Podcasts about powerpoint

In which Amanda makes the worst PowerPoint ever (it's about rationalists and fan fiction, iykyk), Isabel goes on book tour, and we experiment with flip phones.The PowerPoint in question: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ch0rBRdr8PGindVGa0cGQaKDiYR5rFmMiclL58CPci8/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.pFind Us Online Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/wowiftrue.bsky.socialTwitter: https://twitter.com/wowiftruepodInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/wowiftruePatreon: https://www.patreon.com/wowiftrueWebsite: https://wowiftrue.com/ Email: wowiftruepod@gmail.comAbout Us Wow If True was created by Isabel J. Kim and Amanda Silberling. Our editors are Allison Mills and David Newtown. Wow If True is a member of Multitude, a podcast collective, production studio and ad sales provider.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode #248, As the world of graphic design continues to expand, the boundaries between traditional design disciplines and presentation design are blurring. And Creative Pro Week, a premier design conference brings together designers, creatives, and presentation experts. This episode Troy has a behind-the-scenes conversation with Nolan Haims hearing about his upcoming CreativePro Week talks, the process, and his expectations for the event. They also talk about the growing importance of presentation design, and actionable strategies for leveraging PowerPoint as a true design tool. Listen now! Episode Show Notes https://thepresentationpodcast.com/2026/e248 Show Suggestions? Questions for your Hosts? Email us at: info@thepresentationpodcast.com Listen and review on iTunes. Thanks! http://apple.co/1ROGCUq New Episodes 1st and 3rd Tuesday Every Month  

AI is great at writing drafts, pulling data, and generating variations, but marketing has never really been about that kind of output. In this episode of Content Amplified, Sarah Balli, an external communications specialist who also does content creation, influencer marketing, and streams on Twitch, makes the case for keeping the human element in marketing during the AI era. Sarah explains why companies are looking to replace labor, not people, and why the parts of the job that matter most (taste, timing, and understanding people) are the parts AI cannot do. She likens this moment to when Microsoft Word and PowerPoint first arrived and everyone feared for their jobs, then turned those tools into ways to do better work. She walks through the Wendy's-style real-time marketing example AI can never pull off, how to hold a standard of excellence no matter which tool you use, and what to say when leadership asks whether a $200-a-month subscription can replace a team. If you are trying to figure out where you fit in an AI marketing world, this conversation will help you breathe and get tactical.About SarahSarah Balli is an external communications specialist who also does content creation and influencer marketing on the side. She describes herself as a well-rounded marketer who likes working across a lot of different creative areas. Outside of her marketing work, she streams on Twitch and keeps busy with creative projects.Show NotesConnect with Sarah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-balli/Text us what you think about this episode!

On today's PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham begins a relevant series for us all in these days titled “Advancing through Adversity.” Pastor Graham brings the message “Keeping the Dreams Alive” on Joseph and the series of tests in his life that could not destroy is dreams or his character. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

What does great leadership actually look like? Can you make a difference even if you're in the middle of the hierarchy? "If you think you're too small, you've not spent the night under a bedsheet with a mosquito." In this episode, educator and Deming practitioner Balaji Reddie explains why W. Edwards Deming was far more practical about leadership than many people realize. Drawing on both The New Economics and Out of the Crisis, Balaji shares stories and examples that bring Deming's 17 principles of leadership to life. From creating trust and joy in work to understanding variation, coaching people, and improving systems, this conversation challenges conventional management thinking and offers a clear path toward transformation. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Balaji Reddie, who is an educator and trainer in the teachings of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. And the topic for today is Principles of Leadership. Balaji, take it away.   0:00:27.9 Balaji Reddie: Good morning. Thank you so much, Andrew. We had left our last session with that, we'd be dealing with this. And of course, Dr. Deming gave us the outline of Profound Knowledge and he gave us 14 points. He also gave us the deadly diseases and the 16 Obstacles. So people often talk about the diseases, but very often they forget the obstacles. And there are 16 of them which he highlighted for us. And if you think that they're outdated, they're as relevant as they ever were. So you need to keep revisiting those. I think if you start working on removing the obstacles, it's like you're taking your foot off the brake rather than pressing on the accelerator.   0:01:11.3 Balaji Reddie: So you're removing the things that actually stop you before you actually take things forward. But nevertheless, we start with point number 14 where he says, take action to complete, to make the transformation. And he says that there should be a critical mass of people that you need to educate and train and get them on the same page as you are. I'm gonna quote Hazel Cannon here, who is current president of the British Deming Forum. And she talks about the time when she was very young and she attended the Deming four-day seminar, I think in Birmingham. And at the end of those four days, she was overwhelmed as you normally are when you hear how the man speak. And he spoke... He wanted you to make drastic changes. It's not just tinkering here and there.   0:02:08.2 Balaji Reddie: And so she went up to him and she said, "I'm really taken up by what you just said." And then she made a statement, "I'm too small to make these changes in my organization." I believe she worked as a lab assistant in a chemical manufacturing company. They used to make chemicals for cosmetics. So she said, "I'm too small." And Deming just interrupted her and said, "Never think you're too small. If you think you're too small, you've not spent the night under a bedsheet with a mosquito." So make a change where you are and take it from there. So I would like to now quote Dr. Deming from Out of the Crisis. This is Plan for Action: Take action to accomplish the transformation. So he writes there, there are three points and then I'll come to what he writes below that.   0:03:01.8 Balaji Reddie: So he says, "Management in authority will struggle over every one of the above 13 points, the deadly diseases, and the obstacles. They will agree on their meaning and on the direction to take. They will agree to carry out the new philosophy. Management in authority will take pride in their adoption of the new philosophy and in their new responsibilities. They will have courage to break with tradition, even to the point of exile among their peers." So he talks about courage. He talks about courage of conviction. And then he says, "Management in authority will explain by seminars and other means." So I think he leaves it to people of the ways and means. And now today there are a lot of means of doing that. DemingNEXT is one of them. And he says, "To the critical mass of people in the company why change is necessary and that the change will involve everybody."   0:04:00.9 Balaji Reddie: Now he writes something very interesting. He says, "This whole movement may be instituted and carried out by middle management speaking with one voice." So he gave instructions. Why are people saying that he did not tell us what to do? It is just that he expected maybe a lot. And now let's get to that middle management and what he expected. He says here... Let's see here. I'm coming to chapter four now in The New Economics where he says, "A System of Profound Knowledge. The aim of this chapter: the prevailing style of management must undergo transformation." So we just heard that, that what we need to do. And he says, "A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from the outside. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outside view, a lens that I call a System of Profound Knowledge.   0:04:59.7 Balaji Reddie: It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in." Then he says, "The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding the System of Profound Knowledge." Then he says that "the individual, once transformed, will set an example." So setting an example, I believe, is doing the right thing under adverse circumstances, when you stick to your principles despite the fact that there is an easier way out. As they say, choosing a path between good and bad is easy, you choose good. But good and better, you need to make the right choice. And that needs profound knowledge. "So be a good listener," he says, "but will not compromise. Continually teach other people and help people pull away from their current practice and beliefs and move to the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past."   0:06:02.7 Balaji Reddie: So he explains to us what was needed here, right? And he says this is what we actually need to do. Now I'd like to, I mean, I'll be referring to a document. I don't know how we're gonna get this to people, but for the Principles of Leadership. All right, I think I'll have to send this over to you later, but we will do that. So in the Principles of Leadership, just come to them. I am quoting again from both Out of the Crisis and The New Economics. So you will find this there when he speaks about what needs to be done. Modern Principles of Leadership. And he says, "The modern principles of leadership will replace the annual performance review. The first step in a company will be to provide education in leadership." So that would be introducing people to profound knowledge from what we just heard. Then he said, "The annual performance review may then be abolished." Of course, that will take time. "Leadership will take its place, and this is what Western management should have been doing all along."   0:07:12.6 Balaji Reddie: So he says, "The annual performance review sneaked in and became popular because it does not require anyone to face the problems of people. It is easier to rate them, focus on the outcome. What Western industry needs is methods that will improve the outcome." And he says, "Suggestions follow." So first, institute... The first principle. "Institute education in leadership: the obligations, the principles, and methods." And so I think introduction to the System of Profound Knowledge will help. And then after profound knowledge has been sort of brought to the notice of... Of bringing to the notice of the people then you get into perhaps teaching them about 14 Points, et cetera.   0:07:57.8 Balaji Reddie: Comes the second principle. He says, "Ensure more careful selection of people in the first place." So choosing the people, he says again, now here's where it requires you to understand the purpose of what you're doing, purpose of your organization, purpose of the people you're looking out for and making this change. Because when you know your purpose, you know the aim, then you can choose people in the right way. And I believe he said this somewhere, it's a combination of education, training, skills, and experience. So we need to combine these four factors in choosing the right people. Then he says, after selection of the people, ensure better training and education. So we fine-tune all of their... He says a complete background. He said their aspirations, their goals.   0:08:54.2 Balaji Reddie: I kind of borrowed this idea from a company here in India where they had this thing called roles, responsibilities, and objectives. And they used to meet once in a month, but once in a year they used to decide. So the top management, the HR, would sit down with each and every employee and say that, "In this calendar year, this is what we intend to do and this is what we expect from you." And in turn, they used to ask the employee, "What do you expect from us? Because this is what we want from you." And then the employee had a chance of putting forth what he or she wanted, the management, what help they needed. And I think this is where we have to be... It's a give and take. And they didn't just meet once a year; every month they would meet and the question was, "How are we doing?" not "What have you done?"   0:09:51.1 Balaji Reddie: So I think it wasn't a traditional appraisal. If there was any appraisal, it was appraising what top management were doing or intended to do and not so much the employee. I thought that was a good move. So that's what we need to do here: better training and education. Principle number four states: "A manager understands and conveys to his people the meaning of a system. He explains the aims of the system. He teaches his people to understand how the work of the group supports these aims." Now, here's where, you know, when you talk about, say, hiring people in the first place, when you bring in new employees, I believe that there should be a special session by people inside the company who have stayed the longest, who served the company the longest, especially during their bad days. Because the employees need to know what really happened and how the company survived and how we were resilient, we came back despite all the problems that we had.   0:11:00.7 Balaji Reddie: And the historical perspective, especially if there's someone who's in touch with the founding members, that would be a great boon. I know nowadays we talk about the older companies, obviously none of the founders are there, but if there is such a person, exchanging those ideas with the young employees would definitely make a difference. So they would then understand the purpose, the aims, and how your work supports these aims. I think it's the best way to do that. But what I see right now in companies and I'm being very specific about this, because today when new employees join the company, they have an orientation, they have onboarding, as they call it, but that's done by a rookie, someone who's just joined the company and is just making...   0:11:46.8 Andrew Stotz: [0:11:46.8] Following a checklist?   0:11:48.1 Balaji Reddie: Exactly. Like a PowerPoint presentation. They don't talk about the history of the company. And I think there has to be an emotional connect before there is a logical or an intellectual connect. That emotional connect, I think, then makes you feel that pride and you feel good about coming to work and you say, "Oh, I did not know." So I believe this fourth principle is important in that sense, in the way to do that. Now, he says that... Principle five says he helps...   0:12:19.7 Andrew Stotz: By the way, do you know what chapter are you in?   0:12:23.9 Balaji Reddie: Oh, I have combined.   0:12:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay.   0:12:29.4 Balaji Reddie: I took some of the text... Okay. If you want to see here, this is management of people, all right? In that chapter. So I've taken... There are 14 principles there, management of people. In the new edition of The New Economics. It appears...   0:12:48.2 Andrew Stotz: So chapter six.   0:12:50.2 Balaji Reddie: Chapter six, yeah. That's chapter six...   0:12:51.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep.   0:12:52.6 Balaji Reddie: All right. And he talks about pictorial effect of transformation, and then he talks about management of people, role of a manager of people. So there were 14 there, but in Out of the Crisis, the first three which were there, he did not include here.   0:13:10.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay. I just just asked...   0:13:11.0 Balaji Reddie: So I just included those. Yeah. No, so that when people read the book, they could read it clearly, right? So, yeah. So he says now principle number five, which in Economics is principle number two or three, right? He says "he helps his people to see themselves as components in a system, to work in cooperation with preceding stages and following stages toward optimization of the efforts of all stages towards achievement of the aim." So we want optimization, not compromise. So you need to sit together. Just if I were to ask a simple question to you, Andrew, and without thinking, if I were to try to answer this question... Okay. I presume you know how to make a cup of tea.   0:13:58.7 Andrew Stotz: Yes.   0:14:00.1 Balaji Reddie: So what is the first step?   0:14:02.7 Andrew Stotz: For me, boil water.   0:14:04.6 Balaji Reddie: Boil water. And what if I say that's not the first step?   0:14:12.0 Andrew Stotz: Well, first of all, I think you probably have more experience with tea than I do, but I have more experience with espresso, probably. But anyways, go ahead and tell me.   0:14:20.9 Balaji Reddie: Okay. The first question is, whom am I making a cup of tea for? So what I just tried to convey is it's not natural to think about the customer. And so the first step is, for whom is the cup of tea? If it's the person...   0:14:30.8 Andrew Stotz: Grandma.   0:14:40.7 Balaji Reddie: That's right. If she's diabetic, then you would not need sugar. So you gather the ingredients accordingly. If he wants black tea, you don't take milk, right? And that's the point he's trying to say here. When you look at different stages, every every person has a customer. So the first question is, who is my customer?   0:15:07.1 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:15:07.4 Balaji Reddie: And that part of profound knowledge, understanding psychology, I mentioned this last time, is empathy. The word empathy captures this. So you go to the next process as, "Whom am I doing this work for?" and sit down with that person and say, "What do you expect from me? How may I help you?" And that's what decides what you're gonna do. So this this fifth principle here, that he helps his people see themselves as components, I think this is important. The next process is your immediate customer, and the rest of them are customers in a very oblique sense. But what you do is critical to the next person in line, right? So you always spend extra time with that person and of course the other people down the line who your work is gonna be impacting over a period of time, right? But these are the... This is the first step you find out. So who's my customer? So that's principle five.   0:16:09.0 Balaji Reddie: Principle number six: now this comes under psychology again, that a manager of people understands that people are different from each other. He tries to create for everybody interest and challenge and joy in work. Now, if you look at the theory of knowledge, what exactly did he give us when he brought that component of profound knowledge into play? He says that theory is a statement that conveys knowledge by relating cause to effect. So I repeat, theory is a statement which conveys knowledge by relating some cause to some effect. It fits without fail all the observations of the past and helps us predict the future with the risk of being wrong.   0:17:04.7 Balaji Reddie: So I'm gonna repeat this whole statement again. Theory is a statement which conveys knowledge. How? By relating some cause to some effect. It fits without fail all the observations of the past and helps us predict the future with the risk of being wrong. So no amount of examples can establish a theory, and even one example can lead to either abandonment of the theory or modification of the theory. That's what he kept saying. Now, how does this work? So he says it's a system of learning, and all of us have this built in, right? Now, he came from the school of Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order. And if you read that book, Lewis says all knowledge is a priori, it's based on what you already know.   0:18:00.9 Balaji Reddie: For example, let me take this example here. Now, suppose I were to start describing the road to my house. Now, you've not been here, but if I start saying that the road bends towards the left and then there is a command you get to see, now you start constructing a picture in your head based on what you have already seen. It's not the same. That's your theory, right? And then when you actually visit, you say, "Oh, it's the difference between theory and what I actually saw," and then you change your theory. So theory is... It's natural. All of us think naturally like this. And that's why he says here that people are different from one another and we need to celebrate those differences. All of us are born with the system of learning, but not all of us learn the same way.   0:18:49.8 Balaji Reddie: There are some who learn by watching, there are some who learn by doing, there's some who learn by reading, there's some who learn by writing. For some people, one word is enough. You utter a word and they say, "I got it." And for some people, you have to repeat the statement maybe 10 times, 11 times, and then the 12th time you repeat it, they say, "Okay, I got it." Now, is that wrong? We're just different, right? And that's why he says here that we need to understand the learning process of people. And when you understand the learning process of a person and then put that person in the right job, you'll have to stop that person from working. That was his definition of joy in work. People enjoy their work when they realize it resonates with them.   0:19:40.4 Balaji Reddie: And how does that resonance come in? When you under... And because this is so difficult to do, we just throw the responsibility on them by saying, "Here's the target." So the target actually distracts them when actually you should be working on understanding their learning process. So it's a lot of hard work. And sometimes people are motivated enough to discover it themselves, which is great, but we need to create that atmosphere for them to enjoy their work. So interest, challenge, et cetera, he tries to optimize. Now, here's the key. This is beautiful. He tries to optimize family background, education, skills, hopes, and abilities of everyone.   0:20:21.7 Balaji Reddie: So this is not ranking people, very clear. It is instead recognition of differences between people and an attempt to put everybody in a position for development. I think this is one of the most important principles in getting things done. When I teach this to the HR students in my college, I keep saying that I don't think you should call this science as human resource management, because the definition of a resource is obtain it, shape it, use it, and throw it away. We don't wanna do that. I think we should change the title of that department to Department of Learning, because that's what exactly this is all about, and it's learning in both ways where you are trying to understand their process of learning and in effect, you're trying to understand how the company is going to be learning.   0:21:17.0 Balaji Reddie: So you put this in... So this principle, he says, combine all of these things: family background, education, hopes, I love that word. Because if you see one of the things that people talk about, customer satisfaction, I think Deming was the only person who said customers should be happy. Not just satisfied, happier, right? Now comes the next principle. "He is an unceasing learner." So you can never say, "I know it all." Unceasing learner, he encourages his people to study. And I think this fits Dr. Deming himself. He made no excuses to learn. "May I not learn," he would keep repeating that. And I remember Bill Cooper getting irritated and said, "The last time I met you, you said this, and now you're saying this. I got that on tape." He said, "Well, you got this on tape now." He said that, "I do, I learn. And as I learn," he said, "that could have been under different circumstances that I said that, but I'm saying this."   0:22:22.4 Balaji Reddie: And so you keep learning. And he encourages his people to study. The word is study. And he provides, when possible and feasible, seminars and courses for advancement of learning, encourages continued education in college or university for people that are so inclined. So I think this bit is in many places getting to be a part of the systems in most companies. I've seen that happen now, which is a good sign. But it doesn't end there, there are a lot of other things to do. This was the Principle 7 in the list of 17. Now comes Principle 8, and this is so difficult to look at. He says "he's a coach and a counsel, not a judge." You judge people, they shut up.   0:23:15.4 Balaji Reddie: So he says coach and counsel. When they need help, guide them, show them the path. Sometimes maybe you need some help in doing that, well, go ahead. So that was principle number eight. Principle number nine says "he understands a stable system. He understands the interaction between people and the circumstances that they work in. He understands that the performance of anyone that can learn a skill will come to a stable state." Now, this is amazing. He said this way back in the 1950s when he was in Japan teaching them the control chart, where he took one example where he says that further training to the worker and the process was still in control. And he says, "I think he's reached the limit of his learning. He perhaps needs to be taken to another process or maybe given something more challenging so that we can develop the learning process."   0:24:17.6 Balaji Reddie: So he was speaking about this way back in the 1950s, which today you can say comes under understanding psychology through variation. And he says, upon which furthest the lessons will not bring improvement of performance, and a manager of people knows that in this stable state, it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake, because he says you'll actually then demotivate someone. So these three principles...   0:24:44.1 Andrew Stotz: Because a mistake may be just normal variation, or are you saying... Okay. Yep. Okay.   0:24:51.0 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. I mean, it could be anything, right? But if you are highlighting that when he's already reached a stable state, it could just work in a detrimental way, the opposite direction.   0:25:05.4 Andrew Stotz: Ultimately you've reached your goal. A steady state is fantastic.   0:25:07.4 Balaji Reddie: A steady state. And then now you say if you want him to... Anything better here, I think you need to move him out from there, since maybe he needs to be given something either more challenging or whatever it is. But use of psychology and variation together. If people are saying that he spoke about this in the 1990s, he actually spoke about this in the 1950s in Japan. And I have proof. If you go and check Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality, the series of lectures that he gave in Japan, you will see this in one of the chapters, very clearly stating what needs to be done.   0:25:47.9 Balaji Reddie: Now we come to the next principle, which is... I don't know how to explain this, but it's amazing. He says that "the leader has three sources of power: authority of office, knowledge, and personality and persuasive power, tact." So authority, that's your title, knowledge, and personality. Now, personality, persuasive power, and tact is more of a personal thing. It is something that is an attribute. Authority is the title you're given. I think the only thing that you can really work on is your knowledge. And he says that a successful manager of people develops knowledge and personality and persuasive power, does not rely on authority of office. He nevertheless has obligation to use his authority, a source of power, for him to bring changes. He says that maybe some drastic changes to equipment, to materials, to methods, and to reduce variation.   0:26:55.0 Balaji Reddie: So he attributes this to a gentleman, Dr. Robert Klekamp, or Klekamp, I don't know how to pronounce that. So he says, "He in authority, but lacking knowledge or personality, must depend on his formal power. He unconsciously fills a void in his qualifications by making it clear to everybody that he's in position of authority, his will be done." So I think he said if things needed to be done and if he's being guided the right way, then he has to bring his authority into power. I think this brings me to one of the interactions he had with... Was it James McDonald at Ford? When he made him stand up and asked him, "What is your job?" And he said, "I'm vice president, manufacturing," and he sat down. Deming said, "Stand up. That's your title, not your job." And then for the next half an hour, he grilled him on what his job was. And after half an hour, he still didn't get an answer. He said, "You don't know what your job is. Do you think other people in the company know what their jobs are? I think you're running a mess here."   0:28:02.2 Balaji Reddie: So Jim McDonald, instead of feeling insulted, took it in a very different way. Though he said, "I did feel that I wanted to resign and just walk out of there," but he said, "I knew this man was onto something." And that kind of thing of authority of office, I think he did not like if people used it for the wrong reason, but he wanted them to develop knowledge, personality. Personality, well, I think again, on the soft side, persuasive power tact. Not all of us have that, but I think we are living in a knowledge economy, so knowledge would be the key here. And he also says that if you're in a position of authority, use this to get the right work done.   0:28:47.3 Balaji Reddie: Then next he says "he will study the results with the aim to improve his performance as a manager of people." So when the system is not getting what it's supposed to do, then he does not put the blame on the people. He says, "I have... I may be going wrong somewhere." I'd like to share an example of my father in Japan. My father was in Japan in 1964, I said this last time. And he was on this Asian Overseas Technical Scholarship, AOTS. And they run these courses even today. They have three-month, six-month, nine-month, and one-year courses. And from what I remember my father telling me, it's integrated in the sense, I think he was there for six months. So during the morning sessions, they used to have classroom training, sitting in a classroom. And in the afternoon, post-lunch, they would go and work in a company, and that was like their intern. And so it was a combination of theory and practice taking place almost every day.   0:30:02.4 Balaji Reddie: Now, what happened there was on the first day... And that's where he started working with Showa Electric, and said they were called the interns. So on the first day, he was taken to the company and was introduced to his supervisor. The supervisor took him on the shop floor and introduced him to the team that he would be working with. And then, while he was leaving, that supervisor said, "I just need to tell you this, that we also form what is called as a quality circle." And this was... The quality circle movement started in 1962, so '64, the quality circle. And so my father said, "I don't know what you're talking about." And he said, "Well, this is something new. So would you like to be a part of it?" Because quality circle is voluntary, not mandatory. They make you a part of the quality, so if you want to be a part of the quality circle. It's not imposed on you.   0:31:05.0 Balaji Reddie: So my father said, "I need to talk to my teacher, my sensei, at the class." He said, "Yeah. You can talk to him." So he went back to the class the next day in the morning, he asked the teacher, the sensei, that this is what they said. He said, "Oh, it's a very good system. You can become a member of the quality circle." So on the second day, he said, "Yes, I'll be a member of the quality circle." "Great," he said. Now, on the third day, his actual work started. Now, they used to make television screens, CRO, et cetera. And one of the steps there was soldering. They had to solder. And the soldering was the dip soldering. You had to take the printed circuit board and dip it into the solder bath and take it out. Of course you were to... There was a technique.   0:31:52.8 Balaji Reddie: And so his job was that. His first job that he was assigned is to do soldering on these PCBs. And so the supervisor himself sat with my father and demonstrated 10 to 15 times how to do it. Then he told my father, "Now you do it." And then he was guiding him, and he made him make around 10 pieces until he said, "Okay. Now you're getting it right." Okay. Now he said the ground rules. If by any chance you press it down too hard or you keep it too long because of the extreme heat, there will be a superficial crack on the PCB. And that would not be something that affects the customer right away, but over a period of time, it can result in the board cracking and the radio not working. So when you see a superficial crack, you're supposed to pull the cord. There was a cord there. And when you pull the cord, the supervisor will come and help you. Fine.   0:32:56.1 Balaji Reddie: Now my father started doing his work, and his fifth or sixth piece developed a crack. Now, he said, I don't want to sound derogatory, but the Indian in me caught up. Should I report this? What would he think? I hardly left this man alone, and his fifth piece is a rejected piece. And he said, I did not want to pull that cord. But then... He said that, he told me, "Please pull the cord," I decided, let me go ahead and pull it. So when he pulled the cord, a red lamp went on there, and there's a big siren that went on. And the supervisor came running and turned off the siren and turned off that lamp and said, "What happened?" My father showed him the crack. So he said, "Okay, no problem." He put it aside. He demonstrated to my father 10 times again how to do it. And then he made him do it 10 times till he said, "Ah, see, you did this." And he got it right. Now he said, "Let's continue production."   0:33:58.8 Balaji Reddie: Now they went away and now my father got it right. After an hour or so, or maybe two hours, they had their tea break. And they were sitting around a table. Now, this was the quality circle. So the supervisor got up and started speaking in Japanese. Now, this was my father's third day there, so obviously he did not understand what was going on. The only thing he knew that they were referring to him because they could not pronounce his name properly. So instead of Reddie, he was being called Leddie. So Leddie-san, Leddie-san, Leddie-san. So my father said, "I knew he was talking about me." And he said, "I felt so ashamed, I was looking down at my cup of tea rather than looking up." And then when I looked up, he said, all of them were looking at him in admiration and the thumbs up sign. And he was wondering what the hell just happened.   0:34:51.0 Balaji Reddie: And at the end of it, when that supervisor stopped speaking, they all clapped. They clapped. And as they dispersed, each one came and held his hand and they went away. And now my father told the supervisor, "What did you tell them? Did you tell them I made a mistake?" He says, "Yes, yes, I did tell them that." He said, "Then why are they complimenting me? Why are they... Why did they clap? Why did they clap for me? Why are they shaking my hands?" He says, "They're shaking your hand, they're clapping, and they're complimenting because you pulled the cord." So he said, "What do you mean?" He says, "Well, we have a saying here, here in Japan, if after explaining to a person 10 times how to do something, if the person still makes a mistake, then there's something wrong in the way I explained it." So this bit over here is he will study results with the aim to improve his performance as a manager. Don't blame the other guy. What am I doing wrong?   0:35:54.0 Andrew Stotz: You hired him, you train him.   0:35:56.4 Balaji Reddie: Yep. So when Jack Welch used to say, "Sack the bottom 10% of the people every year," and he called them dead wood, well, I would say when you hired them, they weren't dead. You killed them. So that was principle number 11. Now principle number 12 is where he combined both variation and psychology together. He said "he will try to discover who, if anybody, is outside the system, in need of special help." So he draws a normal curve. I'll pass on this document to you so you could share it along with the podcast. And he says here that people belong to the system. These are people who need not be ranked. But a person outside the system on the lower side needs special help. People outside the system on the higher side, well, we need to take the system to that level to improve the system.   0:37:08.4 Balaji Reddie: So he talks about that. He says this can be accomplished with some simple calculations. If there be an individual with figures on production or on failures, special help may be only simple rearrangement of work. It might be more complicated. He in need of special help is not in the bottom 5%. He's clean outside that distribution. So he's trying to use the understanding of variation in a very different sense to understanding people. And he says that we try to reduce that variation in performance between people. That's the job of the system. So this is principle 11 and 12.   0:37:51.0 Balaji Reddie: Now you come to principle 13: "he creates trust." And that creates trust, I would believe, it's a two-way process. And he creates an environment that encourages freedom and innovation. That is the environment where people are unafraid to make mistakes. Because we learned that theory is not the opposite of practice; it's a guide to better practice. And we need all of us working together. And that trust, I think, has got a very funny meaning in my country. I keep joking about this. In India, trust is we will lie a little less to each other. But that's not what this is. We need to be straight honest with each other. And honest is you can only do that by example. Like what happened in my case. I remember when we had installed the ERP system in our company, and there are interlocks. And I remember there was a backlogged order. And I knew that because when we did not deliver the order on time, I negotiated with the customer and I got the delivery date postponed.   0:39:08.0 Balaji Reddie: Now I was trying to test the ERP that month. So I said, let me see if the ERP can capture this because it should show it as a backlogged order. But it showed it as an order that was to be delivered on the new adjusted date. And I said, "How did that happen?" Because that should not have changed. And so I called my assistant. I said, "This should be in backlog. Why is it showing me as a spillover order?" And he said, "No, I changed the date." I said, "Why did you do that?" And he said, "No, because the finance guy will get angry with me." And I said, "That is my problem." I said, "When I told you you're not supposed to change that date..." And I removed his administrative powers in changing the date so that he could not change the date in the system.   0:40:01.7 Balaji Reddie: I removed his powers. And he apologized profusely and said, "Please let me." I said, "No." So till the day I resigned, I kept it. I said, "You're not gonna be doing this because it's not a question..." I said... If I had succumbed to that Andrew, they would have lost my trust. They would have thought that, "Oh, Balaji just talks. He doesn't walk the talk." I said, "No, you're not supposed to do this. We are trying to go by a system. Let's go by the system." So I think you can only create trust through example, through demonstration, if I may say so, and especially under adverse circumstances that you need to demonstrate this.   0:40:46.1 Balaji Reddie: Principle number 14: he says "he does not expect perfection." I think that even he said it in principle of variation. Principle 15: he says "he listens and learns without passing judgment on him that he listens to." This is an extension of the previous points. Principle number 16: he will hold an informal, unhurried conversation with every one of his people at least once a year, not for judgment, merely to listen. The purpose would be development of understanding of his people, their aims, their hopes, and their fears. This meeting will be spontaneous and not planned ahead. So there should be no bias, like an audit.   0:41:41.5 Andrew Stotz: Right.   0:41:42.2 Balaji Reddie: And lastly, principle number 17: "he understands the benefits of cooperation and the losses from competition between people and between groups." So these were the 17 principles of leadership, the beginning of transformation. I think there can be nothing more to do than this. He was so clear in what he wanted us to do. I wonder why people say that there was no method.   0:42:16.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. He definitely outlined a lot of stuff there. One of the questions I had for you on that list is, what do you say to people that say that he's kind of a dreamer? The idea that you can sit down with your employees and have this time and everybody's so busy and just talk about your fears and your goals and all that stuff where we live in this age of, we've gotta get the result, we've gotta be focused. How do you respond to that?   0:42:51.1 Balaji Reddie: Well, I say give this a try. All right? You've done it your way, right? You've done it... Let's just forget about it, and you're seeing what's happening. You want a change, you gotta do something different. So why don't you go by what this man is saying? And if you say that, you know, a dreamer or whatever, well, I'd like to quote John Lennon here: "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."   0:43:16.8 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Yep. Yep. And what do you say for people that feel that you gotta have these targets and goals and KPIs to get the most out of people? And when we think about what Deming's talking about, we're talking about this intrinsic motivation. But it's scary for people to think. It's a lot more comfortable to have these goals and structures than what you could argue is a little bit more unstructured. And how do we balance that? And obviously Deming wasn't saying don't have goals.   0:44:02.1 Balaji Reddie: Yeah, yeah. I think Henry addresses this very well in his 12-day course where he has a specific section on goals, et cetera. And he talks about how Deming said that there are some things called facts of life. Facts of life is, okay, we need to turn out, we need to generate so much of revenue this year because we need to pay for all our salaries and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then we need to have some money for the future. So we need to make so much of money this year. Now that's not a goal, that's a fact of life. But when you are bringing that number out and showing that to everyone, please also indicate to them how we intend to achieve that. Don't just leave it to them and say we need to do this.   0:44:54.4 Balaji Reddie: Okay. I'll give an example here. I don't want to sound... It may sound a little self-serving, but okay, take it in the right spirit. I remember when we had our first strategic meeting at my company, and my boss... Okay, was... He said... I think 20 of us sitting in the room and he said, "Last year, our target was 30 million and we're getting there and we're doing a great job. So this year we're gonna aim for 45 million." Now when he said that, I just put my hand up and he said, "Yes." So I said, "Why 45 million?" And he just stared me down and he looked up at everyone and said, "That's it. Meeting dismissed." He just walked out. These are those days when you had... You know the OHP? You know the overhead transparencies, the projector?   0:45:56.9 Andrew Stotz: Oh, yeah. Overhead transparencies, yep.   0:45:58.8 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. So he had the transparencies, and he just took them and walked out. And all the guys came to me, "Are you mad? You're questioning the owner of the company? Are you nuts?" And I was thinking, "God, what did I say wrong?" And then we started going back to our cabins, and when I sat down at my desk, the phone rang, and it was boss. And he just uttered one word, "Come." So when I was walking towards his cabin, I was thinking to myself, "Nice company, nice friends." And then I knocked on the door, and he said, "Yeah, yeah. Come in." He said, "Sit down." And then he said, "Shut the door." He said, "What the hell were you trying to do today? Are you trying to mock me?" I said, "Please, why would I want to mock you, boss? I wouldn't want to mock you. I just wanted to know why 45 million."   0:46:52.9 Balaji Reddie: He says, "All right." And so he took out what is called the blue book, where we have the yearbook, what happened in our country in the last one year. We have these books that get written, right? So he said, "Look, this is growth in our country in industry. This is our... Sector that we are in, and we are in the organized sector in this industry. And the year-on-year growth for the last five years has been this, and this year the expected growth is so much. And can I expect at least 3 or 4% of that growth?" I said, "Of course, why not?" He said, "That, son, is 45 million." So I said, "Why didn't you tell me this? That's all I wanted to know." He said, "You think these asses..." He was referring to my other colleagues... "Would understand?" I said, "Boss, if I can understand, they can understand. It's one and the same." "Okay. Let's meet tomorrow."   0:47:52.1 Balaji Reddie: So the next day we met again. And he said, "Yesterday, when I uttered 45 million, this genius asked me why, and so I'm gonna tell you why." And he went on to explain. After he finished explaining, my sales guy... Sorry, my marketing guy got up and he said, "I have something to share." "Okay, please come forward." He put the transparency. And he had listed there the top 10 selling items in my company based on revenue, based on profits, and based on quantities. Top 10 for each. There were three products that were common to all the three. So obviously he was sending a message to us, that we had to attain our targets, at least by focusing.   0:48:44.8 Balaji Reddie: The moment he showed that, he underlined these three, the sales guy put his hand up and said, "Yes." "That second product you underlined, our competitor is selling it as a package with another product, but we don't seem to have that on our list." So the R&D guy got up and said, "Could you tell me what the part number..." And he says, "It's part number so-and-so." He said, "Hang on, I've already developed that." You know what was happening, Andrew? We were talking to each other. And that meeting went on for three and a half hours. And at the end of the three and a half hours, all of us knew how to attain 45 million.   0:49:23.8 Andrew Stotz: I thought you were gonna ask a question on the second day, "Hey, boss, so 45 million, why is there no market share gain of our business that we're growing faster than the industry?"   [laughter]   0:49:41.4 Balaji Reddie: So anyway, but this was... This is what I think goals should be transparent in this sense, that why are we giving you this number? And more importantly is the discussion that happens is how are we gonna do this? It just doesn't happen by itself, right? And if you leave it to people, they start distorting numbers, right?   0:50:03.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:50:04.2 Balaji Reddie: As Brian Joiner said, "Distort the data, distort the system, or distort both."   0:50:12.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And we're working on a growth plan for my coffee business.   0:50:19.0 Balaji Reddie: A growth.   0:50:19.6 Andrew Stotz: And really what it comes down to is three things. Number one, are we as the owners gonna hire more salespeople? Because salespeople bring in revenue.   0:50:36.3 Balaji Reddie: Right.   0:50:37.0 Andrew Stotz: Number two, are we as the owners going to develop together with the rest of the team a higher value-added offering...   0:50:50.6 Balaji Reddie: Wow.   0:50:50.8 Andrew Stotz: That we can bring more value than what we're bringing right now, which would bring potential customers to us and allow us to sell more easily. Or are we as the owners going to buy another company?   0:51:07.8 Balaji Reddie: Oh, okay.   0:51:09.2 Andrew Stotz: So those are the three things. And Dale and I have been discussing each one of those in a lot of detail, testing out and debating and discussing. But those are the type that... When it comes to growth, that's just... We know the growth we can produce with no change. And that's in line with the inflation rate or whatever the economic growth, for sure. But as long as we don't lose people on our team or something like that. But to go to our team and say, "How are we gonna grow faster?" Well, that whole point is we can see. Also the other thing is that we can see bigger about the industry sometimes. Sometimes they see something at a small level that they bring back to us and think, "Whoa, wait a minute, that's something valuable." And yeah, so we're getting ready for our final decisions on where we're gonna go with that. But yeah, without that type of change, we're not gonna reach the type of growth that we want to get. And really our idea is 5x growth in five years.   0:52:19.9 Balaji Reddie: Okay.   0:52:20.5 Andrew Stotz: And in order to do that, we have to have a completely different level of quality, service, product, thinking. And so, yeah, it's fun... It's challenging. Anyways...   0:52:32.9 Balaji Reddie: Right.   0:52:33.2 Andrew Stotz: So how do we wrap this up? What is it you want people to take away? You've shared a lot of different stuff. What would you like them to take away from it?   0:52:42.0 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. One, I'm trying to shatter that myth that Deming did not tell us what was to be done. I think he was very clear and we need to reread and reread. And we have to take these as guidelines. You may come up with your own method, but see these as a guideline by and large to put you on the right path. And once you do that, you may develop something which works for you, and that's what he wanted. But let us not just say that he only philosophized about things. I think he was very clear in his head. He just wanted us to do things our own way because nobody understood our problems better than we ourselves. And he was just showing us how to understand things around.   0:53:32.6 Balaji Reddie: He wanted us to know, to understand what we do not know. Through these principles, we can address some of the gaps. Perhaps we were getting a few things wrong. So point number 14, take action to accomplish the transformation. I think it begins with leadership. So point number seven comes into the picture. It begins with training and education. Point number six comes into the picture and it also brings in point number 13, which is learning and development. And education and training is different from learning and development. Training can be very company specific and you can measure the outcomes of training, but you cannot measure the outcomes of development because that takes time.   0:54:19.8 Balaji Reddie: So you need to have some things going in your favor. And for that you need to choose, and he told us how to do that. And yes, he wanted top management to be a part of this because he said those in authority need to do this. But that one sentence that middle management can commence, it can commence there, is a telling statement. So he knew it was possible.   0:54:45.0 Andrew Stotz: That's great. And I like that. Commence. That there's... It's not necessarily gonna be completed by middle management, but middle management can start right now, right where you are. So that's a great way, that's a great way to end with the start. So, Balaji, I want to thank you on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute. And it's an interesting discussion and I'm enjoying it very much. And for listeners out there, remember to go to deming.org and also there, jump on DemingNEXT to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is: "People are entitled to joy in work."   0:55:32.1 Balaji Reddie: Oh, yeah. Andrew, I think saying thank you on behalf of the institute, I am also a part of the institute.   0:55:38.5 Andrew Stotz: Of course. Of course. You are. I appreciate it. Okay.

What separates leaders who truly connect from leaders who just sound polished?In this episode of The Authority Company Podcast, Joe Pardavila sits down with executive communication coach and author Cathy Bonczek to unpack the real reason so many smart leaders struggle to connect.Drawing from years coaching executives at Fortune 500 companies, private equity firms, and major financial institutions, Cathy explains why perfection often kills authenticity, how executive presence actually works, and why the best communicators focus on connection over performance. They discuss the hidden dangers of over-rehearsing, why scripted communication feels fake, and how leaders can build confidence without sounding robotic. Cathy also breaks down the role of emotional connection in public speaking, the mistakes executives make during presentations, and why audiences respond more to honesty than polish. Joe and Cathy also explore TED Talks, media training, PowerPoint overload, authenticity in leadership, and how communication habits quietly shape careers.If you want to become a stronger communicator, a better leader, or simply feel more confident speaking in high-pressure situations, this conversation delivers practical advice you can use immediately. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 Intro00:43 Why leaders chase perfection in communication02:57 The pressure of leadership in the social media era04:51 Why CEOs often struggle in interviews07:00 Authenticity vs oversharing08:34 The performance side of leadership communication09:53 What executive presence really means11:11 Are great communicators born or trained?11:53 The danger of being perceived as “too nice”14:40 The communication habit that holds careers back15:16 Rehearsing to converse instead of sounding polished17:03 Why scripted podcast interviews fail19:09 How leaders become comfortable speaking naturally20:34 The PowerPoint presentation problem25:16 What separates great speakers from average ones26:07 First impressions and confidence27:32 How to stop feeling invisible in meetings29:00 Final thoughts

Read my new book, "The Price of Becoming." www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Scott Harrison is the founder and CEO of charity: water, a non-profit that has raised over a billion dollars and funded tens of thousands of water projects to bring safe drinking water to millions. He previously spent a decade as a New York City nightclub promoter before a dramatic career shift led him into humanitarian work. Key Learnings Scott started a charity: water with $20 from a birthday party. Then $15,000... Twenty years later: over a billion dollars raised, 21 million people served. He says it should be 10 to 100 times more. The cure for water already exists. We're looking for water on Mars while 700 million people drink dirty water on Earth. We solved this hundreds of years ago. We just haven't implemented it. 25% of the money sitting in American donor-advised funds would give every human on Earth clean water. That's parked philanthropic capital. Already tax-benefited. Just waiting. The goal is always 10X what you're doing. If we raised a million last year, we want ten this year. If we raise $100 million, we should raise a billion. The opportunity is always orders of magnitude larger than the moment. Show, don't bullet. Scott shows 210 photos in a 45-minute keynote. No PowerPoint. Single images. A story unfolds frame by frame. Be early to the technology. First charity on Instagram. First to hit a million Twitter followers. First to use VR. The question is always the same: how does this new thing further the mission? The 100% model: solve for the cynic.  Public donations go to one bank account that funds only water projects. Overhead is raised separately from entrepreneurs and business leaders. Then track every donation to a specific village. Don't be mid. Scott's 11-year-old daughter says nobody wants to be mid. Excellence is a core value. There's a lot of mid out there. Design everything. The fact cover sheet. The PowerPoint. The website. The package. "We're always dating." If the message comes in an ugly package, you're at a disadvantage before you start. Treat the donor like a Michelin three-star guest. If a restaurant can think that carefully about a meal, you can think that carefully about a donor who can save a million lives. The Goldman Sachs partner who changed Scott's paradigm. Before making an eight-figure ask, Scott asked a partner: "How does it feel when people ask for a lot more than you expected?" The expected answer was irritated, offended, put off. The actual answer: "I feel flattered that they think I would be that generous." People are generous. The well is there. You just have to drill deep enough. Scott has spent 20 years asking for too little. That might be his next obsession. People give to people, not causes. A dynamic leader who transfers their enthusiasm gets the donation. The cause doesn't. Most of the donations Scott and his wife give are to people, not topics they were already passionate about. Talk 10% of the time. When Scott meets a donor for the first time, he wants to know their whole life story. Their marriage. Their kids. What they wanted to be when they grew up. Be genuinely curious or don't bother. Hire for integrity, humility, curiosity, and energy... 16,000 applicants for 36 roles last year. Energy matters most. Someone who can get you fired up about pickleball, Patagonia, or a new running shoe is exactly who you want on the executive team. The dinner test for hiring: Can you imagine having this person at your home for two hours at dinner? And wanting to keep them for another hour? Get the whole life story. Scott wants the arc from the beginning to the present in an interview. If someone can't tell their own story coherently, they probably don't know themselves yet. The 11-year-old with the piggy bank. He told his parents he was going to fund a whole village. They told him to set a realistic goal. He went knocking on doors. He came back with $10,000. Scott's experience lab in Nashville. A 60-minute immersive tour. A 100-degree room with a treadmill where you carry a 40-pound water vessel. Microscopes that show you parasites. A VR film that ends in celebration. The "give shop," not the gift shop. 53% of visitors donate. 10,000 visitors. $3.9 million raised in year one. Scott's champagne moment: a single billionaire who picks water. The water sector doesn't have one. Republicans and Democrats agree on it. Atheists and people of faith agree on it. Everyone has to drink. Reflection Questions What is the 10X version of your current goal? Where are you asking for too little because the smaller ask felt safer? Who in your work or life is the Michelin three-star guest, the customer, donor, or partner who deserves your most thoughtful experience design?  When was the last time you went 10% talking, 90% genuinely curious about someone else's story?  More Learning:  #290: Scott Harrison – Redemption, Compassion, & The Transformative Power Within Us #680: Scott Galloway - Don't Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Talent #682: Will Guidara - Adversity is a Terrible Thing to WasteAudio Chapters 00:00 The Price of Becoming - Pre-Order Now! 01:18 Welcome Back, Scott Harrison 02:56 From a $20 Bill to Over $1 Billion Raised 04:59 Why the Goal Should Always Be 10X (or 100X) 07:54 Storytelling: How to Get People to Care About a Problem They Don't Feel 10:30 Being Early to Instagram, Twitter, and VR 16:10 Radical Transparency: The Bank Account That Built Trust 19:51 The Beauty of a Healthy Obsession 21:22 Drilling Deep for the Artesian Wells of Generosity 25:04 What It Feels Like in the Room When Generosity Breaks Through 27:01 "Nobody Wants to Be Mid." 30:56 Design Everything: We're Always Dating 32:13 Treat Your Donor Like a Michelin Three-Star Guest 35:39 Selling With Integrity: Talk 10%, Listen 90% 39:15 16,000 Applicants for 36 Jobs: What Scott Looks For 43:12 The Power of Vulnerability in Hiring 45:39 Inside the Nashville Experience Lab 50:34 The Champagne Question: A Billion-Dollar Vision 52:10 The 11-Year-Old Who Raised $10,000 Door-to-Door 54:25 EOPC  

Today on PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham continues the series on marriage and the family that is so important in our culture today. Pastor Graham brings a powerful message on “The Family of God” – the Church. God is our father, and we have been born again into His family. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. Today we're joined by John Plake, Chief Innovation Officer and Editor-in-Chief of the State of the Bible research at the American Bible Society. With decades of experience as a pastor, missionary, professor, and researcher, John brings a unique perspective on how people are actually engaging with Scripture and what we should do about it. The “movable middle” is growing. // One of the most significant insights from recent research is the rise of what John calls the “movable middle”—millions of people who are open to the Bible but not yet engaged with it. This group has grown by approximately nine million people in recent years. They are curious, interested, and even positive toward Scripture, but they lack the tools, confidence, or guidance to engage it meaningfully. This represents a massive opportunity for churches willing to step in and help. People want a guide. // Through focus groups and research, John discovered that many people in the movable middle feel intimidated by the Bible. They struggle with language, context, and navigation. But perhaps most striking is they want help. Contrary to what some leaders might assume, they are not rejecting the church as a guide. In fact, many say, “If we can't trust the church to help us understand the Bible, what good is it?” This creates a clear invitation for churches to step into a more relational, guiding role in discipleship. A surprising discipleship gap. // One of the most sobering findings is that nearly half of weekly church attenders are not regularly engaging Scripture on their own. While churches invest heavily in preaching and programming, many people are not developing personal habits of Bible engagement. John suggests that churches often focus on delivering content rather than equipping people to engage Scripture themselves. The result is a gap between what happens on Sunday and what happens in everyday life. From teaching to equipping. // If churches want to close that gap, they must shift from being primarily content providers to equipping environments. This means helping people develop the skills, habits, and confidence to read and apply Scripture on their own. It also requires understanding the real barriers people face, like time constraints, confusion, or lack of community support, and addressing those barriers with practical solutions. A new tool for churches. // To help leaders take action, the American Bible Society has developed the “Next Step for Church” assessment. This free tool allows churches to measure spiritual health, Bible engagement, and key leadership behaviors within their congregation. Within a few weeks, leaders receive a detailed, data-driven report highlighting strengths, challenges, and suggested next steps. Data that leads to discipleship. // John emphasizes that data is not an end in itself; it's a tool for better shepherding. By listening to their congregation at scale, leaders can identify patterns, confirm instincts, and prioritize what matters most. The assessment surfaces both what's working and where growth is needed, giving churches a clear path forward. It also connects individuals to personalized Scripture engagement resources, helping them take their next step spiritually. Why Scripture engagement matters most. // Nothing has a greater impact on spiritual growth than a person's relationship with the Bible. In fact, Scripture engagement accounts for a significant portion of overall spiritual health. When people consistently engage with God's Word, transformation follows—affecting beliefs, behaviors, and relationships. Signs of hope for the future. // Despite broader cultural challenges, John sees encouraging trends, especially among younger generations. Millennials and Gen Z show increasing openness to Scripture, even if they are still exploring. While overall trends may appear flat, meaningful change is happening beneath the surface. For churches willing to engage this moment, there is real opportunity for impact. To explore the research further or access the free church assessment, visit church.nextstep.bible and begin discovering how your church can better equip people to engage Scripture every day. Thank You for Tuning In! There are a lot of podcasts you could be tuning into today, but you chose unSeminary, and I'm grateful for that. If you enjoyed today's show, please share it by using the social media buttons you see at the left hand side of this page. Also, kindly consider taking the 60-seconds it takes to leave an honest review and rating for the podcast on iTunes, they're extremely helpful when it comes to the ranking of the show and you can bet that I read every single one of them personally! Lastly, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, to get automatic updates every time a new episode goes live! Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe Do you feel like your church’s or school's facility could be preventing growth? Are you frustrated or possibly overwhelmed at the thought of a complicated or costly building project? Are the limitations of your building becoming obstacles in the path of expanding your ministry? Have you ever felt that you could reach more people if only the facility was better suited to the community’s needs? Well, the team over at Risepointe can help! As former ministry staff and church leaders, they understand how to prioritize and help lead you to a place where the building is a ministry multiplier. Your mission should not be held back by your building. Their team of architects, interior designers and project managers have the professional experience to incorporate creative design solutions to help move YOUR mission forward. Check them out at risepointe.com and while you’re there, schedule a FREE call to explore possibilities for your needs, vision and future…Risepointe believes that God still uses spaces…and they're here to help. Episode Transcript Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. I am so glad that you have decided to tune in today. This is one of those episodes that there’s a great resource in it that going to want to make sure you engage with. There’s super helpful content. Plus it’s about an area that I know so many of us are thinking about, we’re wondering about, we’re asking questions about. Rich Birch — So super excited to have John Plake with us today. He is the chief innovator ah innovation officer and editor-in-chief of the State of the Bible Research Series, which comes from the American Bible Society. And they’re on a mission to make the Bible available to every person in a language and format each can understand and afford so that all may experience its life-changing message. ABS has really a whole bunch of different tools and approaches, and we’re excited kind of expose a little bit more about that today. John has been in ministry over 30 years. We’ll just call it over 30 years. And it served as a pastor, missionary, professor, researcher. John, welcome to the show. So glad you’re here.John Plake — Thanks so much for having me today. It’s great to be with you.Rich Birch — Why don’t you fill in the picture a little bit? Tell us a little bit about your background. You know, what brings you to your current work?John Plake — Yeah. Closer to 40 years now. Rich Birch — Nice. Yeah, yeah. That’s great.John Plake — It’s a little uncomfortable to talk about that.Rich Birch — That’s great.John Plake — Yeah. You know, I start out like a lot of people in ministry. I grew up in a home that ministry was central. Actually, both my grandfathers were ministers. My father was a minister. Ministry is kind of the family business in a way, but I really did sense a direction from God when I was about 15 years old to to pursue full-time ministry.John Plake — There was some detail around that. Ended up going to Bible college and and then started what turned out to be about nine years of full-time pastoral service. And I hadn’t been in that for very long before I realized that everything I learned in Bible College was preparing me to serve a generation that no longer existed in a culture that was gone. John Plake — And I thought, my goodness, I know God’s word pretty well. And mean, I’m a lifelong learner of God’s word. I love the Bible. And yet, didn’t really know culture very well. And I didn’t develop those tools until just years and years of practice, some missionary service, wonderful teachers at at Wheaton College and graduate school and and just a lifelong journey of learning.John Plake — So at American Bible Society, when I got here, the State of the Bible, program or this research project was already underway. And we’d been helped out by the Barna Group, which does some wonderful foundational work. And eventually it just kind of grew up and it got to a place where we had an internal team that was running it ourselves, now in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Council or NORC at the University of Chicago. We just do, I think, what is the largest ongoing study of Americans’ relationship with the Bible and faith and the church. And we get to talk about it all the time. Rich Birch — Yeah, I love it.John Plake — So, I mean, this is the best job in the world.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. It’s it’s great research, something that I think should be on the kind of list of things that we need to be paying attention to. It’s been a gift to the church for so long and something that we should continue to to pay attention through. Now, let’s talk about you specifically. You spent three plus decades. I didn’t want to say almost 40. You know, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that. I could say that, you know, a couple years ago, I clicked across one of those numbers with a zero on the end as my birthday. And ever since then, I’m a little sensitive about the the age thing. Rich Birch — So anyways, As a ministry, missionary professor, researcher, you’ve done a lot. How does wearing all of those hats, what do you what does that bring to you as you come to the data? How does that impact you as you think about really the state of the Bible research?John Plake — Yeah, you know, I think research can be dull. You know, it can sound like it’s all about writing questions or it’s all statistics and numbers. But for me, the research is all about the people. Rich Birch — So true.John Plake — It’s all about the people in our communities and in our churches that we’re trying to understand better so we can serve them well with the gospel. I, for years, I’ve used the analogy that that being in gospel ministry is like being a human bridge across a river. I grew up not very far from the Mississippi River in the St. Louis area, and there was a big 100-year flood when I was early on in ministry. And I mean, none of the bridges worked anymore. You couldn’t get from one side to the other.John Plake — And I thought, you know, that’s a tragedy that I encountered sometimes in ministry where maybe I was deeply rooted in one bank of the river, the text, but I wasn’t necessarily deeply rooted in the other bank of the river, which was the context.John Plake — And it’s this lived experience of the people that I was I was serving. And that I wanted to serve in my community, but I needed to understand them better. So I wasn’t just spouting you know Aristotelian logic to them. Or I wasn’t just coming at them with the pat answers that I’d learned. Like I’d never heard anybody in my life walk into my office and say, Pastor John, you got to tell me, what can you describe hamartiology to me from. You know like I had to learn that in school, but that’s not what people struggle with. Rich Birch — That’s so true. Yeah. John Plake — They had totally different questions and I needed to love them and honor them enough to understand their questions and answer them responsibly and reliably from the pages of scripture.Rich Birch — Yeah, love it. Okay, well, we’re going to dig into a little bit of just a couple of the findings just to kind of, we’re trying to whet your appetite, friends, to take steps towards this. So the 2025 data showed, and we’ve seen this, a real bump in Bible engagement, particularly among millennials and men. If I’m reading it correctly, though, we saw 2026, a shift happen, maybe back down. And so what’s going on? Actually, I heard another sociologist in a kind of a related field that was about church attendance talked about the dead cat bounce, that it was like, you know, which I thought, oh, that’s a, but there’s a similarity going on here. Pull this, this finding apart. Help us understand this.John Plake — Yeah, apologies to cat lovers out there.Rich Birch — Yes, exactly.John Plake — We were we were hoping, you know, I think we were really hoping. We looked at 2025. We saw that men in particular were leaning into the Bible in ways we hadn’t seen recently. Millennials doing the same thing. There there were some interesting numbers in 2025. And so when the 2026 numbers came to my desk in late January, I thought, I hope we’re extending I hope it’s going to be a trend. But it wasn’t. It was a blip.John Plake — And there’s more to it, though, than just the fact that scripture engagement didn’t go up. It also didn’t go down. And the level of people in America who are Bible disengaged, meaning they never pick up the Bible on purpose at all, that actually didn’t go up either. What grew was this kind of curious explorer group in the middle that we call the movable middle. And over the last two years, it’s grown by 9 million American adults. Rich Birch — Wow.John Plake — And so what we do see is there’s there’s openness to the Bible. There’s experimentation with the Bible. But people are jumping in and they’re trying it and they’re not being able to get hold of it. And I think that’s largely because of us.John Plake — Because Bible people who are around them aren’t saying, please come do this with me. Let me help you. Let me honor you enough to to respect your questions, to ask what you’re dealing with, and help you explore those issues through the pages of Scripture.Rich Birch — I love that movable middle, man, that feels like the kind of group we want to connect with and reach out to in our community. Any other, when you, when you’ve been thinking about this movable middle, what are some other kind of characteristics of those people or other things that, you know, are kind of telltale signs of this group as we’re thinking about them as it, as it pertains to Bible engagement?John Plake — Yeah, they’re an amazing group, and we’re going talking more about them all year, but they are probably my favorite subject in America. There are 74 million American adults that are in the movable middle.Rich Birch — Wow.John Plake — 74 million of our neighbors who are like…Rich Birch — Wow.John Plake — …and here’s what they tend to say: They love the Bible. They think it’s a great idea. But if you handed them a Bible, they don’t know how to find what they’re looking for. They don’t know how to navigate it. They get confused by the language in in Scripture.John Plake — I remember doing a a focus group with a bunch of people in the movable middle. I was in Chicago. it was an area I was really familiar with. I used to pastor in that area. And we got them talking about their experience with the Bible. And we said, hey, does anything ever stop you or kind of you know make you check out because you’re struggling with what’s going on? John Plake — And one young lady at the table said, yeah, you know the language of the Bible is really really hard for me to understand. It’s it’s a really old book. It uses expressions I don’t understand. And a gentleman sitting across the table from her just kind of chuckled and said, yeah, what the hell’s a mustard seed? And everybody laughed.John Plake — I was behind the glass and I just about fell out of my chair because they didn’t teach me to talk like that in a Assemblies of God seminary.Rich Birch — Yes.John Plake —Things like that, you know, that’s just not the way we roll.Rich Birch — Yeah, yeah. Yes.John Plake — But it was so authentic and he wasn’t being mean.Rich Birch — No.John Plake — He was just saying, boy, I don’t I don’t get it. And then they said, you know, we really want a guide. Rich Birch — That’s good.John Plake — And so we pushed on that a little bit. At the time, there were some clergy abuse scandals that actually there were billboards up in Chicago about clergy abuse scandals that all of us lamented. And so we’re like, OK, listen, do you trust the church to be your guide? Because ee saw these billboards, you know, and it’s your city. And so what what do you think?John Plake — And they said, well, of course we do. I mean, it’s terrible when people in the church abuse their position and abuse others. And that’s not what they’re supposed to do. But if we can’t trust the church to help us understand the Bible, what good are they, really? And so, yes, we’re looking to you, church, to help us connect more deeply with the Bible, understand what it meant to the original hearers and readers and how we apply it to our lives today.Rich Birch — Okay, that’s yeah, that’s really cool. I look forward to hearing more about the movable middle in this coming year. Another thing that jumped out to me, which I feel like, man, I’ve seen this in my church. This is like you you named a group that I see, but it’s surprising, at least it’s surprising on its face. So nearly half of weekly church attenders, weekly church attenders, which is, that’s like really engaged, you know, are not regularly engaging, engaging scripture on their own.Rich Birch — Man, what, so what should we do about that? That’s an interesting, how does, how should that impact our discipleship strategy? What are you encouraging us to be thinking about? And these people that are with us all the time, but they’re not engaged with scripture.John Plake — Well, I think the first thing to do is to just recognize it. Rich Birch — Right.John Plake — You know, a lot of pastors that I’ve talked to, when we talk about scripture engagement, they tell me things like this: Everything we do is scripture engagement. I spend my whole week preparing a scriptural message. I’m, you know, we’re preparing small group curriculum and Sunday school curriculum and all of this stuff. It’s all about the, everything we do is about the Bible. John Plake — Well, okay. But I had a I had a young youth pastor come to me not that long ago and he said, John, look, you were me once a few years ago. If you knew then what you know now, what would you do differently?John Plake — And the answer is I would do everything differently, than the way I ought to do it. Because what, in my tradition, there was a lot of emphasis on the preaching event, and I put a lot of effort into those communication events, but what I didn’t put as much effort into is empowering people in my church to do what I was doing, which was dig into scripture, understand it for themselves, giving them the tools to do that.John Plake — And then in May, we’re going to be releasing a chapter, just in a few few days now, we’re going to be releasing a chapter all about parents. And one of the startling things is the time pressure that moms are under. I mean, it’s incredible. And so we need to understand where they’re coming from and where they have barriers, but also have some compassion on them and help to support them when they’re really facing struggles. Like they don’t have enough time. They don’t have the resources or the community coming around them to help them to engage God’s word ah more fulsomely, more transformatively.John Plake — We know how to do this stuff, but we’re not connecting the dots to everybody that’s coming to hear us talk every…Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s good. I know I’ve in my seat as an XP, um you know, I’ve overseen a lot of what we do on the programming side and what we do on the weekends. And I’ve, you know, it’s like, that i don’t think I’ve ever said this publicly. It’s like the kind of behind the scenes conversation. I’ve sometimes wondered, I’ve said, you know, like, what we do on the weekend to try to make the Bible understandable is so completely different than Tuesday morning in someone’s life. Rich Birch — Like, we pull out all the stops to make it interesting. We get like world class communicators, incredible graphics, you know, emotional music, all of this to try to… But then the question is, okay, so now on Tuesday morning when you’re tired and you haven’t had your coffee yet and you’re just about to go read scripture, man, like that feels like a long ways away. There’s like a gap there that I sometimes wonder maybe we’re making it worse. You know. Maybe we’re making it harder. I said that. You didn’t say that. Rich Birch — So maybe there’s pastors that are listening here and they read this kind of report. They read this kind of finding and they’re like, hey, that’s interesting. But like, how what do I do in my church specifically? So you know we want we don’t want to just leave people with a tough stat.Rich Birch — I think we see that in our church. There’s people in our church that are here all the time. They’re not that engaged. But you’ve actually developed a new tool or ABS has developed a new tool to help us think through that. Why don’t you walk us through it? Tell us a little bit about it. How’s it work? Talk us how it can help us.John Plake — Yeah, so recently we developed two tools that kind of work together. One of them you can find on the internet at nextstep.bible. And it’s just for anybody who’s like, hey, I’m on a spiritual journey. I’m kind of stuck. I don’t really know what to do next. Maybe you’re just getting started exploring what it means to be a Christian. Maybe you’re Jesus’ little brother or sister. Wherever you are in that journey, there’s always a next step for us.John Plake — And so what we’ve done is analyzed along about a million spiritual life surveys. Rich Birch — Wow.John Plake — And from this huge quantity of data, we’ve learned that people are at different places in that journey. They’re at different points on the map. And we want to make sure that they’re equipped to have the right thing at the right time. I think currently there are 21,000 scripture engagement resources available there.Rich Birch — Wow.John Plake — They’re absolutely free. They’re in English, Spanish, and French. So go check it out, nextstep.bible.John Plake — But if you’re a pastor or you’re a church leader, you’re probably wondering, well, what’s going on in my church, right? So I see all the national data, but I think our tendency is to say, well, we’re the exception, right?Rich Birch — So true. Well, that’s not our people. John Plake — I know I know everybody else is struggling, but we’re doing okay.Rich Birch — Yes.John Plake — And and so it’s good to check our assumptions a little bit. They used to say a really sad statistic that 10 o’clock on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America, which makes me sad. What makes me sad also is that 12 o’clock noon in America is the most dishonest hour in America. That’s the hour when pastors tend to start greeting their people after the church service closes and they hear all these comments: oh, Pastor, that was the best sermon I’ve ever heard. And it wasn’t. It just wasn’t. All right, let’s face it.John Plake — There’s somebody out there who preaches better than you do and better than I do. They’re available on YouTube. People don’t need you to be the best Bible teacher in the world. They need you to be the best pastor for them. Rich Birch — That’s good.John Plake — And the tools that are all about focusing on their relationship with the Bible, their holistic spiritual formation, and our leadership behaviors. And so for that, we built the Next Step for Church Assessment.John Plake — It’s actually standing on the foundation or built on the engine block, if you want a different metaphor, of the old reveal research that the Willow Creek Association had come out with. It’s no longer available. And we were able to acquire all of their historical learnings, but also add in things like human flourishing and e-pastoral leadership behaviors that lead to churches really being missionally effective and strong. Excellent stuff on Bible engagement and spiritual formation. John Plake — So the the big challenge we had, I was talking with Dr. Ed Stetzer about this because he was at LifeWay Research when the Transformational Church Assessment was being built. And it was always hard because analyzing this kind of data required a lot of human intervention. It’s very expensive to do. It’s very complicated to deliver. And even a small cost can be a barrier for churches that have strained budgets. It doesn’t matter if you’re a church of, you know, 2,500 25,000 or 250. There’s always more places to put your money than there are dollars that are available to do it.John Plake — And so at American Bible Society, we said, you know what, as a gift to the church, because we love the church, we need to make it completely free. And so you can go to church.nextstep.bible and you could sign up today. Literally, we’re recording this on a on a Thursday. You could go there today and by Sunday, you could be launching your survey. Two weeks later, you’d automatically have results in your own online dashboard. You’d get key highlights emailed to you. There’s a place for custom questions. There’s just all kinds of really, really rich information.Rich Birch — So good.John Plake — And it it doesn’t take the place of the kind of learning that you have as a pastor. You learn deeply in relationship with others. You’re observing what’s going on. You have a team that’s around you. But what it does is it provides this valid, reliable sift and sort function. It’s based on well, I don’t know even know how many, well over 3000 churches, well over half a million survey responses went into building this and making it a tool that that is a good benchmark for you to say, you know what, if we want to move from where we are today to where God is calling us, here are the things we need to focus on.Rich Birch — It’s so good. And friends, I want to encourage you to to go there. Just church.nextstep.bible. I know many of us have a heart for saying, listen, we want to measure more than just nickels and noses. The number of people that show up and revenue that comes in. And this a great way to kind of inject at something that’s at the core of what we’re supposed to be doing as a church. So why don’t we just give a little bit more detail?Rich Birch — What is it? You know, what’s it actually measuring? How is it? You know, how could it be helpful? How how could it kind of dovetail with some of the things we’re already tracking? Maybe give us, you know, what kind of insights are we going to gain from this if we if we put our people through this?John Plake — Yeah, maybe it’s worthwhile to just back up and say it’s based on a congregational assessment. So really this kind of work is all about just listening to your congregation at scale. So if you have 25 people coming to church, you can probably have this conversation with them if you know how to ask the right questions. Rich Birch — Right.John Plake — You can go to the website. You’re like, what’s in the survey? There’s a button you can click. You can read the whole survey. It’s fine. We’re not going to try and surprise you with anything. But really simple stuff. How’s your relationship with Jesus? How often are you interacting with Scripture? What difference is that making in your life? We ask the standard Harvard human flourishing questions. We ask about um how the pastoral team or the senior pastor, him or herself, is doing at actually modeling Christlike leadership for you. Rich Birch — It’s so good.John Plake — And all of that reporting then gets brought into a database. It’s all anonymous. So individuals don’t, they don’t have to tell you who they are. They can’t tell you who they are other than by characteristics. And you’re going to get this really good, robust picture of what’s going on at the church. John Plake — Now, what does it take for somebody to do that? It takes about 20 minutes of their time, and time is expensive, right? People always have too much to do. So in return for that investment, at the end of their survey experience, they will have already told us everything we need to know to match them to great resources at nextstep.bible.John Plake — And with their permission, not without it, they can click a button, pass that data over to the individual nextstep.bible platform. They can create an account and right away, they’re going to be finding things like YouVersion Bible reading plans that are just for them.John Plake — If you’ve got people in your church and they’re outliers, they’re they’re way more spiritually advanced than everybody else, or they’re just getting started and everybody else is way ahead of them, these kinds of tools create bespoke pathways for them so they know what to do next. All the while, the church leadership can sit back and say, okay, here’s our results. And as a team, now what do we need to do to serve the whole congregation well?Rich Birch — I love this. You know, this is what incredible tool that you’ve put together here for our churches to wrestle through and to, you know, not only help us as a church as we’re thinking about these issues, but then help individuals in our church. What what would be some of the ways that churches might use the data that’s generated to impact what we’re doing in our programming? How how could we use this to improve what we’re doing?John Plake — Sure. There are really three things we want everybody to do. First, just discover what’s going on. Just just check your assumptions at the door and and say, okay, what do the data tell us about what’s going on in our church life and in our people’s lives? That’s the first thing.John Plake — Second thing is it’s going to surface for you the top three things that you’re doing great. And it’s going to give them to you in the report. And you need to throw a party. Like there are people who make these things happen for you. No pastor is doing this all by themselves. And so plan a party, celebrate what’s going well.John Plake — The third thing it’s going to do is it’s going to give you suggestions about, okay, here’s where your congregation is today. It won’t surprise you, but it might inform you. I’ve never seen a pastor look at the report and go, ah you guys got it wrong. Rich Birch — Sure, right.John Plake — Usually they they see the report and they go, yeah, okay, yeah, you got me.Rich Birch — Yeah. Confirmed some hunches I’ve had. Yeah. Yeah.John Plake — Right? But we don’t we don’t have time. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the expertise to be able to sit down and and kind of scientifically walk through this process. So we do that for you. We deliver the report. And then we’re going to give you two key action items that we think churches like yours in a similar place have done that have helped move them toward spiritual health and missional effectiveness.John Plake — And that’s really what it’s all about. We want your congregation to be spiritually healthy. We want your your church as a whole to be missionally effective. And when that happens, often there’s numerical growth. Often there’s financial growth. But there’s certainly more missional impact that’s coming through your congregation and its work.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s cool. So if I’m like a church of a thousand people, let’s say, and just round number to picking out of the sky, how how what kind of percentage of my congregation would I need to take this to give me a reasonable, you know, statistical, you know, feeling good about the data for it? What what kind of number um should I be thinking about?John Plake — Well, the first thing is we’ve built in a tool that will tell you how to get to a margin of error of plus or minus 3%. Rich Birch — Love it.John Plake — And that does vary depending on the adult attendance that you have. So let’s say you’ve a thousand adults. And by adults, I mean anybody in high school or older can probably take this survey. Rich Birch — Yep.John Plake — And you can cut the data like by gender or by age. All of that live filtering is in the online platform. Rich Birch — Oh, that’s so good.John Plake — So if you’re the you’re the youth pastor and you’re like, well, wait, tell me about the young people that took the survey. You can just look right at them and compare them to the rest of the congregation, which I bet will be enlightening. But nevertheless, how many do you need if you’re a church of 1,000, it’s about 275.Rich Birch — Okay.John Plake — If it’s a smaller church than that, then you’re still going to need a pretty significant percentage. So if I roll that all the way down to a church of 100, you need 80.Rich Birch — Okay.John Plake — And if you roll that up to a church of 5,000, well, you don’t need that many more than 275.Rich Birch — Interesting.John Plake — So you’re going to report that out to you. It’s very, very doable. And, you know, I’ve pastored at large churches and I pastored a small church. And I’ll tell you, when I pastored a church of under 100, I could have gotten a census of the people, like everybody, to do a survey like this. They would have been glad to tell me these things. Rich Birch — Right.John Plake — And it’s not that I couldn’t have had a conversation one-on-one with most of the adults in the congregation. It was something different in that case. I actually didn’t know what to ask. I used to run into this when I was a campus pastor at a Christian university. And I would have young people walk into my office and I was like, I know I should be able to help them, but the challenge they’re facing is different than anything I’m familiar with. I don’t have any analog for this in my personal experience. And so this sort of takes the mystery away. We don’t ask fluffy questions. We ask research proven questions that are going to give you the information you really need so you can take action.Rich Birch — That’s amazing. That’s think this is such a great tool for people. I can see how, you know, it’d be so helpful for folks that are listening in to, you know, might be be able to plug in grab this experience for their people, help their church, help the folks that are attending. That’s, that’s incredible.Rich Birch — So, you know, you’ve picked an interesting vocation to be connected with the American Bible Society. And because, you know, this is such a critical and important part of developing people’s relationship, obviously, with Jesus; its core to all of it. And we have seen a long historical downward trend, and you’re pushing against that, which is amazing. But what gives you hope in the middle of all of that? What would it when you look at the church around you know, the country, where do you see flashes of just good things going on that are like, you know, when it comes to the relationship with scripture that even, you know, even when we see maybe the overall numbers are not as great as we want them to be, what are some kind of flashes of hope we should, that we could encourage folks with today?John Plake — Well, I’d like to maybe point to just three things that leap to mind. Rich Birch — Yep.John Plake — The first of them is I never talk to anybody in the church who says the Bible is a bad idea. Rich Birch — Sure.John Plake — Everybody likes the Bible. We’re all trying to figure out how to communicate its message better, to understand it more deeply. It’s transforming our lives, and we want to be able to share it with others. John Plake — And that’s great because, number two, there’s nothing that makes a bigger difference in somebody’s spiritual life than their relationship with the Bible. I mean, absolutely nothing. And I’m saying this as a researcher. I’ve tested it. I can’t find anything that makes a bigger difference. John Plake — In fact, when we looked at Christian college and university students, 60% of their overall spiritual health across lots of domains—beliefs, practice, putting faith into action, loving God, loving others, all these things, 60% of the variance in their spiritual health is solely accounted for by their relationship with the Bible.John Plake — So if we can help people have a dynamic relationship with scripture, we win. That’s all there is to it. It’s just that simple. And so that is really encouraging.John Plake — And then the third thing, ah the third thing is how I say this nicely? I'm I’m from Gen X and so to my Baby Boomer friends, I’m sorry, but you guys don’t have the influence that you once did.Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s true.John Plake — And that’s a good thing because there’s new openness among Millennials, and Gen Z and even younger Gen X um that we just don’t see among Baby Boomers. It’s like Baby Boomers made up their minds in the 60s and early 70s and said, this is what I believe and I’m not changing. And they haven’t. John Plake — That’s not to say that someone who’s a Baby Boomer can’t have a a spiritual experience and transformational experience. It does happen. But on the population level, like when we looked at the Bay Area of San Francisco, if you look at the scripture engagement, church engagement, love God, love others data in the Bay Area, it looks like what you’d expect, until you strip out the Baby Boomers. And then suddenly it looks better than every place else in America.John Plake — You’re like, what’s going on? Well, looks like all the unreconstructed hippies that moved to the Bay Area are actually holding a lid on the population numbers. And when you remove that and you go, oh, wait a minute, let me look under the headline and say what’s happening. There’s more going on than is easy to see. And I think this happens in big national trends.John Plake — Oh, is Scripture engagement up or down? Is you know church attendance up or down? Whats what’s going… big national trends. Yeah, okay, those are helpful, and we want those to change. But what’s changing first is below the fold. Things in Gen Z, things among Millennials, things in young men, those things are starting to change, and I think those are the first glimmerings that God is at work in a new way in America, and I can’t wait to see it.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s that’s a great word. And that lines up with what we’re seeing, even just experientially talking to churches across the country. You know we’re so we’re seeing there is something going on with younger generations, which is great to see. I was I was born in 1974, the lowest birth rate year of the 20th century. I am classic Gen X. Like you know I am like statistic I’m the statistical average Gen X and has spent a lot of my time trying to hand stuff from the Boomers to the Millennials. And, yeah, there’s lots of encouraging news there, particularly with the younger generations. Rich Birch — I also want to speak to on the the work I’ve done in the church growth stuff that I’ve done and coaching I’ve done with churches, one of the things that’s just undeniable is churches that have a high view of scripture, that is, they’re trying to get people engaged with scripture. They they talk about it like it’s actually true. How do we say don’t know what’s the best way to talk about that? Those are the churches that are prevailing, and that actually works out statistically. You see that time and again. Talk to us about that dynamic, which is kind of co-related to the things we’re talking about today. From your perspective in the stats and all that, how how have you seen that work out as you’ve looked at churches across the country?John Plake — Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. The churches that are the healthiest in America, that are growing, that where where people are spiritually healthy, have a really dynamic relationship with Scripture. And it kind of it cuts across tradition. Rich Birch — Yep.John Plake — There are some traditional things going on. I was listening to Justin Brierley and his surprising Rebirth of Belief in God podcast, and it was from last season, and he he had someone on, he was interviewing, and what she was saying was there are the parts of the church that seem to be thriving are kind of the, the the older, the ancientness traditions, whether it’s Catholic or Orthodox, that what she called somewhat irreverently, the smells and bells side of of the church.Rich Birch — Sure, sure.John Plake — And on the other side, kind of my end of the swimming pool, I’m, from the Assemblies of God, so the Pentecostal and Charismatic side. And she said, what’s going on is that both ends of that spectrum are totalizing. John Plake — They’re saying, you know what, the the Bible places certain expectations and demands on people. Christ places certain expectations and demands on people. And these parts of the church aren’t sort of shy about talking about that from a biblical perspective. She said, what’s what’s dying is that part in the middle where we’ve reduced church to a PowerPoint and you know an Excel spreadsheet. And she said, that part of the church seems to be dying and no one’s coming to the funeral. Rich Birch — That’s good. John Plake — And I thought, you know okay, right?Rich Birch — Yeah. Yeah, that’s good.John Plake — So if we revitalize our relationship with God through scripture, there’s a next step for every church. It doesn’t matter what, you know whether you’re mainline or evangelical or, you know, Pentecostal or Orthodox or whatever it is, but but reviving our relationship with God through Scripture is really where it’s at.Rich Birch — That’s so good. i Yeah, I call that middle group the just because it rhymes doesn’t mean it’s true group. You know, like the, you know, were just like, it’s all my thoughts. No one wants to come and find us. They want to find God ultimately. Well, I don’t want to pick any fights with anybody that’s listening in, but I really appreciate today’s conversation, John. This has been great. So we want to send people to church.nextstep.bible.Rich Birch — The the promise of in two weeks, your church could have a comprehensive report on spiritual health, on where your church is, spiritual health is at, that’s a huge promise. And so again, this is go to church.nextstep.bible. Any kind of final words as we wrap up today’s episode?John Plake — You know, you might be familiar with Cally Parkinson. Cally was the co-author of all of the Reveal books, every single one of them. She was head of communications for the Willow Creek Association when they were running this. She’s probably had more conversations with pastors and church leaders about survey results like this than anybody I know, maybe than anybody alive. And Cally likes this so much. She said, John, I want to have a personal consultation with the first hundred churches that go through this.John Plake — And so if you want to be in that group, she’s going to offer to spend an hour with you and just walk through your results and help explain it. There are videos throughout the platform that will explain it as well. And you can’t beat talking to Cally. She loves pastors. She says you’re the salt of the earth. And she just really wants to serve you because the work that you do to save people is just so valuable to her. So anyway, just wanted to offer that. And I know you’d probably love to meet Cally.Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well, appreciate you being here today. Thanks for the great work you do at the American Bible Society. John, appreciate you being on today. Thank you.John Plake — Thank you.

This week on Myopia Movies, we put on the mask, stare into the abyss, and then complain about the lighting. We dust off a paywall episode this week as we watch Watchmen—the most philosophical superhero movie ever made, or at least the one most likely to assign you homework afterward. Join us as we unpack a world where superheroes are less “save the day” and more “deeply complicate geopolitics.” We wrestle with questions like: Is Rorschach a moral absolutist… or just the world's angriest inkblot? How does Dr. Manhattan make omnipotence feel like a midlife crisis? And is Ozymandias the smartest man alive—or just really good at PowerPoint presentations with catastrophic consequences? We dive into Zack Snyder's ultra-stylized adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' legendary graphic novel, debating whether it captures the spirit of the original—or just lovingly recreates it in slow motion. Also: we try to determine if any superhero team has ever had worse workplace chemistry, and whether the giant blue nudist is actually the least weird part of this movie. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list!  We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Watchmen hold up? Directed by: Zack Snyder Starring: Malin Åkerman as Laurie Jupiter / Silk Spectre II Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg / Nite Owl II Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake / The Comedian Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter / Silk Spectre

With the Co-Authors of The Greater Game and Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and John Bowen of CEG Insights Louis Diamond speaks with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach® and John Bowen of CEG Insights about founder dependency, enterprise value, and the architecture behind scalable businesses. In Summary Many advisory firms grow successfully while remaining highly dependent on their founders. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that the difference between a successful practice and a valuable enterprise comes down to architecture. Louis sits down with the co-authors of The Greater Game to discuss founder dependency, enterprise value, intellectual property, and why some businesses scale beyond their owners while others do not. The conversation offers advisors a framework for thinking differently about growth, succession, and long-term optionality. The Storyline Many advisors spend their careers helping clients build valuable businesses. Far fewer stop to ask whether their own firms are being built the same way. That tension sits at the center of Louis Diamond's conversation with Dan Sullivan, co-founder of Strategic Coach®, and John Bowen, founder of CEG Elevate Group and CEG Insights. Their new book, The Greater Game, challenges a common assumption about growth: that bigger businesses are simply the result of working harder, adding more clients, or improving existing systems. Instead, they argue that enterprise value is created through architecture—the deliberate design of a business that can scale, transfer, and thrive without its founder at the center. The discussion introduces a framework for understanding why some entrepreneurs remain trapped in optimization while others build enterprises that compound in value over time. Along the way, Dan and John explore founder dependency, intellectual property, succession planning, strategic partnerships, and the role advisors can play in helping entrepreneurial clients navigate each stage of growth. For advisors, the framework creates an important mirror. The same forces that limit enterprise value for entrepreneurial clients often exist inside advisory firms themselves. The result is a conversation that extends well beyond business growth and into questions of optionality, transferability, and what ultimately makes a firm valuable. Topics Covered Enterprise Value Creation Founder Dependency Risk Business Architecture vs. Optimization Intellectual Property & Scalability Strategic Partnerships & Leverage Succession Planning & Optionality Legacy, Impact & the “Greater Game” Mindset > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors What is The Greater Game—and why does it matter to advisors? (17:57) Dan and John introduce the framework behind their new book and explain why advisors should think about it both for entrepreneurial clients and for their own businesses. Why do only a small percentage of entrepreneurs create exponential enterprise value? (22:24) The discussion explores the difference between “architects” and “optimizers” and why most business owners remain focused on improving what exists rather than designing what comes next. Why is founder dependency such a significant valuation risk? (35:00) John explains how businesses that depend on a single individual often struggle to scale, transfer, or command premium valuations. How does expertise become intellectual property—and why does that matter? (35:00) The transition from expertise to transferable systems may be the most important bridge in the entire framework, creating leverage that extends beyond the founder. What prevents many advisors from fully serving entrepreneurial clients? (18:00) The conversation examines why most advisors are well-equipped for traditional planning needs but less prepared for the governance, succession, and enterprise-value challenges entrepreneurs eventually face. What does the next game look like after you've already “won”? (50:00) Dan and John discuss why many successful entrepreneurs and advisors eventually shift their focus from accumulation to significance, impact, and legacy. What's the single most important move an entrepreneur can make? (52:30) Dan shares the concept of Unique Ability® and explains why simplifying around your highest-value strengths often creates the greatest multiplier effect. Key Takeaways Enterprise value is created through architecture, not effort. Many successful businesses continue to grow while remaining highly dependent on their founders. The firms that command premium valuations are often built differently from the start. Founder dependency acts as a hidden valuation discount. The more a business depends on one person, the more difficult it becomes to scale, transfer, or sell at a premium. Intellectual property is often the bridge between a practice and an enterprise. When expertise becomes codified, transferable, and repeatable, value begins to exist independently of the founder. Advisors and entrepreneurs often face the same challenge. The same founder-dependency issues advisors help clients solve frequently exist within their own firms. Strategic partnerships create leverage that expertise alone cannot. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs grow through collaboration, ecosystems, and coordinated expertise rather than attempting to solve every challenge themselves. Most advisors are trained to solve early-stage problems. Entrepreneurial clients eventually require guidance around succession, governance, scalability, and enterprise value—areas that extend beyond traditional planning. The next stage of growth is often not about growth at all. For many successful entrepreneurs, the question eventually shifts from accumulation to significance, impact, and the legacy they want their business to create. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY5xOB8GTQY Quotable Moments “The exit multiple is downstream of the architecture.” “The difference between a three-times and a fifteen-times multiple is often whether the business depends on the founder.” “You have to simplify in order to multiply.” “We're not talking about a 10x game anymore. We're talking about a 100x game.”     FAQs Why do some advisory firms command higher valuation multiples than others? Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that valuation is often determined long before a transaction occurs. Firms that reduce founder dependency, codify intellectual property, and build transferable systems typically command higher multiples than those built around a single rainmaker. What is founder dependency and how does it impact enterprise value? Founder dependency occurs when clients, revenue, and decision-making remain concentrated around one individual. While those businesses can be highly successful, advisors find they are often more difficult to scale, transfer, or sell. What is the difference between an architect and an optimizer? An optimizer focuses on improving an existing business model. An architect builds systems, intellectual property, and structures designed to create leverage, scalability, and long-term enterprise value. What does Dan Sullivan mean when he says “100x is easier than 2x”? The concept challenges entrepreneurs to stop thinking incrementally. Rather than working harder within the current model, transformational growth often comes from redesigning the model itself through better leverage, collaboration, and systems. How can advisors better serve entrepreneurial clients? Many entrepreneurial clients eventually need guidance beyond investment management, including succession planning, governance, intellectual property strategy, and enterprise value creation. Understanding where a client sits in their business journey can help advisors provide more relevant advice and coordination. What is the expertise trap and why does it matter for advisory firms? The expertise trap occurs when critical knowledge, relationships, and processes remain inside the founder's head. Until that expertise becomes transferable and repeatable, enterprise value often remains limited regardless of growth. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that valuation is often determined long before a transaction occurs. Firms that reduce founder dependency, codify intellectual property, and build transferable systems typically command higher multiples than those built around a single rainmaker. Founder dependency occurs when clients, revenue, and decision-making remain concentrated around one individual. While those businesses can be highly successful, advisors find they are often more difficult to scale, transfer, or sell. An optimizer focuses on improving an existing business model. An architect builds systems, intellectual property, and structures designed to create leverage, scalability, and long-term enterprise value. The concept challenges entrepreneurs to stop thinking incrementally. Rather than working harder within the current model, transformational growth often comes from redesigning the model itself through better leverage, collaboration, and systems. Many entrepreneurial clients eventually need guidance beyond investment management, including succession planning, governance, intellectual property strategy, and enterprise value creation. Understanding where a client sits in their business journey can help advisors provide more relevant advice and coordination. The expertise trap occurs when critical knowledge, relationships, and processes remain inside the founder's head. Until that expertise becomes transferable and repeatable, enterprise value often remains limited regardless of growth. Related Resources The Greater Game by Dan Sullivan and John Bowen Strategic Coach® CEG Elevate Group The Greater Game Dashboard Diamond Consultants Advisor Transition Report Dan Sullivan The world's foremost expert on entrepreneurship in action, Dan Sullivan has spent the past five decades empowering business owners to reach their full potential in both their professional and personal lives. His strong belief in and commitment to the power of the entrepreneur is evident in all areas of his company, Strategic Coach®, and its successful membership community. Dan is married to Babs Smith, his partner in business and in life. They jointly own and operate The Strategic Coach Inc., with offices in Toronto, Chicago, and the UK Dan and Babs reside in Toronto. John Bowen John J. Bowen Jr. is the founder and CEO of CEG Elevate Group, the holding company that includes CEG Worldwide and CEG Insights. Through these companies, he helps elite financial advisors serve fewer, wealthier clients exceptionally well while building more valuable and scalable businesses. Before founding CEG, John spent 26 years as a financial advisor and built a $2 billion wealth management business. That firsthand experience grounds CEG’s work today across advisor coaching, enterprise programs, empirical research through CEG Insights, and practical frameworks for advisors who want to move beyond practice growth to enduring enterprise value. John is the author of 21 books on wealth management, entrepreneurship, and success. His newest book, The Greater Game: Your 100x Blueprint for Exponential Growth, Freedom, and Legacy, co-authored with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach, will be published by Hay House Business in May 2026. Today, John and the CEG team work with leading advisors and enterprise firms — including some of the largest advisor organizations in the United States — to help advisors deepen relationships with affluent clients, build scalable practices, and design lives of greater significance. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Architecting 100x Growth: A “How-To” From Legends Dan Sullivan and John Bowen A conversation with Louis Diamond and Co-Authors of The Greater Game, Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and John Bowen of CEG Insights.      Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Architecting 100x Growth: A “How-To” From Legends Dan Sullivan and John Bowen, a conversation with the industry’s top coaches and co-authors of The Greater Game. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: Most entrepreneurs and many advisors spend years optimizing for growth without realizing they’re building a business that still depends entirely on them. Revenue and complexity grow; enterprise value, transferability, and freedom often lag far behind. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that the issue isn’t effort or intelligence; it’s architecture. No doubt these are familiar names in the wealth management industry, but just to set the stage, Dan is the co-founder of Strategic Coach, and John is the founder of CEG Elevate Group and CEG Insights. Together, they spent decades coaching and studying high-performing entrepreneurs and advisory firms. Their latest book, one they joined forces on, The Greater Game, lays out a very different framework for thinking about growth, one built around scalability, transferrable value, and long-term leverage rather than incremental optimization. What makes this conversation especially relevant for advisors is that the framework cuts both ways. It applies to the entrepreneurial clients that advisors serve, as well as to the advisory firms themselves. And in many cases, the same founder dependency and expertise trap that limits a client’s enterprise value is quietly limiting the advisor’s business too. We talk about the difference between operators and architects, why 100 times growth can actually be easier than two times growth, where businesses tend to stall as they scale and how advisors can start thinking differently about their own firms, particularly when it comes to enterprise value, succession, and long-term optionality. It’s rare access to a conversation with two of our industry’s legends whose advice and counsel has not only helped to transform the business lives of many of our listeners, but also my own. So let’s get to it. Dan and John, thank you both for joining us today. Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Lou. It’s a real pleasure. John Bowen: I’ve had the privilege of joining you before, but never with my co-author, Dan Sullivan, and I’m excited to share what we’re doing because I think it can make a big impact in our advisor industry. Louis Diamond: No doubt about it. Yeah, this has been an interview I’ve been very excited to host. So let’s jump right in. Dan Sullivan, I think you are a man that needs little introduction. So many advisors in the industry are fans or clients of your firm, Strategic Coach, but for those who aren’t as familiar or need a refresh, can you just give some quick context into why you started Strategic Coach and what the company does today? Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, it goes back to 1974. I was a copywriter at BBDO, the Canadian branch of BBDO, big global advertising agency. It still is. But I’ve been sort of a lifetime coach. I remember once when my mother finally caught up with what I was doing in life and I was describing what I was doing, she says, “Well, you were doing that when you were a child. You were talking to adults and you were asking adults about their experiences.” And I said, “Yeah, I could do this when I was eight or nine years old, but it took me a long time to get a business model wrapped around it.” But I jumped out in 1974 and started coaching anybody, but it actually turned out that entrepreneurs were the best people to coach because they would write a check on the spot and they would make a decision on the spot and I needed cashflow and I did it. So I’ve been personally, as a Strategic Coach, which was named by someone else. You’re just out there trying to get cashflow to pay for the rent. So I started in ’74, and I was lucky and it really relates to your target audience, Lou. Right off the bat, I got what are called top-of-the-table life insurance agents. And that was really, really great because life insurance agents are purely a conceptual business. So someone can get a new idea at breakfast and they can have a new business by dinnertime just because they can change their mindset. And that moved on. And I did that for 15 years, just one-on-one, 1970s, 1980s. And then, I’d had enough experience that we turned it into a workshop program in 1989. We’ve been at it ever since. So I was at a talk. Joe Polish is a great friend of ours, Joe Polish with Genius Network. And he had a speaker there, and he says, “You’re one of the original gangsters, aren’t you? You’re one of the first people.” And I said, “I don’t know if I’m the original, but I think I’m the only surviving one.” So it’s 52 years that I’ve been doing what I’m doing. And I had the good fortune to meet John in around 2009. John, was that the year? 2009? John Bowen: Yeah, in the little economic downturn that everybody knows about here. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And John had a great coaching program and we had a great coaching program. And over the years, we’ve talked a lot about what makes a entrepreneur exponential in their thinking. And finally, about two years ago, we decided, let’s write a book about this. And that’s the new book, which is called The Greater Game. That’s where this all started. It’s just been a great pleasure because we sync very well. Louis Diamond: Amazing. And Dan, I think a lot of people likely know you either from Strategic Coach. I know I’m personally a big fan of two of your books and I know of others, The Gap and The Gain and Who Not How. We’re going to talk about your new book, but I think it’d just be helpful. Can you talk about the key premise of some of your prior books, The Gap and The Gain and Who Not How? Dan Sullivan: As a result of my membership, I’m a member in other groups. And so Joe Polish of Genius Network fame, he’s been in my program for 28 years, and I’ve been in his program for 15 years. And there was a writer who was in one of the first Genius Network workshops, and he approached me. And I created a lot of books, but I create small books and they’re self-published. I do a book a quarter. I’m 82 in about three weeks. So when I was 70, I said, “I’m going to give myself a 25-year project. I’ll write 100 books in 100 quarters.” And this is quarter number 47, and I’m writing my 47th book. But they’re little books. They’re 60, 70 pages. They’re one-idea books. And Ben Hardy, who was, at that time, the number one writer on Medium, which is a blogging type medium, he approached me, and he said, “I know you don’t write big books and you don’t have publisher books. But,” he said, “if you ever did,” he said, “I’d like to collaborate.” And that was a great good fortune on my part. So we produced three books in five years. The first book was Who Not How. Who Not How basically says when you have a goal, the biggest problem with the goal, you’re excited about the goal, but you’re not excited about doing it. So you find “Whos” who help you and you build teamwork around it. And that was a big seller. And then, we had another concept which was called The Gap and The Gain that entrepreneurs, depending on how they measure their progress, can be perpetually unhappy or they can be perpetually motivated. And it all depends on how they measure their progress, how they measure their goal setting and their goal achievement. And then the third book, which has really turned out to be the big one, up until this book, this book will be bigger. It’s called 10x Is Easier Than 2x. So hence, Coach, everybody has a 10x game plan. Whatever number they want to choose, revenues, personal net worth, whatever, you have a framework of 10x, which is sometime in the future, but you use that future framework for deciding what you’re going to do today that will end up as a 10x result. I thought that was going to be our formula for the rest of my life until I met John. And then John is a great AI practitioner. And I began to realize that that 10x is now becoming 100x for really top-notch entrepreneurs, but the 10x is easier than 2x. And we just crossed the million mark with the three books, which is really good. And it’s great for lead… we’re having people show up and they’ve really bought into what Strategic Coach is. We have a good size company. We’re not a small company. We have 120 team members. We’re in five centers: Los Angeles, Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto and London, England. But it’s been really great because we’ve really grown with technological change and it’s basically, we teach people how to think about their thinking. And Lou, you were in for three years, both in-person and virtual. So you know what the starting structure of it is, but I’m in love with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are crucial characters on the planet, but mostly they operate alone and what we’ve done is create a community for them. Louis Diamond: Fantastic. Thank you, Dan. And John, I think perfect segue to you, because I know you’ve spent your career serving and helping entrepreneurs as well, mostly within financial services or within wealth management. And you’ve been very kind to share some of your amazing research on advisors serving entrepreneurial clients in the past. But for anyone who’s missed those episodes, similar question for you, can you share what your companies do? CEG Elevate, CEG Insights, your new research, and then we’ll dive into your exciting new book. John Bowen: Thank you, Louis. And Dan and I are very excited about just entrepreneurs in general. Dan is, because he’s working with them directly. The best clients for financial advisors are entrepreneurs, largely, if you’re going to go high net worth, ultra-high net worth. So we have a company, CEG Elevate, which is our parent company. Two of the companies that are really interesting for this podcast is CEG Insights and this is our research arm. And we’ll study about 20,000 high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients this year in depth and 6,000 up to 7,000 we’ll do just of entrepreneurs. And this is in the partnership. Lou, I invited you up to… We were skiing two years ago in Park City and you couldn’t join us. But Dan and I made a deal to do a 25-year partnership studying entrepreneurship, one for Strategic Coach and his coaching clients, but really the opportunity for financial advisors. And it’s probably just as well because I came down, and I think, Dan, you were 80 at the time and I was 69. I’m 70 now. And I was skiing with a whole bunch of 40-year-olds, and they’re all going, “You guys are way too optimistic.” And Dan and I are just getting started on this. And the other company that’s applicable is CEG Worldwide, where we have the privilege of coaching and training some of the top financial advisors, those aspiring, and also working with the enterprises to really help move up market and do this great experience. Louis Diamond: Fantastic. Dan, question for you. What was the core problem you and John were trying to solve in your new book, The Greater Game? What is it that existing frameworks weren’t touching? And then John, I’ll have a follow-up question for you after that. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, by the very nature of what we do, we’re not going for wannabes. We’re not going for entrepreneurs who hope to be really successful someday. We’re engaging with and we’re registering into both of our communities, people who, they’re already great. They’re already doing so many things right, but they’re kind of doing it unconsciously. They just have a unique ability for growth. They have a unique ability for networking and expansion, but the very, very core is they’ve done it on their own. And they’ve done it out of intuition and they’ve done it out of ambition and motivation. But their biggest problem is that they’re really lonely. I’m in my sixth decade now of coaching entrepreneurs, and people say, “Well, what’s the number one problem that entrepreneurs face?” And I said, “Loneliness.” They can’t explain themselves to the family they grew up with. They can’t explain themselves with their lifetime friends. They have thoughts about how they’re operating. And they take enormous pride in their ability to transform difficulties into breakthroughs, but they don’t have anybody to talk to. So what we’ve created is a community where when you walk in the room, everybody in that room immediately understands you. Everybody immediately applauds what you’ve done. Everybody is inspired by you. So my framework is I call, “What you’ve done on your own, you’re great. You’re a winner already, but who do you talk to?” You have to hide a lot of your success because they just won’t understand what it is that actually motivates you. And the beauty of the partnership with John is the vast majority of our clients are in 70 or 80 different industries, so they’re not peculiar. We start off with financial services, especially life insurance. But what I notice is that all the difficulty they get into life is they’re trying to communicate with people who don’t understand them. And what we’re saying is, “Stage one, you did it on your own, you’re great by any standard whatsoever. You check all the boxes for being a successful person, but you don’t really have any way to actually check out how other people are doing this.” And so we’ve created a community, and John has created a community where people, immediately, there’s understanding. And not only that, but there’s opportunity because they’re unique in their own ways. Every one of our entrepreneurs has created a very, very unique pattern of success that if they were with 10 other people, they could learn from this. If they were with 30 other people, they would learn even more. So that’s what we’ve done. So stage two is now joining a community where everybody gets you. Louis Diamond: Interesting. And that’s the premise of the book. We don’t want to have people not buy it, but what is the greater game? What’s the game that folks are playing and pursuing and how do you make it greater? Dan Sullivan: I tell you, what I’ve always been lacking, I’m sort of intuitive like most entrepreneurs are. We’ve done about 300 times growth since we started the program. But it’s intuitive. I don’t have any research to back this up. I’m low on fact finder. I find, generally speaking, the best facts are just the facts that I make up, but at a certain point, you’d like to have some actual research to back me up. So I’ve gone as far as I can go with our company without real research. Then John comes into the picture, and now we got some real research. And I will say this, this is generally true. It’s not just a problem with me that I don’t have research. I find that entrepreneurism is one of the least researched subjects on the planet. And John comes along and he’s done all the backfill for how entrepreneurs actually perform and I’ve got research to prove it. Louis Diamond: Perfect. Yeah, John, question for you. So what is The Greater Game? And then, how do you think it relates to what financial advisors have been missing? John Bowen: One of the things that we as financial advisors all want to work with people who have already won. And there’s no better group than entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs. If we look at people with 25 million or more of investible assets across all households in the US, 90% are entrepreneurs. And at the 5 to 25 million of investible assets, it’s three out of four. So at CEG Worldwide, we’ve always wanted to really understand advisors. And we said we’ll partner with Dan and his passion with entrepreneurs, we’ll go ahead and study them so that we can bring insights on how we can better serve them. And the very first thing we want to do is understand, yeah, there’s very different stages that we see of entrepreneurs and we talk about the whole concept of The Greater Game. And the idea here is we wanted to identify… And I’ll share some PowerPoint slides. I know a lot of us are listening and I just want to walk through this, but Louis will have it in show notes, his team will. We really saw four areas. The first one was level one, stage one was foundation for freedom. They had ambition, the vision, but they really needed security. And Dan calls this, and I love this term, “cash confidence.” But it’s really using a financial advisor to have security. And one of the things, the last time I was on with you, Louis, we talked about there’s 59.2% of entrepreneurs who want to switch advisors because they don’t believe they have that security. And that’s kind of the foundation. And this is why you’re never going to read a more friendly financial advisor book for entrepreneurs than this because in our coaching program, we’re developing workshops and so on to bring this message out. And then the second level is where now we saw… and there were four levels. Dan and I identified 5.4% of these entrepreneurs that were just killing it and they were going through all four levels. The second level was energy for expansion. They were very motivated, they were excited about getting up and really the intellectual property, and Dan’s been one of the big leaders in this, is so much of what we know… And as I go through this too, I want every one of the advisors to think about it’s not only your entrepreneurial clients, this is for you too, is having this intellectual property, getting it out of your head so that your business is not founder-dependent or personality-dependent. You’ve got this enterprise. And then, the third level where it really took off was collaboration and multiplication. And Dan talked about the power of community and this is so big. And for advisors, the community is often working with other professionals, the accountants, the attorneys, the investment bankers. Matter of fact, when we survey, we found that 40% of the people with 25 million or more that they invest with an advisor came through an investment banker. So creating that community, teamwork, having the right team and then autonomy. Can you step away from your practice? The entrepreneurs step away 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, making that independence, moving from the founder-dependent to the enterprise. And the last level was exponential. And this is all along the way, the AI opportunities to accelerate this and augment this is really real, but the agency where the blue ocean, creating new markets, then getting the commitment and courage. And at each of these levels, we saw different entrepreneurs just really taking off. And one of the things that’s so important, Louis, for what we’re talking about today is advisors all are ready to treat stage one, the foundation for freedom, but they don’t really understand the other stages, and that’s really what entrepreneurs want. So if you want to work in this market, it’s very important for you to understand what you can do to help. The difference is often for an entrepreneur, a three to five multiplier versus 15, the level one or stage one to stage four. And this is where it gets really exciting. Louis Diamond: This would be a question for John. You found, and he’s mentioned it, that only 5.4% of entrepreneurs operate as architects versus optimizers. Can you explain the difference between those two personas? John Bowen: Well, I’m going to set up the research and let Dan really bring it home. But Dan and I came up with this framework, The Greater Game and the 10 Multipliers, and we’ve got that and we’re putting it in order and we wanted to really confirm. And everything we do is empirical research. So we reached out to 1,000 very successful entrepreneurs, 1,016. And it became very clear that the 5.4% of them were actually executing on all these levels and they were just distancing everyone else. And what we came up with, and Dan mentioned it earlier, that his book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x, but we said, what we’re seeing… and we’ve got a whole bunch, I think it’s 26 stories in the book of entrepreneurs, we’re seeing so many people blow this out that 100x is easier than 2x, and it forces a whole different mindset where if you’re optimizing, you’re kind of looking incrementally. But when you step back as an architect, big picture, wow, huge opportunity, both for entrepreneurs and advisors that are entrepreneurs to make a real big difference. This is something you’ve really coached to and had the privilege of working with thousands of entrepreneurs helping them on that journey. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the things that was confusing for me, Lou, when I first started coaching, because everybody who came in to coach, you remember when you came into your first Chicago workshop, that everybody in the room was motivated. I’m not a motivational speaker. I don’t have to motivate the entrepreneurs who are in Coach. They’re already motivated. The problem is the focus of their ambition and focus. And what we discovered was that there were two types that showed up. I didn’t really understand it, but they’re what I call status-oriented entrepreneurs. And what they are when they were a kid, they didn’t have anything. Their family wasn’t at the top of the pole. When they were born, they grew up in a certain community, but there were certain people who lived in the right part of town and they had really big houses and everything about their lifestyle was way above everybody else in the lifestyle. And they saw the lack of what they had, because of the way they were born, that they were going to match it. But the matching was based in not only what the big home looks like. They’ve got other homes, they’ve got vacation homes. They belong to clubs. There’s clubs for the winners, and the losers aren’t part of those clubs, golf courses and boating clubs and everything else. And what I noticed was their motivation was simply to get to that point where they had the same sort of status. And they’re interesting for a while, but once they’ve gotten to that level of status, they’re not interesting anymore. They go on cruise control at that point and they just want to stay within that framework. But the really interesting entrepreneurs, and we really highlight them in the book, it’s just about growth. So when they get to one level, they say, “That’s great. Okay, now I’ve got a new baseline and now I want to grow even further.” And we have one story, very, very interesting. When he came into my Chicago workshop, I met him and he said, “I’ve got a big engineering company.” This is Paul VanDuyne. He’s out of the Quad City area of Iowa. And he says, “My ambition for your program is for three years, I’m just going to plan my retirement.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got some thoughts about that.” So I said, “Just do your first workshop and we’ll talk about it 90 days from now.” And he came back and he had an entirely different game plan, and he’s grown basically 250 times in his last 13 years. He’s completely transformed the industry that he’s in and he had this growth. So what we’re looking for in The Greater Game, we’re looking for those entrepreneurs who are already successful, but they don’t see any stopping point. They’ll grow to one level and then they say, “Okay, that’s the new baseline. Now I grow to another level.” Meanwhile, three years ago, what happened is the world got a new capability called AI. AI, you’re not talking 10x. If you use it properly… a lot of people are in the very early stages here, but we can see the ones who are applying it for growth. John has set up an entire research structure just to measure the people, and what are the people who are just motivated by growth? They don’t see any stopping point. They don’t see any retirement age. They’re just growing. They’re in better health now than they were when they started their ambition. One of the great breakthroughs we’re having now is the impact of AI on physical fitness and health right now. And so you have 70-year-olds now who are way more ambitious at 70 than they were at 50. So we think a whole new world is being created in front of us, but there isn’t the research to measure what the real winners of this new game are actually doing. And The Greater Game is a lot of Strategic Coach thinking tools, but it’s also the phenomenal research that John is doing, and we’re measuring exactly what are these people who just constantly grow, what are they actually doing? John Bowen: Louis, if I can jump in, I want to go back to Paul just for a second because he was going to do something classical, and Dan is also my coach and I was going to do something similar. Paul told Dan that he was going to retire at 65, and his wife. And he were going to open up a little mom-and-pop coffee shop. And the reason so many of the entrepreneurs are caught in the 2x optimization is they’re grinding it out. They’re working harder to be more successful and the desire to do that isn’t very high. That’s why you retire. On the other hand, what we found, the ones working on 100x are building platforms and ecosystems. They’re architected. And as we were writing the book, CEG grew by 58%. I’m going to give a lot of credit to the book, because as Dan and I were working on the processes, I wanted to walk all the talks. This is where the world is changing. I want everybody to think as a financial advisor, you’re being served twice, one with The Greater Game, they don’t care about a few basis points on returns. That’s table stakes. So much of the level one is taking care of the investment side, mitigating taxes, taking care of the areas, protecting the assets, some charitable planning, maybe shoot in some succession planning. I can tell you only 6% of the entrepreneurs actually feel they’re getting that from you, but that’s only level one. If you can help them from each of the stages, stage one through four, and help them create that vision, they’re going to love you to death. Because many of them want to continue in this path and create tremendous value, bigger impact, not creating legacies in the sense of enduring legacies, but active legacies. Last year, my wife and I set up a private foundation. I called it The Greater Game Foundation. I just love this so much, the difference that you can make, and I want to do it while I’m living, not while I’m gone type of thing. I think that’s one Dan and I very much share. Louis Diamond: Awesome. You wrote the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x, but now you’re claiming 100x is easier than 2x. How can that be the case? Dan Sullivan: The interesting thing, one of my points of proof on the original idea, the 10x Mind Expander, I use a lot of what the entrepreneurs have already done to prove the future. In other words, I said… You’ll remember the exercise, Lou. And I said, “I want you to pick your best number.” Everybody’s got a best number. It’s revenue, it’s net worth, whatever. And I said, “I just want you to multiply by 10.” And immediately there’s this reaction. He says, “You know how hard it was to get to just where I am 10 times?” And I said, “Well, you’ve already done 10 times. You’ve probably done 10 times twice. So let’s go back to the beginning. When were you 1/10 of where you are right now?” And they can nail it. They can tell you the year, they can tell you the month when they were 1/10 of where they were. And I said, “Let’s write the actual structure that got you from 1/10 to where you are right now.” And there’s five stages, and usually it’s an event, it’s a new relationship and all of a sudden they get a big check. And we measure, as entrepreneurs, size of check is a good scorecard. When you’re first starting, you got a $10,000 check, that was the biggest check. But about five years later, you get a $100,000 check, and all of a sudden it seems strange at breakfast, but by dinner you’ve normalized the idea, “Well, I know what it’s like to get a much bigger check, a 10 times check.” And so I have them create five growth stages that took them from where they were 1/10 to where they are right now, and I said, “Now let’s go back and talk about doing 10 times more.” And what they recognize, 80% who’ve got them 10 times the first time is going to be the same. It’s relationship, it’s having a great team, it’s having a simple approach that always works and it’s about the kind end customer. It’s not about them. It’s about who is it that you’re being a hero to in the marketplace. Because the truth is people don’t want to have a lot of relationships as they grow. They’d like to have one relationship to grow. They’d like to have an advisor who’s growing with them. But then John introduced me to the whole world of AI and I said, “We’re not talking 10 times anymore. We’re talking 100 times.” I said, “If you apply this new form of thinking, because it is an entirely new form of thinking, to what you’re doing right now, you can see that 10 times is going to happen just by doing three or four things where you’re eliminating waste, you’re eliminating things that just don’t work anymore, changing relationships, changing teamwork, changing collaborations in the marketplace.” But meanwhile, this new world of thinking is making you healthier. It’s making you more fit. So where before you thought you wouldn’t have the energy at 70, you now have more energy at 70 than you had at 50. So you’re the only one who says when it’s going to stop. I’m 82 in three weeks. We’re having this… I’m 82 and I’m way more ambitious at 82 than I was at 52. And the world is, because the world outside in terms of technological capability and access is way, way bigger in my 82nd year than it was in my 52nd year, and I love the growth. I have to tell you that the greatest point where AI is going to have the impact is going to be making money. The big titans, the Metas, the Googles, the Nvidias, what do they have in common? It’s about the money and where AI is being applied most is how you do new things with money. So that’s where the 100 times now comes from. I’ve normalized it. I said, “We’re not talking a 10x game anymore. We’re talking 100x game.” But the number on the scoreboard isn’t the issue. The scoreboard is, are you actually having fun? Louis Diamond: Yeah, we call it living your best business life. That’s our major barometer in charge. John, I don’t know if you could pull up your slides again, but I want to talk about the bridge between stage two in your pyramid to stage three. So that’s from expertise into scalable property. Can you explain how this relates to a financial advisor or an independent business owner and why this concept is so important for the valuation of a business? John Bowen: The book, it’s written for entrepreneurs, but I wanted to create some bridges while we’re together with Louis on really what’s going on for financial advisors and how you can help them. So if they’re at our stage one, Dan and my stage one of The Greater Game, and they want to go to two, they’re kind of dreaming oftentimes, and we want to help them begin creating the architectural structure. And as an advisor, this is really going to encourage everybody to read chapter two, The Greater Security. It talks about really the VFO, Virtual Family Office structure that they want, and you got to help them get financially solid, building personal wealth outside of the business, tax, estate, insurance, business structure. That’s what we all do today. Then though, if they want to move from level two to three, what we find over and over again, advisors are not equipped to do this, because what we’re taking is that founder where everything’s in its head, we’re now helping them move from just having that expertise to having scalable property. This is that codifying the process of building IP that’s transferable. And this is where the real valuation changes. Now, I’m not asking financial advisors to be the IP experts, but what the entrepreneurs want is they want somebody to help them curate and then coordinate between each of these levels. We go from three to four that the founder is indispensable, oftentimes at three. Now we want the team there to be invincible. And it’s not just the individual team as Dan was talking about. It’s the community. The collaboration is where this really takes off. The noise of AI is making it harder to market, but by partnering, particularly as financial advisors, we can very quickly have groups. One of the reasons why I’m collaborating with Dan, I want to help our financial advisors to work with entrepreneurs. Dan wants that research. So this is the natural collaboration. But they’re interested here in governance, self-managing teams. One of the things that Strategic Coach is brilliant at, the pre-transaction they want. And what we find so often is the indispensable discount. So many businesses sell, if they sell at all, they’re selling for three to five times multiplier, not advisory, but traditional businesses. Well, if you can make it to four, all of a sudden you’re now talking to 10 to 15 times multipliers. And think of it as if I’m a buyer and I’ve been involved in 50-some transactions, what happens is if the business is the guy, the gal, they’re the business, then you’re buying a very expensive job type thing. So let’s just keep a simple one. They’re having a couple million dollars of EBITDA. And let’s say the high range of that, five times EBITDA is $10 million. Well, the difference at 15 times two million is 30. Now, a few basis points I don’t really care about. I really care about capturing that difference. And because there’s a machine working without, I can buy that machine and generate that cash flow and it’s also taking advantage of the vision. And then when we get to level four, this is where most advisors make the biggest mistake is, “I’ve won. I’m at level four. I’ve got tremendous wealth.” Okay, but I’m now looking at significance. And I do want to go, “It’s not enduring legacy I’m looking for. I’m looking for active legacy. I’m looking for family governance.” Do I want to continue to build it like Dan and I’m doing at 70? I’m building the business so I can continue doing it as long as I want to do it. At the same time, and I love the impact we have and I know you do too, Louis, for the impact you have. Why not build the platform that’s going to allow you to do that as long as you want to do that? And if you don’t want to do it, let’s create the most value to transfer. When you start having conversations like that with families, entrepreneur families, it just changes, and very few advisors can do that. And that’s what we’re finding. We have a coaching company, training company, we train those things. They’re winning, quite honestly, almost 100% of the time because entrepreneurs didn’t know that was available to them. Louis Diamond: Interesting. It seems like the difference between stage two in your pyramid, to leap to stage three or four, that seems like a pretty massive pivot point for valuation for building a scalable business, having a self-managing company, et cetera. Do you find or have you seen that advisors or entrepreneurs that are in stage two themselves, they kind of pattern-match when they’re working with their own clients and kind of manage their own clients into stage two, or is it not really connected? John Bowen: I think that once you get the bigger picture and see the greater game, you can help your clients. That is a very small percentage. Remember, it was only 5.4 of when we surveyed successful entrepreneurs were actually playing the greater game, all four levels, the 10 greater multipliers. So I think what we tend to do is we get stuck on what we can do. And all the training is for level one for financial advisors. We don’t know how to guide them through the other levels. And really, the big difference from two to three, Dan and I’ve talked about this a lot, and I think Dan’s one of the biggest champions of this, is collaboration, putting together strategic partnerships. It could be with your competitors. This is for entrepreneurs, competitors, it could be various vendor partnerships. But the ability to open up markets that way when you have now put together in level two your IP, value creation’s huge. For advisors, it’s putting together partnerships with centers of influence. When we survey top financial advisors, 70% of their best clients came through COI, Centers of Influence with accountants, attorneys, investment bankers, and so on. Well, let’s do it on purpose, be successful on purpose. Louis Diamond: Dan, question for you. In all your experience working with successful financial advisors, insurance producers, probably any entrepreneur, what do you feel are the most common things that folks do unintentionally to really hurt their enterprise value even long before, or if ever, they decide to sell their business? Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is they stay entirely within their industry. One of the first questions that we ask our entrepreneurs when they come into the program and where you see it most is in the professions: lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects. I’ll say, “Well, what is it that you are?” And they’ll say, “Well, I’m a lawyer. I’m a tax lawyer.” And I said, “Are you a tax lawyer or are you an entrepreneur who has a specialty in tax law?” Okay. It makes a big difference, because if you see yourself as a tax lawyer, then you’re saying that you’re a better paid factory worker. You’re a manual laborer. But if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s a fairly recent idea in human history. There’s always been entrepreneurs, but it wasn’t until about the beginning of the 1800s that you start seeing this really different class of people in the marketplace, who, it didn’t matter how they were born, they were taking advantage of some new multiplier technology. Steam power being a great example. Around 1800, steam power came on. And anybody who had a bright vision for themselves and had the wherewithal to figure out what needs could be satisfied with a new technology, all of a sudden they became rich. They became rich. And it was very disruptive, because up until then it was based on aristocracy and you were born into wealth or you were born into poverty. There was no crossover. So what we’re saying is anybody who comes into Strategic Coach, I said, “I’m not going to tell you anything about your particular industry.” I said, “You know all the best practice people in your industry and they have workshops and they have conferences and you go to them, but they don’t know how to be entrepreneurs. You know how to create a really well-paying job, but you haven’t created a company.” A company is a totally different realm and I would say the vast majority of entrepreneurs, 95% of entrepreneurs haven’t really created a company. They’ve just created a really well-paying job which requires their presence and their attendance. I said, “You don’t get any payout for your company. If you’re the company, you need to have a structure.” I’ll give you an example. We started the company in 1989, and we’re about 270 times what our first year revenues were, and that was a great year. I was very happy for the first year, but we’re about 270 times. Along the way, what I did is I created other coaches so it wasn’t just Dan, the coach. So we have 16 other coaches. And I’ll give you a little example. In 1994, that year our company did 144 workshop days, 36 per quarter. One coach: me. Last year we did 600 workshop days and I did 12. 588 were done by other coaches. And our coaches are great. They’re clients who have coaching instincts and they do it. So about four years ago, I met one of our clients who’s an M&A specialist, and I laid out all the facts just in conversation, “This is our revenues. We have no debt. It’s repeatable income, around 70% is repeatable for one year.” I put the whole structure together. And I said, “So right off the top, I don’t have any relatives on staff.” The first thing they look for, “Any relatives working for you?” And he gave me a number. It was a big number. It was probably four times revenue for that year. He said, “We got a lot of structures.” Then something happened in the marketplace, and this is a great breakthrough that the US Patent Office sometime in the last 10 years recognized that up until about 10 years ago, to get a patent, you had to have a technological component for what you were doing. Sometime in the last 10 years, the patent bureaus decided that the internet is the technological component. So they’ve introduced education and entertainment as patentable processes. So in the last three years, we’ve gotten 82 patents. 82 patents. And these are our thinking tools, Lifetime Extender, Free Focus and Buffer Days. You know the routine that you learn in the first three days, and we’ve got 82 of them. We’re averaging about 25. I get a new patent about every two weeks. So I saw this M&A specialist, and I said, “This has happened in the last three years.” And he said, “Immediately it doubles the valuation of your company.” So what John’s saying here, as you go through the four stages, more and more you get paid for your creativity, retail, you get paid for your retail. But if you structure it, you record it, you package it, it is even greater than what you got paid for your creativity. Louis Diamond: Super interesting personal anecdote, and I appreciate you sharing that because that definitely did drive the point home for me. I see the applicability to probably any industry, but especially to any financial advisor. Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. Louis Diamond: The best RIA firms, the best advisors, they pretty much all start off with a cult of personality founder who’s the rainmaker. And then the practices that really grow and scale and are valuable are more platforms. That’s what private equity wants to invest in. And those are the firms that get the higher multiples. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So the big thing is there’s a really, really great IP lawyer. He’s in our program and he’s made the breakthrough, and he’s the first IP lawyer that doesn’t charge by the hour. He charges by the patent. If the IP lawyer charges by the hour, it’s a very slow patent. If he charges by the patent, it’s a very fast patent. But the big thing, he showed a slide that in just big corporations, 1980, you took big corp, Fortune 500, the S&P 500, more than 80% of their valuation was tangible. It was property, it was real estate, it was fleets, it was equipment. Last year, more than 80% were intangibles. It was your ideas, intellectual. If you look at Elon Musk, it’s all intellectual capital. If you look at Meta, you look at anything, it’s intellectual. It’s not tangibles. So we’ve entered into that new world and AI has introduced us to that new world. It’s new processes, new structures, new approaches and it’s really interesting. It’s hard for entrepreneurs to get their idea that your creativity is actually property. Louis Diamond: It sounds like the ultimate challenge for anyone listening is translate your process, your ideas, the stuff that you’re doing by instinct as you both had said, and turn it into something patentable or something repeatable that another advisor, another executive, another owner can pick up and deploy and scale. John Bowen: We share the process in chapter four. It’s the fourth greater multiplier. And we actually share Caldwell, the attorney that Dan’s talking about, his story and the value creation. He’s now the major player in that space. And this is where we as advisors, we’re given a twofer, Dan and Louis, is that you can help your clients, but you can do this yourself too. You’ve been involved in a number of large transactions. The difference, I had a $2 billion advisory practice I sold in ’98, and we sold for 16 times earnings. And a big part of it, we were in that blue ocean. We had agents that we created and strategic process that would run without me, and it did type thing. And it continued to grow and went for about 10 fold what I sold for a number of years later. This is something that’s very real. Louis Diamond: Absolutely. I got two more questions for you guys because I know you’re both busy. For an advisor who feels like they’ve won the growth game, they grow 10, 15, 20% per year, they’re charged up, they’re on the Barron’s list, the Forbes list, they’re hitting their AUM milestones, they built an amazing team, they have a family member in the business. They have everything that anyone could want. What does the next game look like for them? What’s the next frontier once you’ve achieved all those things that from the outside looking in, seems like you have it all? What’s the next game to play? John Bowen: Well, we’re going to both say The Greater Game, but the- Dan Sullivan: Well, tell them about the dashboard, John, because the book is just part of the deal here. It gives you the landscape. There’s a great tool that comes with the book. So tell them about the dashboard. John Bowen: Really what we wanted to do is to create kind of a community just around the book. Dan and I and team built a dashboard. We were very creative on naming, thegreatergamedashboard.com. You can go in and we’re now studying every month over 500 successful entrepreneurs. We have that data in here. You’ll be able to see how you compare at each of these stages, the four stages, the 10 multipliers. And you’re going to get specific recommendations. This is for entrepreneurs. But again, you should do it. If you’re a financial advisor, you have an equity ownership, you should definitely be doing it as well. And one of the things that we see over and over again, and Louis, you probably see this a lot in the conversations. They have advisors who have already won. They don’t know what the next game is. And it’s easy to check out at that point. It’s easy to frustrate the next generation of leaders and so on. If you take the time to really see what the opportunities are and architect to realize that vision, you can create, whether it’s selling the practice, creating tremendous value there or designing a role for yourself, maybe it’s executive chairman type for that business that you can guide it with the vision and what you’ve brought and strategy. But bring that team up. That’s going to create so much value, so much impact and you can design it for the life that you want. And that’s where I get very excited. Louis Diamond: I can hear the passion in your voice. Dan, let’s finish with you. Given all of your experience working with entrepreneurs, advisors, business owners, et cetera, what’s the one move that you’ve seen the most successful entrepreneurs in your orbit make that’s changed the trajectory of their firms and their life more than anything else? Dan Sullivan: I’ll answer it in a little roundabout way. Periodically, I have a thinking tool. I said, “If everything was taken away from you as an entrepreneur and they moved you 1,000 miles away, what’s the one thing that you would take with you? It has to be portable. So what is the most portable thing that you have that you would start over again with the greatest value that you had created previously? What would it be? And then you would rebuild what you’ve already created, but you would do it much faster. What would be the one thing?” It’s an interesting thought. But in our concept, it’s called unique ability, that there’s something about you, as an individual, that first of all gave you enough confidence to become an entrepreneur because it’s risky. It’s a risky proposition. It’s guessing and betting and it’s risky business and it’s unique ability. So the starting point for all growth in Strategic Coach is that there’s something about you that’s absolutely unique. You don’t have any competitors on this and it has two qualities. One is that you’re so good at it, you don’t take it seriously. You’ve done this since you were a child and it just comes to you naturally and you don’t see the significance of it. When you’re in Coach, you start seeing the significance of it. And the second thing is you just absolutely love doing it. It’s what you love doing most of all. It comes to you naturally. You don’t even have to think about it. And then you begin to realize that anything else you’re doing as the founder and the owner of your company, probably somebody else can do. So you’re doing 20 things, but really you should be doing three things. The other 17 things still need to be done but not by you. And that’s the breakthrough. You have to simplify in order to multiply. Louis Diamond: I absolutely love that. I know when I was in Coach, that was my biggest takeaway or realization was figuring out what my unique ability was because I think the two components,

This week on Myopia Movies, we put on the mask, stare into the abyss, and then complain about the lighting. We dust off a paywall episode this week as we watch Watchmen—the most philosophical superhero movie ever made, or at least the one most likely to assign you homework afterward. Join us as we unpack a world where superheroes are less “save the day” and more “deeply complicate geopolitics.” We wrestle with questions like: Is Rorschach a moral absolutist… or just the world's angriest inkblot? How does Dr. Manhattan make omnipotence feel like a midlife crisis? And is Ozymandias the smartest man alive—or just really good at PowerPoint presentations with catastrophic consequences? We dive into Zack Snyder's ultra-stylized adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' legendary graphic novel, debating whether it captures the spirit of the original—or just lovingly recreates it in slow motion. Also: we try to determine if any superhero team has ever had worse workplace chemistry, and whether the giant blue nudist is actually the least weird part of this movie. Want to pick a movie we do an episode on and record a special commentary just for you? Purchase something from our wish list!  We are riffers on Cineprov! Check us out!! How will Watchmen hold up? Directed by: Zack Snyder Starring: Malin Åkerman as Laurie Jupiter / Silk Spectre II Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg / Nite Owl II Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan Matthew Goode as Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Edward Blake / The Comedian Carla Gugino as Sally Jupiter / Silk Spectre

Inflation is squeezing consumer paychecks, forcing shoppers to trade down to smaller pack sizes and private labels just to get by. Navigating this hyper-competitive landscape requires immediate adaptability because retail space is earned every single day. Brooke Hardin, an experienced entrepreneur who has spent 15 years navigating the Walmart ecosystem from store leadership development to the broker side, breaks down exactly how small brands can survive and scale in this environment.We sit down to unpack the tactical blueprint for modern supplier success. Our conversation covers the strict execution of the sundown rule, optimizing the digital shelf via ecom penetration, budgeting for search spend through Walmart Connect, and utilizing clean data visuals to tell an immediate story. Brooke also shares her unique philosophy on why the best vendor meetings involve closing the PowerPoint entirely to prioritize organic dialogue.The operational reality of retail means managing tight margin windows and holding partners to incredibly high standards. You will walk away from this episode with a system for auditing your price slope against the rest of the market and a framework for asking buyers open-ended questions that uncover their true category pain points.If you care about retail supply chains, category management, and strategic brand growth, you'll get a lot from this. Please remember to Subscribe and Share. Let us know in the comments: What is the single biggest question you need to start asking your buyers to truly understand their margin pressure?

In this episode of The Building Bigger Lives Podcast, Michael and Kathryn discuss the role of a trainer in leadership, expanding on a previous podcast episode about the four roles of leaders. They explore the mindset, skill set, and tool set needed for effective training, emphasizing the importance of designing systems and frameworks, using visual aids like PowerPoint and Excel, and adapting to online training platforms. Kathryn shared examples from her teaching experience, including the use of interactive activities and chat functions to enhance learning. The conversation highlights the need for trainers to be comfortable learning new teaching methods, using appropriate tools, and seeking feedback to continuously improve their effectiveness. Building Bigger Lives Podcast https://www.instagram.com/buildingbiggerlives Contact Coach Michael Regan- www.facebook.com/CoachMichaelRegan www.instagram.com/coachmichaelregan/ www.linkedin.com/in/mregan/ Contact Kathryn Pedersen- http://www.instagram.com/steamboatmortgage

Nicolás Cruz es cofundador de Colombia Tech, la empresa que está construyendo el ecosistema tecnológico colombiano desde adentro: Colombia Tech Week, AI Summit, GovTech, programas de aceleración y misiones a Silicon Valley. En este capítulo de Ser tu propio jefe, le cuenta a Álvaro Rodríguez cómo se llega ahí cuando nadie creía que se podía.Hablamos del papá emprendedor que lo mandó a repartir facturas en bus a los 14 años, del derecho que estudió por rebeldía y abandonó por frustración con la burocracia, de los amigos en Rappi que "querían comer el mundo" mientras él dudaba si subirse, y del salto desde Filo Legal a montar el festival de tecnología más grande del país.Y la parte que más le va a doler al fundador que está buscando plata: por qué hoy los fondos no quieren ver tu PowerPoint, qué números exactos te piden ahora, por qué la tecnología se está volviendo un commodity, y dónde quedó el verdadero foso defensivo. Más una tesis honesta de cómo crecer "rápido a toda m*****, pero cuidando los fundamentales".

No matter how long you've used your favorite creative tools, there's always one more shortcut, hidden feature, or unexpected workaround waiting to surprise you. In this episode, Theresa Jackson and Mike Rankin share a collection of practical tips and "wait, you can do that?" discoveries submitted by CreativePro Week speakers. You'll hear tips for favorite tools from Acrobat to PowerPoint, including clever ways to edit faster, move between apps, customize layouts, animate designs, manage masks, and make AI more useful in real workflows. Theresa also talks with PageProof founder Marcus Radich about PageProof Intelligence (PI) and learns how a proof can mark itself with AI. Episode Highlights Hear why Mike Rankin is looking at Affinity as a useful add-on to Adobe workflows, including an easier way to use images as custom bullets Learn where to find your Firefly generation history, including the prompts you used to create past results Discover how to export video with transparency from PowerPoint Follow Theresa and Mike through practical "round trip" workflows, from editing PDF images in Photoshop to moving Firefly Boards assets into other Adobe apps Hear Amy Balliett's tip for getting better AI results by using more than one AI tool Learn how Ben Willmore uses keyboard shortcuts to build masks faster in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom Discover Dax Castro's simple InDesign alt-text tip that can save time when adding descriptions to multiple images Resources CreativePro Week 2026: Nashville, June 29–July 3, 2026. https://creativeproweek.com/ CreativePro Events: https://creativepro.com/events/ Event Savings: Save $100 on any CreativePro event in 2026 with the discount code PODCAST: https://creativepro.com/events/ Membership Discount: Get $15 off one year of CreativePro membership with the discount code PODCAST: https://creativepro.com/become-a-member/ PageProof Intelligence: https://pageproof.com/pageproof-intelligence José Semidei: Tips for Creating Gradient Mesh Effects in Illustrator: https://creativepro.com/tips-for-creating-gradient-mesh-effects-in-illustrator/ How to Edit Photos in a PDF with Photoshop: https://youtu.be/aak26NToW5g?si=_ZQBnAU3AkyU6XXV

Épisode 1485 : Aujourd'hui, on va parler de mythologie. Pas des dieux grecs. Mais des dieux du foot.La Norvège revient en Coupe du monde 2026. Ils n'avaient plus mis les pieds dans un Mondial depuis 1998. Presque 30 ans d'absence. Et là, ils débarquent avec une génération monstrueuse. Haaland devant. Ødegaard au milieu. Un sérieux concurrent pour l'équipe de France.-L'équipe de Norvège en mode vikingsLe symbole. La fameuse photo “Vikings”. Si tu n'as pas vu passer ça, imagine la scène. Une plage près d'Oslo. Un fjord. Des bateaux. L'équipe nationale, pas en maillot. En Vikings. Casques, boucliers, épées, fourrures. Shootée par un photographe star, David Yarrow. Ce n'est pas une simple photo d'équipe. C'est une affiche de film. -Le terrain : une équipe qui roule sur les qualifsLa Norvège a roulé sur les qualifications. Huit matchs. Huit victoires. Trente-sept buts marqués. Cinq encaissés. Haaland finit meilleur buteur de tous les qualifs européens. Ça, c'est la partie chiffres. C'est ce que tu vois dans les tableaux de stats. Mais derrière, il y a autre chose. Un travail mental. Un travail narratif.-Le “modèle mentale” : la boussole dans la têteLe staff norvégien a bossé avec des experts en psychologie. Ils ont construit ce qu'ils appellent un “mental model”.En psychologie cognitive, un modèle mentalest une représentation interne permettant de simuler mentalement le déroulement d'un phénomène pour anticiper les résultats d'une action. C'est de la projection.En gros, les préparateurs mental de l'équipe de Norvège ont posé un cadre mental commun. Une manière partagée de voir l'équipe.La photo Vikings : un manifeste visuelEt puis il y a l'image. Le symbole. La fameuse photo “Vikings”. Si tu n'as pas vu passer ça, imagine la scène. Une plage près d'Oslo. Un fjord. Des bateaux. L'équipe nationale, pas en maillot. En Vikings. Casques, boucliers, épées, fourrures. Shootée par un photographe star, David Yarrow. C'est une affiche de film. C'est un manifeste visuel. Le message est clair. “On arrive en guerriers.” “On vient de ce pays-là.” “On assume d'être les Vikings du tournoi.” Évidemment, ça fait parler. Certains trouvent ça épique. D'autres trouvent ça kitsch, caricatural. Mais c'est justement ça, une mythologie. Ce n'est pas neutre. Ce n'est pas tiède. La fédé explique qu'elle veut montrer que l'équipe représente toute la Norvège. Les fjords. L'histoire. Les clichés aussi. Ils embrassent tout.Pour les marques, il y a une leçon : Savoir assumer ses symboles. Aller jusqu'au bout de son imaginaire. Même si ça dérange un peu.-Mythologie de marque : bien plus qu'un storytelling PowerPointParce que c'est ça, une mythologie de marque. Ce n'est pas juste un storytelling PowerPoint. C'est l'histoire que tu te racontes. Et que tu rejoues en boucle. En images. En mots. En décisions. Certains experts en branding parlent d'“identity myth”. Un mythe identitaire. C'est un récit qui vient répondre à quelque chose de plus profond chez ton audience. Une tension. Un manque. Une envie. Dans le cas de la Norvège, le mythe, c'est quoi ? C'est le petit pays qui revient. Après près de trente ans d'absence. Avec une génération en or. Et qui ne vient pas faire de la figuration. Comment trouver sa propre mythologieD'où tu viens.Qui est ton héro ?Quel imaginaire tu assumes.Qui est ton ennemi symbolique.C'est quoi ta “photo Viking”.…Retrouvez toutes les notes de l'épisode sur www.lesuperdaily.com ! Le Super Daily est le podcast quotidien sur les réseaux sociaux. Il est fabriqué avec une pluie d'amour par les équipes de Supernatifs. Nous sommes une agence social media basée à Lyon : https://supernatifs.com. Ensemble, nous aidons les entreprises à créer des relations durables et rentables avec leurs audiences. Ensemble, nous inventons, produisons et diffusons des contenus qui engagent vos collaborateurs, vos prospects et vos consommateurs. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

If you've ever felt something in your body long before you had language for it, and then immediately started talking yourself out of it, this episode is for you. Vanessa Bennett explores how women are conditioned to distrust instinct, often becoming the first ones to disbelieve themselves. She explains why this isn't accidental, it's socialization and policing. Using Jung's frame on intuition and the Cassandra archetype, we unpack the difference between intuition, anxiety, trauma activation, and projection. We also explore why “not irrational, early” is a more honest way to name what the body registers. The repair starts with relationship: rebuilding somatic literacy, pausing before self-gaslighting, and letting the signal matter before you have a PowerPoint's worth of proof. For educational purposes only. This isn't therapy.If you want to go deeper, check out the written companion on Substack and explore community + training at https://www.vanessaBennett.com.Additional ResourcesExplore: VanessaBennett.comBook: The Motherhood MythCommunity: Inner Compass CollectiveTraining: Inner Compass AcademyConnect with Inner CompassFollow on InstagramConnect with Vanessa Bennett:Follow on InstagramFollow on TikTokLearn more on SubstackConnect with Vanessa Bennett on LinkedInSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Guest speaker, Jeff Harrison, teaches about the Trinity.Powerpoint: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14zb2OTvN2keZrjhmwkp-t-u-rvZZJYC-/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110997667000734609517&rtpof=true&sd=trueYouTube: https://youtube.com/live/IK-Fn7mZmagSend us Fan Mail

Paramedic Brad Lawson joins Just a Little Salt to talk about founding the PIERCE Foundation and PIERCE Provisions, running mental wellness summits and a new Responder Fest. Brad explains why cumulative trauma drives PTSD and emotional numbness, how healing looks, and why peer led, story driven summits cut through the usual PowerPoint culture. He announces upcoming events: Responder Fest (Greenville, SC — Sept 10–11), Nashville summit (Oct 5–6) and Asheville (Oct 28–30, couples workshop + themed events).   This podcast is brought to you by Medical Shipment: https://medicalshipment.com/

The Presenter's Dilemma The presenter's dilemma is simple: should we build the talk around slides, or build the slides around the message? Too many business presentations begin with recycled decks, clever visuals, and a desperate slide shuffle. The better path starts with one clear message, a specific audience, and stories that make the idea memorable. Should presenters start by building slides? No, presenters should not start by building slides; they should start by deciding what they want the audience to know, believe, and remember. A collage of slides is not a message. The warm embrace of an existing deck is tempting. We plunder old PowerPoint files, pull in favourite charts, add new content, and then wonder why the presentation feels like a beast with too many limbs. In Japan, Australia, the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific corporate settings, executives often equate slides with preparation. That is the trap. Slides are support tools, not the thinking itself. Before any visual appears, the speaker must boil the subject down to one pungent, crystal-clear message. Do now: Write the central message in one sentence before opening PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, or Canva. How do you choose the right message for a presentation? Choose the right message by understanding who will be in the audience and what will hit the bullseye for them.The best message is not always the speaker's favourite message. The topic gives a clue, but the audience decides the angle. Ask the organiser who usually attends, which companies are registered, what roles are represented, and what outcomes they expect. A talk for CFOs at Toyota, Rakuten, Salesforce, or a Japanese SME should not sound identical to a talk for HR leaders, sales managers, investors, or startup founders. In B2B presentations, audience intelligence changes everything: examples, story selection, data points, objections, and the final call to action. Do now: Get audience intelligence early. Then choose the message most likely to matter to those specific listeners. Why are stories more powerful than raw data in presentations? Stories are more powerful than raw data because they give information context, colour, and human meaning. Data informs, but stories make people care. Numbers can be inert. A spreadsheet, table, or statistic may be accurate and still leave the audience cold. When data is wrapped inside a story, people can visualise the point. That is why presenters translate measurements into familiar comparisons, such as football fields, daily costs, customer time saved, or missed revenue per month. In sales presentations, investor pitches, leadership briefings, and training sessions, the story turns abstract information into something the audience can feel and remember. Do now: For every major data point, ask: "What story, person, image, or comparison will make this real?" How many slides should a business presentation use? A business presentation should use only the slides that strengthen the message; sometimes that means very few slides or even none. The goal is impact, not slide volume. Video meetings make this especially important. In Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Webex presentations, screen sharing often shrinks the speaker into a tiny box while the slides dominate the screen. If the speaker's personal brand, leadership presence, or executive credibility matters, that can be a poor trade. A senior leader presenting to top management may create more impact by using fewer visuals and speaking directly into the camera. This keeps attention on the human being, not the slide machinery. Do now: Cut every slide that competes with your presence rather than amplifying your point. How can speakers tell stories without relying on visuals? Speakers can tell stories without visuals by painting a scene with time, place, people, and sensory detail. A well-told story creates its own screen inside the audience's mind. Instead of showing a snowy New York image, say it was three years ago, heavy snow was falling, and the streets around Rockefeller Center were white. Add a recognisable person, such as Warren Buffett leaving the building in a thick coat and long scarf, and the audience starts building the scene themselves. This works in Japan, Australia, the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific because humans are wired for narrative. The speaker becomes the focus, not the slide deck. Do now: Build stories with four anchors: when it happened, where it happened, who was there, and what changed. When should presenters use slides? Presenters should use slides when the visual can be processed quickly and supports the story rather than replacing it. A good slide earns its place in about one second. Photographs with no words can work beautifully because they trigger curiosity and allow the speaker to explain the symbolism. Dense text, detailed spreadsheets, complex graphs, and tables of numbers often do the opposite. They drag attention away from the presenter and force the audience to read instead of listen. In executive communication, keynote speaking, sales enablement, and leadership presentations, slides should be visual allies. They should never become the main act while the speaker becomes the narrator of a document. Do now: Prefer simple visuals, strong photographs, and story-led explanations over text-heavy slide dumps. Conclusion: How should presenters solve the presenter's dilemma? The presenter's dilemma is solved by changing the order of preparation. First, know the audience. Second, define the one message. Third, choose stories and examples. Fourth, decide whether slides are needed at all. Finally, build only the visuals that help the audience understand and remember. When your personal and professional brand is on display, these choices matter. A recycled slide deck may feel efficient, but it can bury the message. A story-led presentation keeps the spotlight where it belongs: on the speaker, the audience, and the idea that needs to land. Meta description: Learn how to solve the presenter's dilemma by choosing message-first storytelling over slide-heavy business presentations. Keywords: presentation slides, business presentations, storytelling, executive communication, presentation structure FAQs Should I reuse old slides for a new presentation? You can reuse old slides only after you have defined the new audience, message, and story. Starting with old slides often creates a patchwork presentation. What is the biggest mistake presenters make with slides? The biggest mistake is treating slides as the presentation instead of support for the message. The speaker, not the deck, should carry the impact. Are stories better than data in presentations? Stories and data work best together, but stories give data context and meaning. Raw numbers often need a human example or familiar comparison to become memorable. Should I use slides in a video presentation? Use fewer slides in video presentations when your presence and eye contact matter. Screen sharing can reduce the speaker to a small box and weaken impact. What kind of slides work best? Simple visual slides, especially strong photographs with little or no text, often work best. They are easy to process and leave room for the speaker's story. Author bio Dr. Greg Story, Ph.D. in Japanese Decision-Making, is President of Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training and Adjunct Professor at Griffith University. He is a two-time winner of the Dale Carnegie "One Carnegie Award" in 2018 and 2021 and recipient of the Griffith University Business School Outstanding Alumnus Award in 2012. As a Dale Carnegie Master Trainer, Greg is certified to deliver globally across all leadership, communication, sales, and presentation programs, including Leadership Training for Results. He has written several books, including three best-sellers — Japan Business Mastery, Japan Sales Mastery, and Japan Presentations Mastery — along with Japan Leadership Mastery and How to Stop Wasting Money on Training. His works have been translated into Japanese, including Za Eigyō（ザ営業）, Purezen no Tatsujin（プレゼンの達人）, Torēningu de Okane o Muda ni Suru no wa Yamemashō（トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのはやめましょう）, and Gendaiban "Hito o Ugokasu" Rīdā（現代版「人を動かす」リーダー）. Greg also publishes daily business insights on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, and hosts six weekly podcasts. On YouTube, he produces The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show, Japan Business Mastery, and Japan's Top Business Interviews, which are widely followed by executives seeking success strategies in Japan.

A daily quote to inspire the mind, gratitude to warm the soul, and guided breathing to energize the body. Quote: The mind is everything. What you think you become. –Buddha Gratitude: The Arrange button in Powerpoint, that "saves so much time nudging and aligning text boxes. Guided Breathing: Equal Breathing. Visit TheDailyRefresh.com to share your unique piece of gratitude which will be featured on an upcoming episode, and make sure to watch the tutorial of how to make The Daily Refresh part of your Alexa Flash Briefings! Call to action: If you're not listening to this on your Alexa, you should be! Visit TheDailyRefresh.com and click on the word Alexa in the Nav bar for a tutorial on making The Daily Refresh one of your Flash Briefings.

We've been looking at the foundations for building a strong family through the message series “The Way Home.” Today on PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham brings a special message for wives, and the specific biblical instructions as to how she is to live and respond in marriage to the leadership of her husband. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Could God see a king in the most unlikely of people and what happens when a humble leader lets pride take hold? Join Hank and John as they welcome Dr. Geoff Wright to explore 1 Samuel and Israel's shift from judges to monarchy and the tragic rise and fall of King Saul.SHOW NOTES/TRANSCRIPTSEnglish: https://tinyurl.com/podcastOT224ENFrench: https://tinyurl.com/podcastOT224FRGerman: https://tinyurl.com/podcastOT224DEPortuguese: https://tinyurl.com/podcastOT224PTSpanish: https://tinyurl.com/podcastOT224ESYOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/FsALi4-JBiYFREE PDF DOWNLOADS OF followHIM QUOTE BOOKSNew Testament: https://tinyurl.com/PodcastNTBookOld Testament: https://tinyurl.com/PodcastOTBookBook of Mormon: https://tinyurl.com/PodcastBMBook WEEKLY NEWSLETTERhttps://tinyurl.com/followHIMnewsletter SOCIAL MEDIAInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followHIMpodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastTIMECODE0:00 - Part 1 - Dr. Geoff Wright2:06 Israel's move from judges to kings2:40 Teaser5:05 Bio7:40 Come, Follow Me Manual9:09 Anticipatory set–Rosa Parks, Malala, J.K. Rowling10:50 Pretest questions: Seeing potential in the overlooked13:35 Historical context 15:29 President Kimball and patriarch James Womack17:15 Coaches and mentors20:30 “Only pass to one guy”22:51 Martin Harris and God's work goes forth25:00 Wanting a king to fit in29:06 Lunchboxes, big feet, and Dickies pants31:08 Parenting and the PowerPoint pitch35:47 Tying your identity to the Lord38:29 God sends Saul39:00 Greg: The Student who left a gang44:17 Choosing kings vs. letting God prevail47:21 Saul losing his humility49:57 Staying “little in our own sight”52:07 Building skis55:06 Heat, pressure, repentance and drift trikes57:23 Saul hides “among the stuff”58:41 The neighbor who became a best friend1:03:16 The Spirit changes (and hold onto it)1:14:49  End of Part 1 - Professor Geoff WrightThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Cofounder, Executive Producer, SponsorDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsAmelia Kabwika: Portuguese TranscriptsHeather Barlow: Communications DirectorSydney Smith: Social Media, Graphic Design "Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com

You work harder than half your team. You deliver results. But somehow, the person who talks a good game in meetings just got promoted ahead of you. Here's the truth: hard work doesn't get you promoted. Visibility, advocacy, and understanding the game do. Ethan Evans is a retired Amazon VP who spent over 15 years building billion dollar businesses inside one of the most demanding companies on earth. He went from getting fired twice early in his career to running Prime Video, Twitch sponsorships, the Amazon Appstore, and a t-shirt printing business that now does over a billion dollars a year. He worked directly with Jeff Bezos, survived public failures, learned how to navigate corporate politics without losing his soul, and retired early to teach others how to do the same. In this episode, you'll learn: The magic loop: how to turn your boss into your biggest advocate by making them successful first Why invisible performers lose to visible performers every time and how a weekly status report changes everything The exact script to ask for a raise that gets results without threatening to quit Good boss versus bad boss: why consistency beats likability and how to tell the difference in an interview How to give difficult feedback that actually lands: professionally firm, personally warm The career killers nobody talks aboutJeff Bezos's philosophy: strategically patient, tactically impatient, and why Amazon banned PowerPoint for six page narratives ___________ (00:00:00) Introduction: Why Half Your Talent Wins and You Don't (00:00:56) Corporate Politics: The Game You Didn't Know You Were Playing (00:08:28) The Magic Loop: Turn Your Boss Into Your Biggest Advocate (00:27:20) Invisible vs Visible Performers: Why Hard Work Isn't Enough (00:16:30) How to Actually Ask for a Raise and Get It (00:06:13) Good Boss vs Bad Boss: Consistency Over Likability (00:42:42) Giving Difficult Feedback: Professionally Firm, Personally Warm (00:51:28) Career Killers: Betrayal, Gossip, and Breaking Trust (01:04:51) Jeff Bezos: Strategically Patient, Tactically Impatient (01:11:05) The Six-Page Narrative: Why Amazon Banned PowerPoint (01:18:06) Building Billion-Dollar Businesses: Prime Video to T-Shirt Printing (00:58:22) Burnout Is About Vision Loss, Not Hard Work (01:24:48) Hiring A Players: The Reference Check Hack Nobody Uses (01:32:28) Final Advice: Know What You Want and Make the Deal ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL

We've informally heard that Satya is a listener to LS for a couple years now, but it was still absolutely surreal to meet him and do a live pod at Build, together with our friends at No Priors, the leading VC AI Podcast that we also greatly admire!We covered the MAI model technical takeaways on yesterday's AINews, so I will focus our recap of Satya's main messages around three elements:* Satya's adaptation of the Bill Gates Line for positioning Microsoft as the Frontier Intelligence Platform — customers must gain much more value from the Microsoft ecosystem than Microsoft itself, by building on multi-model harnesses like OpenClaw and Scout, drawing on the full enterprise context exposed by context layers like Work IQ (heavily dogfooded by his C-suite), and building up private evals and traces as a new form of Token IP* AI ROI: On one hand, enterprises are having difficult conversations around Tokenmaxxing and Layoffs, and on the other hand, there are serious re-evaluations of the End of SaaS since the Build vs Buy equation has changed so much. Our previous SemiAnalysis guest had… interesting comments on Microsoft's position on this as the ur-SaaS titan, and Satya had great answers* Making the Impossible Possible: Kevin Scott's inspiring framing around what the most ambitious version of applying AI and technology at large to business and social problems, like education and social impact.Enjoy!Full VideoTranscriptVoiceover: Welcome swyx, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil,, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, Satya NadellaSarah Guo: Welcome to a crossover episode of No Priors and Lane Space with Satya Nadella. Um, congratulations on an amazing build. No, thank you so much, and it's great to be with both of you. I listen to both of you or b- both the podcasts all the time. It's great to be on it.Thank you so much. [00:01:00] So you're just talking about, um, these amazing, uh, announcements from across the Microsoft estate all morning for, I think, three hours. What is the, uh, what's the most important reflection or takeaway you have?AI as an Ecosystem PlatformSarah Guo: I, I'd say there are, uh, perhaps the, the biggest one for me is let's sort of conceptualize this more as an ecosystem play as opposed to a single model or even a single platform, right?Satya Nadella: I mean, you know, whatever I... At least for me, having grown up at Microsoft, having seen, whatever, four major platform shifts, uh, I sort of fall into that, um, uh, camp where a platform is defined by fundamentally its ability to create more value about the platform versus what's captured in the platform. And so if you, you view what's happening right now, I think this morning's keynote was how can any company, whether it's an AI native company or a traditional enterprise company, participate as a first-class participant where they can point to AI they created, [00:02:00] right?It's not that they don't use other people's AI. Of course they will. But to me, what's the path? What's the recipe? How do I do it? What does a stack look like? What does the tooling look like? What is valuable? How do you do that? That's it. That's sort of our job to do. Yeah. Ecosystem strategy is, uh, very complicated, right?Sarah Guo: Because you end up building certain components, partnering for certain components, supporting them. You just announced this big suite of models. Like, tell us a little bit about the, uh, training strategy for Microsoft now. Yeah.MAI Models & Training StrategySarah Guo: So, so the thing that we wanted to do with the MAI models was to build, and as Mustafa talked about, first of all, a great lineage, right?Satya Nadella: Starting with pre-training, uh, with very good data quality, uh, doing all the ablations, making sure because in, in some sense it's becoming even harder to build a clean lineage model just because there's so much stuff out there, uh, that you truly need to ablate out to be able to have a fantastic [00:03:00] pre-trained model.In fact, that's one of the challenges of a lot of the open weight models is they look great on one benchmark or two, but they're not great on practice. So that's why, in fact, even in the RFDEs are, they, they are pretty gone really excited about these MAI models because how the heck can a small five B model hill climb?Uh, and it goes back a little bit to what I think is ultimately the key thing to do, which is try to pursue finding that cognitive core. Uh, so to me, starting with a clean lineage- Then creating that ability for companies to be able to use this, right? Not just as a generalist, but to create their own specialist by building this hill climbing scaffold around it, right?So it's not just the model, but you have a hill climb scaffold around it, then you will start building your RLE. You will start collecting the traces. Most importantly, you'll have private evals because we know all the evals out there are good, interesting, [00:04:00] but they're not really that critical- They're work, yeahSwyx: at this point because they all can be maxed. And so the point is each company will have its own private eval. And so that end-to-end platform story around our models is sort of, uh, what I think is interesting. And then the one other thing, Sarah, since you brought that up, is I do feel there's a new frontier.Satya Nadella: Like people talk about the frontier and are you operating at the frontier. Um, interestingly enough, if you add a little temporality to it, you can use, let's say, in, in, in fact, the, the Lando Lakes demo we showed was pretty cool. We used, whatever, GPT-55, right? Then you collected a bunch of traces, and then you took a 5B reasoning model and achieved higher.Sarah Guo: Uh, so that is another aspect of what it means to appear... uh, you know, operate at the frontier Yeah. I, I think, uh, I first of all have to congratulate you on basically building a frontier neo lab inside of Microsoft in two years. Um, I'm wondering, you know, you have all this AI strategy that you're rolling out.Lessons from Two Years of AI DevelopmentSwyx: I'm wondering, what do you know now that you wish you would tell yourself two years ago where- or two or [00:05:00] three years ago? Three years for the Jensen partnership, two years for, uh, MEI. Yeah, I mean, I think the, the thing when, that I reflect quite a bit, right, which is sort of obviously I got into all this when I got excited by the, the scaling laws paper and, you know, when, you know, even the OpenAI partnership came about when those folks said, “Hey, we're gonna really throw a lot of computer transformers.”Satya Nadella: Uh, and they've helped. I- the thing that I always look back and say, “Wow, these things, uh, do have capability that they're climbing up.” W- I mean, this, you know, this crude way of saying it is intelligence is log of compute kind of works. Now what I think we underestimated perhaps is the real-world complexity of deploying these so that they actually deliver the value in the real world, right?So the outcomes as measured by any benchmark is interestingly important, but the true eval is when people out there are able to do unique things that they only can value, and it's very [00:06:00] measurable, right? That I wish we had sort of even, like, had more in our consciousness, right? Which is as an industry.Sarah Guo: Because right now I think when people say, “Wow, I don't want a token max,” it's an artifact of us not having thought ourselves as an industry that we are using tokens to create value every step of the way. So I think that's kind of what I wish we had gotten there, but I'm glad we are here.Real-World Value & Use CasesSarah Guo: What are some of the use cases that you've seen that have created the most value for your customers?Because I know that people talk a lot about code, and I think it's pretty clear that that's something that's having very large scale impact. Are there other areas that you find in common that your customers are really benefiting from? Yeah. I think, yeah, to your point, obviously coding is now got... But it's interesting, by the way, Elijah, to even talk about the coding, right?Satya Nadella: Which is coding has worked so well that we now have to rebuild the IDE, right? I mean, it's kind of nuts to see what we sh- launched is like, oh my God, I have these hundred agent sessions. I... The cognitive load it transfers back to me as a human is so [00:07:00] excessive that now I need a new UI. Uh, oh, by the way, I, like the, the chat as the only artifact was also impossible, so that's why we need a canvas.So it's kind of interesting for all the things about where is software needed or where is UI needed, uh, you kind of need that even for code, right? In a fully agentic world. But that said, one of the things that we are starting to see, we started seeing with co-work, but even some of the work we, we showed with auto com- uh, um, autopilot Right on what you see with claws is a good one because if you sort of think about a lot of human capital is doing the glue work, right?If you now can augment that with tokens/agents that are long-running, durable, right, then your ability to scale even what is still judgment and glue work gets amplified like coding does. Uh, so you can... Like, I'm positive that six months from now we'll all be saying, “Oh, wow,” like, all through ni- the night there was a bunch of stuff that [00:08:00] all these autopilots that I have working on my behalf with my delegated authority, so to speak, right?I can... Sort of given even my identity, did a bunch of work, then of course I'll need my new ADE to say, “Well, what did you do?” Like, I might... “Did I do this work?” And so on. So I think that that's where compressing of workflows, uh, completing of tasks, uh, that's where I think a lot of the value gets created. I think you raised a really interesting point, which is there's the actual agent that's doing the code, and then there's a harness around it, and that's the environment, that's the context, that's everything you're setting up as a developer around actually a coding agent.The Harness Concept for Enterprise AISarah Guo: What is the harness for the enterprise? Is there an equivalent concept for broader productivity work, or how do you think about that concept sort of generalized? That's right. So, so in some sense you kind of want the harness to define the models, the, the data, uh, and the tools, and so that you have a loop across those three.Satya Nadella: And so what we are trying to, first of all, make sure is each of our products that we build, right, whether it's GitHub Copilot or the security copi- the, the [00:09:00] stuff we showed with MDASH or even the discovery for science, it doesn't matter, all of them are multi-model harnesses, um, with tools access so that you can do this progressive, uh, disclosure of tools even so that they're token efficient.Uh, and then you're feeding it with very rich context because that's sort of the other hard lesson we have learned in the last two years is, oh my God, the amount of work you need to do to prep the context layer, uh, such that your plan can execute in the most efficient way is where the magic is. So we have, in our case, we have the GitHub harness, which essentially we're using across all our products.It's available in Foundry, and we are open, like you can use your Llama harness, whatever. Or you can use the, um, uh, you know, any open harness or any harness of yours and train with your tools and multiple models and your context. And so that's the pitch. Because right now a lot of dialogue is, um, “Hey, if I train the harness plus tools and the model together, you get [00:10:00] evals.”Elad Gil: And what we are proving out is... And the best example of that is what we did with MDASH, right? Because when it launched, uh, it found bugs or vulnerabilities that were not found by Mythos Uh, and so there is existence proof, I would claim, that you can have a multimodal harness, uh, that can in fact be more, uh, performant in the real world So a premise behind the, uh, training at the independent frontier labs is really, you know, we're gonna have these models, and we'll have an API business, and we'll support enterprises and startups.Sarah Guo: ButPlatform Strategy & Developer EcosystemSarah Guo: a first-party product, be it productivity or code or search, drives the majority of revenue. That's a different value equation than you're describing, I think, with the Microsoft ecosystem. Uh, if, if that's the case, tell me if it's the case, uh, ‘cause obviously you have first-party products and you have enablement products.Satya Nadella: Um, what is the role of the develop- Like what is gonna be hard and the set of skills and the value capture the developer has in that world? Yeah. So I think that there's always [00:11:00] gonna be the case that someone who is super successful in- as a platform builder can also have first-party products. It was true with Windows.It is true, uh, with, uh, the, the SaaS side and the cloud side as well with us and others and so on. But the thing that is, is it should not be a limiter to other people achieving that same success, right? That I think is the core difference, which is the, the network effects this time around, around intelligence are such because they learn from data, and not really lots of data.It's just a few samples that you have to see to understand what's novel about something. So that's why the game becomes how to protect. So that's why I would say every company, having private evals may be the biggest IP, right? Think about it, like what's that private eval that you can then use even a frontier model to hill climb on and not leak the traces may be one of the biggest [00:12:00] drivers, uh, of IP.Like, so in other words, another te- acid test is you have an eval that's private. You're using, uh, a g- a Model A. Can you switch it to Model B and e- you know, climb up? If you can, then you're in control. If you can't, you're not in control, and that's where even the harness decision becomes super important, right?swyx So therefore, having an open harness, letting all models come in, having your evals, your context, your tools help you hill climb, I think is the skills that an AI native startup needs, a SaaS company needs, or every enterprise needs. Yeah, I think in, in a very real way you are ... Microsoft historically is an operating systems company and th- then become a cloud company.Maybe like the third act is that you're a harness or evals company. Whatever w- ... whatever the, the sort of conglomerate of concepts that you wanna put together. Um, and, and I think like enabling every company to have like frontier intelligence or what- what- Yeah ... I forget the, the [00:13:00] exact term that you used, um, is the, is the mission, right?Satya Nadella: That's it. Like that is, that is the platform promise, that you build with us, you will get your intelligence, uh, for your data. That's it. That ... To, to me, that is the ... Like if there was one tagline, uh, for this entire developer conference is- Can everybody operate at the frontier with their frontier intelligence, right?To me, that is so important because otherwise it, I, I don't know how you achieve stable equilibrium, right? Which is how do I then go and say, “Well, my company is gonna have a terminal value because I now know how to continuously compound-” Yeah ... on top of what's a platform that gets better,” right? So when, like Windows obviously came out, Adobe built, Autodesk built, uh, or even like take what Jensen said.We built DX and he built, you know, CUDA on top of it. Um, right? I mean, I always say to Jensen, “God, I got the short end of that,” right? “I wish, uh, we had recognized it.” But nevertheless, but that, that idea that you can build a platform layer [00:14:00] that someone else can then extend out, um, and build their own intelligence layer in this case, I think is everything, right?Without it, why have a developer conference? I can just come and have you all sort of just worship at the altar of one model. Yeah. But that's not a developer conference. Uh,IP, Evals & Company Valueswyx: backstage we, we had a discussion about what is IP or what is the, the value in a company. It used to be the length of, uh, human experience at a company, and now it's this other thing which is the evals, the, uh, experience in sort of applying agents to the company. Can you... I just want you to like flesh that out a bit more ‘cause- Yeah ... it was very insightful.Satya Nadella: It's a great way to frame it, right? Because yeah, at the end of the day, every company is gonna have both the human capital that is still gonna be super valuable, uh, because humans, uh, and their ability to find the gaps that exist at all times is going to be the way we all will create value, right?I mean, so I'm definitely in the camp that this is going to be about expressing new forms of human agency and ambition even as token capital goes up, right? So let's say a cor- any corporation [00:15:00] has lots of tokens and lot of human capital. The question is how do you compound the two? So if you have a... Like if you take in Teams I have a bunch of agents doing work and a bunch of humans doing work, and the traces between those, that is really important context of how that enterprise is creating value.Then that goes back to train not a generalist model, but to train the company veteran agent, uh, right? That is super valuable again, right? Which is when a company goes says, “It should in fact go onto the balance sheet,” is how I think about it, right? That's so... In fact, there may be... Like human capital was never possible to go put on a balance sheet, uh, because you didn't know how to capture the tacit knowledge.swyx: Whereas now I think you can with the agents that have learned through the h- through, through time, through all the traces. Uh, so that's what at least we think will happen. I, I think the SEC is gonna have to have accounting standards- ... for token, uh, expertise Uh, y- y- you're talking about the equilibrium [00:16:00] state, um, and a stable equilibrium where companies have this compounding value and can see terminal value for themselves.Future of SaaS & Business ModelsSarah Guo: Another challenge to, you know, the considered equilibrium of, okay, there are applications and workflows that are sort of common to a vertical or a horizontal. Um, and this was, like, the generation of SaaS companies and, you know, Microsoft has lots of SaaS properties as well. And then there are things that are very specific to every enterprise that they're differentiated against.Elad Gil: Um, I'm sure you have heard much and participate in much of the debate about the end of software because all these workflows are, are cheap to generate now. Um, do you think the equilibrium looks different between what agents get built- Yeah ... in enterprises versus in their vendors in the future? Yeah. So I think what's happening there is, see, we, we had a particular way we captured, um, I would say workflow in apps, right?Satya Nadella: Because we built a, a data model, right? We schematized some part of some business process. Mm-hmm. We then built a bunch of business logic. Yep. And then we put a bunch of UI [00:17:00] on top of it, right? So that's kind of what every SaaS company- And a little configuration. For, like, 20, 20 years that was the plan.Right, that- Yeah ... and that was it. So interestingly enough, now you kind of get to re-litigate that vertical stacking, right? So I still think, for example, that data model that you built underneath every SaaS application is super good, right? Like, why reinvent it? Like, I, I, my general ledger better be a general ledger.I don't need new schema creation. No. Uh, in fact, that entity relationship, uh, is actually pretty good, robust thing that I want to feed. And you want it to be stable. That's right. Yeah. Then same thing with business logic, right? If, if you look at, uh... We have this product called Power BI, right? It is like dashboards galore people created.The beauty underneath that dashboard is a very rich semantic model, right? Someone took the pain to create a dashboard and do all the measures, and you want that. That's business logic, right? I want that to be available to me. So I think the [00:18:00] challenge of the SaaS business model is we packaged one way. We now have to learn how to unbundle these things and rebundle in new ways and discover new business models, right?I mean, if you look at it, d- what's happening today with Microsoft 365 is a great example, right? We have this thing called Work IQ. In fact, like, what we are realizing is, oh my God, like, you know, if you look at... In fact, there's a pa- historical parallel too, right? We sold first Exchange and SharePoint and, uh, you know, before Teams, we had a thing called Lync Server and what have you, and we thought, “Oh, that's all gonna move to the cloud.”But little did we realize that, um, the number of people who will use servers in the cloud is 10X, 100X, right? Because people were not buying servers, they were just buying a subscription. Mm-hmm. The same thing is now happening with M365 because with Work IQ, we have exposed what is perhaps the most important database in a company that never got used as a database because it was only captive to our apps.Mm-hmm. Right? It, it was all email operated on it, Teams operated [00:19:00] on it, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint. But now, like this is one of the coo- coolest things I get to do with Work IQ. I go to a GitHub repo and I say, “Hey, I attended a bunch of design meetings last week related to this repo. Can you capture all that and tell me what changes I should make?”I mean, think about that, right? It literally can go look at all those transcripts, come back with a plan to change a code base, right? Previously, you could never have thought of using M365 for something like that. So the value creation opportunity now in the agent world is in fact 10X more, but it does require us to have...Sarah Guo: For example, there's going to be usage around M365, right? Which is going to be perhaps more than even the e- end users and we have to even re-architect. Like, in fact, like what I use to serve an inbox or a mailbox cannot be used to serve an agent. Uh, and so that's sort of what we are doing.Pricing Models: Per-User, Consumption & OutcomesSarah Guo: I don't believe in, like, permanent business models for any of these domains, but in the [00:20:00] near term, do you have a prediction between, uh, you know, outcomes-based pricing, token-based pricing?Elad Gil: Enterprise bundles Yeah. The way I- I think about this is always we've had... Like, let's even take the per-user pricing. Mm-hmm. The per-user pricing is really an artifact of someone creating a budget needing certainty, right? Because it's the most important thing. Like, somebody wants a budget- Mm-hmm ... they need a per user.Satya Nadella: And, and per user is just a set of entitlements to usage, right? That's kind of what it is. And so the way is, if the first bundling will be take some usage, bundle it into per user stacks and, you know, then sell subscriptions. So subscriptions I think are gonna be there, per user is gonna be there. Then the next big thing will be consumption.So people will say, “I want consumption.” And it's also possible that people will say, “I don't even want to pay for any of the subscriptions or the consumption's outcome.” Mm. But remember, most people love outcomes until they have an outcome, because once you have an outcome, it's like giving away royalty, [00:21:00] right?Mm. I mean, like I, I've talked to customers who love, you know, outcome-based pricing, and I say, “I'm all in,” until they, “Oh my God,” like, “what are you talking about? You're sharing in my outcome? No, no, no. I want you to go back to per-user pricing, and I want you to consumption price,” right? So I think that debate will go on.Uh, but and all, all, all of these business models have a particular time and a place versus one to rule them all. And if anything, if you're a SaaS vendor or you're a platform vendor, having that flexibility... And quite frankly, we face this with GitHub, right? We just recently announced a per-user pricing on GitHub because little, you know, we- GitHub Copilot was constructed at a per-user level before we understood even, uh, the intensity of usage of agents, right?It was an interactive way for a developer to use code complete, maybe tasks. It was not like, oh, I launched 10,000, you know, agents that are going on all day, right? So that is what the adjustment is about. So now that we really want, there will [00:22:00] always be a per user, but there will have to be a consumption meter.Durability of SaaS & Build vs BuySarah Guo: How do you think about the durability of SaaS more generally? One thing I've observed is in a lot of enterprises internally, there will be teams that almost have agent euphoria. They're so excited about the explosion of things they can build that they're trying to rebuild a lot of applications or going to their SaaS vendors and saying, “We're not gonna work with you anymore,” or, “We're considering an internal project.”And it seems like in six to nine months, maybe some of those people will come back and say, “Actually, we, we can't rebuild everything.” How do you think about what's durable in this world and what isn't? Yeah, it's a... It... I think we have to go through one full budget cycle on this to really see the, um- Uh, the sort of the emergence of the equilibrium, because at the end of the day, there's marginal cost to even generating the app, right?Elad Gil: In, in fact, there can be even a, a simple way to say it, like if you should always acquire something if the marginal cost of building and maintaining, uh, something on your own is higher. Uh, right? That should be like it's a quantifiable- Yeah. Right? A quantifiable thing. And [00:23:00] the maintenance part is important, right?Even, like you got to remember like, hey, you know, all the security stuff that now AI will find, you better fix them too fast. Uh, of course, there's a coding agent to help you with, but then that burns tokens, right? So whose responsibility is it? It's kind of like a, a cycle that you've got to think through.And I think we have gone through the excitement that I can generate a lot of software. I think the next thing would be what software do I really want to generate? Mm-hmm. What software do I want to use from others? How do I compose these two into some agentic workflow that I have agency over, right?Sarah Guo: Because I think there'll be very little tolerance for anybody who's inflexible, uh, at the vendor level. Uh, but at the same time, I think that anyone who has got that flexibility shows up, delivers the value, will be back at again, right? We're selling software, uh, but with just different business models, in fact Uh, speaking about building software, um, one of my favorite moments from, I think, a previous build maybe one or two years ago was they had a b- they, they...Swyx: There was a section of you building your [00:24:00] own software. I'm curious if you're building anything now. Yeah. So I, I think the... You know, first of all, let's face it, right? Building software has made it possible for even the incompetence of a CEO of a company- ... like ours, uh, you can build, so thank God. But that said, I, I, I, I do feel that, you know, something like, um, GitHub Copilot to me, and especially the new Sessions app or the new app, has just made it so much more possible for you to have agency over artifacts that you felt you couldn't touch before, right?Satya Nadella: So to, for me as a CEO, even to go to a code base, uh, to be able to learn about it, like I remember joining Microsoft long back, you know, first and then you say, man, everybody had to go in and look at, you know, whatever, Cutler's, Malik, or what have you to learn how to do good C, uh, C++ code. Um, so now that ability to be more full stack up and down is so good, but that doesn't mean every one of us should be doing the same thing.The question is: [00:25:00] how do you then have the ability to inspect things, learn things, see things, um, I think is just so much more. And so to me, what I'm building a lot of is these long-running Foundry agents. Uh, right? So there's autopilots. So the easiest thing is, to me, I think I just built one, uh, even last week, where the idea was, hey, can I have an agent that is continuously monitoring essentially my own chief of staff autopilot, right?We're gonna have that obviously in, uh, Scout. That's what, uh, uh, we showed. But it is so easy and trivial to build. I took Work IQ. I said, “Take Work IQ, go, uh, and build a Foundry long-running agent.” Uh, store all the memory in, um, uh, using Ray Fin, right? Basically at my backend as a service. And lo and behold, it built it, and not only built it, I could say publish to Teams, and it published the damn thing to Teams.Sarah Guo: So the ability, uh, to have a, you know, some end-to-end project like this complete is just pretty [00:26:00] miraculous. How do you think, uh,Future Engineering RolesSarah Guo: that impacts the different types of engineering roles that exist in the future? Because right now I think there's, you know, a dozen different types of engineers that you can be, from QA, front end, et cetera.You know, there's a big swath. I've heard some people argue that in four or five years we'll basically end up with four engineering roles. It'll be people who are managing agents, it'll be four deployed engineers or FDEs, it'll be security engineers, and then people working on large scale infrastructure for a small number of services, and then everything else just collapses into the agentic world.Satya Nadella: Yeah, I- Do you think that's a correct view of the world? Yeah, I mean, I think, I think we'll have to experiment our way through it. But what you said is what... There are some very at scale things. At LinkedIn, they did structurally change- Mm-hmm ... uh, and it, you know, basically built up a new discipline called full stack builder, right?So they went and said, “Hey, let's bring, uh, people from design and product management, front end engineering, all put them together.” Uh, but also have an edge, right? It's not like the design person still doesn't have the design edge, or the front end [00:27:00] person doesn't have the front end edge, but you can give yourself bigger scope in roles so that you're not confined to one role.Um, and then r- equally, infrastructure has become very critical, right? So in other words, like, I mean, RLEs, I mean, one thing we've realized is even for the Excel team, for example. Mm-hmm. Building the RLE in which a reward can be learned is actually one of the hardest sort of infrastructure problems.Mm-hmm. Uh, and so you kind of need even new talent, right? Distributed systems people even in what was considered an end user app team, uh, because it's a different skill set. So yes, infrastructure, science is the other one, obviously. Um, so I think we'll see how these evolve, right? Where's the s- real... I mean, always the world will have a bunch of specialists.Okay. Um, you know, I think the generalist role is going to be the most exciting, right? Because the leverage of a generalist- Mm-hmm ... um, is where we are going to see the maximum returns, right? When, when you said, “Hey, are you coding?” I'm now a gen- Like, what... I've basically translated [00:28:00] knowledge work Right?Which I did, where I created a Word document or a spreadsheet, or even, uh... And now I can build an app, right? It's in the same sentence. Uh, right? That idea that, “Oh, wow, my generalist skills have gotten higher leverage,” I think is what we're gonna see across the board. Music to the ears of CEOs and VCs that are, like, a little dangerous and a lot of- Golden age for idea peopleSarah Guo: idea people. Yeah. Uh- With a lot of agency. I- if you take that idea of personal agency and you just zoom it out to the organizational context, um, uh, my partner Mike Renall, who, uh, actually started his career at Microsoft, just wrote an essay where one of the big takeaways is i- it's an age where you can be much more ambitious, and you need to be, given the pace of the environment and how quickly, actually, users and companies are open to adopting new technologies.Satya Nadella: Um, how do you think about... I, I feel silly asking this of somebody running a, you know, trillion-dollar-plus company already, butAmbition & Making the Impossible PossibleSatya Nadella: how do you think about how Microsoft can be more ambitious now? It's a great question. Um, I [00:29:00] think, um- I think the, the thing in these type of transitions is to have a conceptual model of how work can change to go after outcomes that you could hardly imagine previously, right?In fact, Kevin Scott has this nice line, right, which is, um, when you can make the impossible... Like, when you're making hard things easier, that's sort of one point of leverage. But true ambition is about making the impossible possible. So now the thing that is missing a little bit in all of our organizations is what is that new conceptual model of what can we build?What was impossible and what can we build? And I'll give you one example of this, right, which is I take great inspiration from sort of the people who were managing the Azure net- network. And they came to the... This was from even last year. You know, we were scaling. You saw that I, I [00:30:00] talked about sort of how we built in the last 15 months more Azure capacity than we built in the first 15 years.I mean, it's crazy. Wild. Yeah. Right? It's pretty wild. And it's the same team. So they saw that and they said, “Bob, this just ain't gonna work if we don't reconceptualize our work.” So they built... Essentially they said, “Our job is not to do Azure networking. Our job is to build the agentic system does, that, that does Azure networking,” right?These are the folks managing the 500-plus fiber operators managing the VAN, right, all over. And fiber operations ultimately is a physical operation. Things get cut, things get, uh, you know, have to be repaired. You know, we have fancy words called DevOps and so on. Basically, emails are coming in and you gotta go respond to them, take care of it.So they built this agentic system. They even have a character for it. It's called Miles, and it sort of does all this stuff, right? They started sort of screaming for more tokens and so on. And so they were saying, “Look, uh, we don't need a headcount. We need tokens in order to be able to [00:31:00] manage, uh, our operation.”That reconceptualization- Mm-hmm ... of what their work is, right? They, they basically took their work and made it meta, right? That meta work is now their new work. Mm-hmm. Right? In the ‘80s, if somebody had come to us and said, “4 billion people are gonna get up in the morning and start typing,” my model would've been, we need 4 billion typists?But we're not doing typing, we're doing knowledge work. So that, to me, I think is it, right, which is whether it's Microsoft or whether it's any organization, is to give ourselves permission to do new types of metacognition, meta work, using these new tools to change the outputs that matter, uh, and then really make the impossible possible.Sarah Guo: So completing that dot or the, the connective tissue across those, I think, is where a lot of the enterprise value will get created.Data Center Build-Out & Community ImpactSarah Guo: Should we talk about data centers? Yeah, please ask. Oh, okay. Well, uh, uh, w- we-- this leads nicely into the data center build-up. I always think, I- I just-- I'm just impressed at the sheer scale of the [00:32:00] build-out from Microsoft, but also everyone else, that this is redefining what it means to be a hyperscaler.And I just feel like that, that, that is at unprecedented scale on finances, uh, on the way you run the company, but also the communities that are, that are impacted. Um, yeah, just talk a bit more about what you're seeing on the ground, like when you visit your- Yeah, I think there are two aspects of it.Satya Nadella: Obviously, the, the build-out is, uh, extraordinary. Um, you know, nothing like this has happened, and it's great to be, uh, one of the participants in it. Uh, but you brought up the other part, right? I think at this point it's clear that unless we as an industry, uh, are very principled about ensuring that the benefits of all the stuff we're talking about are felt in real ways, uh, at the community level, right?Because this is not just a, a campaign, um, right? It has to be real, where people are saying, “Look, this is not ch- changing the prices on energy for me.” In fact, if anything, it's bringing down prices because long term there's going to be a better [00:33:00] grid, there is going to be more energy. Water consumption is, in fact, not sort of, uh...In fact, water is being replenished, right? You gotta really, you know, educate folks on truly what's happening, the cl- uh, the closed loop systems we are building. We have to invest in the training, the jobs, the tax base. In fact, the least talked about stuff is the amount of jobs that get created during construction, after construction.What's the tax base that's there in the community? And, and all this has to be real. Um, and, and if that is the case, then we will have permission. If it is not, we won't have permission. It's as simple as that, right? Which is, uh, we, we... I think we have to take it as an industry pretty seriously. Uh, I think it's good for communities to be skeptical, ask the hard questions, for us to do the hard work, earn that.Um, but at the end of the day, if there's-- if we can really be the produ-- Wait. I've always felt like in human history, if you use a lot of energy but also create a lot of value for society- The story has been fantastic. If you don't [00:34:00] do that, it's not been that great. And this time around, I'm a firm believer that ultimately if you do have a token economy that drives productivity, that drives economic growth, that drives broad spread, um, you know, participation, better health outcomes, um, then I think we'll be in a great place.Sarah Guo: Uh, and that's at least what we all have to be focused on. Yeah. It, it makes me think actually that with all these initiatives that you're doing, might be e- easier to see ROI in the communities first before in enterprise. Yeah. I, I mean, I think both sides. Yeah. In fact, it comes back together. It has to be the people in the communities are going to be employed, are going to be participants, uh, in the real economy, right?Satya Nadella: That's I think the question is. Like, if we- if the broad economy is doing well and the communities are doing well, the dots get connected. It's sort of the market forces are such that we will connect the dots. And that I think is it. Like, you ought to be able to see the evidence. You can't be about o- any one company, uh, but it has to be broad economic growth and broad [00:35:00] ec- you know, community permission.Elad Gil: Yeah. I guess I wanna talk aboutSocietal Impact & Optimism About AIElad Gil: what you're most optimistic about currently or what have you most updated your personal models on regarding societal impact of AI? So you're saying what's the, the, the- What have you updated most on in terms of societal impact of AI? Yeah. I think the, um, the p- the most, um- Critical thing is the first question we even started with, which is we need to tell the story and make it real that everybody has a real shot to participate as a first-class participant in this new economy.Satya Nadella: Right? That's kind of, I think we- in the next 12 months, 18 months, we need a way for people to say, “Oh, wow, I get it.” Right? There's going to be tremendous capability, tremendous amount of infrastructure, but I can see what is going to happen, whether it's the benefits like health outcomes or my ability to create a startup or my ability to run my [00:36:00] local sort of, uh, store more efficiently.It's just happening, and I see that, uh, benefit myself, right? That to me, you know, earning that permission in a path-dependent way, we can't wait. See, the one thing, Eli, that I've now learned is I think the world is gonna be very skeptical of tech and tech companies that say, “Trust us, we've got it. The g- future is gonna be glorious.”Sarah Guo: Uh, you kind of have to deliver tangible benefits. Um, and quite frankly, politicians winning elections, uh, because they have advocated for that. That will be at least my adjustment because without it, um, thinking that somehow... Because it's too important this time around. It's too much of the economy for it not to be the case So one very simple framework I have for, you know, what are, what is gonna be the broad benefit of AI, um, beyond the communities just working in technology, are, are sort of wealth creation- Yepit's [00:37:00] gonna happen in a ton of different companies, startups and large companies. Then you have healthcare. Uh, you, you had amazing demos today. There are companies like Open Evidence. I think that is happening. Um,Education & Future of LearningSarah Guo: education seems like another one that's an- Yep ... obvious good where we haven't seen as much impact as I'd expect.Swyx: Do you have a hypothesis on why that might be, or if it'll come? Yeah, I mean, I think this is where, again, how we think about education, how... You know, recently I met with, uh, the founders of Alpha School and learnt a lot about what they were going and going about, and it's fascinating to listen, uh, to how to even rethink- MmSatya Nadella: uh, what does education really look like. Because I think it's actually very important. Mm. Uh, and I'm not saying anything traditionally being done is less important, right? I was even looking at the, uh... It's fascinating to see. I, I, I forget the which Stanford class it was, uh, the, the Asian guidelines for CS something.Mm. Uh, because you still need people to learn. Uh, like it was an interesting AI class that they were making sure people were learning how to apply softmax appropriately versus saying, “Hey, fix my training run.” Mm-hmm. Uh, so I think learning concepts is important. It's going to [00:38:00] be, uh, critical. But the way we create the incentives, what are the credentials, how we value those credentials, what is the employment opportunity for those credentials?So I think that there's a complete change that has to happen, uh, given the way to get to information, way to educate yourself, way to continuously keep yourself updated has changed so much. So I think interestingly enough, maybe the next big startup and success story could be someone who builds a new university, um, or a new, um, pedagogy even of how to get someone to go through a curriculum and find economic opportunity, uh, that's highly valuable.Well, that has felt, uh, perhaps impossible for a long time, but it's a great note to end on and something that might be possible. It's still possible. Yeah. Thank you, Satya. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate it. Thank you all. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe

Today I want to talk about something that quietly landed in Canada earlier this year that I think deserves a lot more attention than it's been getting in real estate circles. CMHC — that's Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation — has released what they're calling the Housing Design Catalogue.And while it might sound like a government bureaucrat's PowerPoint project, I actually think this is more significant than most developers are giving it credit for.Now, here's where I want to zoom out and ask a bigger question. Could this model work beyond Canada?---------------**Real Estate Espresso Podcast:** Spotify: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](https://open.spotify.com/show/3GvtwRmTq4r3es8cbw8jW0?si=c75ea506a6694ef1)   iTunes: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-real-estate-espresso-podcast/id1340482613)   Website: [www.victorjm.com](http://www.victorjm.com)   LinkedIn: [Victor Menasce](http://www.linkedin.com/in/vmenasce)   YouTube: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](http://www.youtube.com/@victorjmenasce6734)   Facebook: [www.facebook.com/realestateespresso](http://www.facebook.com/realestateespresso)   Email: [podcast@victorjm.com](mailto:podcast@victorjm.com)  **Y Street Capital:** Website: [www.ystreetcapital.com](http://www.ystreetcapital.com)   Facebook: [www.facebook.com/YStreetCapital](https://www.facebook.com/YStreetCapital)   Instagram: [@ystreetcapital](http://www.instagram.com/ystreetcapital)  

Maria Skvortsova: The Team That Gave Up — When Green Reports Mask a Sinking Ship Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.   "They said, 'Yeah, we know, but no one will listen to us.' And they just gave up — waiting for the ship to sink so they could swim away." — Maria Skvortsova   Maria walked into a 20-person migration team where the PowerPoint reports glowed green but the reality on the ground was covered in red flags. Developers were building features against requirements that had already changed — nobody had told them. The scope was impossibly large, and when Maria asked the team why they hadn't raised a red flag, the answer shook her: "No one will listen to us." The team had given up. They were waiting for the project to fail so they could leave. Maria's first instinct was to observe — spend weeks understanding the dynamics, the communication patterns, the culture. But she learned the hard way that when a team is already drowning, there's no time for a slow ramp-up. She needed to act immediately. Her breakthrough came from a simple technique: replacing some daily standups with an async RAG (Red-Amber-Green) status system in Jira. Team members just chose a color for each story — no explanation needed. It gave them psychological safety to signal problems without speaking up in a 20-person meeting. From there, Maria broke the team into smaller cross-functional groups — one QA, one developer, one consultant — so they could actually discuss features instead of hiding behind silence.   In this episode, we refer to Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem. Also check out the episode with Barry and Christiaan, authors of the book, on the podcast.   Self-reflection Question: When you join a new team and sense that something is deeply wrong, how long do you wait before acting — and is that waiting period serving the team or just your own comfort? Featured Book of the Week: Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem Maria chose Zombie Scrum Survival Guide because, as she puts it, "Most Scrum Masters learn by the happy path. We all know how it should be. But we rarely think about how it should not be." The book focuses on detecting anti-patterns early — before they become entrenched behaviors that are much harder to break. Maria finds it especially valuable because it provides concrete experiments you can try with your team to shake off the zombie symptoms. Her advice: start here, because understanding what bad looks like is just as important as knowing the ideal.   [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Episode 247: Unlock the power of PowerPoint in ways you may not have imagined. In this episode, Troy, Sandy, and Nolan are joined by Amanda Dalton, a seasoned graphic designer turned presentation and instructional design expert, to explore how PowerPoint can be a central tool for presentation design, video creation, and instructional storytelling.   In today's ever-evolving world of digital communication, few tools are as versatile, or as underestimated, as PowerPoint. Amanda shares her professional journey and offers insights into how she leverages PowerPoint alongside other tools to create impactful stories, engaging training content, and dynamic visual experiences.   Plus, CreativePro Week 2026 is just weeks away! Amanda is one of the presenter at this year's conference, and we are fortunate to have David Blatner, Director of CreativePro, preview what to expect at this year's Nashville event. Listen now!   Full Episode Show Notes https://thepresentationpodcast.com/2026/e247   Show Suggestions? Questions for your Hosts? Email us at: info@thepresentationpodcast.com   Listen and review on iTunes. Thanks! http://apple.co/1ROGCUq   New Episodes 1st and 3rd Tuesday Every Month  

Show Notes: Mehdi Frikha, founder at  mzx.ai, explains that mzx.ai builds a crew of agents for all knowledge workers, including colleagues in the Umbrex network.  Generating Brand Proposals from RFPs He introduces the first agent, Hector, which generates brand proposals from RFPs or client pitches, from as little as half a page of information. He explains that you input your output language, preferences about proposal approach, the target, the tone etc. Users can include their own PowerPoint template,  and the agent will provide a proposal that is 100% branded and 100% compliant with context, objectives, and the firm's approach. Integrating Firm Knowledge Mehdi mentions that the product is more targeted towards the European and Middle Eastern markets, where long proposals are common. He confirms that the agent can integrate the firm's knowledge, CVs, credentials, and any proprietary databases to generate a full proposal. The final product is fully branded and can be up to 40-50 pages, including all necessary elements to win the RFP or project.  Demonstrating the PowerPoint Output Mehdi demonstrates the 41-slide PowerPoint output, which is a technical proposal for an economic development strategy for AIDO(Abu Dhabi Investment Office) and offers to make the  41-slide PowerPoint output available for viewers. He explains how users simply send the request to the agent. The agent delivers a comprehensive 41 slide presentation based on the information sent.  Mehdi demonstrates how the agent presents the context and objectives of the project including the importance of AI in translating Abu Dhabi's national ambitions into localized investment. The proposal includes global benchmarks, structural drivers, competitive windows, and institutional timing. The proposal also addresses economic and market risks, environmental spatial constraints, and demographic and talent challenges. Structuring the Proposal Mehdi explains that the overall approach to the project is laid out in phases, which can be customized based on the RFP or the firm's preferences. The agent can provide guidance on the structure of the approach, including the number of phases and steps. The detailed version of the approach in this demonstration is 11 pages and can be used as a more detailed project plan. Agent Attention to Detail  Mehdi highlights the attention to detail, including real bullets, semantic selection of icons that reflect the content of the page, and consultant-compliant quality. Mehdi mentions that the agent can be trained to include details such as a placeholder slide for pricing or investment, and any necessary disclaimers in the proposal  in the future. Mehdi introduces the next agent, which translates PowerPoint presentations automatically, including complex slides with timelines and Gantt charts. He demonstrates the translation feature, which translates slides and injects the content in the right place, including right-to-left languages and timelines that read right to left. It has the ability to mirror complex slides and the potential time-saving benefits. Mehdi shows how the platform can generate research reports on any topic, using the request for an overview of nuclear submarine coolant pumps as an example. The Platform Pricing Structure In the demonstration of the third agent, Mehdi explains that the entry subscription will be $20, allowing 120 slides. Enterprise offers will be available for firms that want to deploy the platform in a private cloud, ensuring data security. Mehdi provides the website for sign-up and mentions that there is a closed beta available for interested users, and he mentions that there are many agents in development and invites feedback from Umbrex members for new product ideas. Timestamps: 01:51: Details of Hector's Proposal Generation  03:47: Examination of the Proposal Example  05:34: Customization and Detailed Approach 08:56: Additional Features and Pricing 11:04: Translation and Research Report Generation  20:00 Future Developments and Pricing Structure  Links:   Website: https://mzx.ai/ Proposal permalink: https://umbrex.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Proposal_example_Economic_Development_Strategy_for_Al_Dhafra_Region_English.pptx Report permalink: https://umbrex.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Report_example_Nuclear_submarine_reactor_pump_manufacturers_overview.pptx This episode on Umbrex: https://umbrex.com/?p=287037 Unleashed is produced by Umbrex, which has a mission of connecting independent management consultants with one another, creating opportunities for members to meet, build relationships, and share lessons learned. Learn more at www.umbrex.com. *AI generated timestamps and show notes.  

Are you a business owner feeling like the biggest bottleneck in your own company? Do you dream of financial freedom but find yourself buried in 20−an−hourtasks?InthisinsightfulepisodeoftheSpeakingPodcast,wesitdownwithBlazMarolt,anex−militaryofficerandWestPointgraduatewhohastransitionedhishigh−stakesleadershipexperienceintoamissionforbusinesssystematization.Blazhelpsentrepreneursscalingpastthe20-an-hour tasks? In this insightful episode of the Speaking Podcast, we sit down with Blaz Marolt, an ex-military officer and West Point graduate who has transitioned his high-stakes leadership experience into a mission for business systematization. Blaz helps entrepreneurs scaling past the 20−an−hourtasks?InthisinsightfulepisodeoftheSpeakingPodcast,wesitdownwithBlazMarolt,anex−militaryofficerandWestPointgraduatewhohastransitionedhishigh−stakesleadershipexperienceintoamissionforbusinesssystematization.Blazhelpsentrepreneursscalingpastthe500k mark to build robust operational infrastructures, allowing them to stay in their "zone of genius." We discuss the "two-week vacation test," the 80/20 rule of profitability, and why even the most successful companies often operate in a state of hidden chaos. Whether you're a solopreneur or leading a team of 20, Blaz provides actionable strategies to fix your systems, empower your team, and finally achieve the freedom you started your business for.     Timestamps Timestamp Topic Description 0:00 Welcome & Introduction to Blaz Marolt 0:45 Blaz's Mission: Helping business owners stay in their zone of genius 1:56 The Bottleneck Founder: Why things break down after $500k 2:43 Military Roots: Graduating from West Point and the Slovenian Military 3:42 Transitioning to Business: Boosting production by 50% in electronics 4:34 The IT Leap: Getting hired with only Excel, PowerPoint, and Word skills 5:21 Scaling a Food Delivery Giant: Growing 59x in the Balkans 6:22 The Chief of Staff Role: Doubling revenue for a US coaching company 7:03 The Young Founder Challenge: Overcoming perceptions in leadership 8:16 Military vs. Business Organization: The shocking reality of corporate chaos 9:53 The 80/20 Rule in Sales: Identifying loss-makers vs. profit-makers 11:37 Minimum Order Quantities: Why selling 100 components can be a disaster 12:54 Educating the Sales Team: Making them suffer through the production process 14:13 The Key Person Risk: Why your business shouldn't depend on one individual 15:52 The Soviet Machine Analogy: Planning for capacity and quality 31:19 The 250-Page SOP Trap: Why simple, one-page processes win 33:05 AI in Business: Using it as an assistant, not a replacement for thinking 35:01 The Amazon AI Mistake: Why quality assessment still requires humans 38:42 The 90-Day Operational Audit: What to expect in the first three months 40:53 Educating Employees: Why change management takes longer than system setup 42:52 The 20-Time Rule: Why you have to repeat instructions to be heard 60:42 Blaz's Final Advice: Defining your goals as a founder 61:16 Where to Find Blaz: LinkedIn and networking conversations 61:42 Outro: RoyCoughlan.com and the PodFather Network      

By Mario Seiglie - The life of Nehemiah is examined to understand seven spiritual leadership qualities he exeplified during the rebuilding of Jerusalem. The first four qualities were given in Part One; here, in a PowerPoint Presentation, are the last three qualities. Download the PowerPoint to view in a separate tab

This week, we discuss the Cloudflare CEO's op-ed, upcoming tech IPOs and GitHub getting breached. Plus, ranking our favorite manifestos. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 573 Runner-up Titles We're not making money so we can't put in place the enshitification strategy. Go easy on the AI I hope they're not using PowerPoint in the Vatican I didn't' come here to talk about the Pope I should take more showers I came to measure and chew bubblegum Matt Ray Dalio is not a wave rider. Usability golf No dependencies, no problems Peak Software We are a safe haven for measures Tools and Rules Rundown Layoffs How do AI Layoffs Work? Some Speculation. How I Choose Which Cloudflare Employees to Replace With AI Revenue and IPO Anthropic is paying SpaceX $15 billion per year OpenAI Prepares to File to Go Public in Coming Weeks SpaceX TAM - $28.5 trillion. US GDP - $31 trillion. GitHub Got Hacked. The AI Security Arms Race is Here NHS Pulls OSS Wiz + Anthropic: Claude Enterprise Meets the Security Graph | Wiz Blog Relevant to your Interests Grafana breach caused by missed token rotation after TanStack attack Introducing UniFi 5G Backup SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought Microsoft admits its "infuriating" floating AI button was a mistake Microsoft admits forcing the floating Copilot button on Office users was a mistake—but engagement went up anyway IBM and U.S. Department of Commerce Announce America's First Purpose-Built Quantum Foundry, Supported by Proposed $1 Billion CHIPS Award Microsoft open-sources "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date" Blackstone and Google launch $5B TPU cloud venture with 500MW of AI capacity What It Takes to Preserve Floppy Disks U.S. companies have an AI problem. Indian IT wants to be the solution Audio-generation app Huxe, founded by former NotebookLM developers, shuts down Spotify adds AI-powered Q&A and briefing generation features to podcasts Sponsors Sentry - Quit Buggin': use code sdt26 for $100 in credit for new customers Nonsense GE's nugget ice maker is nearly half off if you buy it refurbished Watch: Drones crash into water after Sydney light show malfunction America the Tasty: The Best Breakfast in Every State Listener Feedback Jason built the DepartTime App iPhone App Conferences VMware User Group, Dallas, June 9-11, 2026 WeAreDevelopers Europe, July 8-10, 2026 Berlin, Coté speaking. DevOpsDays Graz, Sept 4-5, 2026 DevOpsDays Rockies, Sept. 22 – 23, 2026, Discount Code: 26DODSWEDEFTALK WeAreDevelopers NA, Sept 23-25, 2026, Discount Code: DEVPOD26 25 Free Tickets DevOpsDays Dallas, Sept 28-29, 2026 DevOpsDays Vilnius, Sep 30 - Oct 1, 2006 DevOpsDays Istanbul, Oct 24th, 2026 , Coté keynoting. VMware User Group, Orlando, Oct 20-22, 2026 SDT News & Community Join our Slack community Email the show: questions@softwaredefinedtalk.com Free stickers: Email your address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com Follow us on social media: Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky Watch us on: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok Book offer: Use code SDT for $20 off "Digital WTF" by Coté Sponsor the show Sponsor more podcasts with Failover Media Recommendations Brandon: Trek Austin Matt: VESA Coté: AI-Generated Summaries Table for Two Slim Daddy's Repair

In this episode of Pricing Heroes, we speak with Andreas Stauber, Founder and Managing Director of Resilient Value, a pricing consultancy focused on value-based pricing strategy and implementation. Andreas shares how his background at the intersection of business and IT shaped his approach to pricing, and explains why effective pricing depends not only on strategy and systems, but also on governance, data quality, change management, and execution discipline.Key Topics:Why pricing remains one of the most underestimated profit levers in business How pricing complexity builds through exceptions, special cases, and unmanaged discounting Building pricing strategies that reflect company values while reducing unnecessary complexity Why pricing initiatives often break down after the design phase How to build centralized pricing capabilities through diagnosis, executive alignment, and early prototypes What value-based pricing requires beyond PowerPoint frameworks and theoretical value maps Where AI pricing delivers value today, and why human oversight remains essential Recommended Resources:Books by Hermann Simon Impact Pricing by Mark Stiving Professional Pricing Society European Pricing Platform Pricing clubs and peer communities for pricing professionals Connect with Andreas Stauber on LinkedIn.Get in touch with us----------Get your free copy of Get Ready for the Future Of Pricing with our A-Z Guide.For more information about AI pricing solutions, check out our Corporate sponsor Competera.ai.

Paul has been testing various Linux distributions and other Windows alternatives for months as part of a Switcher series. The zen of Linux can mostly apply to Windows, too: Install and manage software with package managers, and embrace the command line, especially. And if you're going to use a local account, at least be smart about it. Also, Vivaldi 8.0 looks awesome and appears to deliver what Firefox is promising with its Nova UI. Plus, Discord has a native app for Windows 11 on Arm now. Windows Week D arrives with a surprise: 24H2/26H1 are aligned and getting the same new features Shared audio with BT LE, multi-app camera support, many improvements - but the big deal may be the performance and reliability improvements across the board This is the next Patch Tuesday, today Friday builds - new accessibility features in Experimental and Beta, more Microsoft CMO Yusuf Mehdi to leave company after an astonishing 35-year run - started in Windows, but with IE, Bing & MSN, Interactive Entertainment (Xbox), Windows and Devices, and then a SLT position before the end. Incredible run. Paul has three milestones and one throughline to share. Lenovo revenues surge 27 percent to $21.6 billion NVIDIA revenues really surged 85 percent to $81.6 billion AI/dev Google adds Google Drive sync to NotebookLM, and moves preferred sources into AI Mode and AI Overviews Saying no to AI: DuckDuckGo usage surges in the wake of Google I/O's AI tsunami OpenAI releases ChatGPT plugin for PowerPoint .NET MAUI to get Material You support for Android in .NET 10 Follow-up on last week's vibe coding adventures: Paul talked about this last week, but a lot has happened since then. The Android app creation capability in Google AI Studio is live. A few thoughts on vibe coding with Android Studio, Claude Code, and more Xbox and gaming XBOX—and, yes, it's XBOX now—has an official merchandise store to go alongside all its other official merchandise stores The Steam Deck is back in stock! Also, it's 40 percent more expensive Tips & picks Tip of the week: Understanding the zen of Linux can help a Windows user too App pick of the week: A grab-bag of apps for Windows RunAs Radio this week: Team Productivity using Loop with Karinne Bessette Brown liquor pick of the week: John Sleeman & Sons Rye Whisky Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365 webroot.com/twit

Paul has been testing various Linux distributions and other Windows alternatives for months as part of a Switcher series. The zen of Linux can mostly apply to Windows, too: Install and manage software with package managers, and embrace the command line, especially. And if you're going to use a local account, at least be smart about it. Also, Vivaldi 8.0 looks awesome and appears to deliver what Firefox is promising with its Nova UI. Plus, Discord has a native app for Windows 11 on Arm now. Windows Week D arrives with a surprise: 24H2/26H1 are aligned and getting the same new features Shared audio with BT LE, multi-app camera support, many improvements - but the big deal may be the performance and reliability improvements across the board This is the next Patch Tuesday, today Friday builds - new accessibility features in Experimental and Beta, more Microsoft CMO Yusuf Mehdi to leave company after an astonishing 35-year run - started in Windows, but with IE, Bing & MSN, Interactive Entertainment (Xbox), Windows and Devices, and then a SLT position before the end. Incredible run. Paul has three milestones and one throughline to share. Lenovo revenues surge 27 percent to $21.6 billion NVIDIA revenues really surged 85 percent to $81.6 billion AI/dev Google adds Google Drive sync to NotebookLM, and moves preferred sources into AI Mode and AI Overviews Saying no to AI: DuckDuckGo usage surges in the wake of Google I/O's AI tsunami OpenAI releases ChatGPT plugin for PowerPoint .NET MAUI to get Material You support for Android in .NET 10 Follow-up on last week's vibe coding adventures: Paul talked about this last week, but a lot has happened since then. The Android app creation capability in Google AI Studio is live. A few thoughts on vibe coding with Android Studio, Claude Code, and more Xbox and gaming XBOX—and, yes, it's XBOX now—has an official merchandise store to go alongside all its other official merchandise stores The Steam Deck is back in stock! Also, it's 40 percent more expensive Tips & picks Tip of the week: Understanding the zen of Linux can help a Windows user too App pick of the week: A grab-bag of apps for Windows RunAs Radio this week: Team Productivity using Loop with Karinne Bessette Brown liquor pick of the week: John Sleeman & Sons Rye Whisky Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365 webroot.com/twit

Today on PowerPoint, Pastor Jack Graham concludes the second part of the series, “Choices,” taken from the book of Proverbs, which is God's way to success through wisdom. In the message “Choosing Success Over Failure,” Pastor Graham teaches that when we choose God's way, or God's wisdom, we always choose success over failure. To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/395/29?v=20251111

Send us Fan MailMost new consultants walk in with work style blind spots they can't see – and their managers notice before they do.In this episode, Namaan – COO of Management Consulted – breaks down his framework for owning your first 90 days in consulting: how to identify your blind spots, read your manager, and carry yourself like someone who's been doing this for years.You'll learn:What your manager actually cares about (hint: it's not how hard you work)The 3 work styles that get consultants in trouble earlyHow to communicate answer-first and show executive presence from week 1Resources:Build your Excel and PowerPoint skills before day 1 with MC's flagship courseIs your team moving decisions or just moving slides? MC Executive Presentation TrainingFree Consulting Prep Just Got a Whole Lot BetterCreate a free MC account for access to step-by-step learning pathways, a brand new case prep course, and more. Download the MC app to prep anywhere.Connect With Management ConsultedCreate a free MC account or download the MC app (Apple, Android) to start your prep todaySchedule a free 15min consultation with the MC TeamWatch the video version of the podcast on YouTubeFollow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTokJoin an upcoming live event – case interviews demos, expert panels, and more

Paul has been testing various Linux distributions and other Windows alternatives for months as part of a Switcher series. The zen of Linux can mostly apply to Windows, too: Install and manage software with package managers, and embrace the command line, especially. And if you're going to use a local account, at least be smart about it. Also, Vivaldi 8.0 looks awesome and appears to deliver what Firefox is promising with its Nova UI. Plus, Discord has a native app for Windows 11 on Arm now. Windows Week D arrives with a surprise: 24H2/26H1 are aligned and getting the same new features Shared audio with BT LE, multi-app camera support, many improvements - but the big deal may be the performance and reliability improvements across the board This is the next Patch Tuesday, today Friday builds - new accessibility features in Experimental and Beta, more Microsoft CMO Yusuf Mehdi to leave company after an astonishing 35-year run - started in Windows, but with IE, Bing & MSN, Interactive Entertainment (Xbox), Windows and Devices, and then a SLT position before the end. Incredible run. Paul has three milestones and one throughline to share. Lenovo revenues surge 27 percent to $21.6 billion NVIDIA revenues really surged 85 percent to $81.6 billion AI/dev Google adds Google Drive sync to NotebookLM, and moves preferred sources into AI Mode and AI Overviews Saying no to AI: DuckDuckGo usage surges in the wake of Google I/O's AI tsunami OpenAI releases ChatGPT plugin for PowerPoint .NET MAUI to get Material You support for Android in .NET 10 Follow-up on last week's vibe coding adventures: Paul talked about this last week, but a lot has happened since then. The Android app creation capability in Google AI Studio is live. A few thoughts on vibe coding with Android Studio, Claude Code, and more Xbox and gaming XBOX—and, yes, it's XBOX now—has an official merchandise store to go alongside all its other official merchandise stores The Steam Deck is back in stock! Also, it's 40 percent more expensive Tips & picks Tip of the week: Understanding the zen of Linux can help a Windows user too App pick of the week: A grab-bag of apps for Windows RunAs Radio this week: Team Productivity using Loop with Karinne Bessette Brown liquor pick of the week: John Sleeman & Sons Rye Whisky Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365 webroot.com/twit

Paul has been testing various Linux distributions and other Windows alternatives for months as part of a Switcher series. The zen of Linux can mostly apply to Windows, too: Install and manage software with package managers, and embrace the command line, especially. And if you're going to use a local account, at least be smart about it. Also, Vivaldi 8.0 looks awesome and appears to deliver what Firefox is promising with its Nova UI. Plus, Discord has a native app for Windows 11 on Arm now. Windows Week D arrives with a surprise: 24H2/26H1 are aligned and getting the same new features Shared audio with BT LE, multi-app camera support, many improvements - but the big deal may be the performance and reliability improvements across the board This is the next Patch Tuesday, today Friday builds - new accessibility features in Experimental and Beta, more Microsoft CMO Yusuf Mehdi to leave company after an astonishing 35-year run - started in Windows, but with IE, Bing & MSN, Interactive Entertainment (Xbox), Windows and Devices, and then a SLT position before the end. Incredible run. Paul has three milestones and one throughline to share. Lenovo revenues surge 27 percent to $21.6 billion NVIDIA revenues really surged 85 percent to $81.6 billion AI/dev Google adds Google Drive sync to NotebookLM, and moves preferred sources into AI Mode and AI Overviews Saying no to AI: DuckDuckGo usage surges in the wake of Google I/O's AI tsunami OpenAI releases ChatGPT plugin for PowerPoint .NET MAUI to get Material You support for Android in .NET 10 Follow-up on last week's vibe coding adventures: Paul talked about this last week, but a lot has happened since then. The Android app creation capability in Google AI Studio is live. A few thoughts on vibe coding with Android Studio, Claude Code, and more Xbox and gaming XBOX—and, yes, it's XBOX now—has an official merchandise store to go alongside all its other official merchandise stores The Steam Deck is back in stock! Also, it's 40 percent more expensive Tips & picks Tip of the week: Understanding the zen of Linux can help a Windows user too App pick of the week: A grab-bag of apps for Windows RunAs Radio this week: Team Productivity using Loop with Karinne Bessette Brown liquor pick of the week: John Sleeman & Sons Rye Whisky Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365 webroot.com/twit

This week on the podcast, we welcome Heather Stefanski, Chief Learning and Development Officer at McKinsey & Company. We explore how organizations like McKinsey are reimagining employee development for the age of AI, shifting learning into the flow of work, focusing on systems and purposeful apprenticeships, and embedding L&D directly into workflow design. You'll also hear all about the evolving skill sets for L&D teams and the importance of updating how we measure development. You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...00:00 Integrating development into AI assistants04:49 Heather's role at McKinsey08:32 Developing skills in the workplace16:08 Designing developmental workflows with AI24:56 Understanding skill proficiency levels26:25 Building agentic development solutions30:53 Assessing AI proficiency levels33:18 Future skills focus at McKinsey42:55 AI in performance evaluations53:13 Using AI for feedback and reviewRethinking Language: Why Development Surpasses TrainingOne of the first shifts Heather Stefanski identifies is a deliberate move away from talking about “training” or even just “learning.” Instead, McKinsey centers its L&D strategy on development, a more holistic approach that encompasses formal programs, feedback mechanisms, leadership modeling, and real-time experiences in the flow of work.For McKinsey, development is inseparable from business outcomes, and employee development is critical to the firm's value proposition. This means McKinsey designs work intentionally to be developmental, combining upskilling, leadership building, and project experiences into a seamless ecosystem.Purposeful ApprenticeshipHeather discusses embedding rituals, such as performance check-ins and feedback sessions, directly into core workflows to build a system grounded in purposeful practices. By standardizing these rituals, McKinsey can even quantify the impact of great teachers on advancement, and L&D becomes part of organizational culture rather than a siloed function.The New Learning Tech StackOne of the most exciting transformations is McKinsey's ongoing work to blend learning seamlessly into technology-enabled workflows. Rather than relying solely on traditional LMS platforms, McKinsey is embedding learning designers into business teams that are building agentic workflows—AI-powered systems that guide, prompt, and provide real-time feedback as employees work.AI agents are being designed to do more than just increase productivity. Heather emphasizes that agents should also foster professional development by challenging users, prompting reflective questions, and offering immediate coaching. This shift pushes L&D professionals to evolve their skills, requiring fluency not just in instructional design but in data analysis and collaborative workflow engineering.What Skills Do Employees Still Need?As AI tools automate routine tasks, think aligning PowerPoint columns or data cleanup, McKinsey is strategically deciding what to stop teaching, redirecting focus to what keeps the firm distinctive: problem solving, judgment, metacognition, systems thinking, and authentic leadership. Purposeful abandonment of now-obsolete skills is as vital as doubling down on those that matter, ensuring development keeps pace with the shifting demands of knowledge work. Resources & People MentionedLisa Christensen on LinkedIn mckinsey.comCursorCLO Lift Group Connect with Heather StefanskiHeather Stefanski at McKinsey & Company Heather Stefanski on LinkedIn Connect With RedThread ResearchWebsite: RedThread ResearchOn LinkedInSubscribe to WORKPLACE STORIES

Paul has been testing various Linux distributions and other Windows alternatives for months as part of a Switcher series. The zen of Linux can mostly apply to Windows, too: Install and manage software with package managers, and embrace the command line, especially. And if you're going to use a local account, at least be smart about it. Also, Vivaldi 8.0 looks awesome and appears to deliver what Firefox is promising with its Nova UI. Plus, Discord has a native app for Windows 11 on Arm now. Windows Week D arrives with a surprise: 24H2/26H1 are aligned and getting the same new features Shared audio with BT LE, multi-app camera support, many improvements - but the big deal may be the performance and reliability improvements across the board This is the next Patch Tuesday, today Friday builds - new accessibility features in Experimental and Beta, more Microsoft CMO Yusuf Mehdi to leave company after an astonishing 35-year run - started in Windows, but with IE, Bing & MSN, Interactive Entertainment (Xbox), Windows and Devices, and then a SLT position before the end. Incredible run. Paul has three milestones and one throughline to share. Lenovo revenues surge 27 percent to $21.6 billion NVIDIA revenues really surged 85 percent to $81.6 billion AI/dev Google adds Google Drive sync to NotebookLM, and moves preferred sources into AI Mode and AI Overviews Saying no to AI: DuckDuckGo usage surges in the wake of Google I/O's AI tsunami OpenAI releases ChatGPT plugin for PowerPoint .NET MAUI to get Material You support for Android in .NET 10 Follow-up on last week's vibe coding adventures: Paul talked about this last week, but a lot has happened since then. The Android app creation capability in Google AI Studio is live. A few thoughts on vibe coding with Android Studio, Claude Code, and more Xbox and gaming XBOX—and, yes, it's XBOX now—has an official merchandise store to go alongside all its other official merchandise stores The Steam Deck is back in stock! Also, it's 40 percent more expensive Tips & picks Tip of the week: Understanding the zen of Linux can help a Windows user too App pick of the week: A grab-bag of apps for Windows RunAs Radio this week: Team Productivity using Loop with Karinne Bessette Brown liquor pick of the week: John Sleeman & Sons Rye Whisky Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365 webroot.com/twit

In this episode, Daniel Yates presented his research on the neuroscience of reptiles. Daniel shared his PowerPoint presentation titled "Learning Science and How to Deal with People for My Reptiles," focusing on the brain anatomy of reptiles and how it compares to human brain structure. He explained key concepts, including the three "humps" of the reptile brain (forebrain, mid brain, and cerebellum), the optic tectum's role in processing visual information, and how different reptile species have adapted their brain structures based on their environments and behaviors. Daniel discussed various studies, including a 40-species analysis and shared his hypothesis about how reptiles perceive and interact with their environments. The conversation also touched on his personal background in science and his approach to studying reptile neuroscience, emphasizing the need for more research in this area.SHOW NOTES: https://www.animalsathomenetwork.com/252-daniel-yates/SPONSORS: Visit The BioDude: https://www.thebiodude.com/ Visit Zoo Med Labs here: https://zoomed.com/JOIN US ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/animalsathomeLINKS FROM THE EPISODE:https://www.youtube.com/@UCETeOch6OVLTC9GQPR3_QhQ PDF DOWNLOAD: https://www.animalsathomenetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Neuroscience-of-Reptiles.pdf

O Google I/O 2026 deixou claro que a inteligência artificial não é mais apenas uma promessa para o futuro, ela já está entrando nos aplicativos, buscas e ferramentas que milhões de pessoas usam todos os dias. No novo episódio do Podcast Canaltech, Marcelo Fischer conversa com André Magalhães, do Canalteh, sobre os principais anúncios do evento mais importante do Google. Entre os destaques estão as novidades do Gemini, agentes de IA capazes de executar tarefas sozinhos, mudanças no Workspace, geração de vídeos por inteligência artificial e até os novos planos do Google para hardware. O episódio também explica por que o Google está mudando a forma como usamos busca, produtividade e até computadores, além de discutir o impacto dessas novidades no Brasil e no mercado de tecnologia nos próximos anos. Você também vai conferir: ChatGPT agora consegue criar e editar apresentações direto no PowerPoint, Operadora cria tradução de ligações em tempo real sem precisar de app e Netflix começa a monitorar atenção dos assinantes durante anúncios. Este podcast foi roteirizado e apresentado por Fernanda Santos e contou com reportagens de André Magalhães, João Melo e Viviane França. A trilha sonora é de Guilherme Zomer, a edição de Livia Strazza e a arte da capa é de Erick Teixeira.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

April 24, 2026 - Equipped 2026 - Day 2 - 10:00 AM Session   In this episode John offers a personal, text-driven tour through the names of God found primarily in Genesis and throughout Scripture, trading a purely academic approach for a pastoral, relational look at who God is. Rather than only cataloguing lexical definitions, John shows how each divine name reveals character, purpose, and a pattern that points forward to Jesus as the fullest revelation of God. Topics covered include the opening name Elohim (God the Creator) in Genesis 1; the tetragrammaton (Yahweh) introduced in Genesis 2 and echoed in Exodus 3:14; titles such as Adonai (Lord), El Elyon (God Most High), El Shaddai (God Almighty), El Roi (the God who sees), and Yahweh Yireh (the Lord who provides). John weaves these names with key biblical passages and images — Paul's road-to-Damascus encounter, Abraham's covenant and the test on Moriah, Hagar's encounter in the wilderness, Melchizedek's blessing in Genesis 14, and New Testament connections in John and Colossians. Key points emphasized are the complementary truths that God is both transcendent (the Creator who speaks the universe into being) and immanent (a hands-on, compassionate God who sees, provides, delivers, and enters human history). Listeners will hear how the names function theologically: as proclamations of sovereignty, as covenant promises, as pastoral comfort for the lonely and afflicted, and as foreshadowings of Christ. Illustrative stories and applications include Paul/Saul's recognition of divine presence, Abraham's faith and obedience, Hagar's encounter with the Angel of the Lord (El Roi), Melchizedek's title “God Most High,” and New Testament scenes where Jesus reveals and embodies the divine “I Am.” John also references a neighbor-turned-Bible-student and a mention of Brother Higginbotham to show how these biblical insights play out in real conversations and ministry. What to expect: a blend of careful exegesis, vivid narrative examples, and pastoral reflection that invites listeners to move beyond knowing God's will to truly knowing God. The episode closes by pointing to Jesus as the ultimate revelation — the Word who was with God and was God — and encourages listeners to study the names of God to deepen love, faith, and devotion. (If you'd like the PowerPoint used in the talk, John offers to share it on request.)   Duration 41:33

By Fred Nance - Jeremiah's Message during the reign of Jehoiakim when there was extreme moral and spiritual decline.

FOLLOW UP: This week, it seems America believes every complicated social problem can be fixed by asking, “Have you tried turning the internet off for the children?” Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation quietly notes that the science behind social media bans might not be as clear-cut as cable-news dads screaming about dopamine loops claim. Turns out, teen anxiety may also be linked to pandemics, school shootings, climate dread, and an economy that feels like a Fallout side quest. Meanwhile, Snap Inc. and YouTube settled another lawsuit accusing their apps of turning kids into doomscrolling goblins, Meta continues to insist social media addiction isn't real while losing money in court, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed at a graduation speech after telling graduates to hop on the AI rocket ship without asking questions — exactly what a billionaire says when he already owns the rocket.In the news, Elon Musk lost another OpenAI lawsuit because apparently even juries have limits. SpaceX's IPO revealed Musk plans to power AI with enough gas turbines to recreate 1890s London smog, and Grok officially became a disclosure liability after the whole “MechaHitler” incident. Tesla robotaxis still clip fences and occasionally require humans to remotely drive the “self-driving” cars. Trump Mobile somehow shipped a gold phone that actually works — a stunning upset — before immediately leaking customer data. LinkedIn finally admitted the platform has become an AI-generated motivational swamp filled with “it's not about X, it's about Y” sludge from people named Brayden. Spotify is handing out podcast verification badges so listeners can tell real creators from algorithmic nightmare fuel. Meta laid off thousands more workers while reportedly using employee surveillance to train AI replacements. And OpenAI is giving everyone in Malta a free year of ChatGPT Plus if they complete an AI literacy course, which honestly makes Malta sound more technologically responsible than Silicon Valley.APPS & DOODADS reflect classic Gen-X paranoia, as Backblaze highlights California's constant threat of wildfires and the idea that local backups are optimistic. YouTube introduced AI deepfake detection tools, allowing creators to finally see which scam ads are using their faces to promote crypto vitamins, while X limited free users to 50 posts a day unless they pay for a blue check — proving once again that the true free speech was the subscriptions we sold along the way. Retrocodex arrived with a strong “everything your teachers confidently told you in 1987 was wrong” vibe.MEDIA CANDY opens with the eternal cry of “FUCK THE FIRETV!!!!” before Jason taps out of Good Omens after ten minutes while Brian takes the bullet for the audience. There's also chatter about Mortal Kombat 2, The Devil Wears Prada 2, Billy Corgan talking goth history with David J, and more existential dread courtesy of Dan Carlin's Common Sense.THE DARK SIDE WITH DAVE welcomes back Dave Bittner for a Mando & Grogu review, Darth Maul, and a stunning but absurdly expensive LEGO Disneyland set. There's also a guy who built a full-size Millennium Falcon “with his wife's permission,” a fan-made Star Tours film, and the Federal Trade Commission discovering that those creepy “your phone is listening to you” ad-tech companies mainly just had PowerPoint decks and confidence. Also: mechanical keyboard simulators now exist, because apparently even fake typing has become a lifestyle brand.Sponsors:DeleteMe - Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to JoinDeleteMe.com/GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout.Shopify - Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at Shopify.com/grumpyPrivate Internet Access - Go to GOG.Show/vpn and sign up today. For a limited time only, you can get OUR favorite VPN for as little as $2.03 a month.SetApp - With a single monthly subscription you get 240+ apps for your Mac. Go to SetApp and get started today!!!1Password - Get a great deal on the only password manager recommended by Grumpy Old Geeks! gog.show/1passwordShow notes at https://gog.show/747Watch on YouTube at https://youtu.be/eX5jVfewaswFOLLOW UPThe Science is Not Settled: How Weak Evidence is Fueling a National Push to Ban Social Media for YouthSnap and YouTube have reportedly settled another major social media addiction lawsuitEx-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Fails to Read Room on AI, Gets Booed into OblivionIN THE NEWSElon Musk took too long to sue OpenAI, jury unanimously agreesSpaceX IPO Filing Reveals Nearly $3 Billion Investment in Gas Turbines for AI Data Centers‘MechaHitler' Is SpaceX's Problem NowTrump Mobile Phone Beats Expectations by Actually ExistingNew crash data highlights the slow progress of Tesla's robotaxisIf You Used Insider Knowledge to Score Big on Polymarket, You May Now Be in Huge TroubleMinnesota passes prediction markets banLinkedIn doesn't want your AI slop anymoreSpotify is launching verification badges for podcasts to help listeners avoid AI slopZuckerberg Tells the Tattered Remainder of His Workers That He Won't Conduct Another a Mass Firing for at Least Seven MonthsOpenAI is offering ChatGPT Plus to citizens of Malta for a yearMassive Crypto ATM Company Bitcoin Depot Is Shutting Down as the Whole Industry Collapses‘Smoke Weed and Earn Bitcoin' With This Vape Pen in Our Increasingly Dystopian Nightmare‘Unstoppable' Crypto Exchange Halts Trading After $10 Million TheftIran Doubles Down on Bitcoin for Ships Passing Through the Straight of HormuzTrump-Linked Crypto Company Notes 'Substantial Doubt' It Can Survive Another 12 MonthsAPPS & DOODADSBackblazeYouTube's AI deepfake detection tool is now available to all creators 18 and olderX accounts are limited to 50 posts and 200 replies a day unless they pay for a blue checkmarkRetrocodexMEDIA CANDYGood Omens Season 3 - The FinaleThe Magnificent Others with Billy Corgan - David J of Bauhaus & Love & RocketsCommon Sense 326 – The Water in Which We SwimTHE DARK SIDE WITH DAVEDave BittnerThe CyberWireHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopOnly Malware in the BuildingMaul: Shadow LordRogue One: A Star Wars StoryNot Even Baby Yoda Can Save ‘Star Wars'Colorado man creates replica Millenium FalconSomeone made a Star Tours fan film.Bring Disneyland Home With This Gorgeous New Lego Set‘Creepy' Listening Tool for Targeted Ads Didn't Actually Work, FTC SaysMechanical keyboard simSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

While the school's promotional PowerPoint slide featured numerous non-curricular clubs, the faith-based club had been excluded. Constitutional expert, lawyer, author, pastor, and founder of Liberty Counsel Mat Staver discusses the important topics of the day with co-hosts and guests that impact life, liberty, and family. To stay informed and get involved, visit LC.org.

0:00 CSI Mayberry0:03 Chick out – Jeff in0:04 Peeping Tom discussion 0:20 Letter – fried bologna with onions0:23 Letter – “Weiner Week” on The BOB & TOM Show0:25 Ninja Turtles song discussion0:26 “Naughty Naughty” – John Parr (copyright reference)0:28 Tom jokes about pickup truck romance scenarios0:31 Letter – wife lied about making car payments; vehicle repossessed 0:48 Tom has never taken a bathroom break during a movie0:49 Letter – Tom is right about cowboy churches0:51 Hot dog at a ballgame beats roast beef at The Ritz0:52 Letter – unusual contest discussion 1:05 Sports – Jeff1:05 Hacky sack making a comeback – Jeff1:09 Josh used to play hacky sack1:11 Benjamin Franklin vape pipe discussion – Jeff1:12 Jeff discusses oversized bong collection 1:23 Pulling-off-your-thumb trick1:26 Animatronic wolves1:28 Adult band camps1:30 Pat wants to attend adult band camp1:32 Classical Gas – Mason Williams (copyright reference) 1:44 Josh attended show choir camp1:49 DJ camp discussion – “just show up with a laptop” – Jeff1:50 Tom has spoken at radio camp1:51 Tom's Wolfman Jack story1:53 Kristi loves capes1:54 Pat's dad wore a cape to a wedding 2:05 Karaoke night song – Pat2:09 Story about a man exposing himself at a bachelorette party 2:26 “Galaxy Sombrero” – Kristi2:29 Jeff reveals his real last name 2:47 Today in History 3:07 Zoom – Al Jackson3:08 Josh discusses his daydreams3:09 “Left at the Light” – Josh's improv/sketch group3:12 Al discusses 88 uses for the word “run”3:13 Slang discussion – “herb” as a term for a nerdy older man 3:29 Fast & Furious cast at Cannes3:31 Teenage boys increasingly interacting with AI companions3:33 PowerPoint presentations being used in online dating 3:51 “I'm Insane” – Pat Godwin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices