your inbox. Subscribe to Box O' Goodies. A weekly email with the books, podcasts, quotes, and other noodles Jen and Pete are mulling over.Listen to all episodes and read full transcripts at thelongandtheshortpodcast.com.Reach us: hello@thelongandtheshortpodcast.comPete's work: humanperiscope.com · Jen's work: jenwaldman.com

Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are unregulated storefronts that exist as a way of pushing out anti-abortion misinformation and blocking people's access to care through deception, shame, delay, and intimidation. Tara Romano, Executive Director of Pro-Choice North Carolina, talks to us about North Carolina's CPC landscape.The term "crisis pregnancy center" refers to anti-abortion facilities that mislead, confuse, delay, misinform, and purposefully re-direct pregnant people looking for education and services, including abortion care. North Carolina has 16 abortion clinics and approximately 100 CPCs, which are typically clustered around college campuses. CPCs in the state began receiving money from the sale of “Choose Life” license plates and $350,000 from general funds in 2013. By 2023, the number was closer to $20 million. Because these are not medical centers, they do not have medical restrictions or medical privacy restrictions. Map photo citation: Swartzendruber A and Lambert D. Crisis Pregnancy Center Map. https://www.cpcmap.com. August 17, 2026. Accessed: August 24, 2026.For more information, check out When Science Finds a Way: https://wellcome.org/insights/podcastSupport the showFollow Us on Social: Twitter: @rePROsFightBack Instagram: @reprosfbFacebook: rePROs Fight Back Bluesky: @reprosfightback.bsky.socialBuy rePROs Merch: Bonfire store Email us: jennie@reprosfightback.comRate and Review on Apple PodcastThanks for listening & keep fighting back!

Today I have the honor and privilege to speak with poet and physician Fady Joudah about his stunning new book-- Exhibit G: Poems, Essays, and Photographs of Gaza. Along with powerful and demanding texts, Exhibit G features a collection of photographs of Gaza presented in collaboration with Hani Almadhoun and the Gaza Soup Kitchen. Together, we are confronted with a demand to witness without translating the experience into what Joudah calls “Palestine in English.” The totality of the experience is at once devastating, horrifying, but also at times beautiful and literally beyond words. Along with reading portions of the essays and poems, Fady Joudah offers his usual probing readings of Palestinian history, culture, literature, and social life. No other document so forcefully and comprehensively expresses this genocide.Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator. He was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He was educated at the University of Georgia, the Medical College of Georgia, and the University of Texas Health Sciences in Houston. In 2002 and 2005 he worked with Doctors Without Borders in Zambia and Sudan, respectively.Joudah's debut collection of poetry, The Earth in the Attic (2008), won the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, chosen by Louise Glück. Joudah followed his second book of poetry, Alight (2013) with Textu (2014), a collection of poems written on a cell phone wherein each piece is exactly 160 characters long. His fourth collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance (2018).  In 2014, Joudah was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. As critic Charles Bainbridge observed in a 2008 Guardian review of The Earth in the Attic, “Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.”Joudah translated  several collections of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's work in The Butterfly's Burden (2006), which won the Banipal prize from the UK and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and in If I Were Another, which won a PEN USA award in 2010. His translation of Ghassan Zaqtan's Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) won the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. His other translations include Amjad Nasser's Petra: The Concealed Rose and A Map of Signs and Scents.Joudah lives with his family in Houston, where he works as a physician of internal medicine.   

The September 1, 2026, edition of the Closing Market Report, hosted by Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason on Illinois Public Media, provides an in-depth review of key regulatory, market, agronomic, and weather developments impacting agriculture. Agricultural economist Scott Irwin discusses the EPA's decision to grant 1.8 billion gallons in small refinery exemptions (SREs) for 2025, explaining how the agency's supplemental rulemaking to reallocate 100% of those volumes into 2026 and 2027 mandates effectively neutralizes potential demand losses and supports the biodiesel and soy complex. Market analyst Naomi Blohm of Total Farm Marketing reviews the rally in soybean futures above $13 resistance, highlighting strong domestic demand, Chinese export sales, and the market impacts of geopolitical friction in the Black Sea and Middle East. Agricultural economist Nick Paulson explains how surging global sulfur prices—driven by Middle Eastern conflict and petroleum byproduct supply disruptions—are increasing the cost of MAP and DAP phosphate fertilizers ahead of fall applications. Finally, meteorologist Don Day of Day Weather breaks down the persistent, above-average heat across the Corn Belt and evaluates upcoming rainfall chances for early soybean planting in Brazil.01:05 Trump Admin's EPA SRE Announcement a Reallocation05:29 Ag Markets with Naomi Blohm, Total Farm Marketing10:27 Sulfur and Increasing Phosphate Fertilizer Prices20:20 Ag Weather with Don Day, Day Weather ★ Support this podcast ★

We please. We rescue. We perform. We hold everything together - until sometimes we disappear or reach for escape.But what if these familiar responses are not fixed identities? What if they are intelligent adaptations: ways we learned to secure safety, belonging, continuity or relief?Following last week's introduction to From Mask to Map, Ashley explores the Nine Adaptation Patterns at the heart of this developing body of work: the Pleaser, Rescuer, Performer, Chameleon, Strong One, Perfectionist, Controller, Vanisher and Escaper.Moving through the different ways we reach towards belonging, attempt to hold ourselves and the world together, or create distance from overwhelming intensity, Ashley considers the protective purpose, genuine strengths and present-day costs carried within each pattern.These are not diagnoses, personality types or nine new boxes in which to place ourselves. With careful attention to Neurodivergent Nuance, Ashley explores why the behaviour alone cannot reveal the whole pattern. Structure may be an essential accommodation rather than control. Solitude may be restoration rather than disappearance. Social fluency may be joyful expression rather than compulsory performance. What matters is the job the behaviour is performing, the freedom we have around it and the price we may now be paying.Ashley also returns to the work of Jungian analyst Dr James Hollis and his question of what, beyond survival, may be seeking expression through us as meaning and purpose.Through recollection, Shakespeare's “ravelled sleave of care” and the image of the Weaver, the episode becomes an invitation to gather every thread of our experience without mistaking any single pattern for the whole design.The episode closes with a brief guided practice, The Weaver and the Thread.The complete guided exploration of the Nine Adaptation Patterns - including discovering your own configuration and mapping the way forward - will be exclusive to the founding From Mask to Map group coaching and hypnotherapy cohort beginning on 15 September. The programme is fully online, limited to ten people and available worldwide, with replays provided for those unable to attend live.Spaces are still available. Visit integrativeiom.co.uk/from-mask-to-map for full details.Our Sponsors:

Prayer Moment 5 of 5 in AugustPrayer for Believers to Fight for BuddhistsOvercome the Works of the Enemy in Buddhists' Lives: Pray that God will remove barriers that keep people from knowing Jesus Christ. (2 Corinthians 4:4)Never Give Up on the Fight: Pray that believers will remain faithful in prayer and ministry to Buddhists. (2 Corinthians 10:3–5)Show Christ's Love Through Lasting Commitment: Pray that Buddhists will recognize the love of Christ through the faithfulness of believers. (Proverbs 18:24)

The sermon concludes a series on maintaining a quiet soul by emphasizing that true peace requires intentional spiritual discipline and structural routines. It urges believers to exercise themselves unto godliness through consistent Bible reading, deep meditation using the MAP method, and humble yielding to God's will. The message warns against competing gods and casual faith, advocating for specific daily habits like morning devotion and faithful church attendance. By submitting to Scripture and establishing a disciplined lifestyle, Christians can overcome inner turmoil and find lasting peace in Christ.

Send us Fan MailEpisode Zero: Transitioning Growth Notes From The MLO Project to The Mortgage AI PodcastFrazier announces the final episode of The MLO Project and introduces “episode zero” of The Mortgage AI Podcast, explaining that Growth Notes is pivoting to focus on where the mortgage industry is going and how to create the most impact with AI. Past episodes will remain available, and episode one of the new show launches September 1. Michael will still appear and also run some episodes, sharing firsthand experience from AI projects he's building, while Frazier drives production and direction. The podcast will emphasize leveraging AI—not just using it—cutting through bad information, noise, and sales agendas, and exploring topics like build vs. buy with guests from mortgage and outside the industry. Frazier invites listener feedback and AI use cases, and thanks sponsors MortgageCon (founding), Summit Lending (broker), Different Coaching (presenter), and Empower LO.MAP is presented by: DIFRNT CoachingFounding Sponsor: MortgageConBroker Sponsor: Summit LendingFriends of the Program: Empower LO

This week, former Forrester Research Director Jeff Clark is back in the studio after his summer break with our host Ian Truscott to discuss an article in The New York Times called “I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I.” written by Julie Averill, the former chief information officer of Lululemon, and some interesting research from McKinsey that supports her experience.  The article discusses A.I. wishing and A.I. washing, and Jeff and Ian discuss how to get A.I. working and share 5 tips:  Create an effective business case Map processes Clean up your data Incorporate your culture Create a change management plan Then, Ian moves to our virtual bar, The Rose and Rockstar, and joins Robert Rose, Chief Trouble Maker at Seventh Bear, to discuss what else we marketers should be talking about, if not AI, and Robert suggests three classic marketing moves that can cut through, while everyone else focuses on digital and A.I. Enjoy! — The Links The people: Ian Truscott on LinkedIn  Jeff Clark on LinkedIn Robert Rose on LinkedIn Mentioned this week: I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I. Helping AI succeed in retail: Turn pilots into measurable impact | NRF The State of AI: Global Survey 2026 | McKinsey  Rockstar CMO: The Beat Newsletter that we send every Monday Rockstar CMO on the web and LinkedIn Previous episodes and all the show notes: Rockstar CMO FM. Track List: We'll be right back by Stienski & Mass Media on YouTube Piano Music is by Johnny Easton, shared under a Creative Commons license Dolly Parton - The Seeker (Official Audio) You can listen to this on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, and Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

#745: A friend once asked Sahil Bloom how often he saw his parents. About once a year, Sahil said. How old are they? Mid-60s. His friend did the math out loud. If they live to 80, you'll see them 15 more times. Sahil was 30, living in California and making great money at a venture fund. Within 45 days of that conversation, he quit his job, sold his house and moved across the country to be near family. He's now managing partner of SRB Ventures, an early-stage fund backing more than 60 startups, and he writes The Curiosity Chronicle, a newsletter read by millions. His book, "The 5 Types of Wealth," is a New York Times bestseller. His framework starts with a scoring problem. Financial wealth gets measured every day. Time, social, mental and physical wealth run in the background, unmeasured, until something forces you to look. You'll get exercises for each. Build an energy calendar that tracks which activities charge you up and which drain you. Map your relationships by how healthy and how frequent they are. Ask what your family and your community need from you. Define what "enough" means in dollars, then write the number down. Sahil also walks through anti-goals — the things you refuse to sacrifice on the way to a goal — and Memento Mori, the Roman habit of keeping your own death in view. Two questions run underneath all of it. Think about how you spent yesterday. Would your 10-year-old self be impressed? Would your 90-year-old self? You don't experience all four seasons in a single day. Sahil argues your life runs on seasons too. Some stretches call for financial growth. Others call for family. Find Sahil at the5typesofwealth.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

SaaStr 875: Who Owns Your Data Now? Agents vs. System of Record, ServiceTitan vs. Podium, Headless Salesforce, and Agentic Renewals on The Agents #013 The agents are writing data faster than any human ever could - and systems of record aren't ready for it. This week on The Agents, Jason and Amelia dig into the biggest meta-theme of 2026: what happens when your AI agents become the primary user of your CRM, your MAP, and every other system you've built your business on? Together, they unpack the ServiceTitan vs. Podium blowup, where an agentic lead gen tool slowly became a competing system of record until ServiceTitan shut them off with 30 days' notice, and why this is just the first of many fights like it coming across SaaS. Then Amelia pulls back the curtain on how SaaStr actually runs Salesforce headless through 10K, what it means that their agents have written 40 gigabytes of data into Salesforce without either of them logging in, and why the storage math is going to force a reckoning for every vendor jacking up API prices right now. Plus: the renewal agent Amelia built that generates a fully custom, hyper-personalized pitch deck for every single customer, using headless Salesforce, Gamma, social data, podcast mentions, and Gmail. And why Clay plus ZoomInfo plus Cowork turned out to be the best enrichment stack their agents have found yet. If you're building on top of systems of record, selling to companies that are, or just trying to figure out how agents change the economics of SaaS data, this one is essential listening. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:00 - ServiceTitan cuts off Podium: what happened and why it matters 10:00 - 40 gigs in Salesforce and neither of us logged in 16:00 - The API pricing reckoning coming for systems of record 22:00 - How SaaStr runs Salesforce headless with 10K 30:00 - The renewal agent: no account left behind 42:00 - Narrative-first pitching: getting the agent to sell 50:00 - Clay + ZoomInfo + Cowork: the enrichment stack that actually worked 58:00 - What comes next: agentic inbound proposals SaaStr hosts the world's largest community for B2B software founders and executives.

Send us Fan MailIf I were to audit your business to figure out the problem we solve to scale your business to multiple six figures these are the seven questions I would ask. The pre context to these questions and the next part afterwards with redesigning your strategy can be found in this Substack here. If you would like to learn more about The Mothered Business Mastermind, click here. Want to download the 15 minute CEO Map? If you only have 15 minutes it will tell you exactly what to work on to move the needle in your business. Click here. Please say hi to me on Instagram @robyn.gooding or take a peek at my website for more info www.robyngooding.comClick here to book your call anytime! If you loved this episode, I'd appreciate if you could leave a review or share on your socials. It truly means the world to me and helps amplify this message for other mothers desiring a supportive business for motherhood.  Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The content shared reflects my personal experience and professional perspective as a coach.Any stories shared are anonymized or composite examples drawn from real experiences, with identifying details changed to protect privacy.This podcast does not constitute medical, legal, financial, or...

Laura McDonald breaks down how to multithread enterprise deals, reach the C-suite, and build buying committee consensus without getting trapped with one champion. Learn how to leverage executive assistants, map the real power base, and neutralize blockers before they kill your deal.

Over the years, we've had hundreds of conversations on this podcast about what it means to build a sustainable, profitable product brand. And some of those conversations are just too juicy. They're too good to live in the archives. Today, I'm bringing one back. What you're about to hear is a short clip from a past episode. It's a topic that has stuck with me and still feels very relevant today.These throwback episodes are intentionally short and to the point because sometimes you don't need a full deep dive.All right, let's dive in.You can listen to the full episode with Morgan Harper Nichols here: http://prooftoproduct.com/206 Quick Links:Free Wholesale Audio SeriesFree Resources LibraryFree Email Marketing for Product MakersPTP LABSPaper CampMentioned in this episode:Take the free quiz!Map out your next 90 days here: http://prooftoproduct.com/quiz

Without the union, he says, he would qualify for Medicaid and food stamps doing the same insulation work. He has been sober for more than 20 years. He holds a Massachusetts license in addiction counseling. And he watches his members vote against their own economic interests every election cycle and cannot figure out how to get through to them. On today's Trades Day episode of America's Work Force Union Podcast, Heat and Frost Insulators Local 6 Business Manager Jeff Saliba joins on behalf of Pete Ielmini and the Mechanical Insulators LMCT. He discusses why the Boston hospital energy report is a call to action for mechanical insulation, how Local 6's MAP-based recovery program gives apprentices a structured path through addiction and a genuine door back into the program, and why the drift toward individualism — workers thinking me instead of we — is the most significant internal challenge unions face heading into this Labor Day. If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988. Visit insulators6.org and follow @InsulatorsLMCT for more.

【東京から5,000円でどこまで行ける？

The Map

An airhacks.fm conversation with Ian Rogers about: Java's early API design strengths versus verbose C++/STL manuals, the Java 7 String.substring behavior change from an O(1) view over the character array to an O(n) copy, substring performance regressions at Google, implementing a custom substring as a workaround, designing APIs without knowing future customers, the SPEC JVM98 jack parser generator throwing an exception per matched token, exceptions used for control flow violating the exceptions-are-exceptional principle, JVM benchmarks skewed toward fast exception throwing, ANTLR and JavaCC as later parser tools, class loaders pairing a type with a runtime notion, ClassNotFoundException thrown from nested jar files, the DaCapo benchmark as a test of exception-throwing speed, Effective Java advice to return interfaces such as Map instead of HashMap, why substring should have returned CharSequence, the argument that String should be an interface and CharSequence the concrete type, CharSequence length limited to int and capped at 2GB, Guava Rope as a collection of CharSequences unable to implement CharSequence because of the int length limit, signed versus unsigned sizing of arrays and strings, byte signed and char unsigned inconsistencies, StringBuilder versus StringBuffer, the race condition avoided by StringBuilder cloning its array in toString, StringBuffer passing array ownership under a lock, biased locking making uncontended locks cheap, the Attack of the Clones problem of defensive cloning, optimizing clones away in the JVM, transactional memory as an alternative to locking, copy-on-write and CopyOnWriteArrayList, Swift copy-on-write, Linux kernel read-copy-update and epochs, writing the Azul C4 garbage collector, the C4 read barrier now used in ZGC and Shenandoah, moving Azul from custom hardware read-barrier instructions to x86, the two-space invariant in concurrent copying collectors, IBM Metronome fixups versus two-space invariants, detecting same-page references by XOR of two pointers, trading computation for memory accesses in read barriers, the Transitive Corporation binary translator, Rosetta for Apple and a Sparc-to-Power translator behind IBM's planned Sun acquisition, writing Android Runtime ART, ahead-of-time compilation of Dex replacing Dalvik, disk-size constraints of AOT compilation, Hans Boehm and sticky mark bits for generational marking without moving objects, ART generational concurrent garbage collection in Android KitKat, HashMap interface dispatch replacing LinkedList iteration from JikesRVM, alphabetically sorted interfaces putting AbstractCollection first, Google Maps interface dispatch consuming half the frame time, frame-rate and pause-time gains from ART, WhatsApp broken by an unbalanced-lock bytecode obfuscator, balanced locks required for biased locking, thread safety annotations in Clang/LLVM guarding the Java heap, the mutator lock and stale pointer risks, a reader-writer lock model of the Java heap, managing risk when replacing an operating system runtime, CyanogenMod as a delivery path for ART, Project Valhalla value types, current work on the Linux perf tool and observability, OProfile origins, GPU versus CPU visibility in system tools Ian Rogers on linkedin: irogers

Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, is driven by a passion for interpreting data and helping marketing leaders Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with greater accuracy. ith a background in sports analytics and journalism, Carlos helps B2B companies identify which marketing activities generate qualified leads, clients, and revenue so they can invest confidently in what works.  In this conversation, Carlos introduces The Condor Pipeline Generation Framework—Understand Current Pipeline Generation, Map the Process, Move Budgets to Their Highest and Best Use, Fix Measurement Gaps, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains why marketers should begin with clients and revenue instead of clicks and impressions, how the Pipeline X-Ray exposes attribution gaps, and why budgets should move toward channels with proven returns. Carlos also discusses using BANT to diagnose conversion problems and why client champions, paid media, and events drive growth in high-ticket B2B markets. — Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with Carlos Corredor  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, a pipeline generation and measurement firm. Carlos, welcome to the show.  Hey, Steve. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.  It's exciting to have you and to learn about your secrets of how you generate a measurable pipeline. But before we get into it, I'm curious: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it through your company?  Yeah. So I've always been passionate about sports and the data behind sports, and I actually worked in sports data analysis and journalism. But ultimately, I've been passionate about interpreting data to have an advantage, whether that's playing tennis or doing analysis for baseball teams. And then I eventually started working in marketing, doing sports websites, and I saw the opportunity. In marketing in general, especially with digital, to use data to your advantage. So I would say that's really what I'm passionate about in terms of my professional life and why I enjoy what I do so much and why I get up in the morning and I really look forward to the day and even to Monday. Because obviously, it's not all fun. But ultimately, I think it comes from that passion of liking what you're doing, and the time flies when you work and you like what you do and you see that you're good at what you're doing and it's making an impact. So I would say that's why.  And have you always been a data person? Are you analytical and like to look at the numbers behind things?  Yeah, yeah. It started with sports. That's where I realized that I had, let's say, that passion at the beginning and ultimately that skill. With baseball at the beginning, it was reading the back of baseball cards and then fantasy baseball in high school, and then actually working in that. In kind of like sabermetrics and Moneyball-type analysis in college.  Because I saw, just like it happens in marketing, how back in the old days, even professionals, they were using the wrong type of data or a very antiquated way of looking at things. So it's like understanding really what has an impact and what is responsible for outcomes. That's, I think, the part that I've always thought was what's important and what I had a knack for, a talent to do that better than others. So that's why I went deep into that.  Okay. So how do you do that? So this podcast is a podcast of frameworks. So I wonder if you have a framework of how to create pipeline generation based on data, and perhaps you can share a simplified version of that with our listeners, something that can be explained in three to five steps.  Yeah, definitely. And I'll give you first the kind of like the philosophy or the mental model, and then I'll give you those steps because one comes from the other. So in marketing, with all of the data that's available, especially today, a lot of people start at the bottom. At clicks, impressions, and then they try to build a bottoms-up report to then prove what's generating leads and clients and revenue. But that is always inexact, takes forever.  What I propose is doing it the opposite: a top-down approach where you start with clients and revenue, and then start figuring out where those leads in your pipeline or clients and the closed revenue is coming from. And you will know all of that at the beginning. So that's, I think, how it starts, that framework. So the first step of the framework is to understand, which sounds really basic, but you'd be surprised today how many marketing leaders, marketing VPs, CMOs of especially mid-market, definitely smaller mid-market, and even some enterprise companies, don't have that data readily available to understand how much pipeline did we, as a marketing department, generate, let's say, last year. So that's, I think, the first step, is understanding that. It's asking your team for a report that says that. Now your team's going to come back and say they won't know the full picture. Maybe they know 10%, maybe they know 90%. But they're going to show you something. So then is the second step. You're going to start adjusting your investments to what you're seeing there, and at the same time, you're going to start fixing the dark holes or what you can't see.  And then simply step number three is rinse and repeat every, let's say, quarter at the beginning. And obviously, there's nuances of how exactly you should adjust and what exactly you can fix. But ultimately, that would be the three-step approach that you asked about.  That's fascinating. So the understand piece is understanding your pipeline or how you're generating the pipeline? What is it? Understanding what?  Yeah. So actually we have a name for that first step. We call it the Pipeline X-Ray. So let's say you start a new job as a CMO of a new company. Or simply you've been in the job for a while and you're listening to this and you say, “Okay, actually, I've never thought about it that way.  Let's sit tomorrow with my team and ask the question: How many qualified leads and closed clients have we, as marketing, generated so far this year and, let's say, last year?” That is understanding that. Now, I'll tell you, I'd be very surprised if the marketing person or the marketing team or the leader has that data in a way that they can say with 100% certainty what the answer is. In terms of, “We've closed these four clients, and we've had 72 qualified leads.  And out of the 72, 50 have come from our paid search campaigns, 10 have come from events, and then the others have come from organic.” In an ideal world, that's the type of answer that you want. But in the real world, again, very rarely do you have that clear understanding right then and there. So that's when step number two becomes, okay, let's close the gaps to be able to have an understanding.  Okay. So essentially, when you say adjust and fix, then are you talking about adjusting and fixing the process of generating clients, or actually mapping the gaps in the pipeline first?  Yeah, so that's a great question. The adjust, I mean move budget around. Not necessarily increase budget. You have to prove what's working. And obviously, if you don't have the full picture and understanding, you cannot just go to your CEO and say, “I need more budget.” So with the same budget that you have, what can you pause and move around towards the things that step number one told you with certainty are working. So if, let's say, out of the 50 qualified leads that you generated, you saw that half of them came from your paid search campaigns, then you say, “Oh, okay.” And then you don't see anything, let's say, for conferences, and now you're going to 10 conferences a year and you're spending a million dollars on conferences, and you're only spending $200,000 a year on your paid media spend. Then you say, “You know what? I'm going to stop. I'm going to pause. We're not going to go to these two conferences this year, and I'm going to move those $200,000, and we're going to double our spend in Google Ads,” for example. That's what I mean with the adjust piece. It could be the opposite. It could be pause paid search and then be more aggressive on our conference strategy. It could be, let's start a paid social campaign, whether that's LinkedIn or programmatic ads, or let's be more aggressive on our PR because right now our leads have come from interviews that our subject matter experts have done in certain types of podcasts or YouTube channels.  But that's what step number one is. But adjust is move budget around. Put your stocks where the returns are positive and where you can expect a better return almost immediately, or at least in the next upcoming months. And then the fix is particularly around the measurement gaps. The fix is what you can't see, right, on step number one. Step number one is understanding. And a report with all of that. When the person that does the reporting for you came back, or when you did it yourself or whatever, probably a lot of leads are like, “Ah, now it says direct traffic. What is that?” Obviously, they didn't just come and wake up one day and say, “Oh, I'm just going to go to condoragency.com.” No, they heard you somewhere, but you're still not sure. You won the client, you know you won the client, the client's paying you money, but you're not sure. So maybe, okay, what needs to improve in our measurement framework.  Usually, you can start with your CRM, your HubSpot, Salesforce, for instance, or whatever you use. There's some web analytics that might need to happen. You need to connect your advertising platforms. You're probably going to need to start talking to your sales team so they ask the right questions when they have discovery calls with prospects. I mean, there's a few things you can do, but I'm talking specifically about measurement gaps so you can have the full picture.  So when you talk to new prospects or clients, can they answer one most of the time?  They can partially answer one. I would go a step beyond because, I mean, that's not the sexiest answer. I would say it's usually, let's just say, around 50% of their leads and clients, they can know who was responsible. And then there's a couple of parts there. First and foremost, not only for your sake, but for the sake of your alignment with the C-suite and with the CEO and the CFO and even the sales team. You want to know, is marketing responsible for this? Number one. Because then that's very important.  Because that's what's going to justify the existence of the marketing team. Then later, if it came from a paid search campaign or a paid social or a conference, if those all are in the marketing budget, that's secondary. But most importantly, you want to make sure that, number one, you're bringing pipeline as a marketing department, and number two, you know exactly what pipeline you're bringing. Not only you, but then also your CEO and your CFO. So then it's like a luxury, let's say, to see if it comes from, the tough part is that you won't know that it comes from marketing unless you're tracking paid search and you're tracking conferences in the CRM the right way. So obviously, they are related in that way.  Okay. Love it. So understand your pipeline generation, and then adjust the budget to make sure you're supporting the ones that generate the most, and fix those that are not optimized. So maybe optimize them or replace them or come up with a new one. How else do you fix other than your measurement gaps?  Okay, you fixed the measurement gaps. Now you can measure it. You have a full picture. Then you have a slate of options, and how do you know what to choose if you're not doing enough?  Yeah. So I think there’s a couple of things there. One is understanding if you… Because, obviously, you always want to generate more pipeline. So you have to then say, “Okay, is my problem that I'm not generating any interest in the first place at all?” Like, there's nobody visiting my website. Or even downloading some pieces of content, what traditionally is called conversions or marketing-qualified leads. Obviously, that's not the goal.  The goal is that they turn into clients. But you have to know that if people are not visiting your website and you're not seeing marketing-qualified leads coming into your CRM, then you have to do certain things. Whereas if the problem is, “Okay, no, that's not the problem, Carlos,” and this is actually more common, which is a little counterintuitive, but the more and more that we work with mid-market clients, we realize this is the case.They are generating marketing-qualified leads. There is activity in the CRM. There are companies, new companies, that you see are visiting your website, downloading and consuming content. But then, for some reason, they are not becoming clients. So that's where we have to dig in and understand. Maybe they downloaded a white paper that was very educational in nature. And they're not ready to buy. Which is fine, and I'm not saying you have to not show that white paper, but you know that white paper is not going to bring you ready-to-buy customers.  So that's when we have the concept of what sales and marketing people call a BANT-type of lead, which is a lead that has the budget, the authority, the need, and the timing. You want, obviously, a lead that has the four things. Now you start, you measure. Okay, we had 10 leads, and they had, let's say, the budget and the authority. They were the CTO. The lead of the technology department in the company that we know has the budget. But they just downloaded this and didn't convert. They didn't have, let's say, the timing or the need.  Then maybe you rely more on, for example, paid search, which is a channel that, by searching the right keywords, the bottom-of-funnel keywords, for example, we are a pipeline generation firm. If somebody is looking for, “What is Google Ads?” That's educational. Now, if somebody's searching for “experienced agencies in B2B managing Google Ads.” Now, that's somebody that's ready to hire an agency to manage their Google Ads. So that's why, for example, in this case, if the component that's lacking is the need and the timing, paid search could be a way to do it. Or intent data, which is now something that is out there not only via paid search, but you identify certain signals and you can target them on programmatic ads or YouTube or whatever. That's another alternative. So that's something that you could do, for example, if you have a pain in moving leads down the funnel and closing clients, and you also realize that you're talking to the right people, but then they're simply not converting.  And the opposite. You get a lot of people that need your service. But they may be too small, or they may be just a manager and they don't have the authority to approve a high-ticket service. Then you go towards maybe LinkedIn targeting, or you do a campaign that is based more on account-based marketing, or ABM. Where you know you're talking to the right people. So again, that's another adjustment that you can make. So I don't know if I… Sorry if I deviated a little bit from the question, Steve, but hopefully that's still—  No, it makes sense. It makes sense. So first you want to measure, and then you diagnose. If you've got some activity but it's not converting, why is it not converting? Maybe it's not the right approach to build trust. Maybe there's another approach.  And then you look at the different elements: budget, authority, need, timing. That makes sense. So let me turn it back to you. So what drives growth in your business?  So for us, I would say if we do that, let's say, Pipeline X-Ray. And we actually did. We've been in business for almost 10 years now. And if you would do a Pipeline X-Ray, the number one driver of leads and new clients are, let's just call it, Condor champions that switch jobs. And not switch jobs that were working with us, but they were working with one of our clients.  And they worked with us, and they saw the work that we did, and they ended up moving to another agency within the same space, for example, or in B2B services, or even if it's something a little more niche like tech services, which is an area that we also specialize in. And then they say, “I already worked with Condor for either measurement or paid search campaigns or demand generation in general, and I like working with them, so they're going to call us.” And then some people, they switch multiple jobs. So embracing that and obviously using that to fuel and to focus even more on doing a great job and maintaining relationships with people, obviously most importantly while they're a client, but even if they switch, not forgetting about them. That has been the main driver. Obviously, we don't want to only rely on that. And then more recently, we've given more structure to our own sales and marketing department for that. And, for example, we closed a client that came via a paid search campaign. But that's still… We haven't scaled those yet.  We're still making sure. We're still in that measurement phase where, yeah, we're putting budget behind a few things and some of them seem to be working better, but not yet at the point of truly scaling that. We're ultimately also a relatively small firm, which obviously makes decisions differently than if you are, let's say, a mid-market or enterprise. But those, I would say, in order of importance, have been our three main drivers of growth: the champions that switch jobs, number one, and then I would say secondarily, paid media and events.  Yeah. So these are the three things. And what about the events? Why do you put events as a third? I'm just thinking that you're a B2B company and trust-based. Would events not be better than paid media?  I would say they're not mutually exclusive. Actually, they rely a lot on each other. And honestly, for us, I just put number two and three, but I would say they're tied for second, and then the other ones are four and below. And the reason why I think events are important, what we're seeing not only for us but for our clients, the outbound activity is really saturated.  I think cold email or cold outreach in general, because it used to be via email, now it's on LinkedIn as well, it's really, really saturated. It's really hard to be heard or to get a reply with cold outreach in general. Paid media, you can be a little bit more creative because you have visuals. Whether that's video that hopefully you can leverage. So I'm a believer in paid media more than the actual cold outreach via email or LinkedIn. But then the events are also great precisely because of that.  People are saturated and tired of being bombarded with messages from people they don't know. Whereas especially after COVID, people started going back to both the office and simply going out there. It doesn't have to be a big yearly conference. It can be just a dinner where you invite four or five people and talk about certain topics or any in-person activity. Well, I mean, a webinar can even be considered an event. Where you're educating your audience on certain things. And especially if your target audience is more on the manager side or below, or director and below, webinars can be an avenue.  But to answer your question, I think that personal connection is really, really powerful. And people forgot about it with, let's say, the boom of cold outreach and digital and now AI, and especially during COVID. But definitely in the last few years, we've seen not only that people are more willing or prefer to meet people in person, but we see that in the data as well, We see cold outreach campaigns that are bringing less and less results. And then when you connect in person.  Especially high-ticket. I also give this example. If you're selling B2B services, which are usually high-ticket. It's a project of either $50,000. It could be an engagement of $2 million over two years. Obviously, you want to know the company, but you also want to trust the human that is going to deliver on that promise. I always give the example: If you're selling an iPhone cover that costs $25, yeah, maybe you can get away with a pretty image on an Instagram ad. You click and you buy. Boom. Great. You can fully leverage digital for that.  But when you're selling a cloud migration project of a million dollars, you're going to want to talk to somebody, trust that person, dig in a little bit more, have a couple of meetings. So it's more complex. So in particular for those instances, that's why I think the personal connection, that it's even better if it starts at an event, or however you manage to do it, helps a lot.  So for Condor, do you make a distinction between B2B companies and B2C, and where you can help them the most?  Yeah. We have a couple of direct-to-consumer clients, but the majority of the work that we do is either for B2B or, if not B2B, it's lead generation. So e-commerce, for example, is a different world. E-commerce, as I mentioned, depending on what you buy, it's immediate. You track things. You have a platform like Shopify or something similar. It's a whole different world. Whereas that's immediate, and you can see everything, and it's all kind of automated and based on an inventory.  Whereas in either B2B services or lead generation, it's more about, okay, what happens after the initial action, after that initial either visit or conversion. Because a conversion is not a purchase. In e-commerce, in direct-to-consumer, in the example that I gave you, we made it. We sold the cover. That's our business. In here, it's like, okay, they downloaded a white paper. Or they signed up for a webinar, but that's only the first step of a long journey of closing, again, a $1 million service client.  So we specialize in that. In what needs to happen, not only to generate the initial raise of hand, but to make sure that the people that raise their hands are the right people, because otherwise they're not going to end up buying. And ultimately, the entire process of lead generated to client closed. Which is a big universe in itself. So that's where we want to focus.  So you basically help them not just to get the leads but to convert the leads and turn them into a client.  Right. Right.  So Carlos, if you had a magic wand and you could fix just one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would you use the magic wand for?  I would say accelerate. I would accelerate by five or 10 years the structure and how mature our sales and marketing team is. I would love to wake up tomorrow morning and have a team of five people in the marketing department and five people dedicated to sales, with SDRs and a sales leader, that is already generating, that we're closing 10 clients a month. So I would say that's… But that obviously takes time.  And you want to go one step at a time, otherwise, to prove ROI and to grow without, let's say, wasting unproven budget or wasting money. But I think a lot of owners—I don't know if it's a cheap answer—but I think a lot of owners would probably answer the same thing.  Yeah. So essentially what you need to do is you need to have scalable sales and marketing so that you can just add people and it's going to—it's like a coin-operated system, right?  Yeah. Yeah.  So if the listeners would like to go through that process and they would like to understand, okay, how do we map our leads, where they come from, evaluate it, and then adjust and fix and scale, where can they learn more and how can they connect with you? Yeah.  So if they go to our website, it's condoragency.com. Condor, like the bird. There are some options there on how to work with us or even some information, even if they want to try and do it by themselves, right? Again, what I mentioned earlier, the Pipeline X-Ray. It's a quick project that we do to get to that, where you can start seeing some valuable information to take action on fairly quickly.  We can get that done in a couple of weeks, the exercise of the Pipeline X-Ray, so then you know what to start adjusting and fixing. And obviously, you can contact me directly also on LinkedIn or via our website. I'm glad to obviously have a subsequent conversation and see if and how we can help.  Awesome. So if you are out there and you want to improve your sales and marketing, then you have to start with the Pipeline X-Ray because you are getting leads, you just don't know where they are from and how effective they are, and then how you tweak the process so that you're putting energy behind the more effective ones and readjusting your budget, and then fix the gaps.  So Carlos can help you with that, right? So make sure you reach out to Condor and get the X-Ray. So Carlos, thanks for coming. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you subscribe and follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, because every week I bring a couple of entrepreneurs who are sharing their frameworks with you. So Carlos, thanks for coming, and thanks for listening. Important Links: Carlos's LinkedIn Carlos's website

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AI is everywhere right now. Businesses are being told they need to adopt it, developers are being asked to build with it, and almost every software product seems to be adding some kind of AI feature or AI Workflow Automation. But just because you can put AI into a process doesn't mean you should. That was one of my biggest takeaways from our conversation with John Godlove and Piyush Agarwal, co-founders of Fusion Hive. Both have spent more than a decade working with automation, data, machine learning, and enterprise technology. What I liked about this conversation was that we weren't talking about AI as some magical solution. We kept coming back to something much more practical: understanding the problem, understanding the workflow, and then deciding where AI actually makes sense. About John Godlove and Piyush Agarwal John Godlove is co-founder of Fusion Hive and has more than a decade of experience helping organizations from startups to Fortune 500 companies build and deploy automation. His background includes work in the Salesforce ecosystem, AI, data, and technology implementation. Piyush Agarwal is co-founder of Fusion Hive and has more than a decade of experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning. His experience includes financial fraud detection, document intelligence pipelines, generative AI multi-agent architectures, and production machine-learning engineering. Together, John and Piyush founded Fusion Hive to bring enterprise AI and automation experience to small and mid-market businesses. Their approach focuses on practical workflows, measurable outcomes, governance, and production-ready AI systems. The Best AI Project Might Be the Boring One When most people think about an AI project, they tend to think about the flashy stuff. They want a chatbot, an agent, or something they can demo and say, "Look what our AI can do." John brought up a different type of project: the boring back-office workflows that nobody really wants to do. Think about someone receiving an email with a PDF attached, opening the document, finding a few pieces of information, entering that information into another system, and then doing the same thing again. Maybe they do it 20 times a day. Maybe they do it hundreds of times a week. John described these as "swivel chair" workflows. Employees are constantly moving between systems, re-entering information and turning unstructured data into structured data. These aren't exciting processes, but they can consume an incredible amount of time. That's exactly why they can be great automation candidates. If you can save five or ten minutes on something that happens hundreds of times, the value starts adding up pretty quickly. Not Everything Needs AI This was probably one of my favorite parts of the conversation because it goes back to something I've seen throughout my career in software development, integration, and testing. Sometimes you don't need AI. Sometimes you just need a script. Piyush made a great point about being deterministic where you can. If you're extracting something from a document and a regular expression, parser, Python script, or existing library can reliably do the job, why send it through an LLM? We've had these tools for years. They work, they're predictable, and they're usually cheap to run. The interesting part is figuring out where that deterministic approach stops working. Maybe you're dealing with text that needs interpretation. Maybe the documents aren't consistent. Maybe you're trying to understand intent or classify information that doesn't fit neatly into a set of rules. That's where AI may start making sense. The answer doesn't have to be traditional software or AI. A good system might use both. Build the Workflow First Piyush described their approach at Fusion Hive as workflow first, and I think that's an important distinction. Don't start by asking, "Where can we use AI?" Start by asking, "What are we actually trying to accomplish?" Walk through what people are doing today. Where does the information come from? Where does it go? Who touches it? What decisions are being made? Where are people wasting time? Where are mistakes happening? Once you understand that, you can start deciding which pieces should be automated. Some steps might be traditional software. Some might use AI. Some might disappear completely. And some may still need a human. That's a much different approach than dropping AI on top of an existing process and hoping it makes everything better. Human in the Loop Is Only Part of the Solution We've talked a lot this season about keeping humans involved with AI, but this conversation made me think about it a little differently. It isn't always just AI versus human. You may actually have three or four options for every step in the process: deterministic software, traditional automation, AI, or a person. The key is deciding which one makes sense for that particular task. A predictable data transformation probably belongs in code. A text-heavy classification problem might be a good fit for AI. A rare exception involving money, compliance, or an important business decision might still need a person. John also brought up something that is easy to overlook when you're designing these systems: the happy path isn't the whole workflow. What happens when something doesn't fit? Does another automation handle it? Does another AI agent look at it? Does it go to another department? Does a person need to review it? Those exceptions are part of the system too, and if you don't think about them before you automate the workflow, you're probably going to discover them the hard way later. Don't Automate a Process Just Because It Exists Another point John made really stood out to me. When you introduce AI or automation, you shouldn't automatically recreate every step of the existing process. He used the example of a law firm where documents might pass through several levels of review before eventually reaching a partner. If you build an AI-assisted process, evaluate it properly, and reach a point where you trust the output, maybe all of those intermediate approvals aren't necessary anymore. That's an important difference. You're not just asking: How do we automate this process? You're asking: What should this process look like now? I've seen this in software projects for years. Companies sometimes spend a lot of money automating a bad or outdated process. They end up doing the wrong thing faster. Before you automate something, make sure the process itself still makes sense. It Still Comes Back to Data At one point in the conversation, I joked that I kept bringing everything back to data. But after years of working with integrations, testing frameworks, healthcare systems, file parsing, and automation, it's hard not to. AI still needs data. If your information is scattered across emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, databases, and systems that don't communicate with each other, throwing AI at the problem doesn't magically clean that up. Piyush described the possibility of eventually creating an intelligence layer over that data—a kind of company brain where people can interact with business information through natural language. That's powerful, but the information still has to be accessible and usable underneath it. Sometimes the first step toward implementing AI isn't implementing AI at all. It might be cleaning up the data, connecting systems, building an integration, or finally automating a process that should have been automated years ago. And that's okay. You're solving the business problem, not trying to win an award for using the most AI. Six Signals That You May Have a Good AI Workflow Piyush gave us a practical framework for identifying a good first workflow. Instead of randomly picking an AI project, Fusion Hive looks for six signals. Volume: Does this happen often enough that saving a few minutes each time will actually matter? Repeatability: Does the process follow roughly the same pattern each time? Measurable cost or delay: Can you point to hours, dollars, turnaround time, or another metric that could improve? Accessible data: Are the inputs already available somewhere, such as a database, email, PDF, or form? Manageable exceptions: Are the unusual cases a small enough percentage that they can reasonably be routed to another process or a person? A clear owner: Is there someone who understands the outcome well enough to say whether the new process is actually working? I like this framework because none of those questions start with AI. They start with the business. How Will You Know It Worked? This is another area where businesses can get themselves into trouble. "We implemented AI" isn't a success metric. What changed? Did the process go from 60 hours a week to 40? Did turnaround time improve? Did the error rate drop? Did employees stop entering the same information into three different systems? Are people able to spend more time on work that actually requires their knowledge? If you don't know what you're trying to improve before you start, it's going to be difficult to prove that the AI actually helped. That also means you need a baseline. Understand what the process costs you today before you change it. Otherwise, six months from now, you may have a cool AI system and no idea whether it saved the business anything. Start With the Problem There is a lot of pressure right now to adopt AI quickly. I understand it. The technology is changing incredibly fast, competitors are talking about it, customers are asking about it, and nobody wants to feel like they're falling behind. But moving quickly doesn't mean you should skip the fundamentals. Understand the problem. Map the workflow. Find the data. Identify the exceptions. Figure out what can be deterministic. Decide where AI actually provides value. Determine where humans still need to be involved. Then decide how you're going to measure success. Then build it. That might not sound as exciting as "put AI everywhere," but it's much more likely to produce something that actually works. And sometimes the best AI project isn't the flashy one everyone wants to demo. It's the boring process everyone wishes they didn't have to do anymore. Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community

In this episode, Ashley explores the ideas that gave rise to From Mask to Map: her developing body of work, book and coaching cohort for late-discovered neurodivergent adults.Drawing on Dr Andrew Huberman's conversation with Jungian analyst Dr James Hollis, she considers meaning, purpose and the deeper intelligence within us that may be continually trying to bring us back into relationship with ourselves. She also returns to the question of State or Trait? - and asks what changes when we stop assuming that every familiar response reveals something fixed about who we are.Ashley revisits the Transactional Analysis Drivers, a framework that remains immensely valuable within her work, while explaining why something more was needed to reflect the Neurodivergent Nuance of lived experience. Through six years of research, client work and personal exploration, the Nine Adaptation Patterns began to emerge - not as diagnoses, labels or another set of boxes, but as a compassionate way of recognising the protective roles we may have mistaken for identity.This episode introduces the patterns and tells the story of how they came into being. Next week, we will meet all nine more fully.The episode closes with a short guided practice, The Part That Learned the Way - an invitation to approach one of your adaptations with curiosity rather than judgement, honour the intelligence within it and begin reading the survival directions written for earlier terrain.Ashley's eight-week From Mask to Map group coaching programme begins on 15 September 2026 and is limited to ten people. Find out more at integrativeiom.co.uk.Our Sponsors:

Prayer Moment 4 of 5 in AugustPrayer for Believers to Feed BuddhistsFeed God's Sheep: Pray that believers will faithfully care for new followers of Jesus, helping them grow strong in their faith through God's Word and loving discipleship. (John 21:15–17)True Love: Pray that Christians will demonstrate the love of Christ by willingly giving their time, resources, and lives to serve others. (John 15:13)Consistency: Pray that believers will build faithful, lasting friendships that encourage spiritual growth and help new believers remain strong in Christ. (Proverbs 17:17)

What happens when the skills that made you successful start getting in the way of your leadership?  In this episode, Jimmy Burroughes, Founder of JBL High Performance, explores the identity shift from expert to leader, why great leaders must empower other to make mistakes, and how coaching can replace control.  Jimmy shares his Simplify to Amplify framework, practical strategies for identifying leadership friction, and insights on maximizing your time and impact.The conversation with the former British Army Officer also looks ahead at how AI is reshaping the workforce -- and what leaders must do now to adapt, develop talent, and lead through change.Get your pen and paper ready -- here, is Jimmy Burroughes.To contact the show: podcast@mentaladvantage.netTo work with John Cullen: john.cullen@mentaladvantage.netTo reach Brandon Allen: brandon.allen@mentaladvantage.netTo learn more about Jimmy and get his assessments: Fix Firefighting Managers in 90 Days

In this episode, Ashley explores the ideas that gave rise to From Mask to Map: her developing body of work, book and coaching cohort for late-discovered neurodivergent adults.Drawing on Dr Andrew Huberman's conversation with Jungian analyst Dr James Hollis, she considers meaning, purpose and the deeper intelligence within us that may be continually trying to bring us back into relationship with ourselves. She also returns to the question of State or Trait? - and asks what changes when we stop assuming that every familiar response reveals something fixed about who we are.Ashley revisits the Transactional Analysis Drivers, a framework that remains immensely valuable within her work, while explaining why something more was needed to reflect the Neurodivergent Nuance of lived experience. Through six years of research, client work and personal exploration, the Nine Adaptation Patterns began to emerge - not as diagnoses, labels or another set of boxes, but as a compassionate way of recognising the protective roles we may have mistaken for identity.This episode introduces the patterns and tells the story of how they came into being. Next week, we will meet all nine more fully.The episode closes with a short guided practice, The Part That Learned the Way - an invitation to approach one of your adaptations with curiosity rather than judgement, honour the intelligence within it and begin reading the survival directions written for earlier terrain.Ashley's eight-week From Mask to Map group coaching programme begins on 15 September 2026 and is limited to ten people. Find out more at integrativeiom.co.uk.Our Sponsors:

00:00:00 Psalm 10 00:01 Matthew 1000:06:50 Genesis 1000:10:05 Ezra 1000:15:54 Map to HeavenDay 10 Commentary and Content:https://andrewhorval.substack.com/p/route-66-day-10Gospilled One-Year Reading Plan:https://gospilled-andrewhorval.blogspot.com

Five years ago, we hit record with a simple question: where should we go next? Somehow, that question turned into a friendship ritual, a passport of conversations, and a surprising education in places we had only half-understood. To celebrate our anniversary, we get personal, grateful, and a little stunned by how fast time moves when you keep saying yes to curiosity.Then we jump to what's coming and what just happened. Kristen is gearing up for an intense horseback trek and discovers she accidentally signed up for Georgia the country, not Georgia in the United States, which sparks a real talk about travel planning, training, and saying yes even when you're nervous. From there, Kristen shares a powerful trip to Dharamshala, India, timed around a documentary focused on compassion and empathy, with a visit connected to the Dalai Lama's world and Tibetan culture in the Himalayas.We talk through the reality of the journey, including a 22-hour flight, high-altitude hills that turn every walk into a workout, and the moments that make it all worth it: prayer flags, ancient Tibetan scriptures, a butter lamp ceremony with more than a thousand candles, and wellness experiences like a sound bath of frequency-based sound healing. We also keep it honest with practical travel tips, from monsoon season to food safety, plus the sensory details you only learn by being there, like street dogs at night, monkeys, smoke, and smoggy air.If you like thoughtful travel stories with real-world details and big-hearted takeaways, subscribe to Where Next, share this anniversary episode with a fellow traveler, and leave a rating or review so more people can find the show.Map of Dharamshala, India Support the showPlease download, like, subscribe, share a review, and follow us on your favorite podcasts app and connect with us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wherenextpodcast/View all listening options: https://wherenextpodcast.buzzsprout.com/HostsCarol Springer: https://www.instagram.com/carol.work.lifeKristen: https://www.instagram.com/team_wake/ If you can, please support the show or you can buy us a coffee. 

Pamela Potts is an executive coach, keynote speaker, and bestselling author of Every Leader Is a Coach.She is the creator of the Leader Coach Approach™ and OMO Method™, helping founders and senior leaders build trust, strengthen accountability, and multiply their impact through coaching-based leadership.With more than 25 years of experience building and scaling high-growth technology and ed-tech companies, Pamela brings a practical, human-centered approach to developing people and creating sustainable performance.SHOW SUMMARYIn this episode of Selling from the Heart, Larry Levine and Darrell Amy welcome Pamela Potts to explore why effective sales leadership is less about directing people and more about developing them.Pamela explains why successful salespeople don't automatically become successful leaders. Leadership requires a different skill set—listening deeply, staying curious, asking better questions, and helping people develop solutions they genuinely own.She introduces her OMO Method: Observe, Map, and Optimize, a practical framework for coaching without judgment, uncovering what is really happening, and helping people create their own path forward.The conversation also explores accountability, trust, consultative selling, and self-coaching. Pamela challenges leaders to stop becoming the bottleneck and become the multiplier—because great leaders don't simply manage people. They develop them.KEY TAKEAWAYSTrust starts with self-awareness. Understand your own perspective before trying to understand someone else's.Become a multiplier, not a bottleneck. Leadership is about developing capability in others. Great sellers don't automatically become great leaders. Coaching requires a different set of skills. Choose curiosity over judgment. Listen to understand instead of immediately trying to solve. Ask better questions. “Tell me more” can unlock insights that advice never will. Use the OMO Method. Observe, Map, and Optimize to turn challenges into opportunities for growth. Let people own their solutions. People are more committed to ideas they help create. Accountability belongs in coaching. Clear commitments, follow-up, and feedback turn conversations into action. Coach yourself first. Self-coaching creates the awareness needed to effectively develop others. Treat failure as data. Use setbacks as information for improvement rather than reasons to stop.HIGHLIGHT QUOTESWe stop being the bottleneck and start being the multiplier for our teams.What we're doing is listening to actually hear instead of solve.What we solve and what we contribute to is what we own.We're not going to manage people. We're going to develop people.Once you can coach yourself, then you can coach others as well.ADDITIONAL RESOURCESExplore the secrets of heart-centered leadership and thriving workplace cultures with Culture from the Heart Podcast! Nominate a visionary CEO at https://culturefromtheheart.com/HomeGet Larry's New Book: Selling Food from the Heart, https://a.co/d/07dzlMx8Subscribe to The Selling from the Heart Podcast Youtube Channel! Stay updated with the latest episodes and leadership tips: https://www.youtube.com/c/sellingfromtheheart/Get Your Daily Dose of Inspiration:https://www.sellingfromtheheart.net/daily

Product returns represent an $800+ billion challenge across the e-commerce landscape, yet most brands barely scratch the surface of secondary market recovery. In our Season 3 FINALE of Retail War Games, Jeremy sits down with Sender Shamiss, President & CEO of ReturnPro. Sender breaks down his journey from writing multi-channel e-commerce software to building a massive reverse logistics infrastructure that spans across the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and Europe. Sender reveals how ReturnPro helps major retailers like Walmart protect brand MAP pricing, recover up to 80 cents on the dollar for returned inventory, and deploy cutting-edge X-ray and AI technology to catch organized return fraud without even opening the box. Thank you for tuning into Season 3 of Retail War Games!   

How much of what you're chasing right now do you actually want?The car. The house. The watch. The vacations. The team. The awards. The social media following. The recognition.And how much of it made its way onto your list because you keep watching everybody else?In Episode 399 of The MindShare Podcast, David Greenspan digs into what "keeping up with the Joneses" looks like in a world where social media puts hundreds of other people's lives, businesses and successes in front of us every single day.And Realtors... we're having a conversation about those videos too.One Realtor pours coffee in a listing video and suddenly everybody needs the coffee shot. Somebody sits at the kitchen island, now everyone's at the kitchen island. Somebody makes a funny video and half the industry decides they're comedians.And then there's the dancing.At a time when Realtors are fighting to demonstrate their value and professionalism to consumers, what are we actually communicating with some of the content we're putting online? But this episode goes much deeper than social media.David explores how comparison affects the businesses we build, the teams we think we need, the brokerages we join, the money we spend, the goals we chase and even how successful we believe we are.Because your situation can be perfectly fine until you see what somebody else has — and suddenly you start questioning something you weren't questioning five minutes ago. The challenge in this episode is to come back to your own Map.Figure out what you want personally, professionally and financially. Build your own scoreboard. Stay in your lane. Stop spending so much time watching what everybody else is doing.And go get your shit done.What You'll LearnHow social media has put "keeping up with the Joneses" on steroidsWhy comparison can completely change how you feel about a life or business you were happy with minutes earlierWhere healthy competition ends and damaging comparison beginsWhy Realtors copying the same content makes it harder to differentiate themselvesWhat your online content communicates about your professionalism and valueWhy your marketing should amplify who you actually areThe difference between wanting a particular business model and liking what it looks like from the outsideWhy seeing another agent build a team, start farming, launch a podcast or change brokerages doesn't mean you shouldHow the pressure to look successful can influence financial decisionsWhy your personal definition of success needs to belong to youHow David's Mapping process helps you evaluate what actually belongs in your life and businessWhy there will always be somebody with more — more money, more followers, a nicer car or a bigger businessHow comparison can quietly become another form of procrastinationWhy staying in your lane gives you more time and energy to actually get shit done00:00 — How Much of What You're Chasing Do You Actually Want?The car, house, vacations, business goals, team, awards and recognition — and how much of it actually belongs to you versus what you've picked up from watching everyone else.02:50 — Keeping Up With The Joneses in 2026Why social media has amplified comparison at a time when people are already questioning their finances, careers, businesses and success.The Question Everyone Keeps Asking: "How Are Things Out There?"Why people are looking around to determine where they stand and how quickly somebody else's highlight reel can make your own life feel inadequate.Realtors... What Are We Doing?The coffee shots. The kitchen islands. The identical listing videos. The comedians. And, of course, the dancing Realtors.Professionalism, Content and Your Value as a RealtorIf the industry wants consumers to better understand the value of Realtors, agents need to think seriously about what their content is communicating.Trying to Stand Out While Copying Everybody ElseWhy your experience, personality, communication style and actual strengths should drive your marketing instead of whatever another Realtor happened to make popular online.15:37 — Commercial Break17:27 — Keeping Up With The Joneses in Your BusinessTeams, farming, podcasts, brokerage changes and the danger of building a business because you like what somebody else's looks like from the outside.Looking Wealthy vs. Actually Being WealthyCars, homes, vacations and the social pressure — especially in sales — to project an image of success.What Are You Trying to Prove — And To Whom?A question worth asking before deciding whether the things you're chasing actually matter to you.Mapping: Come Back to What YOU WantUsing personal, professional and financial goals to create your own Map and evaluate whether the decisions you're making actually move you toward it. Your Scoreboard Needs to Belong to YouWhy somebody will always have more — right up until you finally buy the Ferrari and some asshole flies over you in his private jet.Comparison Has Become ProcrastinationWatching, scrolling, studying, saving, screenshotting and consuming everybody else's strategies while the calls, follow-ups and work in your own plan remain undone. Stay in Your LaneLearn from other people, pay attention to what's working, then come back to your Map and ask: What am I building?Your Action StepAudit the things you're chasing. Ask why you want them. Then do the same with your business and marketing to determine what actually belongs in your plan.You can learn from other people. You can be competitive. You can want the car, the house, the business, the money, the vacations and all of it.Just make sure the life you're working so hard to build is actually your life.Because there will always be someone with more. The Joneses keep changing, and now the algorithm can introduce you to a brand-new one every thirty seconds. Your scoreboard needs to belong to you.Know what you want. Come back to your Map. Stay in your lane.Then go get your shit done.

Can flexibility and high standards co-exist in high school? In this episode, you'll hear stories from students at Map Academy about how personalized learning, strong relationships, and meaningful accountability helped them overcome barriers while still maintaining ownership of their work. You'll also hear from Map Co-founder & Co-director Rachel Babcock about the systems that allow students who were left behind in other schools to succeed at Map. —Explore more stories at ⁠educationdisruption.org⁠Education Disruption is a podcast by ⁠Map Academy⁠—a free, charter public high school open to all Massachusetts students up to age 24.Explore careers at Map: ⁠themapacademy.org/careers⁠This podcast is a Hairpin production: ⁠hairpin.org⁠

How To Conquer The Fear Of Public Speaking | Richard McCann Speaking Coach InterviewPublic speaking is one of the biggest fears on the planet. It even has an official name: glossophobia. Most people never get past it, and their careers pay the price every time they stand up in front of a room.Richard McCann knows the fear from the inside. He started out petrified, reading from his own book at his first talk in 2005. He has since delivered 3,521 presentations and coached over 7,000 people in 16 years, and in this episode of the Business Growth Podcast, powered by ActionCOACH UK, he breaks down exactly what separates forgettable speakers from unforgettable ones.His core message is simple: you're not born a great speaker, you become one.What You'll Learn:- The 3 Biggest Mistakes Speakers Make: Lacking presence, racing through filler words, and reading slides or an obvious autocue. Richard explains why senior leaders who are brilliant at their jobs still fall flat on stage.- How To Build Gravitas: Why you need to be a slightly exaggerated version of yourself, projecting your voice and holding the space, even when it feels unnatural at first.- Why Filler Words Kill Credibility: A World Economic Forum speaker said "um" around 40 times in 2 minutes. Learn how slowing down and putting pauses around your phrases instantly puts you ahead of most speakers.- Ethos, Logos, Pathos: Aristotle's 3 pillars of influence, and why pathos, the emotional connection built through storytelling, is the one most business presentations miss.- How To Prepare Without A Script: Richard's method of mind maps and bullet points, filming and timing each section, and starting with the end in mind.- The Power Of Owning It: If something is on your mind, say it out loud. Richard explains why naming the elephant in the room disarms cynics and calms your own nerves.If You Haven't Started: Watch the greats and model them. Search "W Mitchell keynote" on YouTube, the speaker who inspired Richard, and study what he does. Then practise slowing down and chunking your words in everyday conversations, meetings, and phone calls.If You're Already Presenting: Ditch the word-for-word script. Map your talk as bullet points or a mind map, film yourself delivering each section, and time them until the whole talk flows naturally. Then find a coach and get feedback on your delivery.For Everyone: Open with a story before you show a single fact or figure. And when something is off, own it out loud rather than hoping nobody notices.Whether you're a business owner presenting to your team, a leader pitching for investment, or someone who dreads the next meeting, this conversation shows that great speakers are made, not born. Subscribe for weekly conversations with the world's leading business minds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

KMOX's Michael Calhoun talked with Caitlin Whaley, Senior Director of Advocacy at the Missouri School Boards Association. The Missouri State Board of Education met in Jefferson City for a full day, talking about letter grades for schools and preliminary MAP scores.

In this episode, Dr. Murray Stein shares insights into Jungian psychology, focusing on dreams, the individuation process, and the importance of conscious self-awareness. Discover how understanding your unconscious can lead to greater wholeness and societal harmony.Dr. Stein is a graduate of Yale University (B.A. and M.Div.), the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), and the C.G. Jung Institut-Zurich (Diploma). He is a founding member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts and of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts. He has been the president of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (2001-4), and the President of The International School of Analytical Psychology-Zurich (2008-2012).He is a training analyst at the International School for Analytical Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland. His most recent publications include The Principle of Individuation, Jung's Map of the Soul and Jungian Psychoanalysis (editor). He lectures internationally on topics related to Analytical Psychology and its applications in the contemporary world.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Jungian Psychology and Dreams03:01 The Impact of Jung's Book 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections'06:28 Interpreting Dreams: Freud vs Jung10:52 Big Dreams and Their Significance13:52 Dreams as Compensation for Consciousness17:14 Everyone as a Poet of Their Inner World21:31 The Power of Staying with the Image in Dreams25:50 The Purpose of the Unconscious and Individuation30:55 The Spiritual and Cultural Dimensions of Aging34:47 The Stages of Individuation and Personal Growth39:08 The Dangers of Blocking the Inner Work43:04 Seeking Honest Feedback from Close Ones46:45 Jung's Inner Guides and the Red Book50:20 The Power of Self-Knowledge and Consciousness52:36 The Collective Shadow and Group Mind53:58 The Role of Individuation in Preventing War55:04 How to Cultivate Collective Consciousness58:25 The Impact of Inner Work on Society58:54 The Joy of Exploring the Jungian Universe59:13 Closing Remarks and Final ThoughtsGrab your copy of The Time is Now and start your journey toward living a more intentional and fulfilling life -⁠⁠ https://a.co/d/aDYCQ9oJoin this channel to get access to exclusive perks:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl67XqJVdVtBqiCWahS776g/join// Connect With Me //ORDER MY BOOK, THE TIME IS NOW: A GUIDE TO HONOR YOUR TIME ON EARTH: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.timeisnowbook.comWebsite: ⁠⁠⁠https://throughconversations.com⁠⁠Substack - https://throughconversations.substack.comYouTube community -https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl67XqJVdVtBqiCWahS776g/join// Social //X: ⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/ThruConvPodcast⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/thruconvpodcast/?hl=en⁠⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠https:⁠//www.youtube.com/channel/UCl67XqJVdVtBqiCWahS776g

Send us Fan MailSay hi to me on Substack here and tune in for what you can expect over there and how Substack fits into my overall approach to business!If you would like to learn more about The Mothered Business Mastermind, click here. Want to download the 15 minute CEO Map? If you only have 15 minutes it will tell you exactly what to work on to move the needle in your business. Click here. Please say hi to me on Instagram @robyn.gooding or take a peek at my website for more info www.robyngooding.comClick here to book your call anytime! If you loved this episode, I'd appreciate if you could leave a review or share on your socials. It truly means the world to me and helps amplify this message for other mothers desiring a supportive business for motherhood.  Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The content shared reflects my personal experience and professional perspective as a coach.Any stories shared are anonymized or composite examples drawn from real experiences, with identifying details changed to protect privacy.This podcast does not constitute medical, legal, financial, or...

A poem about a map opens North and South, the first collection of the great twentieth century poet Elizabeth Bishop, and since, maps have been associated with her poetic vision—at once telescoping and binocular—and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also hand-held, man-made, intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative, and personal. For several episodes, Wes & Erin will be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with “The Moose” as expressions of, among other things, her map-like imagination. Upcoming Episodes: Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey”; more Elizabeth Bishop poetry: “First Death in Nova Scotia,” “One Art.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email advertising@airwavemedia.com to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: A poem about a map opens north and south, the first collection of the great 20th century poet Elizabeth Bishop. And since maps have been associated with her poetic vision, at once telescoping and binocular, and with the polarities and preoccupations of her work. The map's privileged, sweeping, bird's eye view of the earth is also handheld, man made intimate. Depending on its level of minuteness or obsession, it can contain the tiniest details as well as, let's say, the whole enchilada. And though it purports to be scientific and objective, it is representational and therefore subjective, particular, imaginative and personal. Over the next few episodes, we'll be reading a selection of some of Bishop's most anthologized poems, starting with the moose as expressions of, among other things, her map, like imagination. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, have you ever seen a moose in the wild? 1:12 Wes: I have not, but I have seen Instagram videos of them and people getting too close, and I've heard that they actually are quite dangerous. 1:23 Erin: Oh, perfectly harmless. 1:24 Wes: As cute as they look. So not safe as houses. Which is a very surprising line, unless you think that houses maybe aren't as safe as they seem or ought to be. But that's something we'll talk about later. How about you? 1:38 Erin: I have not. And I actually, it's become a running joke among certain friends of mine that I haven't seen a moose because I long to see a moose in the wild. This is my dearest wish. 1:52 Wes: Is that the first time anyone said that in history? I long to see. 1:56 Erin: I don't know. 1:57 Wes: It's a good first line for a poem, actually. Why do you long. Long to see a moose in the wild? 2:03 Erin: Really? Maybe because of the poem. I don't know. I just really want to, but I. Maybe this will become significant without getting too personal or maybe with getting too personal. With apologies to the listeners. Ten years ago now, when my grandfather passed that summer, my grandmother wanted to go up to Maine and revisit certain places that she had been with him. And we ended up going to Acadia. And I was so excited to see. Am just. I got it into my head that I had to go to Acadia and see a moose. And I even bought a sweatshirt. I'm not wearing it right now. I looked down to see if I was wearing it. It's the same size and shape as this one. This is a Yankees, 1996 World Series sweatshirt. 2:42 Wes: It's not a Rocky and Bullwinkle sweatshirt, is it? 2:45 Erin: No, no, no. It's an acadia and it has a. It has a mousse on it. And so I bought it the first day that I was there and I was like, this is my sweatshirt and it has a moose on it. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I. I bought a moose sweatshirt in, I think Grand Teton, and I was like, I'm gonna see a moose. And I did not see a moose. And then I lived obviously many years in Utah, and things would happen. Everybody knew I wanted to see a moose. And I would go to these trails where you could see moose. And I would like be going up a trail and someone would be coming down saying, there are moose up there. We just saw a moose. You just saw baby moose. I'd get all upsided and I would. I would run up and it was gone and people would taunt me. 3:32 Wes: So you don't want to see like a magic white heart or something like that? 3:38 Erin: No, no, I just want to see him. Even the garden variety moose? No, no. Just a humble moose will hide itself from me when. When it knows that I am after it. 3:49 Wes: Because they are a goofy, right? Are they majestic? Are they goofy looking? Are they both? 3:55 Erin: I think they're both. And I think that kind of qual quality is really well captured in the poem. No, I mean that quality of if not being then looking safe as houses or being a gargantuan size, and yet having. I know this is a female moose, which I believe is called a cow, as opposed to a bull. Right. But the bulls, even their horns have that hand like quality to them. You know, it looks kind of like an outstretched hand. 4:22 Wes: Interesting. 4:24 Erin: Yeah. They're not majestic. 4:25 Wes: Yeah, I think that's important to the poem. It's not some obviously majestic creature, although it is large and there is majesty in it in the poem, but it's not the typical majesty that you can just get from, oh, look at this beautiful animal. 4:41 Erin: Yeah. And this is kind of why I brought up my grandfather. There was some connection for me as I think there is something quite personal going on with the moose at the end, other than the shared experience of everybody in the bus, all of that. Like there's something bigger than us, more than us, and yet familiar in a way. And it's magical in a sense, because to see it is kind of a rare thing. Yet it also comes out of the landscape that she's that she's grown up in and that she's part of. I think there's a. Yeah. A lot of interesting dualities going on. 5:17 Wes: Okay. So maybe you can read the whole thing and then you could give a little bit. Or we could give a little bit of the biographical background because this is a bus trip she actually took. Right. 5:26 Erin: Yeah. 5:27 Wes: The significance of Nova Scotia, which is where she's departing from in the poem and all of that stuff. But. Yeah. Do you want to start by reading? 5:35 Erin: Sure. The moose from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea, home of the long tides, where the bay leaves the sea twice a day and takes the herrings long rides where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home, where silted red sometimes the sun sets facing a red sea and others veins the flats. Lavender rich mud and burning rivulets. On red gravelly roads, down rows of sugar maples, past clapboard farmhouses and neat clapboard churches, bleached ridged as clam shells, past twin silver birches through late afternoon a bus journeys west, the windshield flashing pink, pink glancing off of metal, brushing the dented flank of blue beat up enamel, down hollows, uprises and waits patient, while a lone traveler gives kisses and embraces to seven relatives and the collie supervises goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dog. The bus starts. The light grows richer. The fog shifting, salty, thin, comes closing in. Its cold round crystals form and slide and settle in the white hen's feathers in gray glazed cabbages on the cabbage roses and lupins like apostles. The sweet peas cling to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Bumblebees creep inside the foxgloves and evening commences. One stop at Bass river, then the economies, lower middle, upper five islands. Five houses where a woman shakes a tablecloth out after supper. A pale flickering gone the Tantramar marshes and the smell of salt hay. An iron bridge trembles and a loose plank rattles but doesn't give way. On the left a red light swims through the dark. A ship's port lantern. Two rubber boots show illuminated, solemn. A dog gives one bark. A woman climbs in with two market bags. Brisk, freckled, elderly. A grand night. Yes, sir. All the way to Boston. She regards us amicably. Moonlight as we enter the New Brunswick woods. Hairy, scratchy, splintery moonlight and mist caught in them like lamb's wool. On bushes in a pasture the passengers lie back, snores some long sighs. A dreamy divagation begins in the night, a gentle auditory slow hallucination in the creakings and noises, an old conversation not concerning us but recognizable somewhere back in the bus, grandparents, voices uninterruptedly talking in eternity, names being mentioned. Things cleared up finally. What he said, what she said, who got pensioned. Deaths, deaths and sicknesses. The year he remarried, the year something happened, she died in childbirth. That was the son lost when the schooner foundered. He took to drink. Yes, she went to the bad when Amos began to pray, even in the store and finally the family had to put him away. Yes, that peculiar affirmative. Yes, a sharp indrawn breath, half grown, half acceptance. That means life's like that, we know it. Also death talking the way they talked in the old featherbed, peacefully on and on, dim lamplight in the hall, down in the kitchen, the dog tucked in her shawl. Now it's all right now, even to fall asleep, just as on all those nights. Suddenly the bus driver stops with a jolt, turns off his lights. A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood and stands there, looms rather in the middle of the road. It approaches, it sniffs at the bus's hot hood, towering antlerless, high as a church, homely as a house or safe as houses, a man's voice assures us, perfectly harmless. Some of the passengers exclaim in whispers, childishly, softly, sure are big creatures. It's awful plain. Look, it's a she. Taking her time. She looks the bus over, grand, otherworldly. Why. Why do we feel. We all feel the sweet sensation of joy? Curious creatures, says our quiet driver, rolling his Rs. Look at that, would you? Then he shifts gears for a moment longer by craning backward. The moose can be seen on the moonlit McAdam. Then there's a dim smell of moose, an acrid smell of gasoline. 11:05 Wes: Thank you. Very nice. It's really great to hear it spoken out loud. Spoken is the wrong word. It's the word read, performed. Do you want to say anything about the form of the poem before I ask you about some of the autobiographical background? 11:22 Erin: Yeah. Short lines, six line stanzas, 20, I believe. 28 stanzas in all. Irregularly rhymed, should we say? Kind of like a lot of bishop, you know, we get A, B, C. Then sometimes not rhymed where you might expect. So the rhymes peek their heads out and then. And then recede. Chatty a little bit in places, lots of repetitions of words. But that. That's something we could talk about More. But, yeah, kind of. Kind of mysterious form. One of the best things I've ever heard or read, I guess, about Bishop was by Michael Hoffman, who wrote quite a bit about her. And he said that it seems as though every time Bishop is writing, whether in form or in a kind of nonce form that she's creating, that she seems to be just inventing every form, like from scratch. You know, there's no blueprint. She doesn't have a familiar style in which she writes or particular kind of verse form that she seems to gravitate to. And when she writes, you know, a sistina or a villanelle or a sonnet or something like that, it seems like she's almost inventing the form as she goes along. And in this instance, there's a real. I keep wanting to say homemade after Crusoe in England. But, yeah, I think that's maybe what he was trying to get at, that homemade quality, that sort of bespoke kind of quality. And in the places where the rhyme goes in and out, I think that's really exemplified. 12:53 Wes: Well, it better be bespoke. She took forever to write it. 12:55 Erin: Yeah, that's right. She started this in, I think, 1946. 13:01 Wes: And then she finished it when this 13:04 Erin: was published in Geography 3. So she finished it in the 70s. 13:07 Wes: Okay. 13:08 Erin: Geography 3 came out in 1977. And this must have been published before then, individually, perhaps in the New Yorker, I think. Oh, geography three is 76. I would say maybe 72 is the date that comes to mind. Don't quote me on that. 13:24 Wes: Do we know why it took her so long? Obviously, she put it down for a couple days here and there. 13:29 Erin: It was the July 15th issue, 1972. So close to the day that we're recording. Why did it take her so long? She just worked on things forever and ever and ever. You see it, if you read. I highly recommend to listeners that they Get Words in Air. A very, very thick book of all the letters between Bishop and her friend Robert Lowell. You see her bringing up things or even mentioning in a description that she's writing to Lowell in a letter, a line that will later show up in a poem. Yeah. Low rate of productivity is great to. 14:08 Wes: You know, I can relate to that. 14:11 Erin: I take it as my model, honestly. Like, you know, live. Live Large and die with a slim Collected is kind of a. 14:19 Wes: Kind of a great Monroe Doctrine. But call it. What's another name? Bishpro. 14:28 Erin: That's right. 14:29 Wes: Is it right that she was forced to complete it because she agreed to read it this is something for deadlines. Right. At Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony. 14:38 Erin: I didn't know that. I know she read it at that ceremony, but I didn't know that that's what. The impetus for completing it. But that doesn't surprise me. 14:45 Wes: Yeah. So deadlines help every once in a while. 14:47 Erin: Absolutely, absolutely. 14:49 Wes: And then biographically. Right. This is based on a trip that she actually took, and she. She'd been to visit relatives in Nova Scotia and then came back on this bus trip. And the. There really was a moose. There really was a collie. Seven relatives for the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. Seven else. 15:11 Erin: Yeah, yeah. The specificity and all of it's. You know, there is a kind of like a photo realism, not just in the style, but in the. You know, we could sort of be certain that these things happened the way that she is recording them somehow, and yet she's spinning it into something more than just reportage. 15:30 Wes: So she was raised partly by her grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. Right. Her. Her father had died in infancy and her mother was institutionalized. 15:41 Erin: That's right, yeah. 15:41 Wes: She aged at. When she was 5. 15:43 Erin: That's right. 15:44 Wes: So it's important just because. Yeah. The bus is leaving Nova Scotia, but go. Go ahead. 15:48 Erin: Yeah, it is important. She was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and she's buried there. I've seen her grave up there. It has a line or two lines from the bite on her tombstone. All the untidy activity continues. Awful but cheerful. Yeah. So she was born in 1911. Her father died, I think, of Bright's disease when she was 8 months old. And then her mother was institutionalized when she was 5, and she never saw her again. She didn't die until the 30s, I think, while Bishop was at Vassar. 16:23 Wes: Do we know what she was institutionalized for? Mental illness in general? 16:28 Erin: Yes. I don't know exactly what. In a short story of Bishop's, she describes as her. A scream coming from her mother. And whatever was wrong was exacerbated by her husband's death. And so then Elizabeth was left to be raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia who were quite poor. And I guess she was kind of running around barefoot on the farm and stuff like that. And her father's family were very wealthy, and so when they came up to visit Elizabeth, they were, I guess, horrified by the fact that she was just like, you know, running around, hanging out with farm animals. And they took her to. Back with him to Worcester, and she was very unhappy there. Very ill child. She had asthma and eczema. And really, like, I think almost died of both at one time or other, very unhappy. And then eventually she moved to an aunt's house in, I want to say, in Revere, Massachusetts, and she was a little happier there. And then she went to Vassar, and I've been to the Vassar campus to see various buildings associated with Bishop and also to see. They did a really fabulous exhibition of her postcards at the Vassar Library a couple of years ago, which I really loved, seeing her hand and her little. In jokes and asides and really amazing to see. Anyway, at Vassar, the librarian there set up a meeting between Bishop and Marianne Moore, who became a mentor to her. They were very close. And then also over the course of her life, she was very close with and had an important friendship with Lowell. Hence the enormous book of letters. I have it here. It's so heavy I could barely pick it up. But this is a great book. It's kind of like an epistolary novel. Yeah. And she was. I think it's important to say, too, that she was a lesbian who had a very long relationship with a Brazilian architect named Lota de Mecedo Soares, who was her partner in Brazil for 15 years. She lived down there, known for travel. A lot of her collections, whether it's Geography three, which is the most obvious one, or north and south, have. There are a lot of Brazilian pumps. There are a lot of geographical poems. The first poem in her first collection, north and south, was the Map, which is often read as a kind of ars poetica. She's known for these types of, you know, sweeping landscapes that the moose begins with, and an interest in landscape and in this kind of bird's eye view. But then also you get these telescoping details, like a cinematic close up interspersed. Much is made of that in Bishop, of that kind of vision of hers, and specifically of, I don't know, the idea that she creates these. These beautiful miniatures, which is true, but maybe sometimes can be a little. I mean, she's revered, as she should be, and she's one of the most popular poets and she also has a great ear and she has so many other great things going on. So I don't want to exclusively focus on that kind of visual element, though it's there and it's very rich. 19:43 Wes: So from narrow provinces of fish and bread and tea. That's a very good opener. Why are they narrow provinces? And what is the. What are the fish and bread and tea doing? Fish and bread sounds vaguely like it could be a biblical reference, but maybe it's not. But you add tea. Right. There's something mundane here and perhaps restricted, provincial. And that's what she's going to be departing from. I mean, well, begins with the tides, but. 20:12 Erin: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's right. Narrow in a few kinds of ways. Because there's a strange. Because of the Bay of Fundy, there's almost that like U shaped corridor of land around it. So Nova Scotia is kind of narrow. And then up into. Then there's the narrow isthmus. I don't know, I don't know if I'm using that word correctly. Up into New Brunswick. Yeah, so there's something maybe a little, I don't want to say spiritually narrow, maybe somewhat limited or like practical. Practical and, you know, just the necessities and a place we learn that that is. That maybe has to be stalwart in response to the vagaries of the water around it. The Bay of Fundy, I was reading online, the tide, over the course of just one tide, can rise and fall 50ft because the bay is like a giant funnel. When it goes out, it just leaves this vast, open, muddy plain basically behind it. 21:16 Wes: She portrays this very beautifully. We get the image of the tide retreating and then the flats that are being illuminated by the setting sun as burning rivulets. And then there's almost a transition into the bus ride when she says on red gravelly roads, eventually the subject of that is going to be the bus. Although in the beginning, before we get to the bus, it looks like the rivulets have almost become roads. So you almost get the sense like the tides come in and it's going to go further inward, it's going to go all the way to Boston, but it's going to become the inhabitants of the bus who are much like the herrings. Right. In the first stanza. The herrings on the tides take herrings on long rides. So it's almost as if as the tide comes in, she is caught in the tide and brought along with it towards her destination. 22:08 Erin: That's right, yeah. And the bay itself, the water itself is also like a traveler, you know, you might go to visit it and find it's not at home, it's gone out for on a trip or something. So there's also that connection as well. Whereas the roads are part of this more solid and dependable and the water being fickle and not always depended on to be there. 22:31 Wes: Well, I was going to say there's something very poignant about the way she describes the tides and whether they're in or out. And I can't put my finger on it exactly. It's almost. It's this idea of. Right. Where if the river enters or retreats in a wall of brown foam depends on if it meets the bay. Coming in the bay, not at home. If the tide is in or coming in the river clashes with it in a wall of brown foam. Is that the idea now? And what's the image there? Is it always a wall of brown foam? Well, either way, I just. Something about this idea of. It depends on whether the bay is at home or something like that. It's a poignant image. 23:12 Erin: It is. It's that sense of just. Of disappointment or just missing someone, like a missed opportunity. Seems kind of surprisingly emotionally resonant, considering that she's talking about a tide. 23:25 Wes: And we. You know, it introduces the idea of home and. Which I think will be significant. And later on we'll talk about whether the moose is safe as houses and the reflections of the elderly and all that stuff. But. 23:40 Erin: And boundaries, too, right. You have very slippery boundary between the bay and the. And the sea, between the rivers and the bay that feeds them. And I think that boundary very much plays into the idea of home. And you could say that the bus seems to be a part of that too. Right. Like the bus becomes the home. So there's a little bit of the slippery idea of this transposition of home life into the bus, or the people on the bus all becoming the. We like a family within it. The way that it can literally cross national boundaries. It's going to Boston across the border. 24:18 Wes: Yeah. And then they'll be observing provincial life, I guess, from within the bus. And. And, you know, a woman shaking out an apron, for instance, or home life. But, yeah, I had the same thought to you. The bus. The interior of the bus becomes its own kind of mobile home, I guess. I guess the wall brown foam part. There's that push and pull, or it's a matter of who's doing the pushing. Right. In one case, the brown foam. The wall of brown foam is caused as. As the river pushes on the retreating tide. And the other case, it's the tide pushing back against the river as it comes in. But in either case, there's a clash there. 24:58 Erin: Then there are places, though, where there's blurring of boundaries. Like one of my favorite lines in the whole poem, the idea of the churches as ridged as clamshells. She always takes that. This is much remarked upon among scholars of Bishop. Where you get the thing that's. That's really big, suddenly reduced in size to the handheld, but coming out of the same idiom. You know, both the clamshell and this clapboard church are in a way equally native to Nova Scotia. The brilliance of connecting those two things and fishing being an industry in the area, you know, sort of springing out of the fishing industry. 25:42 Wes: Yeah. And shells are what's left as the tide retreats. Right. As it's as if the houses are just the natural residue of a retreating tide. 25:52 Erin: That's great. 25:52 Wes: From the beginning of the poem, there's a sense of momentum, and almost like you, at least in my case, I felt like I'm on a camera moving over the landscape, and it starts with the tide, and then it moves to the burning rivulets. Right. So now we're hovering over. I don't know what you would call it, a. A tidal plane. Anyway, she calls it the flats. Right. So all the silt, and we're moving along there, and then suddenly we're on a gravelly road. So the sun takes over from the sea. The redness of the sun. And then the bus takes over from the sun. But that's the momentum of the poem is from sea to sun to bus. 26:37 Erin: Yeah. The bus flashes pink. We get lots of pairs of the same word, creating a kind of chime with each other. So we get the windshield flashing pink. Pink glancing off of metal. And we wonder, I suppose, because part of the reason why the roads are red is because of the clay content. Right. Of the road itself. So we get that combination of, like, something red in the road or in the composition of the soil and rock of the area. 27:07 Wes: Laterite, I think, which I only know because of Graham Green, who I've been reading. Oh, and what heart of the matter. He's talking about laterite houses, like. So from the red clay, you can make, you know, homes from as well, and common in Sierra Leone. So he used the word like a hundred times before he finally looked it up. All right. There must be something that's going to not know what he's talking about. I'm like, oh, okay, now I get it. Yeah. 27:41 Erin: So that's the mineral, the. 27:44 Wes: It's reddish. Yeah. Reddish clay type of soil, topsoil or something like that. I should know more about this because I used to write about this, too, when I was writing about transportation and engineering. 27:56 Erin: Right. 27:57 Wes: It's important what kind of soil you're building on. But anyway, I remember nothing about that. But, yeah. So it could be the right word. Who knows? But. But, yeah. So you're getting at the. Yeah. The way the redness of the sun is interacting with the. 28:12 Erin: Yes, it's coming. 28:13 Wes: The redness of the soil. 28:14 Erin: Yeah. And that kind of redness coming from below and above to glint off of the bus. The windshield is flashing pink from the sun and the metal is flashing pink from the road. They're both brushing the dented flank of the blue beat up enamel from one direction or the other, it seems. Yeah. Sort of tunnel of red in which the. In which the bus is traveling. 28:41 Wes: Such a vivid image that she gives us. It made me think, you know, sometimes it's almost better than film. It's more vibrant or more. Don't know how to say it, but I was thinking about this because in some of the philosophy podcasts we do, there are philosophers who deny that we have imagery in our head. Exactly. Or we can never. Which seems true. Right. We can't imagine anything with the vividness that we would have if we actually saw it. But it makes me think when I read a poem like this, but also. And also reading some of the novels I've been reading. Well, there's a special kind of vividness to figurative language that perception can't capture. In some ways it's more. More vivid, definitely. 29:26 Erin: I think the sonic quality of the word, the repeated. Right. It's on the one hand a repeated image, but then it also creates that kind of just the soundscape, makes them feel somehow more synesthetic to say, but somehow more picturable or more tangible or more. I don't know, the pink glancing off metal, the dented flank beat up enamel. You know, there's just. It's like. I think that's contributing to it, to the vividness of the image. And yeah, you talked about momentum, too. I mean, this entire. This whole first sentence is six stanzas long. It ends with. And Akali supervises. So there's also that kind of. Yeah. Locomotive propulsion of the camera work, so to speak, Zooming in and then following the road into the bus. And then the bus arrives to sort of catch again, quite cinematically the scene that's actually happening or the place where the eye, if there is an eye in the poem, actually is the lone traveler embracing these relatives with the collie watching on. So there's a sense in which the I eye of the poem doesn't actually catch up with the speaker until stanza six and the end of this first sentence until we get goodbye to the elms, to the farm, to the dogs. So there's kind of lamination at that moment of the I eye and the capital I. 30:49 Wes: We seem to be gradually getting more of a point of view. Right. It's very omniscient in the beginning, hovering over the landscape. And I think gradually we're going to be getting a her point of view in the bus and then a we. But also just to note, this is one. I think this is the first of three pauses. Right. There's gonna. It's gonna pause here, the bus. The momentum is gonna stop as the bus lets on the lone traveler, which I presume is her. Right. Her saying goodbye. And then there'll be a pause when the amicable freckled woman gets on. She's there because we need everything to be in threes. And then we. Then we're gonna pause for the moose in the very end. I didn't miss anything. Right. There's not other places where we stop? 31:32 Erin: No. I mean, there are, of course, stanzas that end some more definitively than others and stopped with a period. There's a stop at Bass River. Right. So there is a little bit of that kind of start. Stop syntactically. But I think you're right that those are the stops where there's content. 31:49 Wes: Content goes. 31:50 Erin: Yes. And where there's a very particular. Yeah, the content of the bus, except for the moose obviously doesn't get on the bus. But there's a stop that's motivated, let's say, rather than just being described as various stops along the way where we don't know who got on and who got off or whatever. Certainly there's also a movement toward that more personal experience of the speaker. But then there are also things that the speaker couldn't possibly know or you know, because once she's said goodbye to everyone and gets on the bus, then we also get the sort of nature show close ups. The crystals of fog, the lupins like apostles, the sweet peasants clinging. One of my favorite parts, clinging to their wet white string on the whitewashed fences. Again, we get two uses of white right next to each other. Bumblebees creeping in the foxgloves. All things you really can't see from certainly from a moving bus. 32:43 Wes: Yeah, the point of view gets focused very, very gradually, maybe through the whole palm. Maybe it's not fully focused until the very end, but. Yeah. So you're pointing out something important which is at the sort of omniscient point of view is still here in these very. What do you call it when you take a close up with your phone? Macro, ironically. Yeah. These very close up pictures of flora and fauna and very Beautiful. 33:12 Erin: Yeah. They compound and then they get more and more loaded and mysterious. And just when we're about to maybe go over the edge, we get recalled back a little bit. That's at least how I'm reading, for instance, stanza 12, about the ship's port lantern and the boot and the bark of the dog. And then suddenly a woman climbs on the bus. And so we're sort of stopped from going off into some sort of train of thought that you could follow there down a rabbit hole. But I love that stanza on red light swimming through the dark. It reminds me of the last stanza of disillusionment, of 10 o'. Clock. Do you know the old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather? I think that's how it goes, the Stevens bomb, because we get the boots and the red light in the ship, so they're probably. No. No real connection there. 34:07 Wes: So all of these little intricate descriptions that she's giving, right. It begins with the light growing richer, which I take it mean, means we're approaching dusk and evening, or we're in dusk and it's evening is approaching and a kind of mini winter, Right. Something. It's a diurnal cycle, but there's a bit of a parallel to something seasonal. Right. So we get crystals forming and the images like sweet peas clinging and the bumblebees inside foxgloves. As evening commences, it's almost like. I don't know if this is true, but it's almost as if we're getting the response of the animals and flora and fauna to the commencement of evening. That's our first indication of it. So I was surprised to see, okay, it's still light out enough for us to see a woman shaking a tablecloth out after supper. And that is beautifully described as a pale flickering. Right. Almost as if that's something like the light reflecting off the enamel bus, or not pink anymore, but just a flickering of pale light and then gone, I suppose. Does that mean that we're now without light? Is that sort of the way nighttime is ushered in by the end of the next stanza? And it's in the next stanza that we see a red light in the dark. Now we have a ship in the dark. So it's almost as if. Yeah, the shaking of the tablecloth is like a magician. Abracadabra. Now it's nighttime, Right? 35:39 Erin: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. You're making me realize how many connections there are to Keats in this poem. Right. There's something Keatsian about it, very. To Autumn, you get the sweet peas clinging on the fence. You get that image of fecundity things on top of other things. You know, the mossed cottage trees and the late flowers for the bees. And then the shaking out of the tablecloth is like the hair lifted by the winnowing wind. Right. Because there's. There's wind, there are flowers and bees. And then there's also, of course, redness and that image of, you know, like the evening. Autumn. Evening redness. And maybe this is. Yeah. Rows of sugar maples. Those could be red as well. If we're in an autumnal landscape, can't be too late because everything is, you know, it's got to be like August, maybe because we have this. Or. No, I guess maybe not. Gray glazed cabbages. I don't know enough about cabbages to know at what point in their development. 36:40 Wes: Yeah. Whatever season it is. I just think that the evening is almost like a mini winter. It gets colder and we see the. 36:46 Erin: Definitely. 36:47 Wes: We see the effects of it. But, yeah, maybe autumn is probably the logical season for. 36:53 Erin: Right. Yeah. And that point. Or that point in the transition from summer to autumn where, I mean, even on a summer night in Nova Scotia, the evening temperature is quite autumnal regardless. And so when the woman climbs on with the market bags, we get. 37:09 Wes: Shall we take a. Shall we? 37:12 Erin: Oh, yes. 37:13 Wes: Let's let the freckled amicable woman on in part two. 37:17 Erin: She'll have to wait. 37:18 Wes: Let's not let her on the bus yet. 37:20 Erin: You have to wait for everyone else to get off before you can get on. It's one of the cardinal rules of public transportation. Okay, we will continue in part two. Thank you. 37:29 Wes: Thank you.

Episode 173 - Level of consciousness explained - Bill McKenna explores Dr. David Hawkins' Map of Consciousness, moving from shame, guilt, grief, fear and anger into courage, acceptance, reason, love and joy.Disclaimer: Please note that all information and content on the UK Health Radio Network, all its radio broadcasts and podcasts are provided by the authors, producers, presenters and companies themselves and is only intended as additional information to your general knowledge. As a service to our listeners/readers our programs/content are for general information and entertainment only.  The UK Health Radio Network does not recommend, endorse, or object to the views, products or topics expressed or discussed by show hosts or their guests, authors and interviewees.  We suggest you always consult with your own professional – personal, medical, financial or legal advisor. So please do not delay or disregard any professional – personal, medical, financial or legal advice received due to something you have heard or read on the UK Health Radio Network.

Subrata Mitra, Co-founder and Partner at Accel India and co-author of Down But Not Out, shares what decades of backing Indian startups have taught him about building companies that survive setbacks, adapt through uncertainty and keep going long enough to succeed.00:00 Introduction01:01 Why Subrata Wrote Down But Not Out03:08 The Founder Stories Behind the Book09:29 The Map, the Compass & “Long-Term Greed”13:44 What Makes a Founder Resilient?15:46 How Investors Evaluate Founders17:21 How Founders Learn, Adapt & Evolve21:12 The Role of Mentors, Coaches & Family25:13 Finding Your Mission Beyond Money27:32 From Generalist to Specialist30:01 The 2 Things Founders Should Focus On Every Day30:50 Why Relationships Matter More Than Grades36:55 Find Your Unique Skills & Double Down39:08 Why Startup Culture Should Make Room for Joy43:01 What Subrata Would Tell His Younger Self44:40 Why No Startup Goes Straight Up & Advice for Young FoundersWhen Subrata Mitra wrote the first cheque to Flipkart founders Sachin and Binny Bansal, he says a $200 million outcome would have made them happy. Flipkart crossed that milestone so quickly that nobody stopped to treat it as a major marker. It eventually became one of India's biggest startup success stories.But the more interesting story is everything that happens before the outcome: ideas that do not work, difficult decisions, founders who have to change, co-founder challenges, unexpected opportunities and the resilience required to stay in the game for 10 to 15 years.On this episode of the Prime Venture Partners Podcast, Amit Somani sits down with Subrata to discuss the ideas behind his book Down But Not Out, which brings together stories of Indian founders who experienced major setbacks but continued to build. Subrata explains why entrepreneurship is more like a Test match than a T20: you need the stamina to stay long, but you must also recognise the right opportunity and hit the ball when it comes.The conversation explores what Subrata looks for in founders, why it can take eight to nine months to understand whether a founding team has what it takes, and why the ability to evolve may matter as much as what a founder knows when they start. They also discuss coaching, mentorship, family support, complementary co-founder skills and the transition from being a generalist founder to becoming a more specialised leader as the company grows.Connect with Subrata Mitrahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/subratamitra/Follow Amit SomaniX (Twitter): https://x.com/amitsomani?lang=enLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesomani/Listen/Watch this podcast onSpotify:Apple Podcasts: Read the transcript for the entire podcast here - https://bit.ly/Prime-Venture-Partners-And-Accel-India About Prime Venture PartnersPrime Venture Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm backing exceptional founders building category-defining technology companies across SaaS, fintech, AI, healthcare, consumer internet and enterprise software.Learn more: https://www.primevp.in/Follow Prime Venture Partners:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2780448/admin/dashboard/X (Twitter): https://x.com/Primevp_inInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/primevp_in/Learn more about:Accel: https://www.accel.com/news/portfolio#IndianStartups #VentureCapital #StartupInvesting

Prayer Moment 3 of 5 in AugustPrayer for Believers to "Find" BuddhistsFind People to Share the Gospel With: Pray that God will lead believers to students who are ready to hear the good news, and that they will faithfully make disciples wherever He sends them. (Matthew 28:19–20)Build Relationships with People Who Don't Know Jesus: Pray that believers will invest time in genuine friendships with Buddhists, reflecting the heart of Jesus, who sought those who were far from God. (Luke 15)Find People of Influence: Pray that God will open doors for believers to share the gospel with students and leaders who have influence on their campuses, just as Paul shared the gospel with governors and kings. (Acts 24–26)

Don’t miss this massive channel shift! Subscribe to our Newsletter:https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this episode of the Ultimate Partner Podcast, host Vince Menzione sits down with Alexandra Zagury, Corporate Vice President of Channels at Microsoft, to explore ecosystem shifts, partner-led growth, and AI transformation. https://youtu.be/9jrSGX5bM90 Key Takeaways Microsoft’s telemetry and propensity data offer unprecedented insights that many partners are currently failing to unlock. Partners must evolve past basic licensing models and build comprehensive managed service stacks across the entire customer lifecycle. Establishing an AI Center of Excellence on the Microsoft platform is critical for capturing future market share and technical intensity. The modern tech ecosystem demands a shift from product-led growth to true partner-led growth driven by multi-partner collaboration. Renewal engines targeting 110% to 125% retention require an always-on motion starting well in advance of contract expiration. Investing in sales readiness and precision velocity training ensures that end sellers can effectively articulate the value of the Microsoft platform. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Key Tags Microsoft, telemetry, Hyperscalers, channel, small medium enterprise, telcos, hosters, SSPs, Cisco, CSP, agentic GTM, propensity data, SPX, PUPP, cloud descent, MSPs, managed XDR, Agent 365, skilling, co-sell, renewals, flywheel, AI Center of Excellence, enterprise Transcript Alexandra Zagury Audio Podcast [00:00:00] Alexandra Zagury: One of the things that I think is the best kept secret at Microsoft is the telemetry that we offer our partners. [00:00:08] Vince Menzione: You can feel it happening. The ecosystem is shifting beneath us, the way Hyperscalers are partnering, how AI is remaking the channel and what it means to win in 2026. Welcome to the Ultimate Partner Podcast. [00:00:22] Vince Menzione: I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and each week I sit down with leaders at the intersection of technology. Partnerships and outcomes. The voices shaping how ecosystems actually work. We talk about what’s real, what’s changing, and what it takes to lead in this era where the partner channel isn’t just part of the strategy. [00:00:41] Vince Menzione: It is the strategy because being in the room changes everything. Let’s [00:00:46] Guest: start. [00:00:50] Vince Menzione: I am thrilled because I get to have a leader that is somewhat new in role and is the corporate vice president of channels for Microsoft. And so Alex is here to, is joining us for the first time at Ultimate Partner. I’m thrilled to have you. Thank, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Welcome, welcome. [00:01:14] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Thank you. You and I are gonna be in the center seat in the middle. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We wanna. So I am thrilled. Um, you’re relatively new in your role at Microsoft. [00:01:24] Alexandra Zagury: Seven months. [00:01:25] Vince Menzione: Seven months, [00:01:26] Alexandra Zagury: yes. [00:01:26] Vince Menzione: Wow. That’s a, that’s a crazy. So take us through, ’cause for those who don’t know you, but a little bit of an introduction, your title, your role, CVP, and uh, your remit. [00:01:37] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about that and what your organization is focused in, in your mission. Yeah. [00:01:41] Alexandra Zagury: So hi everybody. Really exciting to be here. Thanks for the invitation, Vince. I always love to be with partners and with the channel. So my, I came to Microsoft to lead a new role, which we call Global Channel Sales, and it was part of the strategy of Microsoft to really bet on the growth in small, medium enterprise. [00:02:04] Alexandra Zagury: With the channel partner led growth. So my remit is really to lead our managed partners, but also to lead the strategy when it comes to the channel. Very specifically looking at the telcos, the distributors, the hosters. The sis and, uh, the SSPs of course. And, and so my role can be summarized in one word growth, and that’s what we do every single day is map our ambition to your ambition and figure out how we actually conquer this age of ai. [00:02:40] Vince Menzione: It’s a pretty big role. It’s a pretty, you know, I forgot about hosts ’cause we don’t, we don’t talk about them as much these days in the cloud. [00:02:48] Alexandra Zagury: Still a lot [00:02:48] Vince Menzione: of opportunity. You’ve got, and you’ve got all the telcos as well, which are pretty significant organizations, right? Lumen Field, just around the corner. [00:02:56] Vince Menzione: Mm-hmm. Right up the. Right up, I said across the river, but it’s across the pond in Seattle. And, uh, what does that look like from an organization perspective in terms of dollars? Are you allowed to disclose numbers? [00:03:08] Alexandra Zagury: No, we [00:03:08] Vince Menzione: don’t talk numbers. Okay. And, but you have a long career in this type of environment, in this role. [00:03:15] Vince Menzione: 10 years at Cisco, right? [00:03:17] Alexandra Zagury: Mm-hmm. [00:03:17] Vince Menzione: Tell us a little bit more about your background, [00:03:18] Alexandra Zagury: please. Yeah, sure. Um, well I started out as a, a sales leader. Uh, actually I started out in banking, if you wanna go all the way back. Um, but I fell in love with the channel actually, when I was at Yahoo, believe it or not. Wow. [00:03:32] Alexandra Zagury: Because it was the first interact sales model that I had the privilege to operate in, and I really understood. Stood the power of going through a channel. And then I was at Blackberry where I, I, I also, um, well had various sales leadership roles, but our model was all through, was all through the channel. [00:03:51] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. Um, some startups and then help [00:03:54] Vince Menzione: in those days too, right? [00:03:55] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah. It was all sps and I learned from Jim Balze the channel fundamentals. So, um, and then ended up, of course, at Cisco the last. Nearly 11 years, which I think is also one of the greatest channel companies. Yes. And really has thrived in a partner, partner led growth, and in a partner led model. [00:04:12] Alexandra Zagury: And so when, when Microsoft called, I mean, this was just the opportunity of a lifetime. To lead the channel during an era where we’re all getting disrupted, we’re all having to blueprint new systems, new ways of working, where go to market is getting identified, and we’re all having to figure out how to become customer zero ourselves, but then also how to go to market. [00:04:36] Alexandra Zagury: With, with agents. And so this was the, the most exciting time that I could think of to join the Microsoft ecosystem and really take us to the next level. [00:04:44] Vince Menzione: Well, your background is perfect for this. I, I, Rodney Clark is a friend, has been a guest on the podcast and in, in the studio, and I think of Cisco is the quintessential channel company. [00:04:56] Vince Menzione: Like when I think about how channel got created and how it worked well, it was always Cisco that did it. So give us like your perspective now, like seven plus months and like how does this feel like you’ve You’ve got a big remit and, uh, various, uh, routes to market. We’ll call them, uh, channels to market. [00:05:14] Vince Menzione: So take us through a little bit of that, like Yeah, sure. [00:05:16] Alexandra Zagury: Describe [00:05:16] Vince Menzione: the transition, what it’s been like [00:05:18] Alexandra Zagury: for you. So one of the things we’re focused on is supporting the channel through the transformation, and we look at it in a couple of lenses. The first lens is really helping the channel become customer zero. [00:05:29] Alexandra Zagury: We really believe that the partners that invest in. Actually identifying their own processes and their own go go to market are the channels, are are the partners that it can actually win because if you are using it, you’re gonna be able to sell it. The second layer is all about technical intensity, and I’m very passionate about this because I see it from two lenses. [00:05:51] Alexandra Zagury: One is. I would like each and every of our partners to lead in building an AI Center of Excellence based on the Microsoft platform. It is a unique opportunity. I can give you lots of numbers, right? We’ve all heard about the trillions of agents that are gonna be here by 2030. We’ve all heard about the tam. [00:06:12] Alexandra Zagury: I mean, our TAM is going from 777. Million to over a billion, uh, to over a trillion. I, it’s, the numbers are just enormous, insane, right? Over half a billion of customers in our base that are using, that are, that are based already on the Microsoft platform. So all the goodness of our IU IQ platform can be unlocked with all the services that the partners can build. [00:06:36] Alexandra Zagury: So investing in that technical skilling and building those practices are gonna be, is gonna be essential. The third part. The third pillar is all about ag agentic, GTM. So once you’re actually using, uh, the Microsoft platform, you’re gonna have to reimagine all your business’s pro processes, your sales processes, and the more that you are integrated into how we do, how we do things. [00:07:00] Alexandra Zagury: One of the things that I think is the best kept secret at Microsoft is the telemetry that we offer our partners. Yeah. I mean, it’s unbelievable. I’ve never seen the quality of propensity data. And now I’m gonna give you the ABCs, which is please, A SPX, which is where we get all our copilot data, PUPP, which is our proposal upsell, uh, planner, right, cloud descent, where you can actually get your next action directly to your sellers. [00:07:27] Alexandra Zagury: There is just so much goodness that we give, which is part of our, our investment in partners. Which takes me to the fourth pillar, and that is all about value alignment and one of the things that I’m very focused and I bring with me from, from Cisco and the work that I did with MSPs is really thinking through what is that value exchange between us and the partner. [00:07:49] Alexandra Zagury: I believe that I’m in the business of earning your trust. Earning your preference. And, and, and we do that by really mapping that value alignment. So not just, one of the things that the whole industry has copied from Microsoft is really looking at our incentives across the customer lifecycle. Yes. So really mapping the value alignment across the customer lifecycle, not just at the point of the deal. [00:08:13] Alexandra Zagury: ’cause that was the whole purpose of CSP. That’s right. The investments we make in tele telemetry, the investments we make in our go-to-market assets and having those bi-directional feedback loops so that we can be continuously improving. So those are sort of the things that I’m thinking about every day. [00:08:29] Alexandra Zagury: There’s a couple of others as we lead and support you in this transformation. ’cause I think of my job as to supporting and driving growth with you so that we have that joint ambition. But also supporting the transformation that both of us are on this journey. [00:08:44] Vince Menzione: And Microsoft was the first with Jay McBain was with us yesterday, and we talked, we’ve talked about this before, but you were the first company to take and look, get rid of the old metal systems, right? [00:08:55] Vince Menzione: The bronze, silver, gold, mm-hmm. And move to basically a point system for partners so that they can come at it from a kind of a global perspective on how they drive success. What was, um, what did you learn about this partner community, your first months that you didn’t expect? [00:09:12] Alexandra Zagury: Can I say something controversial? [00:09:14] Vince Menzione: Absolutely. Okay. [00:09:14] Alexandra Zagury: I love, [00:09:14] Vince Menzione: we love controversial, [00:09:15] Alexandra Zagury: so I think one of the things that I was surprised was that I didn’t see all the partners really unlocking the value of CSP. Yeah. What do I mean by that? When Microsoft moved to the Point System, and I was on the other side, really, I was so jealous of CSP when I was running managed services. [00:09:34] Alexandra Zagury: Here’s an offer that is for partners, for Partner that gives you that initial. Guarantee in terms of the margin that helps you throughout the customer life cycle with all the incentives and, and programs that we have. And I didn’t see, I mean there are some partners, but I was surprised not seeing more partners really building their value stack and their services across the lifecycle. [00:09:59] Alexandra Zagury: And I think there’s such a great opportunity now to do that. That was one of the most surprising things I thought. Oh my gosh, there must be so many, so many services stack, so many people really unlocking, unlocking that, that value. That was a, that was a little bit surprising. [00:10:14] Vince Menzione: Why? Why do you suppose, why do you suppose that was happening? [00:10:17] Alexandra Zagury: I think some of the things that we were listening here, there’s some, sometimes complexity. There are things that we still have to. Get better on, and I’m one of the first ones to say that like our partner experience, we have, um, you know, a lot of focus right now on partner center and ensuring that we’re identifying it. [00:10:36] Alexandra Zagury: I don’t know if I can say it, but, you know, one of the things that we’re looking at is replicating internally. We have Agent J. That supports our sellers through the sales process. Nice. We’re looking at having something similar for our partners. Very cool. Getting some claps there. So, yeah, so, uh, I think, you know, that I, some, there are some lockers that we, we have to acknowledge a lot of them are operational and comes with being a 50-year-old company. [00:11:02] Vince Menzione: I, I’ll give you my perspective too. I wanna get your thoughts on this. ’cause I got to, I’ve gotten to know this MSP community, which is a, you mentioned managed services and that, um, I think that some of them, well, I think Microsoft is leaning in, in a much bigger way. Um, we had Jose on stage yesterday and just the, the energy around the room, there he is, he’s back here. [00:11:23] Vince Menzione: The energy in the room around the MSP community is palpable and it maybe it wasn’t there a few years ago. Maybe some people got off the bus, so to speak, like they weren’t really paying attention mm-hmm. To all the change and all the investments. That you men, you’re mentioning or being made to support this, would you, what would you say about that? [00:11:42] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah, I’d say that that that is correct, but I’d also say that what I learned, you know, leading MSP at Cisco was that. All the stars have to be aligned, right? And if one thing is not right, if you don’t have product market fit, if you, if you, if you don’t have a good way to, uh, consolidate your offer, if you don’t have that investment in practice development, like there’s a series of things that we need to get right. [00:12:07] Alexandra Zagury: And I think Jose and I spent a lot of time thinking through those things and we’re, we’re ready to, to welcome the community and specifically around security. I mean, that was the second thing that I was really surprised because I lost so many deals on the other side to Microsoft, and I was like, and then I come on this side and I’m like, there’s all this opportunity everywhere. [00:12:28] Alexandra Zagury: I look underneath this chair, this opportunity, and I’m like, why are people not going after it? There is the opportunity to build managed XDR solutions, the opportunity to reinvent the song. There’s, there’s just so much opportunity and I think people get so stuck in the. Just thinking of it from a licensing model and not thinking it from the, the full on end-to-end value that you can then unlock through the best licensing model on the planet. [00:12:55] Alexandra Zagury: And so, look, we’re here, we’re, we’re ready to talk to all of you and, and really figure this out ’cause we are gonna place really bet big bets next year on ensuring that we’re growing with the MSP community. [00:13:08] Vince Menzione: So what are you personally focused on in changing Microsoft to drive this. [00:13:13] Alexandra Zagury: Well, uh, I don’t know. [00:13:14] Alexandra Zagury: Changing is a, is a, is a big word. Well, I like evolution, change, [00:13:17] Vince Menzione: evolution, evolving. [00:13:18] Alexandra Zagury: You know, I [00:13:19] Vince Menzione: transition. [00:13:21] Alexandra Zagury: I think there is, there is a couple of things that I’ll say that one of the things that I, I’m really focused on right now, the first one is skilling. We’re at a time of such transformation. That investing in skilling, and if you look at our skilling model, it has four pillars. [00:13:37] Alexandra Zagury: The first pillar we’re best in class, in which is certification specializations, and making sure that our ecosystem is certified to go to market. The second one, which we call project ready. It’s sort of how we help you, uh, technically skill the folks that sit in your practices. And there’s more work to do there, and there’s more that you can learn about how we can actually help you. [00:13:59] Alexandra Zagury: And then the middle part I’m obsessed with right now, which is sales ready and tech sales ready. So it is ensuring, because AI is new for everybody. Yes. It’s a muscle, it is a proposition that you have to sell it’s value that you’re selling. I, I love what the gentleman from Lenovo was talking about. It’s, it’s that CSB always on motion. [00:14:21] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. And so really getting very crisp to the end seller at the, at the reseller. For example, at the end, seller at the partner about why Microsoft. Why now, how do I sell and how do I win? And giving them the assets, the competitive battle cards, the, the, the ability to end objection handling all these. Great, we have them. [00:14:45] Alexandra Zagury: I mean, the amount of content we have, but it’s about doing it at what I call precision velocity. [00:14:51] Vince Menzione: Precision [00:14:51] Alexandra Zagury: velocity, right? Which is this concept of how do we get very precise at a persona level. So that we get the velocity of impact. And so I’m, I’m very obsessed with that right now. And there’s two other things I’m very obsessed with, right? [00:15:04] Alexandra Zagury: The other one is this practice building, ensuring that we are together building these AI centers of excellence, um, especially for all our managed partners. This is something that I’ve put on, uh, every single PDM in our org is gonna, is gonna be talking about that. And then the third one is one that I find super interesting, which I think all of us. [00:15:25] Alexandra Zagury: Have a lot of work to do, which is partner to partner. [00:15:29] Vince Menzione: Yes. [00:15:29] Alexandra Zagury: If we look at a customer outcome, thank you. A customer outcome is built of many partners, right? There’s so many different touch points. I think some folks talk about seven partners in, in a customer outcome, and so how do we actually. Use agents, use agent solutions to suddenly unlock this opportunity because most of the time you’ll see an SSP with an si, maybe an ISV in the middle of a transaction to deliver on that customer outcome. [00:16:04] Alexandra Zagury: Yes. So what can we Microsoft do? And I’d love ideas, right? I haven’t cracked this. I don’t think the industry has completely cracked this. It’s more of a, a science than, than, well, more of an art than it is a science today. So that’s the third thing that I, I, I’d love to really improve and, and get better at. [00:16:20] Vince Menzione: I wish you got to see my slide earlier. ’cause I had the seven seats. I had this, I had the seven partners surrounding the customer. Customer is able to make their decisions now because with their cloud commitments [00:16:31] Alexandra Zagury: mm-hmm. [00:16:32] Vince Menzione: They’re in the, they’re in the seat where it used to be. I would rely on the partner to tell me what to do. [00:16:38] Vince Menzione: I, I’m cobbling together the best solution for my organization. Based on the trusted partners, to your point, those seven seats, and that’s partner to partner action. And Jay McBain was here yesterday and he took us through a great example. It’s AstraZeneca, that Microsoft won AWS, thought they were gonna win the deal, and then there were Microsoft partners in involved. [00:17:00] Vince Menzione: And the, the decision was made in December, but the deal didn’t happen until July. And that whole process was because all these different partners showed up. And influence the decision and the solution areas for that customer. [00:17:12] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah, that’s the best example of PLG partner led growth in action, which I think, again, that is the other thing that I’m super excited about is that actually p proving in the AI era that it’s about PLG as partner led growth, not the other PLGI. [00:17:31] Vince Menzione: I love that. I love that. Instead of product led growth, it’s partner led growth. So I understand there’s three layers that you’re very interested in that you want, you were gonna take us through today. Okay. Do you know about this, [00:17:44] Alexandra Zagury: the layers [00:17:45] Vince Menzione: of we have, uh, copilot chat. Oh, yes. 365 and, and agents. [00:17:49] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah. [00:17:50] Vince Menzione: From a product perspective, I thought maybe, [00:17:51] Alexandra Zagury: yeah, sure. [00:17:52] Alexandra Zagury: This is, I mean. This is the, uh, advantage of choosing the market Microsoft platform. Yeah, so as you look, look at it, there’s, there’s definitely different options, but when you look at Microsoft, what’s really, really interesting is that we have all the, all the layers. There’s no AI without data, and we’ve got that data foundation. [00:18:15] Alexandra Zagury: We also have the intelligence data foundation, right? Then we’ve got the, the layer of actually building those AI agents, and then the last layer that we have is actually the experience or the application layer. So when you look at our platform is a completely integrated platform with the different choices. [00:18:35] Alexandra Zagury: We are not behold, beholden to one LLM or another LLM. You’re actually able to bring your data and, and bring the LLM that you want to deliver on the, on the outcomes that you need. And I think that is very, very unique about our proposition. Yeah, I [00:18:50] Vince Menzione: agree. [00:18:50] Alexandra Zagury: But the other thing that is unique, it’s the most exciting product out there. [00:18:55] Alexandra Zagury: Agent 3, 6 5, our own oh oh seven. It really is a differentiated proposition that every single partner can build services around. Starting with your advisory services, tell me customer, what is it that you are thinking of? Then you actually move on to thinking about security because again, just like there’s no AI without data, you have to start with that data foundation. [00:19:24] Alexandra Zagury: There’s no AI without security and no security without ai. And so really thinking through how, uh, agent 3, 6, 5, I love it. I get these claps once a, I love, love really thinking about how Agent 3, 6 5 really unlocks, not only. A security budget, but an observability budget because you can do both. You are talking to both, uh, folks at the customer, right? [00:19:47] Alexandra Zagury: You can actually start talking about how you’re gonna actually govern all of these agents, manage all of these agents, but also there’s the observability layer, which is gonna tell you what actually can you do? How can you actually deliver on the outcomes that we all want from ai, which is productivity. [00:20:05] Alexandra Zagury: Experience and efficiency and all the other things. So I think this is the biggest opportunity this channel has ever seen, and every single partner is gonna have to make a choice on what platform they’re gonna lead with, and we believe it should be ours because it is completely integrated across these three layers with our very own oh oh seven. [00:20:30] Vince Menzione: I wanna get your perspective, but it feels like many of these partners in the MSP community are stuck at that CSP level. We were having this conversation about getting through that, coaching ’em through it. What would your be your perspective on that? [00:20:44] Alexandra Zagury: Um, I’d say, uh, use this moment to unlock that opportunity. [00:20:50] Alexandra Zagury: First off, invest in your skills. Get your, get your team skilled and, uh, on Microsoft, build your center of excellence. Map out your strategy where actually you’re gonna monetize and use all the different assets that we have. And if you are being really, um, I mean, most of them are serviced through a distributor. [00:21:12] Alexandra Zagury: Make your distributor accountable for supporting you in packaging the offers and giving you the, uh, information that you need in terms of skilling. And then in terms of co-selling, again, distributor has a lot of tools that can help you understand how to unlock the co unlock, the co-selling opportunity with Microsoft. [00:21:35] Alexandra Zagury: I think that’s another really big competitive advantage that Microsoft has. When, uh, Microsoft changed what it started by, by, by changing its strategy. I think clarity is kindness. We were very, very clear that where we want, we wanted partners, of course, to play an enterprise with a services stack, but we were very clear that we were betting on a partner led growth in small, medium enterprise, right? [00:22:03] Alexandra Zagury: And so we’ve built our whole operating system. Around that. And so I think it’s really about finding the information that you know you want, planning your strategy, getting skilled and go to market with us. Our co-sell Advantage is very, very unique. It is one of the only companies that has the sales teams completely aligned because CSP is our hero motion. [00:22:29] Vince Menzione: So being with a customer through the journey on CSP, but also renewals are a big component of growth. Talk to us about that. [00:22:36] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah. Renewals are, uh, a machine and an engine that is just absolutely beautiful. It’s your [00:22:42] Vince Menzione: flywheel. [00:22:43] Alexandra Zagury: It is your flywheel. Um, and it is the gift that keeps on giving. We, of course, have a very focused, um, and in fact, one of the things that I’ve done since. [00:22:52] Alexandra Zagury: Uh, since we’ve started, it started a very focused motion in terms of looking at our renewals. We have very specific targets. We, we like to see a renewal at 110% at the moment of renewal. And then we like to see a motion, t plus three, T plus six. That gets us to that a hundred and and 25%. But what we’ve also found out is that this needs to be an always on motion. [00:23:18] Alexandra Zagury: So one of the things that we’re doing is using this concept of precision velocity becoming very rigorous. ’cause we have all the data. Yeah. In terms of what is that next action, and really looking at starting that renewal process, we see that the partners that are able to reach the targets are the ones that start at T minus. [00:23:36] Alexandra Zagury: Six, maybe T minus three, you’re cutting it, but T minus six. And really building that constant motion, getting out in front Yeah. With the customer is really important. And then of course, we now even have these amazing go back motions, uh, with, with our partners where we actually, after the renewal, we go and. [00:23:56] Alexandra Zagury: The renewal was not at the target. We just constantly keep on going. Uh, going back with the, with the partners and we’ve unlocked a, a bevy of data. We, our operating model, we call it the pods, where the PDM sits at the center and orchestrates it with all the different roles that we have. And so we now have a very systematized moment, uh, motion of how to do the renewals. [00:24:18] Vince Menzione: So for the partners in the room, what’s one investment that they should make and what should every partner in the room do differently? Going into, uh, July 1st. [00:24:27] Alexandra Zagury: Well, I think the first thing, remember, CSP is our hero motion, so really for, uh, real, really focused on that. But the one investment, can I say two? [00:24:38] Vince Menzione: Please, please. [00:24:38] Alexandra Zagury: Your time. The, the first one is skilling, right? This is the time. [00:24:43] Vince Menzione: Yeah. [00:24:43] Alexandra Zagury: Technical intensity is super, super important, and really making those investments in skilling not only from a practice perspective, your your, your technical practice, uh, teams, but also from a sales readiness perspective. [00:24:59] Alexandra Zagury: This is a new muscle. It’s we’re all learning how to truly sell outcomes, and so getting your sales teams ready. Is is really important. And then the second one very tied to that is building your AI Center of Excellence based on the Microsoft platform. Because as we go into FY 27, you will see that the partners that prefer and grow with us are the ones that will see the investment come to them. [00:25:28] Vince Menzione: So I want to use the term front. I I, I’ve been avoiding the term frontier firm, but I think it is super critical. Everything I’ve heard today, like you need to be customer zero. You need to get in train, advance on it and go build against it. [00:25:41] Alexandra Zagury: Absolutely. Well, if you had, let me a third, I would’ve said customer zero. [00:25:46] Vince Menzione: You have it? Alright. We have less than a minute. Would you be okay if we ask for like maybe one question? Yeah, absolutely. We’ll do like one, maybe two. So good to have you by the way. Thank you, Vince. So nice to have you here. [00:26:04] Vince Menzione: I think we did such a good job. Oh, here we go. Here’s, here’s fun. A mic is coming your way. [00:26:20] Vince Menzione: Thank you. Here we go. Okay. [00:26:22] Guest: So we’ve been very keen on, um, skilling our people, and I still find it very hard to get all of the information out of Partner Center to get a complete global view. Are you and your team thinking about maybe having an MCP server access and having a real portal working with that data? [00:26:41] Alexandra Zagury: You just touched on one of our areas of improvement. Absolutely. In fact, um, thank you for, stay tuned for holding us accountable to that. That is definitely one of the things that we’re working on is how to integrate skilling hub into partner center. Right. As most of you will know, there are it Qs, and so that’s one of the things that we are definitely prioritizing, but thank you for holding me accountable to that one. [00:27:09] Vince Menzione: Awesome. [00:27:13] Vince Menzione: We have one more back here, David. I see. We wanna see how fast they can move that microphone across the room. Relay system here. The relay team. There we go. [00:27:25] Guest: That was excellent, Alexander. Thank you. And welcome. [00:27:28] Alexandra Zagury: Thank you. [00:27:29] Guest: Can you point to a specific example? ’cause I think it’s so critical what you highlighted just the skill piece and the customer outcomes piece. [00:27:35] Guest: Right. Can you point to a specific example of a story that you really love that highlights, uh, customers lighting it up with ROI. [00:27:44] Alexandra Zagury: Yeah, I think, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re a platform, so I just saw a win wire. Like at Microsoft, we get these win wires all the time about how an SSB actually won a, a deal against one of these big AI only companies. [00:28:00] Alexandra Zagury: And it was really about selling the full platform, right? Yeah. Because if, if you, if you put a full platform against an LLM proposition, I mean, the full platform really stacks up because it’s completely integrated. It’s not behemoth to one, you’re not making a bet on one company. And it really highlighted our mantra around trust and intelligence. [00:28:24] Alexandra Zagury: The customer was able to see, they, they were an M 365 customer, so all their iq, all their intelligence was already there. They knew that they, there were guardrails against it. They had a problem with shadow ai and by actually standardizing on copilot and going on that journey from copilot paid to agents, they sue the, they saw the full, uh, value proposition. [00:28:49] Alexandra Zagury: And so we won that deal and it was one of the. First E seven deals that we won, so it was great. [00:28:55] Vince Menzione: Fantastic. Great. Congratulations. [00:28:57] Alexandra Zagury: Thank you [00:28:58] Vince Menzione: Alex. I am so honored and thrilled that you got, you chose us to be your I I would say the first big Yeah, absolutely. Presentation in front of the partner community. [00:29:07] Vince Menzione: I’m so excited to have you. [00:29:08] Alexandra Zagury: Thank you [00:29:09] Vince Menzione: guys, and hopefully many more times ahead with us. [00:29:10] Alexandra Zagury: Absolutely. Invite me at anytime. [00:29:12] Vince Menzione: Okay. Well, thank you [00:29:13] Alexandra Zagury: so much. [00:29:14] Vince Menzione: Thank you. So great [00:29:15] Alexandra Zagury: to have you. Thank [00:29:16] Vince Menzione: you so much. Thanks for listening to The Ultimate Partner Podcast. If today’s conversation resonated, share it with a partner leader in your network. [00:29:26] Vince Menzione: Subscribe where you listen, and head over to the ultimate partner.com. For show notes related content and the resources for this episode. And if you haven’t already, now’s the time to register for the Ultimate Partner Live Event in Reston, Virginia, October 26th through October 28th. Until next time, keep showing up in the rooms that matter because being in the room changes everything.

When small manufacturers hit a growth ceiling, the problem usually isn't the product, it's the constant firefighting, isolation, and lack of structured strategy. Strategic thinking, leadership development, and smart capacity planning often get pushed aside in favor of “just getting through the week.” Today's guest, Brian Becker of Becker Growth Strategy and program director of the Manufacturing Accelerator Program (MAP), helps small manufacturers escape that reactive mode and build organizations that are designed to scale on purpose, not by accident. In this episode of Marketer of the Day, Brian shares how MAP, a tuition-free, national, virtual executive education program gives small U.S.-based manufacturers the tools, peer community, and strategic frameworks they need to grow. He explains why founders often feel alone on an “island,” and how curated cohorts, breakout rooms, and cross-industry conversations (including everything from biotech to feral pig trapping to chocolatiers) create mastermind-style support that changes how owners think and lead. Brian dives into focus and execution as the real differentiators between businesses that plateau and those that expand. He walks through his “future casting” exercise, where owners imagine their ideal business five years from now with smooth operations, predictable revenue, strong team, and then reverse engineer the concrete steps to get there. From figuring out whether you truly have a sales problem or a capacity problem, to deciding whether to chase that dream big-box retail contract, Brian shows how clarity leads to better decisions.He also breaks down a practical task triage system what only you can do, what you can delegate, and what you should only touch on your worst day along with a powerful sports analogy of running a business like a soccer team: you can't play offense (big growth goals) if your defense (operations, fulfillment, and retention) isn't solid. For manufacturers eyeing larger enterprise customers, Brian shares the risks of overreaching too soon and how to ramp capacity intelligently so big opportunities don't become “career killers.” Beyond operations, Brian tackles workforce development and the talent gap in U.S. manufacturing, especially among younger workers. He explains how reframing roles around STEM, robotics, complex problem solving, and hands-on challenges can make manufacturing careers more attractive to the next generation, and how MAP is bringing in workforce experts to help owners rethink how they present and structure these jobs.Throughout the conversation, Brian emphasizes that no one is coming to save your business, but the right questions, the right community, and a willingness to invest time in your own growth can completely shift your trajectory. He shares hard-won lessons from his background in education, nonprofit fundraising, and as COO of Well Found Foods during COVID, plus life advice from his football days: “You said you wanted to be one. This is what being one means.” https://youtu.be/moRBOQXR_ck?si=TNRP9_l6sWXZnqpJ If you're a small manufacturer (or any small business owner) who feels stuck in the weeds, struggling to scale, or unsure whether to double down on sales or build capacity first, this episode will give you concrete mental models, frameworks, and next steps. Tune in to learn how to think more strategically, delegate more effectively, build your peer network, and grow a manufacturing business that doesn't depend on you doing everything yourself. Quotes: “Business owners oftentimes can fall into the trap of worrying about everything else except for the strategic growth of the business.” “Every single business is different, and most importantly, it's because of you and the other people in the business; there's no one-size-fits-all solution.” “For most business owners, they need to invest in themselves, and the sooner they can understand that no one is coming to save them,