Podcasts about Xerox

•⁠ ⁠"பாஜகவின் Xerox போல செயல்படுகிறார் முதல்வர் விஜய்" - மு.க.ஸ்டாலின். •⁠ ⁠நிரந்தரமாக இருப்பது திகவும்.. திமுகவும்தான்”- திமுக முன்னாள் அமைச்சர் கே.என்.நேரு •⁠ ⁠எதன் மூலம் தவெக வென்றதோ அதையே பயன்படுத்தி நாமும் வெல்வோம் - எடப்பாடி பழனிசாமி. •⁠ ⁠MLA பதவியை ராஜினாமா செய்த நால்வருக்கு நோட்டீஸ் அனுப்பிய சபாநாயகர்? •⁠ ⁠'மின்வெட்டு ஏற்படுவதற்கு திமுகவே காரணம்' – அமைச்சர் செங்கோட்டையன் குற்றச்சாட்டு. •⁠ ⁠தவெகவில் இணைந்தார் முன்னாள் எம்.எல்.ஏ விஜயதரணி? •⁠ ⁠50 பெண்களை ஆபாச வீடியோ எடுத்து மிரட்டிய தவெக பிரமுகர்.•⁠ ⁠கேரளாவை தொடர்ந்து தமிழகத்தில்.. 1 1/2 வயது குழந்தைக்கு நேர்ந்த கொடுமை! தாய் கைது! •⁠ ⁠"70 ஆண்டுகளில் ஒரு முறை கூட வைகை அணை தூர்வாரப்படவில்லை; 2 மாதங்களில் நடக்கும்" - நிர்மல் குமார். •⁠ ⁠மறைந்த மேஜர் முகுந்த் வரதராஜன் பெயரில் சாலை! •⁠ ⁠இந்தியாவின் உயரிய விருதை பெற்ற தமிழக ராணுவ வீரருக்கு உற்சாக வரவேற்பு! எதற்கு தெரியுமா? •⁠ ⁠மொத்தமாக எரிபொருள் வாங்குவோருக்கு கட்டுப்பாடு விதித்த மத்திய அரசு.•⁠ ⁠"திமுக நம்முடன் இணைந்து செயல்படும்; பினராயி விஜயனை என்னால் கட்டிப்பிடிக்க முடியாது" - ராகுல் காந்தி •⁠ ⁠மீனாட்சி நடராஜன் வழக்கு தள்ளுபடி? •⁠ ⁠'அமைதி ஒப்பந்தத்தின் இறுதி வடிவம்' - அமெரிக்கா - ஈரான் பேச்சுவார்த்தை குறித்து பாகிஸ்தான் பிரதமர்! •⁠ ⁠ஹார்முஸ் நீரிணையை பயன்படுத்த சேவைக் கட்டணம் - ஈரான் வெளியுறவு அமைச்சர் அராக்சி அறிவிப்பு •⁠ ⁠உலகின் முதல் ட்ரில்லியனர் எலான் மஸ்க்?

PlastChicks Lynzie Nebel and Mercedes Landazuri interview Norm and Sue Fowler poolside at the Plastics Pioneers Association (PPA) and Plastics Hall of Fame (PHoF) Spring 2026 Networking/Conference in Sarasota, Florida. They speak to Norm and Sue about how they met, their relationship and home life, his induction into the Plastics Hall of Fame in 2025, her professional career, his career at Xerox, mentoring, contributions to the plastics industry, leadership roles in SPE-Inspiring Plastics Professionals, and life in Key West, Florida. Watch Norm Fowler's induction into the Plastics Hall of Fame (YouTube).Watch the PlastChicks podcast on the SPE YouTube Channel.PlastChicks is sponsored by SPE-Inspiring Plastics Professionals and the Plastics Industry Association. Look for new episodes on the first Friday of every month.

Sébastien Jeanne-Beylot, CEO de The Good Experience, a construit son parcours en partant du terrain commercial chez Xerox avant de créer sa première entreprise à 22 ans. En 2022, il reprend une société historique de l'événementiel fondée en 1994 et engage une profonde transformation. Sous son impulsion, l'entreprise se digitalise, change d'identité, développe son activité à l'international et enrichit son offre autour de l'expérience client, de la data et des nouvelles technologies. Convaincu que la réussite passe par l'entourage et l'apprentissage permanent, il mise sur l'innovation, l'exécution et la fidélisation de ses clients pour construire une croissance durable.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, we unpack the growing debate between global and domestic investors on India's AI future and what it will take to create the country's next big AI winner. We also look at Coinbase's renewed India push, why the global crypto exchange is treating India as its top growth market in Asia-Pacific, and how it plans to expand. Plus, why NPCI's UPI Help platform is seeing nearly a million subscription cancellations a month, and what that says about India's recurring payments ecosystem. And finally, HCLTech faces a setback as Xerox prepares to shift part of its BPM operations in-house, potentially impacting employees.

Joseph Wilson was loosing the battle to Kodak when he discovered the xerography machine. Then he made it sellable. Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Simple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those. [Handyside Ad] Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young and that’s Stephen Semple. Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young and there’s Steve Semple. Welcome. Oh wait, I got stuck making copies of copies. See what I did there? Stephen Semple: You’re so clever. Dave Young: You know what I did there, right? Yeah. Stephen Semple: I saw it, yeah. Dave Young: Today we’re talking about Xerox. Stephen Semple: Talking about copies of copies. Dave Young: Copies of copies of copies. Stephen Semple: Oh, and back in the day there were a lot of copies. A lot of copies. Dave Young: Oh man. I have copier stories. Yeah. Stephen Semple: I bet. I think those of us of our genre- Dave Young: Honestly, so Xerox, and we’re going to learn the story of the Xerox corporation and we’re going to… I don’t know their whole story, but I can tell you this, the photocopier or before there was something else before that. There was carbon paper. Stephen Semple: Yes, yes. Dave Young: But nobody owned a printing press. Stephen Semple: Correct, yeah. Dave Young: And so I would make the case that a photocopier was the first social media meme sharing engine. Stephen Semple: Oh, because we could photocopy our butts and share it the office. Dave Young: No, no, no, no, not your butt. I mean, I don’t know what you do in Canada. Here, I remember as a kid going to coffee, but my dad, small town, small town America, and he went to coffee twice a day with his buddies, 10 o’clock and three o’clock. They’d go down to the local cafe and they’d sit around a table and have coffee, eight or 10 of them. And somebody would always have a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a joke. Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: A cartoon, a usually off color story and they’d pass it around and then somebody would take it and make another copy of it and share it somewhere else. But you couldn’t do that if you didn’t have a copier. Stephen Semple: Well, that’s true. Dave Young: So thank you, Xerox. Stephen Semple: For making our lives richer. Dave Young: And now we can just electronically copy stuff and shoot it off as a text and a meme. Stephen Semple: One of the things you’re going to love about this story is it involves a fire extinguisher. So I’ve got your attention. Dave Young: Oh, I am all in. Stephen Semple: You’re all in. And Xerox is still pretty big. They do 7 billion in sales, but back in the early ’70s, Xerox was a monster. It’s estimated that over 10 billion copies a year were being done. Dave Young: 10 billion. Stephen Semple: That’s a lot of copies of copies of copies- Dave Young: Yeah. Once people had it, they were like, “I’m a printer.” Stephen Semple: Of copies. Yeah. Dave Young: I’m a publisher now. Stephen Semple: Yeah. In 1973, they did 3 billion in sales, which would equate to about 20 billion today. And they were close to 90% of the copier market with profit margins close to 20%. That’s just huge. It was one of the most valuable companies in the world. Dave Young: Until there started to be some competitors, Xerox became the generic word for a photocopy. Stephen Semple: Correct. Dave Young: “Give me a Xerox of this.” Stephen Semple: Yeah. So our story starts back with Joseph Wilson in Rochester, New York, which as we also know, is the home of Kodak. And Joseph was the new president of a company called Haloid, which was a Rochester based company doing photographic paper that was founded in 1906. And frankly, they were getting killed by Kodak, which at that point was 90% of the industry. And so Joseph’s trying to make headway in the photography paper business and basically is just like get nowhere. No matter what he does, he just cannot seem to create traction. Dave Young: One of his problems, Stephen? Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: Haloid. Stephen Semple: Yeah, maybe. Dave Young: That’s not a good name. Stephen Semple: Yeah, maybe. But what he decides to do is look for new opportunities. He’s actively searching through the National Patent Archive. So meanwhile, we got to think about this. It’s the mid ’40s. World War II has recently ended and the GI Bill is out there and it’s really fueling the growth of service-based industries. Banking, insurance is exploding. White collar is becoming now the thing to do. The American office is now basically the new engine of the US economy, but it’s still pretty primitive and labor-intensive. You think about going back to your whole thing, how did you copy and share information? Things were typically retyped or it was typed with a carbon paper, which meant you had one copy or a single document. Dave Young: Yeah, like a mimeograph sort of a thing maybe. Stephen Semple: Yeah, yeah. Single document could take an hour. And secretaries were manually retyping documents using carbon paper which created smudges or like as you said, the mimeograph machines, which were clunky Dave Young: Or send it, I mean, if you need more of that, you send it off to a printer. You send it off to somebody that can load it up on a printing press. Stephen Semple: Yeah. And for the people who don’t remember mimeograph machines, because I barely remember them, they stank. Dave Young: They smelled wonderful. Stephen Semple: Oh God, they were foul. They were this like, oh my God. Dave Young: The teacher would come in with a stack of stuff and hand it out and everybody would smell it. You just put it up your face and inhale. Stephen Semple: It was instead of glute. Dave Young: Weird, weird purple-y ink. I don’t even know how it worked, but yeah. Stephen Semple: So anyway, so Joseph is searching through patent archives and he comes across this invention by Chester Carlson, who’s a physicist who has got really bad arthritis and was looking for a better way to make copies. And Carlson had created, I got to read this, created an electrophotographic apparatus for dry writing. A process he turned xerography. Dave Young: Xerography, yes. Stephen Semple: There we go. Dave Young: And Haloid finally has a better name. Stephen Semple: Exactly. But the prototype was clumsy. It was large. It had been rejected by lots of people, but it caught Wilson’s eye. He could see the potential to revolutionize the office. And so it’s 1946 and he makes this big gamble. He purchases the patent for $10,000. Dave Young: Wow, okay. Stephen Semple: At that time, Haloid’s annual revenues is just a little over 100 grand. Dave Young: All right, man. Stephen Semple: So that’s a big bet. Dave Young: Huge. Stephen Semple: And the challenge was he had to turn this clumsy prototype into a viable commercial product. And there were a lot of challenges including the high heat from the fuser. It’s basically a toaster oven inside of a unit that bakes toner onto paper. Dave Young: Yeah. It puts a hydrostatic image of whatever’s on the paper on a blank piece of paper and little tiny particles of toner stick to that image and then you bake them in. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: The little tiny microplastic things. Stephen Semple: And yes, it can catch fire. More on this later. Dave Young: Yeah. That’s why when you’re done making a bunch of copies, it all comes out warm. Stephen Semple: Yeah, exactly. So to raise money, Wilson sold some personal stock. He downsized a factory, did a bunch of things, raised about $12 million, which would be equivalent to about 140 million today and put it into development. So in 1954, after nine years of development, he has the first copier. It weighs 650 pounds. Dave Young: Sure. Stephen Semple: And it’s called the Xerox 914 because it used 9×14 paper. Dave Young: 9×14, that’s a choice. Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: So in addition to the $12 million that they invested, they’ve also got millions of dollars in debt. Dave Young: I’m stuck on the 9×14, Stephen. I’m thinking it’s the size of an accounting ledger, something like that. Stephen Semple: I didn’t look into why that size or… Because again, a lot of times what becomes standards change. Dave Young: Yeah. But see, that’s why you do what you do on this podcast and I do what I do. I’d have gotten stuck researching this into the 9×14 and followed that off into the woods and it would be a whole different podcast. Stephen Semple: It would be. It would be probably better. Dave Young: Oh, I don’t know about that. Anyway, I interrupted you again. Stephen Semple: So they’ve invested all this money. They’re millions in debt. They finally got a prototype and they basically say, “Okay, here’s what we got to do. We got to find a production partner to make this happen because we’re not going to produce this thing.” Dave Young: 600 pounds, yeah. Stephen Semple: Because that’s not what we do. So Wilson approaches IBM who basically at that point is a rising tech leader. Dave Young: Sure. Stephen Semple: And a lot of people don’t realize how old IBM is. I’ve got a picture of an old IBM cheese cutting machine. Dave Young: Yes, yeah. Stephen Semple: They were around forever. But anyway- Dave Young: I did a college internship at IBM. Stephen Semple: Oh, did you really? Wow. Dave Young: Where they made copiers. Yeah, I got copiers. Stephen Semple: Oh yeah. Oh, this comes back. Dave Young: Yeah, yeah. Stephen Semple: So IBM’s being run by Thomas Watson Jr. and he rejects the idea because basically it’s going to be about a $10,000 price tag and it’s going to fill a room all just for copying. He thinks this is a really, really bad idea. So Wilson doubles down, mortgages everything to make it themselves and they’re still facing these huge challenges. They meet a guy who works with equipment manufacturer AMF who’s developed this brand new sales strategy that he’s using for selling bowling alley equipment. Dave Young: Oh, is this the lease purchase? Stephen Semple: Yes, sir. Yes. So this is this brand new idea. What they decide to do is to lease the Xerox 914 for $95 a year and it would include 2,000 copies plus a nickel for each additional copy. Dave Young: Okay. So they’re selling copies, not machines. Yes, yes, yes. Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: Here’s where it gets funny. It’s September 1959. The Xerox 914 makes its public debut in Manhattan. And during the demonstration, the machine bursts in the flames. Dave Young: Perfect. I’ll take three. Stephen Semple: Well, here’s the funny thing is it becomes this spectacle. It attracts onlookers and in fact the event is a resounding success. Dave Young: Yes, because the smart people will go, “Oh, they’ll fix that.” Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: Look, the copies came out, but they’ll fix the fire thing. Stephen Semple: Here’s what they did. Instead of re-engineering the device, remember, this is the late ’50s. The world’s a different place. Instead of re-engineering device, Wilson’s team ingeniously packages it with a fire extinguisher that they rebrand as the scorch eliminator. Dave Young: Hell yeah. Stephen Semple: Honest to God, I cannot make this up. The scorch eliminator. Oh, instead of re-engineering it, we’ll just give everybody a free fire extinguisher. Dave Young: That’s fantastic. I love that. So you could fill the paper tray with dough and pizza would come out the other end. These guys are geniuses. Stephen Semple: It’s a year later. It’s the 1960s and the machine is now available nationwide and it’s like a resounding earth-shattering success. Dave Young: Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. [Using Stories To Sell] Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: It’s a year later. It’s the 1960s and the machine is now available nationwide and it’s like, a resounding earth-shattering success. Production basically started at 50 per month and quickly went to 100 a day. At the end of the first year, they leased 200,000 [inaudible 00:14:32]. Dave Young: Well, this whole story, this is proof of what a good idea it was. Stephen Semple: Oh, absolutely. Dave Young: People don’t care if it catches fire as long as I get some copies out of it. Stephen Semple: Yeah. And the copier room becomes a new social hub. It becomes the way we share jokes. Dave Young: You want to make sure it has some overhead sprinklers. Stephen Semple: Well, you’ve got the scorch eliminator. You’re good. The company gets officially renamed Xerox Corporation and really it launches the information revolution. The stock quadruples, revenue soared at 250 million. Now, remember IBM? Dave Young: Oh yeah, they come around. Stephen Semple: The guys who rejected the idea. So the number of copies being made annually in the United States surges from 20 million to over 9 billion with Xerox basically dominating. And IBM, remember, took a pass, but they decided to enter the business in the early 1970s. They create their own copier. Now- Dave Young: They figured out that they were the biggest customer of Xerox. Stephen Semple: Yeah, essentially. Yeah. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: Now, Joseph had a choice at this point. He knew they were leveraging his technology, but he also knew that it would be hard for him to win on legal grounds alone. So what he decided that he needed to do was to out innovate them. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: And so what Joseph Wilson envisioned was an office of the future because he saw computers coming. Remember, this guy was a visionary. He saw computers coming. Dave Young: Oh, yeah. I love this guy. Stephen Semple: But the problem, computers were large, difficult to use, but he was like, “I saw what happened with the photocopier, it went from being massive to small. Computers, same thing’s going to happen.” Dave Young: Yeah, yeah. Stephen Semple: So he decided to invest the equivalent of $20 million to establish PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center. Now, he hired a top computer scientist from ARPA, Robert Taylor, and gave him a clear mandate, “Pull together the brightest folks and create the next technological revolution.” The goal was for it to be this visionary think tank to leapfrog everybody. Here’s what they created. Gary Bernier and I did another podcast on this, which talked about this failure of Xerox. And there’s something I didn’t realize until doing this research, which kind of filled in a blank. So I actually recommend people go back and listen to that podcast. But here’s what they created, networking, the mouse, and the graphical user interface. If Xerox had developed that today, Xerox would be the giant of the industry. Could you imagine? Dave Young: Did they also figure out printing to like laser printing? Stephen Semple: I’m not sure whether it was laser printing- Dave Young: I’m sure who- Stephen Semple: But they did invent the whole idea of what you see is what you get, like that whole idea that the screen… But I’m not sure whether it was laser or not. Dave Young: Basically, when I was at IBM, that’s what they were making, were photocopiers that were also laser printers. You could go photocopy something by standing at the machine or you could send a document to it and have it printed. Stephen Semple: And so here’s the interesting thing because I’d always wondered why did these things not get to market? And here’s what actually happened. Before these things were finally created in terms of prototype level, Wilson died and the executives who were basically under him took over and they didn’t have the vision and they saw the paperless office as cannibalizing their business. Kind of like Kodak. Remember Kodak developed all the stuff for digital cameras and went, “Oh, well, we can’t do this because it’s going to cannibalize our business.” Dave Young: Yeah. WYSIWYG, mouse. That’s not the business. Stephen Semple: Right. Well, and remember we did an episode a little while ago where we were talking about the iPhone and the brilliance of Steve Jobs. He was willing to cannibalize their own business to make that happen. When you’re unwilling to cannibalize your own business, you got a problem. This is the same thing that killed Kodak. It’s the thing Jobs overcame to create the iPhone. So speaking about Jobs, the idea for the Mac came from a visit at PARC. In 1979, Jobs negotiated a tour of PARC in exchange for allowing Xerox to invest in Apple’s pre-IPO stock. And basically Jobs saw all this stuff, saw the mouse, saw the graphical user interface and went, “Holy crap, this is the future. This is the future.” So again, when Gary and I did this episode talking about Xerox and the failure of Xerox and the success of, har, Palo Alto, I never realized the timing of the death of the founder. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: And it explains so much in terms of the execs not getting the idea. He would’ve. Joseph would’ve. Dave Young: Oh, I think so. Yeah, for sure. Stephen Semple: He would’ve been all over it. And Xerox would be a different company today. Dave Young: Yeah. Pretty amazing. Stephen Semple: But the things that I really loved on this is, again, Joseph was looking, he saw this world trend. He was in the photo paper business and he saw this whole idea of a copier, but also greater than that, it wasn’t just the idea of the copier. He saw what was the importance of the office and what was going on in office space. And the other part that I loved, and then proactively went looking for innovative ideas. And the part that I really love the most is they didn’t let the fire stop them. Dave Young: I do. Yeah, that’s so great. I don’t know. Yeah, some people say that’s a negative, but here’s a fire extinguisher. Stephen Semple: Right. Now granted, it was the late 50s, early 60s, different era. Dave Young: Here’s the thing, Stephen, offices can be kind of boring. And if you can introduce the prospect that there’s going to be a fire down in the copy room every now and then, there’s something to talk about while you’re standing around the water cooler. So when I worked for- Stephen Semple: It’s a whole different thing of lighting a fire under people’s ass. Dave Young: Oh yeah, yeah. I keep an emergency bag of marshmallows in my desk drawer in the hope that the copier catches fire. I did my college internship at IBM. It was a paid internship. So I can legitimately say I worked for IBM back in the day. It was back in the day when they actually manufactured stuff. IBM made machines. Now they just… I don’t even know what they do. They consult? Do they- Stephen Semple: There’s still a lot of IBM technology in the backgrounds, like with servers and things along… How much they manufacture versus just license, that I don’t know. Dave Young: So they’re a software and consulting company and felt all of that. But in 1984 they were still manufacturing, I worked for their Boulder, Colorado plant and it was 5,000 people working there. Stephen Semple: Amazing. Dave Young: And they made floppy drives and printers and printer/copiers. So you could buy a photocopier/printer the size of a large deep freeze and they’d install it. And I think they probably same thing, probably same business model. You’d pay by the copy, you’d rent the machine. One of the coolest things was that they had a laboratory at that facility. And in the laboratory, they had a copier lab where they had Xerox and Canon and all the other competitors, they had machines installed. They would call Xerox and say, “Hey, we need a machine, bring it here, install it in the lab and we want the usual maintenance agreement. So you got to send a Xerox guy to come maintain this thing.” And they would run that machine all day long making test patterns. They would print test patterns all day long and then evaluate them, put them under the microscope, see where that machine was performing and how it performed against theirs. I mean, it was kind of a cool lab. Who does that? Stephen Semple: So the other thing I just want to add on Xerox before we finish off, because I forgot to mention this as one of the lessons and this is actually probably the most important lesson. And that is, they looked at the guy selling bowling alley equipment and did the leasing. That was brand new, but they did an interesting twist to it that I think can be overlooked in terms of the real power of what they did. Because sure, leasing made it easier to purchase, but there’s two additional things that they did that made it easy to purchase 2,000 copies included. Which meant immediately if you’re going, “I’m leasing this for 100 dollars a year, 2,000 copies. Oh, that means my copy is so many cents a copy.” Dave Young: And if I never make another copy, yeah. Stephen Semple: Right away I’m saving money. So it allows for the financial justification becomes really easy. But here’s the other thing that becomes wild is, when I put the machine in, I’m not saying to people, “Hey, be careful how much you use this.” My goal is I want 2,000 copies to happen. Once I create the habit of people creating copies, it’s now embedded in the business. Dave Young: And then you have bean counters that tell you… Yeah. Stephen Semple: Well, could you imagine how different it would be is if it was less money, $50.05 a copy, you’d be telling everybody, “Now be careful how often you copy.” Dave Young: Yeah, but even then they were. Stephen Semple: Right, no, but the point is it allowed the habit. It allowed the habit to happen. It was just because you wanted to use up the 2,000, 2,000 copies. So anyway, I just think there was brilliant, especially for brand new technology, a brilliance in terms of how they structured that lease. Dave Young: They found an interesting business model to copy- Stephen Semple: They did. Dave Young: In a completely unrelated field. Stephen Semple: They did. Dave Young: And that’s the benefit of getting outside of your category to look for innovation. Stephen Semple: And then put a twist on it that eliminated friction of using that equipment because the first 2,000 copies were free. Anyway, I just thought it was brilliant. I just wanted to point that out. Dave Young: Yeah. I love, what was his name again, Wells? Stephen Semple: Joseph Wilson. Dave Young: Wilson. Well, I know there’s a W in there. Joseph Wilson. Stephen Semple: Yeah, Joseph Wilson. Yeah. Dave Young: All right. It was a good he didn’t name it Wilsonography. But I love it. I love the Xerox story. Thank you, Stephen. Stephen Semple: All right. Awesome. Thanks, David. Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90 minute empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.

In der heutigen Folge sprechen die Finanzjournalisten Nando Sommerfeldt und Holger Zschäpitz über die Megaaktie Micron, den Emerging-Markets-Irrtum und den verrückten Space-Hype. Außerdem geht es um Micron Technology, UBS, AST SpaceMobile, Firefly Aerospace, Redwire, Planet Labs, Rocket Lab, Qualcomm, BP, Zscaler, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Wacker Chemie, Siltronic, Salesforce, Marvell Technology, Snowflake, HP Inc, Abercrombie & Fitch, Synopsys, Agilent Technologies, Braze, PDD Holdings, BASF, Thyssenkrupp, Siemens Energy, IBM, Xerox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Costco, Walmart, PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Ferrari, Apple, Nissan, Morgan Stanley, Hermès, Tesla, VanEck Space Innovators ETF (WKN: A3DP9J), Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) (WKN: A42A7G), iShares Core MSCI World ETF (WKN: A0RPWH), Invesco EQQQ Nasdaq-100 ETF (WKN: 801498). Wir freuen uns an Feedback über aaa@welt.de. Noch mehr "Alles auf Aktien" findet Ihr bei WELTplus und Apple Podcasts – inklusive aller Artikel der Hosts. Hier bei WELT: https://www.welt.de/podcasts/alles-auf-aktien/plus247399208/Boersen-Podcast-AAA-Bonus-Folgen-Jede-Woche-noch-mehr-Antworten-auf-Eure-Boersen-Fragen.html. Hier könnt ihr den AAA-Newsletter abonnieren: https://www.welt.de/newsletter/article232797673/Alles-auf-Aktien-Der-taegliche-Boersen-Newsletter-fuer-WELTplus-Abonnenten.html Und - ganz neu: AAA gibt es jetzt auch auf Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alles_auf_aktien/ Disclaimer: Die im Podcast besprochenen Aktien und Fonds stellen keine spezifischen Kauf- oder Anlage-Empfehlungen dar. Die Moderatoren und der Verlag haften nicht für etwaige Verluste, die aufgrund der Umsetzung der Gedanken oder Ideen entstehen. Hörtipps: Für alle, die noch mehr wissen wollen: Holger Zschäpitz können Sie jede Woche im Finanz- und Wirtschaftspodcast "Deffner&Zschäpitz" hören. +++ Werbung +++ Du möchtest mehr über unsere Werbepartner erfahren? Hier findest du alle Infos & Rabatte! https://linktr.ee/alles_auf_aktien Impressum: https://www.welt.de/services/article7893735/Impressum.html Datenschutz: https://www.welt.de/services/article157550705/Datenschutzerklaerung-WELT-DIGITAL.html

Is it possible to build a home for 10% less and frame it in a single day? Kris Krohn goes toe-to-toe with 30-year veteran builder Chad Brown to investigate a disruptive new framing technology that is upsetting the building industry. They break down the massive cost savings of steel over wood, how a "Xerox machine" for steel frames works, and the high-paying affiliate opportunities available for those helping builders make the switch.

Forty percent of prospects never make a buying decision, and the reason is rarely the competition. Rohail Khan, founder of Avant.AI and executive consultant for Corporate Visions, breaks down why the status quo is the most dangerous competitor in any sales cycle and how to defeat it.Khan draws on 25 years as a C-suite executive, including roles at Xerox and Bank of America, to explain what CEOs and CFOs actually pay attention to during a pitch and why most sales teams lose the room within the first five minutes. The conversation covers how to use earnings call transcripts to find unconsidered risks, how to escape the commodity trap by shifting from features to financial outcomes, and why "you phrasing" transfers ownership to the buyer in ways that change the entire power dynamic of a pitch.Host Sean Grady also gets into Daniel Kahneman's prospect theory, the EBITDA pivot, the value wedge, and the three deadly sins of sales messaging. Khan offers specific AI prompt strategies using tools like Perplexity and Gemini to surface insights that clients do not yet know they need.Whether you manage large accounts, prepare executive proposals, or are trying to break through to the C-suite for the first time, this conversation delivers a concrete framework for turning uncertainty into urgency.Learn more about Corporate Visions at corporatevisions.com. Visit Sean Grady's website at seankgrady.com to sign up for the newsletter.#SalesPodcast #CSuiteStrategy #EnvironmentalTransformationTAGS:Rohail Khan, Avant AI, Corporate Visions sales training, C-suite selling, executive sales strategy, no decision sales, EBITDA pivot, value wedge, prospect theory, Daniel Kahneman loss aversion, B2B sales podcast, sales training podcast, closing deals, unconsidered needs, sales messaging, commodity trap, Environmental Transformation PodcastCHAPTERS:0:00 Introduction and Rohail Khan's Background2:55 The Elevator Pitch and C-Suite Preparation8:00 Understanding the CEO, CFO, and COO Mindset11:30 Using Earnings Calls for Sales Research15:55 Sponsor Messages16:40 Why No Decision Is the Biggest Competitor19:45 Finding Unconsidered Needs With AI Research25:30 Biggest Preparation Mistakes in Executive Pitches29:30 You Phrasing and the Power Dynamic Shift31:45 The EBITDA Pivot and Avoiding Speeds and Feeds34:30 Breaking Through the Procurement Gatekeeper38:30 The Value Wedge and Defensible Differentiation41:00 Making the Customer the Hero Through Storytelling43:00 Decision-Making Psychology and Managing Risk47:30 Prospect Theory and the Cost of Inaction52:30 Telling Details Versus Superlatives in a Pitch53:45 Reframing Emotional Anchors With Analogies55:30 The Three Deadly Sins of Sales Messaging56:30 How to Connect With Corporate Visions

Think Hawaii is all pristine beaches and postcard-perfect sunsets? Think again. This week, we're swapping our beach towels for crime scene tape as we dive headfirst into the dark underbelly of the Aloha State. From high-stakes island syndicates to mysteries buried deep beneath the volcanic soil, we're proving that even paradise has a body count. Pack your sunscreen—and your skepticism—because it's about to get shady in the sun.Research links below!SFGate - "The FBI warned Hawaii serial killers were coming. Then one struck."Serial Killer Calendar - "Murders in Paradise"PBS Hawai'i - "The Honolulu Strangler with Robbie Dingeman"Medium - "The Honolulu Strangler"Ke Alaka'i - "The tragic deaths of five women and an escaped murderer known as the 'Honolulu Strangler'"Hawaii News Now - "20 years ago, a killer shattered the morning calm and changed Hawaii forever"khon2 - "Xerox Murders"Star Bulletin - "Carlisle: Uyesugi was in control"Star Bulletin - "Grand jury indicts Uyesugi for first-degree murder"Star Bulletin - "7 dead in Nimitz Hwy. Xerox shooting"Star Bulletin - "Uyesugi's father, brother tell of torment in his head"State of Hawaii vs. Byrab Uyesugi

Jim and Lauren celebrate Episode 99 of I Want That Too with a packed conversation about Disney's latest merch experiments, the surprising box office success of Devil Wears Prada 2, and what Disney's newest earnings call may reveal about the company's digital future. Along the way, Jim begins a two-part deep dive into Disney's long history of embracing emerging technology, leading into the cautionary tale of Go.com and the company's first major internet gamble. NEWS • Lauren rope drops the new Mandalorian and Grogu collection at Bath & Body Works and breaks down Disney's latest franchise licensing strategy. • Disney continues leaning heavily into Toy Story 5 merchandise months ahead of release, with Jessie emerging as a major focus of the film's marketing push. • Jim shares early impressions from the newly released Toy Story 5 Little Golden Book and explains why Jessie appears to be central to the upcoming sequel. • Devil Wears Prada 2 overperforms at the box office with a remarkably strong second weekend, signaling major audience demand for nostalgia-driven theatrical releases. • Disney officially moves forward with Hocus Pocus 3 following the breakout success of Devil Wears Prada 2 and renewed interest in female-driven legacy franchises. FEATURE • Jim and Lauren unpack Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro's latest earnings call comments about Disney+, Epic Games, Fortnite, AI, and the company's evolving “hub and spoke” digital strategy. • Jim begins Part One of a new series exploring Disney's complicated history with emerging technology, from Fantasound and Xerox animation to the rise and fall of Go.com. • The story traces Disney's aggressive late-1990s internet expansion, including the acquisition of Infoseek and the company's attempt to build a Disney-controlled online entertainment hub. • The episode also revisits Michael Eisner passing on Marvel during its 1996 bankruptcy period, years before Disney eventually acquired the company for $4 billion. HOSTS • Jim Hill - X/Twitter: @JimHillMedia - Instagram: @JimHillMedia - Website: jimhillmedia.com • Lauren Hersey - X/Twitter: @laurenhersey2 - Instagram: @lauren_hersey_ FOLLOW • Facebook: @JimHillMediaNews • YouTube: @jimhillmedia • TikTok: @jimhillmedia SUPPORT Support the show and access bonus episodes and additional content at https://www.patreon.com/jimhillmedia. PRODUCTION CREDITS Edited by Dave Grey Produced by Eric Hersey - https://strongmindedagency.com SPONSOR UnlockedMagic.com - https://unlockedmagic.com/?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=iwantthat If you would like to sponsor a show on the Jim Hill Media Podcast Network, reach out today. https://www.jimhillmedia.com/sponsor/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inside the Tenth Legion: Colonel Tom Kelly's Legacy with Laura Bates | 100% WILD Podcast Ep. 472 In this episode of the 100% WILD Podcast, Matt Drury and Tim Kjellesvik sit down with Laura Bates, the daughter of the legendary Colonel Tom Kelly. As the turkey hunting community celebrates the Colonel's 99th birthday, we dive deep into the origin of his masterpiece, Tenth Legion, and the brand-new "Bootleg Revival" Limited Editionrelease. Laura shares fascinating stories about the original 1974 unauthorized Xerox copies that fueled the book's underground fame and why it has earned a status comparable to a "religion" among Southern turkey hunters. The conversation explores the personal side of a pillar in the hunting world, detailing what it was like growing up in the Kelly household and the moment Laura realized her father was a cultural icon. We also get the Colonel's unfiltered take on modern turkey hunting trends, from his distaste for decoys to the "edgy" language that gave his writing its authentic flavor. Whether you are a long-time member of the "Tenth Legion" or a new hunter discovering the heritage of the turkey woods.   00:00:00 – Tim's Intro returns to the Bass Pro Shops studio  00:01:25 – Introducing Laura Bates, daughter of Colonel Tom Kelly  00:02:11 – The Bootleg Revival: The 1974 Xerox story  00:05:21 – Building the legacy through NWTF and The Colonel on the Fox 00:10:10 – Why Tenth Legion became the "Turkey Hunter's Bible" 00:15:52 – Growing up Kelly: When Laura realized her dad was a legend  00:19:48 – Celebrating Colonel Tom Kelly's 99th Birthday 00:23:36 – The "Flavor" of the 10th Legion: Edgy language and authenticity  00:28:36 – Fans and Fame: Being recognized in the most unlikely places  00:32:02 – The Origin Story: How the Colonel became obsessed with turkeys  00:37:32 – Laura's Perspective: Will she write her own book on the legacy? 00:42:08 – Colonel Kelly on Tactics: His honest thoughts on decoys and reaping Join the Rack Pack Facebook Group :/ n73gskjt7bfb2ngc   Get ahead of your Game with DeerCast available on iOS and Android devices App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deerc... Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... Don't forget to stock up for your next hunt! 1st Phorm has you covered! Protein Sticks: https://1stphorm.com/products/protein... Level-1 Bars: https://1stphorm.com/products/level-1... Energy Drinks: https://1stphorm.com/products/1st-pho... Hydration Sticks: https://1stphorm.com/products/hydrati... Send us a voice message on Speakpipe! https://www.speakpipe.com/100PercentW... For exciting updates on what's happening on the field and off, follow us on social Facebook:   / @officialdruryoutdoors   Instagram: @DruryOutdoors X:  @DruryOutdoors  Be sure to check out http://www.druryoutdoors.com for more information, hunts, and more! Music provided by Epidemic Sound http://player.epidemicsound.com/ #dodtv

ถ้าพูดถึงนวัตกรรมเปลี่ยนโลกอย่างเมาส์และหน้าจอคอมพิวเตอร์ที่เราใช้งานกันอยู่ทุกวันนี้ หลายคนคงนึกถึง Apple และ Microsoft แต่ความจริงที่น่าตกใจก็คือ เทคโนโลยีเหล่านี้ไม่ได้มาจากสมองของ Steve Jobs หรือ Bill Gates เลยแม้แต่น้อย แต่มันถูกคิดค้นขึ้นโดยบริษัทขายเครื่องถ่ายเอกสารที่ชื่อว่า Xerox นี่คือเรื่องราวของการปล้นกลางแดดที่ยิ่งใหญ่ที่สุดในประวัติศาสตร์เทคโนโลยี ทำไมบริษัทยักษ์ใหญ่ที่ผูกขาดตลาดถึงยอมปล่อยขุมทรัพย์มูลค่ามหาศาลหลุดมือไปง่าย ๆ และอะไรคือเบื้องหลังมหากาพย์การหักหลังที่นำไปสู่วลีเด็ดระดับตำนานที่ว่า “เราแค่แอบเข้าบ้านเศรษฐีเพื่อไปขโมยทีวี แต่คุณดันตัดหน้าขโมยไปก่อน” คลิปนี้จะพาไปย้อนรอยความผิดพลาดที่ราคาแพงที่สุดในโลกธุรกิจกันครับ เลือกฟังกันได้เลยนะครับ อย่าลืมกด Follow ติดตาม PodCast ช่อง Geek Forever's Podcast ของผมกันด้วยนะครับ #SteveJobs #BillGates #Apple #Microsoft #Xerox #ประวัติศาสตร์เทคโนโลยี #บทเรียนธุรกิจ #นวัตกรรม #คอมพิวเตอร์ #การตลาด #ธุรกิจ #สรุปธุรกิจ #ดราม่าไอที #GeekStory #TechHistory #ความรู้ธุรกิจ #เล่าเรื่องธุรกิจ #วงการไอที #เทคโนโลยี #ผู้นำธุรกิจ #geekstory #geekforeverpodcast

Artist and educator Carmon Colangelo retired at the end of April after 20 years as founding dean of Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. Blending traditional and digital printmaking techniques, his work is currently on view at the Bruno David Gallery in Clayton. STLPR arts and culture senior reporter Jeremy D. Goodwin talks with Colangelo about his career, the role of artificial intelligence in art and more.

What if your sales problem isn't your people — but the system they're stuck in? Mike Carr spent years doing what everyone told him to do: commissions, quotas, performance plans. Every new hire came with the quiet assumption they'd be gone in a few months. He even optimized onboarding to make firing faster. Then he did the math: it was costing ~$75,000 every time. He called it "Burning the Porsche." His friend Travis Timmons — who'd been applying Deming's principles — kept nudging him to look at it differently. Mike's first reaction? "This is crazy talk." In this episode, they walk through what changed, what didn't work at first, and why the biggest shift wasn't the system — it was the psychology. If you've ever felt stuck trying to fix your salespeople, this will change how you think about it. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today we have an interesting discussion. I'm going to be continuing my discussion with Travis Timmons, who we've been talking about all kinds of things, including offsites, which I've found very, very valuable. I know the listeners have, too. But we're also joined by Michael Carr, who is a business owner who found the teachings of Dr. Deming about 10 years ago and has been trying to implement it ever since. Why don't we kick it off with you, Travis? Tell us a little bit about how you came across Michael and what your relationship's been like over these years.   0:00:43.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Great to be here again. Yeah, Mike and I met, I'll say it's probably 14 years ago, something like that. 13, 14 years ago, a business organization he and I were both part of and sat around a table of other business owners working on problems together. And long story short, and part of the problem solving, got to know Mike a little better and had some individual conversations about how Dr. Deming and the Deming approach was having such a positive impact on my business. Might be of interest to some of the things he was working on in his. And encouraged him to attend the Deming two and a half day. But that's kind of how we met, working on business problems together, having some of the same frustrations that even though we're in different industries, the problems seem to look eerily similar across businesses. So, yeah, that's kind of how he and I met and encouraged him to maybe explore Deming and see if it'd have a positive impact on him like it did for us.   0:01:49.2 Andrew Stotz: We were talking before we turned on the microphone about the idea of how do we reach the young man or woman out there who's looking for answers. And we know Deming has a lot of those answers. So I'm really interested to learn more about you, Mike, about not only, of course, your Deming journey, but maybe tell us a little bit about your business and your experience so people can kind of put you in context, in particular where they are and thinking about where you are and where you were.   0:02:17.8 Mike Carr: Sure. Yeah. I came into business about 25 years ago and I did it kind of accidentally where while I was in grad school, I started a campus chapter of Habitat for Humanity and I had more volunteers than I could handle. So over a weekend, I wrote a small piece of software to let people kind of sign up online. This is before the days of SaaS and everything that we're used to today. And that actually took off so quickly that I was supporting it for free, I was giving it away for free to other organizations - nonprofits. And eventually my wife said, this is taking so much of your time, you either need to start charging for it or shut it down and spend some more time with the family. So I quit my full-time job at the time, put all my effort on what became the business, and quickly found myself running a business with no business background or training because my training was in electrical engineering. So I hired my first salesperson and not knowing sort of how traditional business works, I hired the person on salary, fixed salary, and sort of set up a system for her to sell within.   0:03:39.3 Mike Carr: And again, not knowing Deming, not having any business background. And so I kind of accidentally set up sales the way Deming would have recommended because that's just what I thought made sense. Then later on hired a director of sales who had a lot of success in sales, but traditional sales, and he seemed to know what he was talking about. So we completely switched our sales to more of a traditional sales approach based on his recommendation. And that's when problems really started. Because as we're aware on everyone on the call here, the commissions, quotas, and that kind of thing cause a lot of unintended consequences. So at the time that I met Travis in the peer group that we belong to, I was having a lot of issues with sales. I couldn't figure out how to get sales to work. We were hiring and firing people rapidly. And Travis mentioned Deming to me and the Deming two and a half day training which I attended. And I had become so steeped in traditional sales at that time that after the training I literally said, this is crazy talk, this Deming stuff.   0:04:55.4 Mike Carr: It doesn't align at all with traditional sales techniques. But I gave it a shot and over the next year or two we started implementing it. We started trying things. I kept learning about Deming and at some point I realized this is actually the way I was doing it in the beginning when things were actually kind of working back then. So it was funny how I had come full circle from where I had started.   0:05:23.0 Andrew Stotz: And plenty of people that are listening have commission-based salespeople, bonus incentives, all kinds of different things. And they're like, that's the way you do it and the problems that you face are just part of it. And they couldn't see any other way. And it's way too much risk in their mind to even experiment with another way. So what were the problems that you were facing when you talked about I was facing these problems from the way I was compensating my salespeople? I want to make sure that we connect with people who are like... I don't want someone to say, well, that's not me. I want someone to understand exactly the problems that you were facing and then so they can think, okay, yeah, I probably have that problem.   0:06:11.7 Mike Carr: Right. So it was a lot of... So I'll describe sort of the sequence that we would go through. We would hire someone who seemed really qualified. We would give them a day or two of training, we would give them a telephone and a computer, and we would say, "Okay, you've been trained, you have the equipment, go do some hunting and get some sales," and basically leave them alone to go and do that. Of course, they would sort of rapidly fail because they didn't have the support they needed. They didn't have a system to work within. And so we would start applying pressure, we would start messing with compensation and apply incentives, and then we eventually get to a PIP, a performance improvement plan, and then we would eventually let them go and then do all the offboarding and then start from square one. And we did that so many times that we actually started optimizing our process for rapid hiring and firing. At one point, I moved to these thin client PCs so that we didn't even have to send an entire PC to the person.   0:07:25.7 Mike Carr: We could just send the thin client and put their desktop up in the cloud so that when we had to fire them later, it was just a lot quicker to get all your equipment back. So we optimized for that rapid hiring and firing, and we were literally going into most hires with the assumption we're going to fire this person within a couple of months. And so obviously you can imagine the stress that creates for the person we hired, obviously, but also stress on the part of management because we're just constantly failing all the time. Not to mention the business isn't getting revenue and we're missing all the opportunity that we could be capturing. So one day I said to the management team, let's add up how much it costs us to go through this entire cycle beginning to end in terms of man-hours and salary and so forth and missed opportunity. And the number we arrived at was something like $75,000. 75,000 to $100,000 every time we go through the loop. And so to put this in context, I said to the team, this is as if we had gone and bought a Porsche and then just poured gasoline all over it and lit it on fire every time we go through the loop. So I started calling it Burning the Porsche. Let's just burn the Porsche again, guys. And so we got to call it Burning the Porsche. We were optimizing for rapid hire and fire, and obviously stress levels on all sides were just skyrocketing. So those were the problems that we were facing.   0:09:10.0 Andrew Stotz: And I can hear a skeptical person say, oh, you just didn't know about how to train. I know how to train my salespeople, and I put them through this intense training, then I apply all those incentives and it works. What do you say to that?   0:09:27.4 Mike Carr: So, yeah, we tried all of those things. So we gave them piles and piles of written materials, we made training videos, and of course we wanted to hold them accountable for those things. So we had quizzes at the end of each training section, and assuming they passed the quiz, which was five or 10 questions, written questions, we would check the box. And we would later, when they began to fail, we would point back at the checkboxes from the training and say, "Hey, you were trained on this. We checked the box. Why are you not doing the things that you were trained on and the box was checked?" So, yeah, we tried a lot of different varieties of training and different accountability techniques, and just nothing was sticking. And I think everyone was just getting more and more frustrated. On the part of the person that we were hiring and firing, let's not forget about them. I mean, they're going through this three to six month process that's very anxiety-producing in the system that we had, and it can't feel good for them.   0:10:37.1 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's interesting because when you're in that situation, as many people are, there's no way out. It's just tightens the screws tighter. Every book you read, everything you see, every person you talk to, it's just you've got to engineer your KPIs better. That's what it is. We need more granularity in KPIs and all of that. And did you feel at some point, before you met Travis and learned about Deming, did you feel at some point like there's no other choice, I just got to do it this way, or what was going in your head before you came upon Deming?   0:11:24.5 Mike Carr: Yeah, I mean, that's exactly how I felt, is that other people are getting this to work somehow. So it must be that I'm just not applying enough pressure or my compensation structure isn't correct. We need a different mix of base salary and commission, and we need different quotas because other companies seem to be making this work somehow, and I just don't know what magic they're using. So that made me even double down to say I just need to look around and look at more companies and how are they structuring their commissions, how are they holding their people accountable? I started reading a lot of business books on the topic, lots of sales management business books that reinforce that thinking. You just need to get your compensation structure right and everything works. But for me, nothing worked.   0:12:21.5 Andrew Stotz: It kind of reminds me of an AA meeting as I imagine Travis sitting down next to you and then hearing the struggles that you're going through. It's like, yeah, been there. And maybe Travis... Now that we understand the background of kind of where Mike was coming from, let's talk about maybe on that day that you first met or in your first conversations, what were the things that stood out?   0:12:48.3 Travis Timmons: It was probably several months in because we'd meet monthly at that business peer-to-peer. But yeah, to your point, it's like, hey, I struggled with similar things. Mike is pretty humble. He's a super smart guy, PhD in engineering, so he doesn't lack intelligence. So he can figure stuff out, but just like me, was not trained in business. And there's a lot of things out there that just seem to make sense when you read them, but they're not applicable. And nothing seemed to take the entire system into consideration or make an assumption that people were good. That was the other thing that jumped out at me and I had the assumption that would align with Mike's worldview because as he's already said there a few times, he knew he was putting these employees through the ringer as well and he didn't like that. So it just got to a point where I'm like, hey, I found something that is different. It takes a system view and for me, it took the stress off and gave me a construct with which I could work within.   0:14:04.5 Travis Timmons: And with his background in engineering, he obviously knows how to put stuff together, so I thought this would be a good fit for him to at least explore it and look at something different than what the traditional business approach was out there. And it just kind of went from there. He finally got tired of me bugging him about it, I think, and said, yeah, I'll go to this two-and-a-half-day so Travis stops bringing it up. But it's the same thing I was doing before finding Deming. The same problem kept coming up in my organization, and I'd read a book about it or I'd have somebody tell me, "Hey, have you tried this," "Have you tried that?" And it wasn't taking an entire system view to how to solve the system for the business. So that's where I introduced it to Mike and said, "Hey, go check this out. You're a smarter guy than I am. See what you think about it."   0:14:54.7 Andrew Stotz: It kind of reminds me of AI these days because we all use AI in different ways, but I get on the TV, on the internet, talking to friends, like, oh, I'm doing all of this and I'm doing all that and I've redesigned everything. I'm like, so how much more money is in your bank account? Are you really? And it's like there's this excitement that everybody's talking about, but I'm not able to get that. Am I missing something? I'm just not smart enough. But I'm like, "Wait a minute, I'm smarter than those guys. I know that." And that guy he doesn't.... And so maybe you can talk a little bit, Mike, about your journey, your discovery, the seminar, and kind of how it started for you and where did it go?   0:15:48.7 Mike Carr: Right. Well, so let me start at the end of the journey, and then that will illuminate the beginning. So what I realized today, and I volunteer a lot with scouting because of this, is we don't really have, we don't really train young people in leadership. Most schools don't have a class on leadership. They might have some introduction to some type of leadership, say, in sports, but we don't really train people to lead other people or to manage other people. And so what I think happens, my theory is most leaders in business, specifically, lead by copying what they see other people doing. It's a Xerox copy of other leaders, and probably in the same business, in the same company, even. And so I think what we have today is we have a lot of people who want to be good leaders, they want to be good managers, but all they have to go off of is copying from what they see other people doing. And unfortunately, that's a lot of these sort of accountability techniques and pressure techniques. And so going back to the beginning, when I got into business, my background was engineering.   0:17:14.6 Mike Carr: And I had no business background, no business training. I had been in Scouts, but Scouts doesn't teach you really how to manage, how to be a sales manager. And so I was just lacking any kind of a background. So that's where I went wrong at the time, and I looked around to copy other people. How are they doing sales? And for me, I think what I took away from the two-and-a-half-day was here is a framework not just for sales management, but here is a framework that finally gives me sort of the perspective that I could use to develop my own leadership skills in a way that makes personally a lot more sense to me. And I come from an engineering background, and Deming was also an electrical engineer. And so I think it just kind of resonated with me because the techniques and the concepts he was talking about felt very familiar from my engineering training. Let's think of this as a system. Let's look at root causes. And let's think about how changing the system, how is that going to change outcomes?   0:18:22.4 Mike Carr: All of that sort of aligns with a lot of electrical engineering. And so it kind of made sense. But then I said, what Deming's really proposing here is that we take these concepts that are applied to electrical engineering and we extrapolate them to business management. And I thought that's a really interesting idea because I hadn't really thought about that before. And once I made that connection, that leadership framework just kind of came together naturally because now I have a leadership framework that I can build off of and that I understand and that seems to make sense.   0:18:57.6 Andrew Stotz: And how would you summarize that for someone who doesn't know Deming? What are the top three things that you got from it that you really have incorporated into your leadership style?   0:19:11.8 Mike Carr: Well, the number one is the psychology piece. If you're copying off other people for sales management specifically, you're copying a lot of high stress, a lot of judgment approaches, rankings, measuring personal performance, measuring individual performance, not as a team. So you have all of these sort of tricks that people do in sales management. And so the number one thing for me was the psychology piece, which is, no, no, no, let's just start with the assumption that people want to do a good job. And in my case, we're selling software that helps nonprofits. So why are we using these high-pressure techniques? People naturally want to help nonprofits do better. Let's just find those people that have an intrinsic motivation to do that, of which there are many, and then let's give them a system within which they can do that. They can go out and help nonprofits solve problems. And so that was the number one thing is just moving away from the manipulation and persuasion techniques that you see in business books and copying from other business leaders and moving toward the intrinsic motivation piece.   0:20:28.3 Mike Carr: So that would be my number one for sure. And then the number two is thinking, which is Deming's number one thing, is just thinking of everything as a system and a collection of subsystems and understanding. One thing we did early on is previously we would send out a memo across the company whenever we made a sale and we would congratulate the salesperson who closed the sale. And I said, well, it's not... Once we implemented Deming, I said, it's not just the salesperson that made this sale. This sale was the result of everyone in the company working together to produce a good product and provide good support to our customers and do good marketing and all the stuff that's required. It's all of us working together. So we just said, "Let's stop congratulating the one person and let's celebrate the sale across the entire company and congratulate everyone." So it's these kinds of things that sort of just seem natural to me and that just aligned with sort of my worldview.   0:21:34.8 Andrew Stotz: And how do you handle that for the salespeople? Is it the case that in your type of style, in the Deming style, that really only a certain type of salesperson can work in that environment and the rest of them are gonna say, "That's not for me. I want to get the commission dollars and I made that sale, and everybody else's job is to produce and deliver?" It starts with the sale.   0:22:03.1 Mike Carr: No, you're absolutely right. There are people like that, and in fact, we changed our recruiting process. And right from the first screening call now, we start talking about the fact that we pay a fixed salary and we don't have commissions and we don't have quotas. And initially, I thought that would be really appealing to people. I thought everyone we talked to would be like, "Wow, that's exactly what I want." But we actually found and experienced a number of people that when we explained that, they said, "No, that's not for me. I want the commissions and I want the quotas and I want the celebration that comes with closing a sale and I want those things." So we just make it... Today, we just make it very clear up front because we're more about finding the person that's gonna be a good fit and has the intrinsic motivation for what we're doing. And so we're very upfront about it early on.   0:23:08.2 Andrew Stotz: And that makes sense. There are some rainmakers out there who can bring in a huge amount of sales, who are very skilled at it, and they know the game very well. And so they say, "I don't want my compensation tied to anything to anybody else." And they have plenty of places to go work. But for the people that are different from that, that say, "I want to be part of an overall system and I want to contribute to this company," and all that, there are people that also see the value of that. And then I guess from an overall business perspective, when you change the way you looked at the way you're hiring salespeople, the way you're incentivizing them, and the way that you're getting people working together, what are some... Some people say, "Yeah, you're gonna lose some good salespeople. Your sales may even go down if I take all of my great performers and I say, "All right, we're going on flat salary plus some bonus for the whole company when we do well." I'm gonna take a hit in my revenue for the next six months. But what benefit on the other side do I get?   0:24:19.0 Mike Carr: Right. And that's exactly what we saw. Initially, sales went down and we did have some people leave, and we did have some people that we had to ask to leave, unfortunately, because they had been hired under a different system, the pre-Deming system, and they weren't really a good fit for the way we were doing it now. We did have some people stay as well. So it's kind of a mixed bag there. But it did take a number of years to stabilize. And to be honest, Travis probably heard me... Every time I would come to the meeting that we had together, it would be always the same problem: "I can't get sales working." And for the first couple of years, it was always pre-Deming, "I can't get sales working." And then Travis sent me to the two-and-a-half-day training and I implemented all that, and the next two years was, "I can't get sales working." But eventually, it did start working. And also, it's not easy. Deming is not easy. And even Deming himself said there's no instant pudding.   0:25:32.5 Mike Carr: So it does take a lot of study, a lot of learning. There are good resources out there, but there could be more. I think this podcast is one of them that's a really good resource I learned a lot from. But sometimes it's a little bit hard to find resources to help you get up and running. So it takes some time to sort of figure all this out, get all your systems re-implemented from scratch. And so that's why today, when I meet people and suggest Deming, I always suggest just try this one thing or try this one thing. Don't try to just immediately jump in the deep end with both feet.   0:26:14.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I want to come back to that in a second, but I want to go also to Travis because what Mike's talking about is I'm sure all kinds of stuff you faced and dealt with related to incentivizing and all of that. Maybe you can talk a little bit about your experience.   0:26:30.7 Travis Timmons: Yeah, one of the things kind of to circle back, like you said, there are some rainmakers out there. And I think the consistent thing I've heard from smaller businesses under, I don't know, under 10 or 15 million in revenue and under, it's hard to afford what the rainmaker wants to be paid. So when you have that reality as a small business owner, it'd be great to have a rainmaker. You can't afford a rainmaker, but you're trying to put a system in place for non-rainmakers that works for rainmakers. And I don't even... I'm not saying that Deming doesn't work at large organizations, because it absolutely does. But I think that's the reality of... I think who we're trying to reach is the small business owner out there that doesn't have their MBA from Northwestern and doesn't just have any kind of. Like Mike and I, we had zero business experience, but the reality is you need a different approach to have the sales piece work. Yeah, we never really had a sales team in our world, so I didn't have that problem to solve in my organization just by the nature of kind of how we were structured.   0:27:48.3 Travis Timmons: But we did have other issues in terms of the system thinking. And that's where realizing to Mike's point, the one big thing we had to tackle early on was like, hey, if we have a good client visit, it's not just because the physical therapist crushed the visit. The front desk had to have a good experience. The billing team had to get the bill out clean. Everything had to happen correctly for that visit to go well. And in our world, that would be, I guess, our sale. So the system thinking, how do you get the entire team to understand what direction you're going in? So you have to be a team player minded person. I think Mike would agree with that to work well within Deming. But yeah, we didn't have the sales... Now, I've heard plenty of stories over the years in different organizations I've been part of that had the same problem Mike did. And I've heard at Deming seminars time and time again, organizations that made the switch and it was a game changer for their organization. And it doesn't happen in two months, to Mike's point.   0:28:54.4 Travis Timmons: But it has a way to approach things in a systematic and methodological way. If that makes... Does that kind of align with what you'd say, Mike? The system approach and collaboration for the entire team to understand, here's where we're going, rather than sales doing this and development doing this and marketing doing that and accounts receivable doing this, like nobody's trying to get the same thing accomplished at the end of the day until Deming helped me see that in a different light.   0:29:26.3 Mike Carr: Yeah, I would agree with all of that. But I would also say while you're also learning Deming at the same time, so it's a little tricky to learn it all and implement it all at the same time. I explain it to my team as if you're driving a car at 70 miles an hour on the freeway and fixing the car at the same time. It's hard to do both.   0:29:50.3 Andrew Stotz: I thought you were going to say and climbing out of it into another car while you're fixing both.   0:30:02.3 Mike Carr: Yeah. Similar. Yeah, fixing both. So yeah, because that's a good point because you're still running the company you had, you're trying to transition to the new sort of company under the new system, and you're learning about it all at the same time. So it is not... There's no instant pudding, but I would say it's worth it at the end of the day.   0:30:14.3 Travis Timmons: I would say...   0:30:17.0 Mike Carr: I want to... Sorry. Go ahead.   0:30:18.7 Travis Timmons: And Mike, you can tell me if you would disagree with this, I'll just go observationally because you said, "I listened for two years, you complain about sales," and that's true. And then on the flip side of that, when you implemented Deming, it took about two years. I don't think it was that long, but it did take some time. What I think would maybe be interesting for the audience to wrap their head around, and Andrew, you probably could tease this out better than I can, but you've stuck with it. What would be the reason you stuck with it versus everything else you tried for a few months and then switched? And you kind of explained that with the system view, but I think that's the powerful thing is there is a lot to learn with Deming and it's a constant journey. It's a journey. I'm still well over a decade into this and I'm still learning. But what made you stick with this approach versus the whack-a-mole that you were doing prior, if that's a fair way to look at it?   0:31:21.4 Mike Carr: Yeah, I mean, it's really just the way it aligns with my worldview and my engineering background. The systems thinking just sort of makes sense to me. And so I said, it all just lines up so well, and it just seems like it ought to work. I just need to sort of figure it all out and get it in place. And I just didn't want to go back to sort of the high stress, rapid hiring and firing. I would rather put my effort toward bringing value to my customers than spending hours and hours debating how our compensation structure should balance base salary versus commission. I was spending so much of my week fiddling with the commission structure, and I wasn't doing the things that were bringing value to the customer at the end of the day. So now I feel a lot more productive, even if it takes some time to get it figured out. I feel like it's... My time is spent more productively in the things that I do now, figuring out the system.   0:32:34.0 Andrew Stotz: I'm curious because if you objectively look at it, people understand system. In biology, we learn about system. Doctors understand the human body and interactions. And yet we kind of blindly... If I think about it... I take care of my mother, she's gonna be 88 in a couple of weeks. And when you take care of someone that's fragile, everything has a secondary effect. And so it's easy, for instance, if she has to go to the hospital for something and then they see something and they think, "Oh, well, we should just give her medicine for that." Well, okay, have you thought about the fact that that medicine may help her with that, but she could fall because of the dizziness she's gonna get from that, and that fall could pretty much end her life? And also have you thought about the fact that what we're optimizing for is not necessarily what you're optimizing for? We're not optimizing for longevity. We're optimizing for today being the best day it can be. So when I look at, even in the case of my mom, for instance, with blood pressure, one of the things I use is I went out there and I found beetroot, and I basically make a beetroot drink, measure blood pressure before and after and throughout the day.   0:34:09.8 Andrew Stotz: It probably lowers blood pressure more than any pill. And I'm monitoring everything as an analyst, which is my background. And the side effect is good health of drinking... If you drank too much beetroot juice with carrot and other things I mix in with it, that's a side effect. But yet my mom is, "Just give me the pill." And I'm just curious, what kind of world are we in where we do know systems thinking, but it's like it's crushed out of us. It's not even crushed out of us. We know. And if we look at all the things that we do in society, whether it's disease or whatever, it's just constantly, we don't follow it. And I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that? Or am I wrong? Many people just simply don't understand systems thinking.   0:35:08.8 Travis Timmons: Well, I think it's complicated. I think it's complicated, A, because to Mike's point earlier, we're not taught about this through a traditional structure, or if we are, we're taught about it... Like, I had a background with military training, and it doesn't get much more command and control than that. And that doesn't work in the real world, so to speak. So there's not a lot of training mechanisms out there that prepare you to deal with. I love the fact that Mike, as the engineer, said the most important thing to him was the psychology. I think that speaks volumes to how powerful, when you get the entire system working well, it gets back to the joy in work.   0:36:00.5 Travis Timmons: And Mike might correct me on this, but I think one of the reasons he continues to dive in, as do I, with Deming is it doesn't suck energy away. It just... You have more energy because you have a method and a system to work within that makes sense. Like if I do this over here, if I know that there's an entire system involved, to your point with the blood pressure medication, if I do this, it's gonna have a consequence. And if you have that worldview of your business, if I tamper with sales but I don't fix the product, it's gonna be hard for the salesperson to get sales because my product isn't good. Or that whole system view. But yeah, I think it's awesome that a PhD electrical engineer, super smart guy, the most important takeaway for him was the psychology and energy piece. I think that speaks volumes to what Dr. Deming does.   0:37:02.5 Andrew Stotz: I wrote it down and I wrote down intrinsic motivation. But also, this is another... When Deming tells the story about the girl who makes a Halloween costume with her mom and they don't have much, but it's something nice. And then they go to a Halloween party and then an adult comes up with the idea of having a competition. And of course she didn't win, but it was an amazing experience with her and her mom making this costume over time. And you just think, we understand intrinsic motivation very well, but yet very few people are optimizing for that and truly thinking about that. So both intrinsic motivation and systems thinking we know, but yet for some reason just isn't encouraged.   0:37:57.4 Mike Carr: That's because the first day of kindergarten you get the gold stars. And then it sort of goes downhill from there. But I have a business example of what you're talking about, Andrew, with the understanding systems thinking but not applying it. And I've brought this up with my team in the pre-Deming days. I used to ask, why do we pay the entire company a fixed salary except for these three people over here? What's different about those three people than everyone else? I don't pay developers per line of code written. I don't pay them based... I don't have a quota on how many bugs they're allowed to write per week. It's just not done that way. It's a fixed salary, and we give you some tools to work with and a system to work within. But for some reason, we have these three people over here that we have to treat completely differently from everyone else. Why is that? And the only reason that I could come up with is that's just how everybody else does it. So I think discovering Deming sort of answered that question for me, which was, you don't have to do it that way. You can just pay everyone in the same way because everyone basically is motivated intrinsically to do the job and feel like they're making a difference.   0:39:36.2 Andrew Stotz: One of the ways that we do it in our coffee business is we look at the results of the business every three months. And then I've developed a benchmarking system that looks at what I call profitable growth. Are we profitable and are we growing? And then I look at that relative to our global peers, and then I say, are we profitable and growing more than our peers? And it's a scorecard, but it's a scorecard for the whole company. And then what we do is every quarter we say, okay, we were profitable and growing better than our peers, and therefore we're going to allocate some of the profit that we make as a bonus. And then we do a compensation across the whole company split in a couple different ways. But our objective... And we've had different meetings and stuff, but there was something that triggered my business partner, Dale. I don't know what it was, Travis, but Dale just had his first kind of offsite and he listened to the podcast and he got a lot from that. And he even presented some of the Deming stuff because we've done lots of training, but he was like, many people in our business don't even really know it anymore because it was a while ago that we did a lot of that training and stuff like that.   0:41:16.3 Andrew Stotz: So I wouldn't say that we're implementing to a level that I would if I was running it, but that's also, you own companies and you run companies and you don't want to confuse those two things. But anyways, the point is that once we did that... And then we fly everybody in across Thailand, wherever they are, whether they're sales or technicians or whatever, and bring them together for a day to review the results. And that's the first kind of offsite where we had a very specific... And Dale and I had a meeting a couple of weeks before it, and I went through from what you talked about to help narrow it down, to help him think, "Okay, what do you want to get out of this?" Because I really started to understand that you were really focused and you were not overextending yourself as to everything that you wanted to accomplish. But the excitement that employees feel when they're all in it together, that's what we want more of. And like you said, it's the way we think, and that's the way we want to live. So, yeah, that's a little bit of my story there with what your influence was, Travis.   0:42:29.2 Travis Timmons: That's great. Yeah. And I think, I mean, you mentioned benchmarking and KPIs. And one thing I'd want to make sure listeners understand, because sometimes when we talk about Deming, they think, oh, you just rainbows and puppy dogs and everything's going to be fine. We do have, and I know you do too, Andrew, and I know Mike does, there's a lot of KPIs we look at. And we want to be industry leading. But when you have a different view, it's a long-view and it's a system view. And when everybody's working to optimize the system and understand if we do this well, we get to stay in business and maybe crush the competition along the way, that's kind of fun. But the KPI piece and the Deming system approach, it's a long-term view. So that's just something that came to mind. I've had people say this before, and I'm sure Mike's heard it, because, oh, you're just paying your salespeople a salary, how do you motivate them? How do you keep score? Mike has a KPI dashboard, I am certain. Fitness Matters has a KPI dashboard for sure. Andrew's coffee company has a KPI...   0:43:52.2 Andrew Stotz: No, we don't.   0:43:53.6 Travis Timmons: You have to track.   0:43:55.3 Andrew Stotz: What we don't use is, I just don't use.... We don't use that word KPI, because I hate the connotation of it. But we definitely track and use that for feedback, just like you guys are. But yes, I just it's just I have a pet peeve about that.   0:44:14.2 Travis Timmons: Yeah, yeah, no, I totally get it because it has all the negative connotations that go with how do you make those happen? But like for the common cause versus special cause and variation and all of that. But yeah, it's fun to see when you optimize your system and the entire team works. You have I've shared on the podcast here some of our data and it's just it's fun. It's work. It's work. Every day is hard. But you have a method by which to attack the work. And I think Mike could probably speak to that too with his experience. But that's why he's stuck with it all these years. Even though there was about a year into the process of Deming where he was still complaining about sales, he had a consistent process by which he was tackling it, and it got better along the way, I think.   0:45:08.6 Andrew Stotz: And the thing that I would like to wrap it up with is to just dig a little bit deeper into something that you said, which is it takes time to figure it out. And I would like you to talk about that little bit of learning and application journey because obviously if someone's able to go to a seminar, that's fantastic, but let's take someone in Europe, in Asia, wherever, that they may not have that access. Tell us a little bit about how you started that journey and what you've now seen and what you would recommend, which you already did give some recommendation. But maybe you can just talk a little bit about that because one of the things that's unique about this is that, number one, it's one guy, Dr. Deming. It's not a movement like Lean or something else that has certifications and these traditional things. And so it makes it harder to understand it. It makes it harder for it to spread. But maybe just tell us a little bit about your experience there.   0:46:19.1 Travis Timmons: I'll share my piece, and I'm sure Mike has great examples as well. But yeah, the down and dirty DemingNext is a tool that is available now that was not available when I started my journey. So you get bits and pieces through DemingNext. That's amazing. That was not around when Mike and I either one started our journey, I don't think. Second, if you could just have the concept of looking at your business as an entire system rather than pieces and parts. And then I always recommend people start in one of two small areas. It's either with the PDSAs, plan, do, study, act. That's a very easy, low-cost way to start somewhere in your business. Or operational definitions. Those are the two areas I think are very easy to implement, low cost. And when you apply that to a systems view, I think right there a lot of positive things can happen. And then the DemingNext that the institute has as a resource is one of the things that I think allows more people to get access to Deming and implement it.   0:47:34.3 Mike Carr: Yeah, I would reinforce all of that. The DemingNext program is really good. The two and a half day is really good. I would also recommend going to the two and a half day multiple times if you're able. And I would also recommend taking as many of your management team and C-suite as you possibly can and putting them through the two and a half day or whatever kind of training, DemingNext or whatever training you're using, because I've found that about 80% of Deming is having a shared vocabulary across the company so that you can have these meetings and you can say things like common cause variation and everyone knows sort of what you're talking about. If you don't have the shared vocabulary, it's kind of hard to make the improvements in the business. So whatever training you're using, and I would encourage people to just like sponge mode, just anything you can find, try to gather it all together from whatever place and share it across the company. But the number one thing that I would do if I were starting today is I would... This is one of the things where I think AI can really help you out because you can sit down with ChatGPT and you can just simply say, "Help me learn about W. Edwards Deming."   0:49:00.3 Mike Carr: And you can have a conversation and you can say just ask it, "How can I apply this to my company?" And that's probably going to start a really interesting back and forth. Of course, you need to make sure it's not hallucinating something along the way, but I think that could be a really interesting resource to help learn and relatively inexpensive, and you can get it for everyone in your team and use that as an onboard. You could even ask it, "What is something simple I could try tomorrow that I could see if it works in my company?" and see what it recommends. If I had to start over, that's probably where I would start.   0:49:35.6 Andrew Stotz: That's great advice. And I know also with like NotebookLM and things like that where you can upload the source documents and then have a discussion, AI is super critical now, and I think opens up a whole new opportunity for spreading the message. So that's a resource where you couldn't get it until you talk to Kelly Allen as an example, or others that know it, and here you have a huge resource. I want to wrap up there, but before we do, let's give you guys the last word. Travis, maybe you want to just wrap up your thinking on what we've just discussed and what you want the audience to take away. What do you want them to do? What's your call to action?   0:50:22.7 Travis Timmons: Yeah, call to action would be start learning one thing about the Deming approach and Dr. Deming. I think you'll be surprised how it looks at the business world differently. So I would just encourage people to, as Mike said, be a sponge, whether it's listening to these podcasts, taking a look at DemingNext, ChatGPT, there's all kinds of different routes. But just start to see why is this different. And then the podcast, DemingNext, just so many stories of businesses that were having a hard time and having kind of the life sucked out of the owner that found a different way. And yeah, just happy to have this opportunity to share. I think Mike and I are both passionate about getting the word out to as many business owners as we can because we know it's hard and we know it doesn't have to be. So I would just encourage people to start where they feel comfortable. There's no wrong or right place. You don't have to get a certification in Deming to do Deming.   0:51:06.3 Andrew Stotz: Right, Mike?   0:51:29.2 Mike Carr: I guess my call to action would be to take a step back from the things that you may have seen other companies doing. Maybe you didn't have that leadership training. Maybe you learned leadership and management skills by copying what you saw other people doing. And basically just ask yourself, is there a better way than what I'm seeing other people do? And just open that door for the learning that's going to come with learning Deming and give it a chance. Try something, give it a shot, see how it works for you with the understanding it's not going to work right off the bat. It's gonna take some doing and take some learning. But just try to see that maybe what other people are doing is maybe there's something better than what other people are doing and just allow for that opportunity.   0:52:25.3 Andrew Stotz: Yes. As one of the people in a 12-step self-help program said, you have nothing to lose but your misery.   0:52:38.0 Travis Timmons: Right. Right.   0:52:40.2 Andrew Stotz: So, Mike and Travis, I want to thank you on behalf of the Deming Institute for this discussion. Fascinating. And I really want to encourage listeners to take some action. Go to deming.org and jump on DemingNext. Get access. ChatGPT, NotebookLM, whatever's your tool, go for it. It's right there. And the results you get from it are enormous. Now, this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I want to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and really, it's what makes it all worthwhile, and that is, "people are entitled to joy in work."

**Palabras clave:** - **Wozniak**, **Jobs**, **Apple II**, **Macintosh**, **Xerox**, **Bill Atkinson**, **Copland**, **Schooley** --- ### El mito del garaje y la verdad de Hewlett-Packard ### Ingeniería minimalista y la revolución visual ## BASIC en la ROM: la “memoria del idioma” ### ️ Ranuras de expansión: crecimiento sin límites ### Steve Jobs: el puente entre técnica y mercado ### La cultura corporativa tóxica y la presión de los plazos ### Xerox y la transferencia de tecnología ### Bill Atkinson y la superposición de ventanas ### ⚖️ Conflicto interno: Jobs vs. Schooley ### ️ Fracasos del sistema operativo Copland y la “muerte piadosa” ### Patrones útiles observados ### ✅ Conclusión

Hoy hablamos de la histórica rivalidad entre Apple y Microsoft. Repasamos cómo nacieron casi a la vez en los años 70, cómo Xerox inventó la interfaz gráfica moderna pero no supo explotarla, y cómo Steve Jobs y Bill Gates construyeron dos imperios muy distintos que acabaron enfrentándose en los tribunales y revolucionando la informática que usamos hoy.

In this NDS Chronicles episode, David Lee Corbo (The Raven) and Top Lobster read raw paranormal testimonies while hyping the official Bohemian Grove 2026 event.First story: a man's lifelong black cat “familiar” appears during toxic relationships and leads him to scry in candle flame, hearing the whisper “Scotta” — confirmed in an Akashic Records reading as his Kaliak (ancient Celtic crone goddess) spirit guide from a past life as warlord turned monk in Scotland. They bail on the AI-slop story midway.Second testimony from Jesse (Ontario): his young daughter suffers horrific night terrors — standing, screaming, pissing herself with zero morning memory. After listening to NDS, the family purges Halloween decorations, Matilda, Zombieland, and demonic movies. They discover a witch aunt on dad's side and Freemason great-grandfather (sound editor on Invasion of the Body Snatchers & The Manchurian Candidate). Grandma's medium roommate and her black cat that went feral during her deathbed conversion to Christ seal the spiritual attack.Plus: full Bohemian Grove breakdown — VIP day Aug 7 at Standard Coffee Shop & Casino (live Bible study with Matt, Ed Mabry, possibly Laura Baker, 50-person cozy hang), main event Aug 8 at Wildwood Community Center (400 capacity, stage, merch, bar, live podcast streams), Timothy Albarino costume contest with megalithic prison pose, life-size Kandahar giant photo op, and more.Unboxing includes banana menorah, “It Ain't Gonna Suck Itself” lobster tank top, Dictionary of Angels book, and Dead Sea Scrolls texts. Wild banter on dookie soup video, entities, Xerox hate, and Emmett cameo.Submit your stories: chroniclesnds@gmail.comPatreon.com/NephilimDeathSquad for early access, ad-free, and first dibs on VIP tickets.Timestamps:0:00 – Intro, Bohemian Grove 2026 Full Details & VIP/Contest Announcement11:45 – Feline Watcher Black Cat Familiar Story: Scrying, Akashic Records & Kaliak Goddess28:20 – Jesse's Daughter Night Terrors, Pissing Screams & Full House Purge (Matilda, Zombieland)45:10 – Family Witch, Freemason Great-Grandfather (Manchurian Candidate) & Black Cat at Grandma's Conversion58:30 – Package Unboxing: Banana Menorah, “It Ain't Gonna Suck Itself” Tank Top & Angel Dictionary1:12:00 – Dead Sea Scrolls Book, Kandahar Giant Render & Closing Banter  Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/nephilim-death-squad--6389018/support.☠️ Nephilim Death Squad — New episodes 5x/week.Join our Patreon for early access, bonus shows & the private Telegram hive.Subscribe on YouTube & Rumble, follow @NephilimDSquad on X/Instagram, grab merch at toplobsta.com. Questions/bookings: chroniclesnds@gmail.com — Stay dangerous.

Why Paper Jams Persist Abstract Mojan and Fred dive into the surprisingly complex world of the “paper jam,” a problem that remains a daily frustration despite decades of high-level scientific research. From Fred's time at HP to the massive technical laboratories at Xerox, they explore why the interaction between rigid mechanisms and non-rigid, organic media […]

Another episode of outtakes because we had TONS to say about M3GAN 2.0! Not only are there subjects that got saved from the original episode, but our fun tangents as well. Email us: KillerFunPodcast@gmail.comFollow us on Facebook: fb.me/KillerFunPodcastAll the Tweets, er, POSTS: https://x.com/KillerFunPodInstagram: killerfunpodcast

iPod saved Apple from chapter 11 and there would be no iPhone with it either. Oh, and Jony Ive helped, a little, too! Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands. Steven Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Steven’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those. [Seaside Plumbing Ad] Dave Young: Welcome back to the Empire Builders Podcast. I’m Dave Young and Steve Semple’s here and we’re talking about empires. When you told me the topic for today here just a few seconds ago, it’s like, “Oh, we’re talking about an empire inside an empire. We’re talking about an empire that changed lots of things.” Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: So we’re going to talk about the iPhone. Stephen Semple: Correct. Dave Young: Oh, man. Man, did it change things? Stephen Semple: Well- Dave Young: I mean, so- Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: … you think people that aren’t… Gosh, I keep thinking that, gosh, there were a lot of years I didn’t have a cell phone, let alone an iPhone. Stephen Semple: Correct. Dave Young: But cell phones changed everything, and then iPhone changed it more. And gosh, what year are we talking about? Early 2000s? 2000-ish-four, ’05, ’06, somewhere in there? Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: Is that about right? I’m just trying to think of when I got one. Stephen Semple: Oh, you’re talking about when it launched? 2007 is when I- Dave Young: Seven. Okay. Stephen Semple: Yeah. 2007 is when it launched. And when you think about it, we used to have our Palmpilot for our contacts, we had our dicsman for our music, we had our cell phone for telephone calls, and we had internet cafes for our internet access. Dave Young: For our laptops and all of that. Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Right. Dave Young: All these devices. Stephen Semple: And today, it’s both the bestselling phone of all time, the best-selling camera of all time, the bestselling music player of all time, the best-selling GPS of all time, and the best-selling game console of all time. Dave Young: Crazy, isn’t it? It’s a ubiquitous product, really. Stephen Semple: Yes. It’s the most profitable product of all time. 2.3 billion have been sold. One fifth of humanity has one. Dave Young: Man. Stephen Semple: Right? Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: It created a whole brand new economy called the App Store that did not exist before. And it was not an obvious product. Steve Jobs initially hated the idea. I want to say this again. Steve Jobs initially hated the idea. He thought smartphones would never take off and they were a dumb idea. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: This is how not obvious the product was. Dave Young: Yeah. Every now and then you hear somebody saying, “Oh, I wish I could go back to a flip phone.” And you think, “Yeah, that would be nice.” But then it’s like, “Well, no. No, I don’t know if I could get by without all this stuff.” Stephen Semple: Yeah. It’s really incredible. The birth of the iPhone, to really understand the birth of the iPhone, is you actually have to go back to the iPod. It’s predated the iPhone. And Tony Fidel invented the iPod. Here’s what’s really important about the iPod, is Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the iPod saved them from bankruptcy. The iPod is what saved Apple. And basically Tony Fidel, back when he was 12, he bought an Apple 2, and it was really his first true consumer product. And in 1991, he graduated. And of course, that was the early days of the internet. We forget how even new the internet is. And a couple of people had left Apple to start a company called General Magic to build handheld computers. Tony joins General Magic, and it’s amazing. There’s lots of ideas. But what he found is there was these tons of ideas and no focus, nothing ever made it to development. And that frustrated him because he actually wanted to develop things. So he goes over to Phillips, and Phillips had an MP3 player. And Napster came along, which was allowing people to download music, but it’s free, but it’s kind of illegal and maybe sketchy and all that other stuff going on. Basically he looked at it and he said he wanted to start to develop this unified digital music player in a site where people could download things legally, because he felt people wanted that. And Steve Jobs also felt people wanted that and Jobs got wind of what he was working on. This is 2000 when the dotcom bubble happens. Jobs gets wind of this idea and is back at Apple at this point and reaches out to him and says, “Come on over and help us to develop this.” Now, Jobs had a bit of a windfall. The iMac comes out and the Apple is back because iMac had some pretty good success, but the iMac was still only 3% of the marketplace. So Jobs hires Tony to come and lead up this idea of music, right? So in 2001, iTunes is launched. So iTunes predates the iPod, but here’s the thing, it was not for purchasing. It was just for ripping and organizing music. That’s what you could do with it. And then in October, the iPod is launched. So in October of 2001, the iPod is launched. Dave Young: So they have this solution that lets you rip all your CDs and organize them on your computer, but you can’t carry them around with you yet. Stephen Semple: Right. Not yet. So in January, they launched that. October, not that many months later, they launched the iPod. And people can also go over to sticky sales stories where Matthew Burns and I did the whole thing on the advertisements around the iPod because it was brilliant. Every other MP3 player out there was advertising, “Oh, this many megabytes or whatever.” Dave, you and I can remember, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” Dave Young: “A thousand songs in your pocket.” Silhouettes of people dancing, colorful silhouettes, it put you in the ad. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: And they didn’t talk about technical specs, didn’t talk about any of that stuff. It was just, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” Stephen Semple: They ran three ads, three different types of ads, “A thousand songs in your pocket.” And then when they came up with the version that would work for both Windows and Mac, Windows and Mac. But not a thousand, it would be one or the other, and then the last one would be the price. But that was it. But a thousand songs in your pocket were all like, “Oh my God, that’s incredible. A thousand songs in your pocket.” Dave Young: Mind blowing. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So April of 2003, a couple years later, the store comes out that allows people to buy music. But I remember my first iPod. Yeah, I couldn’t buy music. I just downloaded all my CDs, loaded them on my computer and put them on the iPod and that was amazing. Then you could start buying music and that was really, really cool. And very, very quickly, this whole space grew to $4 billion in sales and five years later, $20 billion in sales. And Apple ends up becoming three quarters of the entire MP3 market. Just dominated it. Now, at this point, mobile phones are starting to get smarter. The interface is still not great, but a lot of people inside the walls at Apple start feeling the writings on the wall. The writing is on the wall here because they’re going to get better and they believe that the smartphone will kill the iPod, but Jobs still hates the idea and sees phones as a niche. And he basically is famous to saying, “Apple is not a phone company.” But the internal people keep working away on him. And by 2005, Jobs green lights making a phone because others convince him of the trend. Now, when Jobs does something, he’s all in and he reaches out to the best people inside of Apple and basically asks them to join this super secret project. And here’s the crazy thing. Could you imagine this? You’re working at Apple and you get this email basically saying, “Do you want to join this super secret project? It’s going to be X number of years long. You are going to dedicate your life to it. You’re going to probably burn out. It’s going to cost you relationships.” They literally said this to people, “And we can’t tell you what it is until you sign this non-disclosure agreement.” Then when you signed the non-disclosure agreement, they told you what it was and you had to sign another non-disclosure agreement, but they got people to join the project. So they approached this as being, their first thought process on the iPhone was, this is an iPod that we’re going to attach a phone to. So what did the first iteration have? Clickwheel. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: Because the clickwheel was beautifully elegant on the iPod, but that they really quickly learned, not good on a phone. Dave Young: Not good on a phone. Yeah. Stephen Semple: It was a nightmare to text. It was a nightmare to do all these other things. You couldn’t put a keyboard. Then they looked at the Blackberry and they went, “Well, this keyboard on a phone’s not great because you lose half your real estate is lost to keyboard.” Dave Young: Just these little buttons. Yeah. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So enter Johnny Ives who had designed the iMac. And he loves buttons and he loves function, he loves design, he loves sleek tech, but he was like, “How do we get rid of all these things?” And he’s playing around with this idea on a new device. Now this device doesn’t go anywhere, but it’s where he first develops the whole idea of the pinch. Dave Young: Okay. Stephen Semple: But he starts looking and going, “I think this would work for the iPhone.” He creates this massive interface, this giant multi-touch pad that he’s working on for this other department. But he all of a sudden realizes, “Wait a minute, if we shrink this idea down and make it work on a screen, we could get rid of the keypad.” Dave Young: Altogether, yeah. Stephen Semple: Altogether. But here’s the problem, current touchscreen technology at that time couldn’t do it because it was pressure sensitive. Then they came across this new screen called compassitive, which detects electronic signals, which means that it could detect where your fingers were- Dave Young: Actually were. Yeah. Stephen Semple: And whether it’s two fingers and all of that. They also realized they had to create a new OS and all these other things. So in January of 2007, they get it pretty much good enough that Jobs can do a demo, but it’s glitchy. The demo he does in 2007, people should go to YouTube and watch this because it’s a beautiful demo. It’s a beautiful, beautiful demo. And in fact, right now we’re going to insert the little thing about how he introduces the launch of the iPhone. Steve Jobs: So three things, a wide screen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone. Are you getting it? Stephen Semple: Okay. But you still want to go to the YouTube thing and watch this because his demo, it looks so slick. But here’s the interesting thing… Dave Young: Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this. [Using Stories To Sell] Dave Young: Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing. Stephen Semple: The technology was so glitchy that they literally were like, “This is the only map you can do. This is the only phone call you can make.” They literally found this one single path where they could show everything that they knew it wouldn’t glitch. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: But Jobs being the way Jobs was, he made it seem like, “Oh, I’m just going to do this and I’m just going to do this.” It was like they had spent weeks like, “Oh no, this is the only way we can make this work.” Dave Young: We’ll work the rest out before it goes to market. Stephen Semple: Yeah. So basically they announced it in 2007 and basically what Jobs does, he goes to Maps and he calls up Starbucks and he orders 4,000 cups of coffee. But the point is, they also say, “Hey, this is going to be launched in six months.” So the team’s now got six months to actually get this sucker working, and they get it finished. But the interesting thing is, there were still a lot of people on Wall Street and things like that who didn’t think it was going to be that great because it was two times the price of everything else. It was twice as expensive as any [inaudible 00:15:03]- Dave Young: I mean, it still kind of is. Stephen Semple: Yes. Dave Young: Yeah. Stephen Semple: And AT&T, because AT&T did a development deal with them, AT&T was the only carrier it was available on for the first bunch of years. It was first four years that it was only available on AT&T, which was a brilliant move for AT&T, because AT&T- Dave Young: It really was. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: I can tell you how I got my first iPhone. Stephen Semple: Okay, let’s hear it. Dave Young: I didn’t get iPhone 1. Well, I did. I got an iPhone one, but I got it secondhand. When the iPhone 2 came out, our partner, Michelle Miller, said, “Hey, anybody want to buy my iPhone 1 because I’m going to get a 2.” And I’m like, “Well, dang it. It doesn’t work in…” I was living in Western Nebraska. We didn’t have AT&T. And so, “Shoot, what do I do?” But then I read AT&T, you can sign up for AT&T and get a contract with them on the website. So you just sign up and I’m like, “Okay. But I’m in Nebraska.” And I found out that the weird local cell phone company that I had actually had a, I don’t know what you call it, a roaming agreement with AT&T. So there were no extra charges to be on the AT&T network on the local thing that I had. But I needed a Colorado address. I couldn’t just change my existing cell phone number to AT&T because I wasn’t in their coverage area. So I got a 303 area code and signed up for an AT&T contract and then activated this used phone on that account. And the address I gave them was Denver International Airport. Stephen Semple: Oh, fantastic. Dave Young: So I have a 303 phone number and my address is Denver International Airport. In the back of my mind, I think somewhere tucked away in a back corner of an office at AT&T is a pile of mail waiting for me. And if I ever walked in there, they’d say, “Oh yeah, we’ve been waiting for you to come get your mail.” Stephen Semple: As you know, I’m Canadian. We had to wait a couple of years because AT&T actually had the international rights and it took a little while for one of the Canadian cell phone companies did a deal with AT&T. So I think the iPhone was out a couple of years before we were able to get them here in Canada. But even with all of those hurdles, in the first week, they sold 250,000 of these phones in the first week. Dave Young: Yeah. Just creating this scarcity at first by limiting it to one carrier and a slow rollout across borders. When you saw someone with one, you went, “Oh, I want that. I want that.” Stephen Semple: Yeah. Now here’s the other part- Dave Young: I still have it somewhere. I was just looking for it in a drawer behind me. If I’d known- Stephen Semple: Yeah, but I don’t ever tell you [inaudible 00:17:50]- Dave Young: … sooner than five seconds before we start, I’d have had my iPhone out. Stephen Semple: All right. Well, you have to send a picture. Send me a picture of yourself with it. Dave Young: You know what’s amazing about it holding it? The first ones were so small. Stephen Semple: Yeah, they were actually. Dave Young: They’re so big now, but they were tiny. Stephen Semple: Remember, the whole thing was phones went from big… I find the phone evolution funny because phones went from big to teeny, tiny, to now getting back to being- Dave Young: Now bigger and bigger. Stephen Semple: … bigger and bigger. Dave Young: Screens that fold out. Stephen Semple: But here’s the other thing that changed at Apple. So when the iPhone came out, because all of a sudden now there was this people started developing apps for it. And in fact, Jobs was against initially apps being developed outside of the Apple infrastructure, but then people were just breaking the infrastructure, even though it validated the warranty. He then relented and said, “Okay, well then we do need to create the App Store,” and the App Store now is one of their most consistent products. So the thing I find that’s remarkable about all of this, one of the most consistent revenue streams for Apple is the App Store. Their most successful product is the iPhone, both of which initially Jobs was very against. And yet we think about jobs as being this amazing visionary. He was very against both these products. But here’s why I’ll give him credit as a CEO. He clearly, even though he said no to stuff, people could still bring the idea back to him because they did. And unlike a lot of other CEOs, he was open to change in his mind. Because he did on both of these things. Dave Young: And I think the standard that he said was, “Hey, okay, we’ll do it, but we’re not going to half-ass it.” Stephen Semple: Right. Because once he decided to do it… Oh no, once he decided to do it was like all the chips into the middle of the table, we’re going to do this and this is going to be fricking awesome. Like, yes. Dave Young: The ironic thing is, it ain’t going out with that wheel from the iPod. Stephen Semple: Right. Well, and that’s the other interesting thing, is when you think about the design approach, they first thought of it as adding a phone to the iPod and that locked them into the click wheel. And then they went, “Well, maybe it’s a phone with an iPod,” but then that locked them into the keyboard. Then all of a sudden realized it’s neither it’s something new. Dave Young: It’s a new thing altogether. Stephen Semple: It’s a new thing altogether. And that’s what made it magical. It was a new thing altogether. Dave Young: Ironically, you could say that it killed- Stephen Semple: And its inspiration came from the computer trackpad. That’s where the inspiration was. Sorry. Dave Young: Yeah. And you could make the case that it killed the iPod. Stephen Semple: It did. Dave Young: But I think it became the iPod. iPod just got absorbed into it. You don’t need an iPod anymore. Stephen Semple: And I’m glad you pointed that out because I meant to mention this. Because here’s the other part where I will give Steve Jobs a lot of credit, because how many businesses have we seen have failed because they were unwilling to destroy their own products? Their most successful, most profitable product was the iPod. And what was going to get killed in this? Was the iPod and they were willing to do it. Dave Young: It wouldn’t have caught on to the level that it did if it was like, “Oh, wait. Now we have to buy two devices from Apple. I have to carry two of these things around. That doesn’t make any sense.” Stephen Semple: And when you listen to Steve Jobs’ presentation of the iPhone, he lays it right out, that you don’t need the iPod anymore, that this was a killer. Now look, think about- Dave Young: And you don’t need a GPS in your pocket and you don’t need all the things. Stephen Semple: Right, right. But this willingness to destroy your own most successful product. Look, Xerox was unable to do that. Dave Young: Who? Stephen Semple: Xerox died because it was unwilling to kill its own products. How many other companies have we seen that happen, where it’s like, “Well, no, we can’t do that because that’s how we make money.” And Jobs was like… So when you say fully on board, once he was fully on board, it was like, “Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. No, the iPods days are numbered. We know that.” Dave Young: Yeah. You want to hear my pet peeve about it? Stephen Semple: Sure. Dave Young: Being a broadcaster at the time, I guess it was after I left the radio business, but one thing that they could have easily done, and I’ve heard that the circuitry is already built into it, but they opted not to do it, was put an AM/FM radio in it so that you could actually listen to the radio on the same device. And I think they opted for selling you songs instead of letting you listen to your local radio station. Because they could have easily done that, right? Stephen Semple: Interesting. Dave Young: There were walkmans that had AM/FM built into them. Stephen Semple: It’s interesting because there’s- Dave Young: But they opted not to do that. Stephen Semple: And it’s interesting that no… From the best of my knowledge, none of the cell phone companies have opted to do that. It seems like if you’re going to listen to somebody’s radio station now, it’s through their app. Dave Young: Yeah, you have to stream it. Stephen Semple: Yeah. Dave Young: But not over the air. We could go into a whole list of things, but I think one of the biggest issues with that is safety, right? If you have a device that can pick up over the air transmissions and you don’t need an internet connection to do it, you can listen to a tornado warning without- Stephen Semple: Yeah, it’s true. Dave Young: … those kinds of things, you can tune into things that are going on. Not that radio stations anymore are doing much of that. But anyway, I always thought they could easily do this. They just didn’t. Stephen Semple: Yeah. I don’t know much about that, but the part- Dave Young: But I still have one. Stephen Semple: Yeah. But the part, again, that I found interesting about this was, he was against it. He came for it. Once he was for it, he was fully in and they were willing to destroy their most profitable product to replace it with another product. Because once he saw the writing was on the wall, it was like, “No, we’re going to do this and we’re going to do it awesome.” Dave Young: Yep. Well, it’s a great story and it’s a great product. I still have one and they keep adding things that I don’t even know how to use. Stephen Semple: That’s very true. Dave Young: Isn’t that the truth? But I can still listen to my music and answer my phone calls. Stephen Semple: And take pictures. Dave Young: Yeah, the cameras, to me, one of the best parts of it. Stephen Semple: It really is. Dave Young: I have some old grainy photos that I took with the little pocket. What did you call them? Just the little PDAs that were out just before- Stephen Semple: Oh, I never had any of those, so I don’t know. Palm pilots and things like that? Dave Young: Yeah, the Palm Pilots. Stephen Semple: Oh, did they have a camera in them? I never had one with a camera in it. Dave Young: Yeah. I have a bunch of grainy photos that I took with a Sony version of a Palm Pilot that had a grainy little camera in it. So it was about the same kind of camera you’d get in a flip phone. Stephen Semple: Okay. All right. Dave Young: I have cool pictures of… From 2004, Roy Williams took me onto the land that they had just bought that was going to become Wizard Academy. Those were taken on my little Palm Pilot phone. Stephen Semple: There you go. Dave Young: Wish I’d have had an iPhone back then. Stephen Semple: Right. Well, and that’s the thing. We have it with us all the time. All right, cool. Dave Young: Thank you, Steven. Stephen Semple: And I know it’s not our typical thing to talk about, but look, the iPhone changed the world. Dave Young: That’s true. Stephen Semple: Let’s just face it. It changed the world. Dave Young: In many ways still doing it. Stephen Semple: It sure is. Yeah. Dave Young: Thanks for bringing us the iPhone. It looks like I’ve got some notifications I got to go check, Steven, so let’s put a pin in this one. Stephen Semple: All right. Thanks, Dave. Dave Young:Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five star rating and review at Apple Podcasts. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute empire building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com

Air Canada CEO [Michael Rousseau] to step down in 2026 amid recent controversy over French-language skillsThe Board of Directors of Air Canada has announced that President and Chief Executive Officer Michael Rousseau will retire by the end of the third quarter of 2026, following nearly two decades with the airline.Did the official press release mention the crash?Did the official press release mention the CEO's inability to speak French?Will he remain on the board?According to the Board, when did it start the internal succession planning process?According to the Board, when did it start the external succession planning process?Did the press release stick to Canadian/Quebec language laws and use the appropriate accents in Montreal and Quebec? YES: Montréal, Québec.Some TRUE and FALSE questions from the company's latest proxy statement:TRUE of FALSE: Air Canada “regularly test the linguistic skills of its more than 15,000 public facing employees in respect of Canada's official languages”TRUE of FALSE: The proxy states it has “2 official languages.”TRUE of FALSE: In the CEO's opening letter to shareholders he states that “We are immensely proud of … promoting our official languages.”TRUE of FALSE: Language proficiency is an official skill used to describe directorsTRUE of FALSE: Air Canada is the only airline required to offer services in both official languages in CanadaTRUE of FALSE: “Air Canada uses both official languages of Canada in its corporate, customer and employee communications and is committed to promoting both official languages of Canada across the country, and have policies, programs, procedures and tools to help our employees learn and improve their language skills. Six of the seven members of our Executive Committee are bilingual.”Xerox Board of Directors Appoints Louie Pastor as Chief Executive OfficerWill he be chair or just a director?How many CEOs since 2022?How many CFOs since 2025?What is the average board tenure of a Xerox director?How many different executive positions has Louis Pastor held at Xerox since 2018?How many times has Louis Pastor resigned from Xeros since 2018?On March 25, 2026, Starbucks Corporation held its 2026 Annual Meeting of ShareholdersAverage support for directors?Number of directors with 99% support?Lowest support?Percentage against Say on Pay?The Accountability Board submitted a shareholder proposal requesting supermajority shareholder voting requirements be replaced with majority voting requirements. The board gave no recommendation? What percentage of shareholders supported this proposal?How many supported an SHP asking for an Independent Chair?Why was it so low?Finally, there were 4 anti-SG/anti-woke/anti-DEI. What was their average level of support?Democrats Examine Elon Musk's Role in Suspension of Business Disclosure LawThe Corporate Transparency Act requires companies to report information about their ownership to the government, an effort to combat problems such as money laundering and terrorism.In February, a New York Times investigation revealed that Mr. Musk was quietly operating at least 90 private companies in Texas that would have been subject to heightened disclosure; and that he has used limited liability companies that disclose little about their ownership structure to disguise his spending, including to support Mr. Trump in the 2024 election.The Treasury Department suspended the law last March one day after Mr. Musk posted on X, in response to a user frustrated about the law, that he “can look into it.”Who is the group examining Elon Musk led by?What is Chick-fil-A offering families to ditch phones at the table in push to unplugTotal bill forgiveness“Conversation Cards” sponsored by Chick-fil-AA signed photograph of CEO Andrew Cathy, the third generation of the Cathy family to lead the companyEarly access to new menu itemsIce CreamNetflix cofounder Reed Hastings says his first boss out of college would wash his dirty mugs at 4:30 a.m.—so now he returns the favor for his staff too“One morning I came in very early to the office [at] like 4:30 [a.m.], and I went into the bathroom, and there was my CEO. And he's washing coffee cups,” Hastings explained. “And I was like, ‘Barry, are you washing my coffee cups?' And he said, ‘Yes.' And I said, ‘Have you been doing that all year?'” “He said ‘Yes.' And I'm like, ‘Why?'” “And he said, ‘Well, you do so much for us and this is the one thing I can do for you.'”How does Reed return the favor to his staff?Investors Suing to Vote on ESG Proposals Meet Corporate PushbackChubb Ltd. and BJ's Wholesale Club Holdings Inc. are pushing back against shareholder lawsuits seeking to place ESG proposals on annual meeting ballots.Chubb: 23% F (3/13) with 13% total influenceThere are only 3 women on Chubb's board, how many Michaels do they have?CEO (2004-) and Chair (2007-) Evan Greenberg has been at the helm for 22 years. How many years has he served with Lead Independent Director Michael Connors (2011-)?BJ's Wholesale Club30% F with 14% influenceTwo of 10 key executives at BJ's are women. How many of BJ's 6 key board leadership positions are led by women (3 committee chairs, CEO, Chair, Lead Director)?A CEO trying to reindustrialize America says blue-collar pay is headed for ‘massive hyperinflation' and kids should skip college to become weldersThis is from Hadrian Automation, a high-tech manufacturing company that builds "software-defined factories" for the aerospace and defense industries using AI-powered software, unlike a traditional machine shop which relies on the "tribal knowledge" of veteran machinistsWhat is the name of Hadrian's CEO?Duke ThunderRex ChargerChris PowerBlaze CannonJack HammerDid he graduate from college?

What do a cold beer, a pair of duck-hunting boots, and a heavy sledgehammer have to do with $14 trillion in brand equity?In this masterclass, David Aaker—the "Father of Modern Branding" explains how these iconic "memory anchors" do the heavy lifting that traditional "demand marketing" cannot. We dive into the "Curse of Success," why most companies are stuck in a "herd" of sameness, and how to navigate the silo problem without falling into the trap of centralization.If you've ever struggled to justify brand spend to a CFO, Aaker provides the evidence-based ammunition needed to prove that brand is a strategic asset, not a line-item expense.Key TakeawaysThe Power of Signature Stories: Why L.L. Bean's boots and Haier's sledgehammer are more effective than mission statements for aligning culture and brand.Escaping the Herd: Growth doesn't come from being "better" than the competition; it comes from being different enough to own a new subcategory.The $14 Trillion Asset: Brand equity is a massive financial engine. Aaker explains why short-termism and "performance marketing" are currently eroding this global wealth.Solving the Silo Problem: The natural instinct is to centralize. Aaker argues the real solution is cooperation and communication, allowing local units to stay agile while remaining brand-aligned.The Curse of Success: Why the most successful firms (like Kodak or Xerox) are often the most vulnerable to disruptive innovation because they are optimized for their current business.Timestamps01:11 – The $14 Trillion Framework: Why Aaker's work governs modern marketing.12:20 – The Silo Trap: Why centralization is the "natural" but wrong solution.17:20 – Short-Termism: How "demand marketing" risks the long-term health of brand equity.22:14 – The Beer: The Asahi Super Dry story and the power of owning a subcategory.32:01 – The Boot: L.L. Bean's origin story as a "memory anchor" for brand loyalty.35:15 – The Sledgehammer: How Haier's signature story baked quality into their culture.42:43 – The Curse of Success: Why winners like Kodak and Xerox fail to innovate.About Our GuestDavid Aaker is the Vice Chairman of Prophet and Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He is the author of over 15 books and is widely credited with creating the modern framework for brand equity.LinkedIn: David AakerLatest Book: Aaker on Branding: 2nd EditionReferencesAaker on Branding https://prophet.com/2025/04/aaker-on-branding-second-edition/Blog davidaaker.comBrand Relationship Spectrum https://medium.com/@DavidAaker/branding-a-new-offering-the-brand-relationship-spectrum-649d6b33eddf

On our last non-JoJo episode for a while (?) we talk about three more episodes of China's To Be Hero X, episodes 7-9. We're wrapping up the E-Soul arc and starting the Lucky Cyan one. We also talk about St. Patrick's Day, the Oscar winners, Frankie Valli, skating in church, and what a horse is. | Follow us on Apple Podcasts | Support us on Patreon | Follow us on BlueSky | We're on Threads/Instagram | Subscribe to us on YouTube | Join the fan Discord

This week, we bridge the gap between the classroom and the closing room. We are joined by BJ Allen, Professor of Marketing and Sales at Brigham Young University (BYU). BJ isn't just a theorist; he's an expert in the "Silicone Slopes" tech scene, a researcher, and a mentor to the next generation of sales superstars.We dive deep into the evolution of sales—from the "old school" days of Xerox and IBM to the modern "SaaS Machine." BJ explains why sales is no longer just "artistry" or "fluffy" talk—it's a data-driven process where the best learners always become the best earners.In this episode, we discuss:The "Spin" Revolution: Why the Spin Selling methodology changed the game by proving sales is a repeatable process.The "Frenemy" Relationship: How marketing and sales are finally aligning through Account-Based Marketing (ABM).LinkedIn as Your Personal Website: Why 90% of B2B buyers vet you online before they ever take your call—and how to brand yourself as a content expert, not just a "President's Club" winner.The Power of Micro-Testing: Why you should A/B test your subject lines and intros like a scientist to see what actually moves the needle.AI and the Authenticity Gap: Why the rise of automation is actually a "golden ticket" for salespeople who double down on human, personalized interactions.

Today's guest is David Shake, Director, ServiceNow PMO - North America at Crossfuze. Founded in 2000, Crossfuze is a global consulting and services firm specializing in the ServiceNow platform. As a 2025 ServiceNow Partner of the Year, Crossfuze helps organizations accelerate digital transformation through advisory, implementation and managed services. The company focuses on optimizing workflows, improving service delivery and enabling customers to maximize the value of their ServiceNow investments.David is a focused and innovative professional with strong leadership, management, and communication skills. He excels in balancing competing priorities while building collaborative teams and strong client relationships. As a Client Lead at Crossfuze, David directs complex projects involving process and system design, resource management, and global service delivery. Passionate about customer success, David leverages his ServiceNow expertise to deliver operational excellence and help clients achieve their business goals.In the episode, David talks about:0:00 His journey from Xerox sales intern to service delivery leader5:47 Crossfuze as an elite ServiceNow partner offering implementations and support6:59 Delivering ServiceNow reveals gaps between vision and reality10:13 The need to be honest, realistic and solution-focused in implementations13:45 Seeing growing demand in SecOps and risk management16:00 How Crossfuze's small size cultivates a collaborative, expert-driven culture18:14 Why Crossfuze's reputation and expert breadth drive industry differentiationTo find out more about all the great work happening at Crossfuze, check out the website www.crossfuze.com

The 2017 NYDJ Apparel (nee Not Your Daughter's Jeans) transaction pre-dated Serta as the original “uptier” liability management deal in which lenders holding a majority of the loan amended the waterfall to uptier their existing holdings plus new money, subordinating minority lenders holding the same loans.In a conversation with 9fin's Global Head of Distressed & LevFin Max Frumes, Debevoise's co-head of restructuring Sidney Levinson, who represented the majority lenders in that case, discusses the significance of the deal at the time and the evolution of LME technology ever since. They're joined by Debevoise Partners Scott Selinger and Erica Weisgerber, to of the co-heads of the firm's expanded Liability Management and Special Situations Group.Listen as they explore the commonalities and differences between the NYDJ situation and other well-known restructurings including Serta, J.Crew, Envision, Robertshaw, Trimark, Boardriders, Chewy, Petsmart, Caesars and Xerox.Have any feedback for us? Send a note to podcast@9fin.com. Thanks for watching and listening!

Send a textThink about that meeting last week where you knew exactly what needed to change, but you softened it. Think about that email where you danced around the real issue because you did not want to seem difficult. This pattern costs women leaders credibility and influence. In this Women's History Month episode, Kele Belton unpacks the leadership wisdom of Ursula Burns. As the first Black woman Fortune 500 CEO, Burns turned Xerox around not with fancy jargon or perfect diplomacy, but by saying exactly what she thought.WHAT THIS EPISODE IS ABOUT Ursula Burns served as Xerox CEO from 2009 to 2016. She took over when the company faced multiple crises: massive debt, declining market share, and regulatory scrutiny. What got her through was not diplomatic language or comfortable silence: it was her commitment to candor.In this 5-minute Monday Momentum episode, Kele breaks down why "palatable" gets you nowhere when the stakes are high. This is part of our Women's History Month series featuring five icons who changed how we lead: Brené Brown, Ursula Burns, Mellody Hobson, Indra Nooyi, and Ellen Ochoa.WHAT YOU WILL LEARNThe Candor Practice. When you feel the urge to soften a message, pause and ask: "What would I say if I were not worried about how it lands?".The Transformation. How to move from "I am not sure, but maybe..." to "I recommend we prioritize these three deliverables."The Utility of Truth. Why real leadership is saying the useful thing even when it is uncomfortable.The Clarity Formula. State what you are seeing, name the consequence, and make your recommendation.The Authority of the Unfiltered Voice. Why your thoughtful perspective is more valuable than perfect diplomacy.WHAT YOU WILL ACTUALLY DO THIS WEEK Follow the Ursula Burns practice in three steps:Notice the softening reflex. Identify one conversation where you are worried about seeming difficult.Ask the Clarity Question. "What would I say if I were not worried about how it lands?"Deliver the Recommendation. Use the formula: State what you see + name the consequence + make the recommendation.The Shift: > ❌ Instead of: "I am not sure, but maybe we could look at adjusting the timeline." ✅ Try this: "The timeline is tight, and we will miss it unless we cut scope. I recommend we prioritize these three deliverables."MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODETop 10% Global Ranking. Communicate to Lead is now officially in the top 10% of podcasts globally with a Listen Score of 25.Ursula Burns. Author of "Where You Are Is Not Who You Are."Ignite Your Leadership Power Accelerator. Join the waitlist for the 12-week program designed for women ready to move from execution to strategy.QUICK ANSWERS (FAQ)Who is Ursula Burns? Ursula Burns is the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company as CEO. She served as Xerox CEO from 2009 to 2016.ABOUT YOUR HOST Kele Belton is a communication and leadership facilitator, coach, and consultant who specializes in helping women leaders stop softening their message and start leading with strategic command. Through her Top 10% globally ranked podcast and her coaching programs, Kele provides actionable frameworks that help high-performing women move from being palatable to being powerful.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kele-ruth-belton/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetailoredapproach/Website: https://thetailoredapproach.com

Why you should listenDoug Pelletier has spent 35 years winning enterprise accounts (Disney, Pfizer, Xerox) as a small Salesforce partner, proving that company size is irrelevant when your positioning and sales approach are right.Learn why Doug hired a General Manager at just six employees, and how that single WHO decision helped him scale to 130 people without burning out on tasks outside his strengths.Get Doug's approach to managing cash flow daily (a discipline he's maintained for 17 years) and why he says cash flow matters more than profitability for consulting firm owners.About Doug PelletierDoug Pelletier is the Founder and CEO of Trifecta Technologies, a technology consulting firm he launched in 1991 that has grown into a trusted Salesforce and enterprise solutions partner for leading organizations. A sales- and strategy-led founder, Doug focuses on identifying real business problems, building executive relationships, and hiring strong operational leadership early – allowing him to concentrate on growth, client strategy, and selling. His leadership is shaped by decades of experience and a strong emphasis on financial discipline and long-term stability. Having gone through multiple industry shifts, Doug views AI as a major inflection point and leads Trifecta in helping organizations move beyond the hype to apply data, architecture and AI in practical ways that drive meaningful business outcomes. Resources and LinksTrifecta.comDoug's LinkedIn profileSnowflakeDatabricksApolloZoominfoPrevious episode: 667 - The Land-and-Expand PlayCheck out more episodes of the Paul Higgins PodcastSubscribe to our YouTube channel: @PaulHigginsMentoringJoin our newsletterSuggested resources

Outcome-Based Selling sounds powerful - but most sales transformation efforts stall because organizations still think like product companies. In this episode, we unpack what it really takes to shift from product selling to true customer centricity and enterprise sales strategy. In this episode of the B2B Sales Trends Podcast, Harry Kendlbacher sits down with Michael Oren, SVP Americas Sales at Dematic, to explore the uncomfortable truth behind outcome-based selling and sales transformation inside enterprise environments. This is not theory. It's lived experience - from Xerox to Dematic - across real organizations, real customers, and real accountability.

In this episode of RevOps Champions, host Brendon Dennewill sits down with Rob Triggs, founder of RTR and creator of the COMM Sales Program (CALM), to share his journey and unpack what it really takes to scale revenue and build predictable, high-performing engines without chaos.Rob details his unconventional path, from Xerox service technician to top-performing sales leader, which fundamentally shaped his belief that selling is an act of service, not pressure, a concept he argues is universally applicable.This episode is a must-listen for founders, revenue leaders, and operators who want aligned teams, calmer sales motions, and scalable systems built for the future.What You'll LearnWhy empowerment is the key to scaling without slowing momentumHow misalignment shows up at growth ceilingsWhat separates data-driven companies from teams that just collect dateWhere CRM and automation implementations go wrong and how to get them rightHow AI shifts leaders from reactive reporting to predictive decision-makingWhy belief, mindset, and clarity still matter in an AI-powered organizationResourcesWorking Genius Ceilings of ComplexityDigiMarConCALM: COMM Sales ProgramIs your business ready to scale? Take the Growth Readiness Score to find out. In 5 minutes, you'll see: Benchmark data showing how you stack up to other organizations A clear view of your operational maturity Whether your business is ready to scale (and what to do next if it's not) Let's Connect Subscribe to the RevOps Champions Newsletter LinkedIn YouTube Explore the show at revopschampions.com. Ready to unite your teams with RevOps strategies that eliminate costly silos and drive growth? Let's talk!

  Learn how to build authentic branding that transforms your business from forgettable to magnetic. Authentic branding is the secret weapon that separates thriving seven and eight-figure businesses from those stuck competing on price. In this episode, we explore why your brand goes far beyond logos and colors—it's about aligning your messaging, positioning, and visual identity with who you truly are. Discover the strategic framework that took one service business from 100 customers to 2,000 after a complete rebrand, and learn why generic AI-generated content is killing connection while authenticity is becoming the ultimate differentiator in a crowded marketplace. Re Perez is the CEO of Branding For The People, a strategic branding agency serving seven and eight-figure service-based businesses. A former Fortune 500 brand consultant with senior roles at firms like Interbrand and Siegel+Gale, Re has worked with giants including GE Money, TD Ameritrade, and Xerox. He's also the author of "Your Brand Should Be Gay (Even If You're Not): The Art and Science of Creating an Authentic Brand." Toni Bache is an entrepreneur, advisor, and strategist with over 15 years in senior global leadership roles for multi-billion dollar companies. She now helps entrepreneurs build businesses that don't sacrifice freedom and flexibility. KEY TAKEAWAYS: True branding starts with the who, what, and why—not logos and colors. Position your brand at the intersection of credibility, uniqueness, and relevancy. An inauthentic brand name or personality can cap your growth potential. Strategic differentiation (like using purple in a sea of green competitors) sparks conversations and memorability. AI content is garbage in, garbage out—your unique voice and stories are the differentiator. Vulnerability and personal stories create connection points that generic business tips never will. Being polarizing is a feature, not a bug—it filters for your ideal clients. You are the secret sauce; share the things that make you memorable, even if they feel mundane. Growing your business is hard, but it doesn't have to be. In this podcast, we will be discussing top level strategies for both growing and expanding your business beyond seven figures. The show will feature a mix of pure content and expert interviews to present key concepts and fundamental topics in a variety of different formats. We believe that this format will enable our listeners to learn the most from the show, implement more in their businesses, and get real value out of the podcast. Enjoy the show. Please remember to rate, review and subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss any future episodes. Your support and reviews are important and help us to grow and improve the show. Follow Charles Gaudet and Predictable Profits on Social Media: Facebook: facebook.com/PredictableProfits Instagram: instagram.com/predictableprofits Twitter: twitter.com/charlesgaudet LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/charlesgaudet Visit Charles Gaudet's Wesbites:  www.PredictableProfits.com www.predictableprofits.com/community https://start.predictableprofits.com/community  

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. 1985, I started to work at a telecom equipment manufacturer. We had a main frame computer in our combined office- and lab room. We were four sitting in the room and it was this one terminal for all of us and maybe even for someone more. Downstairs, we at component technology department had our big climate controlled laboratories. I used an HP 85 computer having the Basic programming language to automize measurements of resistors. And there were several more of them for other measurements of various electronic components. Also more advanced computers were used in the labs and as I recall also with other languages than Basic. I remember I learned briefly a bit about one of those languages but have forgotten which one. The secretary at the department could send Telex messages around the world. We handed a hand written manuscript to her and she typed it into the Telex system. And she had a Xerox computer with big, at least the 8 inch floppy discs. Not so many years later my manager got a Personal computer running DOS and some years later it DOS computers also to the staff. But also very early we had a Sun Unix station. And for many years Unix became my daily driver at work. Before I started to work, in school we had some education in Basic programming. We were using the at least in Sweden very successful and good Luxor ABC 80 computer. At the end of my school time, my school got the top notch ABC 800 with colour screen. At home so I could get a chance to learn somewhat more about computers and Basic programming in my own pace, I got a Zinclair ZX 80 computer, which I later upgraded to ZX 81. One summer job when I was a student I was at Televerket, the Swedish PTT. It meant that I visited numerous of exchange stations. Many at the country side, some with very few subscribers so I could hear the relay start when someone was making a call. At bigger stations it was noise from relays all the time. As I mentioned, after studies were completed I was working with telecom equipment in particular for land line telephony. Not at least I worked with components for the line cards, the card at the telephone exchange that is facing towards the end user. The book The_Cuckoo's_Egg is a hacker thriller based on a true story that happened in the mid-1980's going on for a year. It was written by the hunter shortly after. Cliff Stoll describes Unix commands, which are similar to Linux. He talks about passwords, about encryption and a lot more. Many technical details he describes by using analogy with more common non technical life examples. A security hole in GNU-Emacs software, a software still around today, plays a central role in how the hacker could penetrate. To fix and update security holes are very relevant today as well. Many things in computers and technology have changed. But at the same time very much of the problems are valid today although they are somewhat different. And the way he describes technical details for the non-technical reader are relevant also today, I believe. At the same time as the book has many technical details, he also describes the daily life at home, the left wing culture he belonged to at the university, his long hair and the dress code he belonged to. And the music. He also describes his contacts to numerous authorities and frustration in those contacts. I am very impressed of his analytical research approach, his persistence, his skills and inventiveness including inventiveness of his girl friend and others. One take away for me is that he kept a detailed log book. It is an important research tool. The log book together with the print outs of exactly what the hacker did were core references for analyzing and make conclusions, retract and change conclusions when new information lead to that earlier assumptions were wrong. He also wrote a technical paper about it before he wrote the book. For those interested, there are several videos with him of later date on various topics.Provide feedback on this episode.

Troy Anderson is CFO of Kelly Services, a staffing solutions provider to various industries, who has spent his career driving transformation across some of the most complex business environments. Before joining Kelly, he served as CFO at Universal Technical Institute, where he helped double revenue over five years through a mix of organic growth and strategic acquisitions. Earlier in his career, he held senior finance leadership roles at Conduent, a $6billion player (bought by Xerox).  Conduent life cycle a $6b public company acquired by Xerox Investor relations at Xerox as a game-changer for my career  Making finance a partner across the value chain Business Process Outsourcing vs AI The need for a deep understanding of your business  Catch the full transcript below

In the vein of Ancestral Recall Mike starts out with the ancient mother ship article "UB Trippin'" and then challenges Rich to apply it to contemporary Pauper. How does the 1997 "Xerox" strategy innovated by Hall of Famer Alan Comer inform not just Dimir Terror... But so many great decks in Pauper? Find out, and how not to cast an Arms of Hadar in our latest podcast.

What if feeling like you only had a stick on the battlefield was the moment God showed you the sword? In this episode, Francis Piché shares his declaration: to create the best men's group in the world for conscious men who want to establish something beyond their own life. The Knight Club isn't just about mission, it's about working on that mission together with brothers who share the heroic code (humility, excellence, respect, optimism, integrity, and courage). His vision? Chapters around the world where men can travel to Paris, London, Barcelona, or Sydney and know they'll connect with people like them who they can do life and business with. Francis was inspired by a recent trip to Scotland where he felt deeply connected to the knighthood and brotherhood, realizing this is his next chapter. He reveals the dark night in Orange County when he felt so powerless that ending it all seemed like the only option. Financial debt, feeling worthless in a place full of luxury cars, unable to even talk to a woman because his self-esteem was on the floor. After rejecting his friend's money in anger, he told his brother Jason he felt like all he had on the battlefield was a stick, not even a sword. That conversation saved his life. Later, Francis asked for the photo of the bright star he'd seen that night. The star's name? Sisaph, which means "the sword of the giant." God had the story for him all along. Francis also shares how his sales mentor Bob Smith told him after selling his entire year's quota in six months: "What do you mean 150%? Your goal is 200%. That's how successful people think."   [00:07:06] The Knight Club Declaration Declaration: Create the best men's group in the world for conscious men, men of faith Men who want to establish something beyond their own life, creating a legacy Rising together in ups and downs, working on mission together Differentiator: Not only thinking about mission, working on it with Thinking Into Results program [00:08:40] The Vision: Chapters Around the World Vision inspired by recent Scotland trip, felt connected to knighthood and brotherhood Imagine chapters everywhere: Paris, London, Barcelona, Sydney, South America Connect with people like you who share the heroic code Can do life and business with them, have great time traveling [00:09:20] The Heroic Code Humility, excellence, respect, optimism, integrity, and courage All guys in group embody these attributes, you can rely on this Creating retreats for men, sometimes incorporating women together Traveling, connecting great people, business owners, dreamers who want to make difference [00:11:40] Am I Alive While I'm Alive? Best friend died last year out of nowhere at 47 Asked himself: "Am I alive while I'm alive? Am I having a bold life?" Bold means: Brave, Original, Loving, and having Dedication to a cause/mission Purpose of life: be fully alive, being free, helping others, making a difference [00:17:00] The Dark Night in Orange County Two-three years ago, perfect storm: waiting for clients not responsive, deeply in debt Felt not good for own clients, business not showing up, felt powerless and meaningless Saw beautiful woman at hookah bar but too scared to talk, she left in McLaren Friend Simon teased "Be a man, why don't you talk to her?" hitting self-esteem to floor [00:19:20] The Stick on the Battlefield Rejected friend's money with gesture he felt, was rejecting own friend and self "What's the point? Why am I here? I'm not even a man" Only reason didn't consider ending it: didn't want burden of bringing body back to parents Friend Jason had long conversation, wouldn't let him give up [00:21:00] The Sword of the Giant Told Jason: "If I was on battlefield right now, all I have is a stick, not even a sword" After conversation felt reignited, asked for photo of bright star from that night Looked up name of star: Sisaph, which means "the sword of the giant" "God had that story for you. You're the giant, you're the star. Remember this." [00:22:20] The Power of Brotherhood Moment of reawakening the giant within Not just support in bad times, also celebrating good times All have ceilings, all have pressure (next exit, firing employees, etc.) Requires new identity to go to next level [00:24:40] The Godfather's Wisdom At 16, godfather gave birthday card: "Don't choose job for paycheck" "Do what makes your heart come alive, otherwise you'll be poor all your life" Chose multinational job for $55K over $30K small organization that offered travel Was miserable for four years, flames diminished every day [00:26:20] Found the Card 20 Years Later At 36, found the card and realized: "He was right" Associated being successful with getting all that, which is a lie If you have enough of your why and excitement, you'll go through challenges Purpose of living: to be fully enlivened [00:27:20] Bob Smith: The Sales Mentor Week before starting new job at Xerox, fiancée said "I want to cancel the wedding" Three months before wedding, she left next day, "house of cards collapsed" Sales coach Bob Smith at bootcamp helped him recreate himself Bob's lesson: "Seven things to be a successful salesperson... #7 most important: Have fun" [00:29:00] "You Can Do Anything You Want" After bootcamp, thanked Bob for the week Bob put hand on shoulder, piercing eyes: "I've watched you this week" "You can do anything you want in your life. It's just up to you" Gave permission to go for it [00:29:40] Sold Entire Year in Six Months Won rookie of the year, at six months sold whole year's quota Told Bob "My goal now is 150% for President's Club" Bob: "What do you mean 150%? Your goal is 200%. That's how successful people think" Ended at 167% of plan, almost best in entire company, second place [00:37:20] Are You Alive While You're Alive? Friend passed away from running, something burst in heart, died at 47 Life is precious, not just at 65-80, but now Mission: make sure fully playing game, not playing small Other friend with cancer chose date, said: "Never let anyone or anything sway you from who you really are"   KEY QUOTES "The name of the star was Sisaph, which means the sword of the giant. All along, while you're at your lowest point, God had that story for you. You're the giant, you're the star." - Francis Piché "You can do anything you want in your life. It's just up to you." - Bob Smith (to Francis) CONNECT WITH FRANCIS PICHÉ 

HT2488 - If You Can See It, Too Over the years, I've talked a lot about using a camera like a Xerox copy machine. If your photograph shows me what I would have seen had I been standing next to you at the moment of exposure, how does your photograph bring me something new, something from you, something valuable? Show your appreciation for our free weekly Podcast and our free daily Here's a Thought… with a donation Thanks!

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This week, for Christmas, a heart-warming festive treat full of joy, goodwill and Peter Sellers at his cuddliest. ONLY JOKING.Actually, it's Carol for Another Christmas, Rod Serling's bleak, angry, Cold War reworking of A Christmas Carol . Conceived as the opening salvo in a run of UN-friendly TV specials, the film is a full-throated warning against isolationism, nuclear brinkmanship and the idea that minding your own business ever ends well. Xerox paid for it, ABC aired it ad-free on 28 December 1964, viewers and critics were divided about it, and it then disappeared for nearly 50 years.Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Cleopatra) in his only television outing, the film stars Sterling Hayden as Daniel Grudge, a wealthy American industrialist who hates foreign aid, diplomacy and the United Nations in equal measure. On Christmas Eve he clashes with his liberal nephew Fred (Ben Gazzara) and is hauled through a series of visions featuring war dead, nuclear devastation and, most memorably, Peter Sellers as “Imperial Me” – a cowboy-Santa demagogue preaching radical individualism. It was Sellers' first screen appearance after his near-fatal heart attack earlier that year.Also featuring Eva Marie Saint, Robert Shaw, Steve Lawrence, Pat Hingle, Britt Ekland and music by Henry Mancini, the film is verbose, didactic and relentlessly grim – and all the more fascinating for it.Joining Tyler is Tilt Araiza (The Sitcom Club / Jaffa Cakes for Proust), drawing parallels with Planet of the Apes, The Prisoner and unpacking Serling and the social and political climate just one year after after the assassination of JFK... looking at how things came together to produce this Christmas curio.

In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Melissa Faith Hart, Founder & CEO of eBodyGuard, about building a privacy-first “electronic bodyguard” that uses voice activation and high-accuracy location to help deliver critical emergency information to first responders—supporting safer communities and smarter cities. About Melissa Faith Hart Melissa Faith Hart is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of eBodyGuard®, creator of the eBodyGuard personal safety, evidence, and wellness technology, including the eBodyGuard Safety Card™ and eBodyCam™, available in the App Store and Google Play. These tools are core components of the vendor-agnostic eBodyGuard Smart Discovery Platform, designed to integrate discovery both within and beyond criminal justice IT systems. With more than 20 years of experience working alongside law enforcement and District Attorneys, Melissa helped pioneer the first criminal eDiscovery system in the United States. She spent 17 years in corporate America, primarily at Xerox, and later served on the Pink Tax on Mobility initiative sponsored by New York University. She also collaborates with NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) to improve transit efficiency and passenger safety. Guided by her Six Sigma certifications, Melissa applied rigorous process improvement principles to the criminal justice system, partnering with experts from Xerox PARC to address long-standing inefficiencies. She later served as Executive Director of a program that automated criminal discovery, integrating 363 law enforcement agencies to enable evidence sharing within 72 hours. Melissa believes personal safety is a primal human right and remains committed to transforming systems and technologies to better protect and support communities. About eBodyGuard eBodyGuard is a personal safety technology company on a mission to keep people safe wherever they are™ and to enable Smart, Safe Cities by combining innovative tools with secure data practices. At the heart of its offering is the My eBodyGuard Program™, an integrated ecosystem that includes the My eBodyGuard Appt™, My eBodyGuard Portal™, and My eBodyGuard First Responder Portal™, designed to streamline emergency response, evidence capture, and communication with first responders in real time.  The My eBodyGuard App empowers users with features like direct 911 connection via voice activation or one-tap, GPS location accuracy, and secure audio/video evidence capture, all with strict compliance to FBI CJIS, HIPAA, COPPA, and FERPA data privacy standards.  eBodyGuard works with community stakeholders including law enforcement, 911 centers, city planners, and victim advocates to bridge gaps in emergency communication and public safety, ensuring privacy-protected information helps save lives and strengthen communities.  Watch Full Episode on ⁠Youtube⁠. --- Follow Adam on Instagram at ⁠https://www.instagram.com/askadamtorres/⁠ for up to date information on book releases and tour schedule. Apply to be a guest on our podcast: ⁠https://missionmatters.lpages.co/podcastguest/⁠ Visit our website: ⁠https://missionmatters.com/⁠ More FREE content from Mission Matters here: ⁠https://linktr.ee/missionmattersmedia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of Innovation and Digital Enterprise, Patrick and Shelli talk with Michael Ehlers, the new Chief Technology Officer at PlanSource. Mike outlines his leadership philosophy and career evolution, emphasizing that professional growth is rarely linear. He shares formative experiences at Hewitt and Xerox that taught him the importance of transparency during project setbacks, the value of blameless postmortems, and how to treat failure as a chance to grow.Those experiences inform his current leadership and hiring strategy, which prioritizes candidates with grit, curiosity, and collaborative spirit, over those with rigid technical expertise. He explains that technical skills can be acquired, but behavioral attributes are foundational to a successful dev culture.Mike shares insights earned through his range of experience, from startups to large multinationals, stressing that at any scale, leaders need empathy to understand customer needs, agility to make change, and transparency to build trust.(00:12) Welcome to Michael Ehlers, CTO at PlanSource(03:35) Navigating Leadership Challenges(10:40) The Importance of Career Growth and Culture(23:34) Leveraging Postmortems in Software Engineering(28:31) Cultural Shifts in Organizations(37:32) Empathy in Innovation: Understanding Customer NeedsMichael Ehlers has had a full career leading software and engineering teams, often at SaaS companies in the HR space. Currently, he is the new Chief Technology Officer at PlanSource. Previously, he has held roles at Benefitfocus, Paylocity, Voya Financial, Aon Hewitt (Alight), and Xerox, where he served as Vice President of Front End Development for their HR Outsourcing business. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering.If you'd like to receive new episodes as they're published, please subscribe to Innovation and the Digital Enterprise in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find the show.Podcast episode production by Dante32.

"Inovação não tem um corpo de conhecimento codificado. Cada profissional chega por uma porta diferente: design, marketing, tecnologia. Mas inovação é muito mais que usar a última IA da moda" No décimo quarto episódio do Hipsters.Talks, PAULO SILVEIRA, CVO do Grupo Alun, conversa com DENIS BALAGUER, diretor de inovação da EY, sobre o que realmente significa inovar em grandes corporações e por que a maioria das pessoas entende errado. Uma conversa sobre inovação corporativa, destruição criativa e por que empresas precisam se transformar radicalmente.  Prepare-se para um episódio cheio de conhecimento e inspiração!

Is the increasing investment in marketing by SMBs a sign of growth and optimism, or is it masking a deeper struggle with confidence and effectiveness?Agility requires not only adapting to the rapid pace of technological change but also understanding the core challenges faced by your customers, like SMBs struggling to measure marketing ROI. It also demands a willingness to simplify complex tools and processes, empowering businesses to achieve more with less.Today, we're going to talk about the evolving landscape of marketing for small and medium-sized businesses, the challenges they face, and how B2B marketers can become essential partners in their success. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Frank Vella, CEO at Constant Contact. About Frank Vella I am the CEO of Constant Contact, a comprehensive digital and ecommerce marketing platform that makes it simple and effective for a business to market or sell their idea in today's complex online marketing world. We strive to anticipate our customers' needs and provide them with the tools and support they need to improve their businesses. Because when they succeed, we succeed.Prior to joining Constant Contact, I built best-in-class operations at various sized tech firms across the globe, including top-tier companies like Microsoft, GE Capital, HP Enterprise and Xerox. I have led companies through growth, transformation and successful exits while remaining focused on building a terrific culture and keeping a company's product and presence ahead of the crowd. I'm a proud Canadian expat now living in New York City, and in my free time I enjoy traveling with my family. Frank Vella on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-vella/ Resources Constant Contact: https://www.constantcontact.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/ Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Is the increasing investment in marketing by SMBs a sign of growth and optimism, or is it masking a deeper struggle with confidence and effectiveness? Agility requires not only adapting to the rapid pace of technological change but also understanding the core challenges faced by your customers, like SMBs struggling to measure marketing ROI. It also demands a willingness to simplify complex tools and processes, empowering businesses to achieve more with less. Today, we're going to talk about the evolving landscape of marketing for small and medium-sized businesses, the challenges they face, and how B2B marketers can become essential partners in their success. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Frank Vella, CEO at Constant Contact. About Frank Vella I am the CEO of Constant Contact, a comprehensive digital and ecommerce marketing platform that makes it simple and effective for a business to market or sell their idea in today's complex online marketing world. We strive to anticipate our customers' needs and provide them with the tools and support they need to improve their businesses. Because when they succeed, we succeed.Prior to joining Constant Contact, I built best-in-class operations at various sized tech firms across the globe, including top-tier companies like Microsoft, GE Capital, HP Enterprise and Xerox. I have led companies through growth, transformation and successful exits while remaining focused on building a terrific culture and keeping a company's product and presence ahead of the crowd. I'm a proud Canadian expat now living in New York City, and in my free time I enjoy traveling with my family. Frank Vella on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-vella/ Resources Constant Contact: https://www.constantcontact.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Palm Springs, Feb 23-26 in Palm Springs, CA. Go here for more details: https://etailwest.wbresearch.com/ Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstromDon't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.showCheck out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company

Episode: 2763 The legacy of Steve Jobs, who simplified computers and computing devices.  Today, the man who made it simple.

When Troy Anderson accepted the CFO seat at Kelly Services in 2024, he stepped into an organization that, as he tells us, “had done a number of acquisitions … and really invested in the business.” The legacy staffing firm had spent nearly $1 billion to expand its reach but had yet to fully integrate those pieces. Anderson's mission: align a global operation that had grown faster than its systems.It was a familiar challenge. Across three decades and multiple industries, Anderson has made a career of steering companies through transformation. At Universal Technical Institute, he led a finance overhaul that supported a business which, he tells us, “more than doubled the company.” Before that, as a senior finance leader at Xerox and its services spinoff Conduent, he helped raise $2 billion in debt and “build out the public company infrastructure … from scratch.” That experience, preceded by an investor-relations rotation where he worked directly with Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and CFO Kathy Mikells, became “the game changer” that propelled him toward the CFO office.Now, at Kelly, Anderson is guiding a transformation “on both sides of the ledger … organizational and technology.” He's integrating recent acquisitions, modernizing finance systems, and preparing the company for the cyclical realities of a staffing industry he describes as “in decline for about two years now.”His approach reflects a pattern consistent throughout his career: when others see complexity, Anderson sees structure waiting to be built—and an opportunity to apply every lesson learned from the transformations that came before.

Burnout recovery isn't about doing less—it's about leading from peace. Discover how to hold ambition and contentment together without striving, and why true success begins when your pursuit flows from presence, not pressure.If you've ever wondered whether peace and ambition can coexist—this episode is your answer.In Ambition Without Burnout: The Paradox of Peaceful Pursuit, Julie Holly explores how high-capacity humans can pursue growth without losing the stillness they've fought to find. This conversation reframes the tension between gratitude and desire—not as conflict, but as confirmation that you're evolving.From a psychology lens, this episode unpacks Cognitive Dissonance Theory through an identity-level lens: that internal friction you feel isn't failure—it's feedback. It's your nervous system asking for congruence between who you've become inside and how you're living outside.Philosophically, Julie draws on Stoic wisdom, reminding us that peace isn't the absence of activity—it's the absence of attachment. And inspired by Ryan Holiday's Stillness Is the Key, she reframes stillness as precision, not passivity.Through the story of Anne Mulcahy, the CEO who led Xerox from collapse to resurgence by leading from calm instead of chaos, we see how peace and pursuit don't compete—they complete one another.At the heart of this episode is the soul-level truth that drives Identity-Level Recalibration (ILR):When your identity is anchored, your ambition becomes an act of gratitude. Because you're not striving for worth—you're stewarding what's already been entrusted to you.ILR is not another mindset tactic or productivity hack. It's the root-level recalibration that makes every other tool effective—because it doesn't just change your habits, it changes the who beneath them.Whether you're facing burnout recovery, decision fatigue, or a quiet sense of success without fulfillment, this episode will remind you: You don't have to choose between stillness and expansion. You can pursue without performing. You can build without burning out.Today's Micro Recalibration: The Both/And BreathFind a quiet moment—wherever you are.Take a deep inhale and whisper inwardly, “I am.” Exhale slowly and say, “I'm becoming.”Repeat this ten times.The inhale anchors your identity; the exhale activates your becoming.Because peace and purpose were never meant to compete—they were designed to coexist.If this episode gave you language you've been missing, please rate and review the show so more high-capacity humans can find it. Explore Identity-Level Recalibration→ Follow Julie Holly on LinkedIn for more recalibration insights → Schedule a conversation with Julie to see if The Recalibration is a fit for you → Download the Misalignment Audit → Subscribe to the weekly newsletter → Join the waitlist for the next Recalibration cohort This isn't therapy. This isn't coaching. This is identity recalibration — and it changes everything.

We're back, baby! Join Paige as she takes Mando through the history of Synanon and their pathway to Cedu Schools (but pronounced like Sea-Doo, you know thos jetskis that are like...not jetskis? Actually I looked it up and they qualify them as "personal watercrafts" which feels weird. Huh. Wait, it turns out that Jetskis are like a brand of personal watercrafts. So it's like how Band-Aid or Xerox just became the name for the thing. That's crazy, man. I ain't never thought about Jetskis this much in my life.) Also, we have a Patreon! [Insert Air Horn Noises Here] If you'd like to donate and join our cult, please visit www.patreon.com/cultpodcast or visit our website and click on the Patreon tab. Also also, if you'd like to listen to Armando's new show, Boyfriend Material, click this link right here or go to linktr.ee/midnightsnack.tv

You think you know how to sell until you hear Oren Klaff talk about it. Today, we're hosting the man behind Pitch Anything and Flip the Script to uncover why most marketers lose deals before they even start. Oren doesn't just challenge conventional sales wisdom. He flips it upside down, showing how neediness kills deals.Oren Klaff is a leading expert in sales, raising capital, and negotiation. As Director of Capital Markets for Intersection Capital, he has helped companies secure billions of dollars in funding. He's a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker for global giants like Google and Xerox, and a pioneer in neuroscience-based persuasion.Oren explains why marketers must learn to hold boundaries, call out clients' “games,” and create consequences on every sales call or risk being dismissed as low status. His approach is raw, counterintuitive, and insanely practical for anyone who needs to persuade at scale. If you're ready to rethink how you pitch, sell, and win deals, this one is for you!In This Episode:- Writing the 'Pitch Anything' book- Why neediness when selling kills deals- Practical sales techniques to break neediness - How to maintain a high status in sales calls- Dealing with the ‘final boss' in negotiations- The importance of setting consequences in sales- Holding clients accountable for their behavior and values- Pitch Anything vs. Flip the ScriptBuy Oren Klaff's Books:Pitch Anything: https://a.co/d/fRAqAby Flip The Script: https://a.co/d/hTcp9lP Listen to This Episode on Your Favorite Podcast Channel:Follow and listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/perpetual-traffic/id1022441491 Follow and listen on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/59lhtIWHw1XXsRmT5HBAuK Subscribe and watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@perpetual_traffic?sub_confirmation=1We Appreciate Your Support!Visit our website: https://perpetualtraffic.com/ Follow us on X: https://x.com/perpetualtraf Connect with Oren Klaff: Website - https://orenklaff.com/ LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/orenklaff/ Connect with Ralph Burns: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphburns Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ralphhburns/ Hire Tier11 - https://www.tiereleven.com/apply-now Connect...

Moving to a new city can feel like starting over—but it doesn't have to. In this episode of Social Intelligence, AJ Harbinger and Johnny Dzubak break down a science-backed three-step strategy to plug into a brand-new social circle in weeks, not months. Whether you're relocating or just looking to shake up your current routine, you'll learn how to find the right spaces, start meaningful conversations, and turn physical activity into instant connection. Plus, you'll walk away with this week's Triple Stack Challenge that jumpstarts your social success. What to Listen For [00:00:00] Why moving is the perfect moment to build a better social life [00:02:00] The danger of bubble living—and how to break out of it [00:03:30] What is a “third place” and why it's the secret to meeting new people [00:07:30] Johnny's story: How bartending made him everyone's first friend [00:09:00] Client story: How Luke built a social circle through a run club and open mic [00:10:00] Framework #2: The “Because Disclosure” to trigger instant trust [00:12:00] How to make small talk meaningful with personal micro-disclosure [00:13:00] Framework #3: Use physical activity to create social glue [00:14:00] Client story: From workouts to racketball to finding your tribe [00:15:00] Weekly Practice Plan: Block time, script disclosures, and test workouts [00:16:00] Triple Stack Challenge: Third place → Opener → Invite Episode Takeaways Within the first 90 days of moving, forming one close tie can increase happiness by over 50% Avoid "bubble living" by identifying a third place outside work and home Repeated presence at third places creates propinquity—we like who we see often Use “because disclosures” to spark trust and show vulnerability instantly Even trivial reasons build connection, thanks to Ellen Langer's Xerox study Join group physical activities (run clubs, fitness classes, rec sports) for biochemical bonding Use the Triple Stack: Pick a third place, open with a disclosure, invite to an activity Prep matters—script disclosures, treat social outings like meetings, and take brief notes after interactions to increase recall and follow-up success A Word From Our Sponsors Tired of awkward handshakes and collecting business cards without building real connections? Dive into our Free Social Capital Networking Masterclass. Learn practical strategies to make your interactions meaningful and boost your confidence in any social situation. Sign up for free at ⁠theartofcharm.com/sc⁠ and elevate your networking from awkward to awesome. Don't miss out on a network of opportunities! Unleash the power of covert networking to infiltrate high-value circles and build a 7-figure network in just 90 days. Ready to start? Check out our ⁠CIA-proven guide⁠ to networking like a spy! Indulge in affordable luxury with Quince—where high-end essentials meet unbeatable prices. Upgrade your wardrobe today at ⁠quince.com/charm⁠ for free shipping and hassle-free returns. Ready to turn your business idea into reality? Shopify makes it easy to start, scale, and succeed—whether you're launching a side hustle or building the next big brand. Sign up for your $1/month trial at ⁠shopify.com/charm⁠. Need to hire top talent—fast? Skip the waiting game and get more qualified applicants with Indeed. Claim your $75 Sponsored Job Credit now at ⁠Indeed.com/charm⁠. Curious about your influence level?  Get your Influence Index Score today! Take this 60-second quiz to find out how your influence stacks up against top performers at ⁠theartofcharm.com/influence⁠. ⁠DCM Insights⁠ ⁠The Activator Advantage: What Today's Rainmakers Do Differently⁠ ⁠The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation⁠ ⁠HBR: What Today's Rainmakers Do Differently⁠ ⁠AJ on LinkedIn⁠ ⁠Johnny on LinkedIn⁠ ⁠AJ on Instagram⁠ ⁠Johnny on Instagram⁠ ⁠The Art of Charm on Instagram⁠ ⁠The Art of Charm on YouTube⁠ ⁠The Art of Charm on TikTok Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices