Transcript

Paul Ford Operation Postlight.

Rich Ziade Operation Marketing Postlight.

PF Operation Podcast. 

[music ramps up, plays alone, fades out]

RZ You know what’s the worst kind of creep?

Paul Ford Oh yeah, I read the New York Times.

RZ Scope creep.

PF Ohhhhh, different topic. Yeah, that is awful. That is bad stuff. 

RZ Yes. 

PF Well Rich, who knows something about scope creep?

RZ We are experts at defending the scope of a project, making sure it doesn’t get out of hand such that you can’t deliver. And we’re going to share a lot of the tools and ideas that we use–

PF Are we gonna have a conversation that people can tune into via Zoom?

RZ We are. We’re having a special edition of The Postlight Podcast. It’s gonna be live streamed September 16th at 1pm.

PF Okay, where do people go?

RZ Eastern Standard Time. They go to Postlight.com/events. We’ve done these in the past. They’re always kind of fun. Very lively.

PF Don’t think webinar. Think lively, fun goofball experience.

RZ Please join us. Postlight.com/events.

[music fades in and out]

RZ Paul.

PF Oh, hey.

RZ I’ve learned something over the years.

PF Oh, thank god.

RZ As a manager, as a leader of a, you know, a growing company of 10s of people and you’re trying to get everyone aligned. You know what I’ve learned?

PF What have you learned, Rich? What have you learned?

RZ That when you name something, it not only inherits meaning, but inherits purpose and drives people’s behavior.

PF This is one of those things that when you’re on the other side of leadership, you look at it and you go, I cannot believe how stupid it can be. I can’t believe they give it an acronym. And they’re talking about that acronym as if it’s a real thing.

RZ Well we joke about it right? When we come up with the acronym.

PF Then six months later, everyone is using the acronym, and they still think you’re goofy. But they forgot you created it. But this is your thing, right? Like I am not a native acronym creator. And when you do it, I’m like, ugh. And then over and over again, over the years, I have learned the power of the acronym. 

RZ It does something, right? Is it creates a—everybody knows what the DMV is. Not just that you get your license from there, but it actually represents something cultural and meaningful and tangible. The word I’m looking for is tangibility.

PF Well, it’s the Northstar, right, you’ve used that phrase too. Where it’s just like, suddenly everyone has something to orient around, that they can point to, instead of debating what it is.

Can I tell you when they debate what it is, this is the sinister quality of naming something.

PF Before we go there, let’s let’s come up with an initiative. Tell me, you know, give me an example.

RZ Well to give it away to maintain quality and take it you know, how do we make sure that our different client relationships are going well, and the projects are good. 

PF Let me set this up for the listener. So literally one day, so we’ve been talking about, like, as Postlight was growing, how do we organize Postlight so that it’s not Rich and I zooming in on every project or other people too. Like, everybody was kind of stretched thin, you know, we were kind of the red phone, people could call us. And what was happening is we were managing kind of waiting for something to go wrong. That was a bad thing. So Rich, pulled me into the purple conference room. And he started to write down the different things, the different ways that you assess a project on the whiteboard. And the list that you came up with, I guess we came up with, but this was really your brain working was quality, opportunity, relationships and efficiency. 

RZ Yes.

PF Quality of the project, opportunity presented by this particular client, what is the status of the relationship? And are we running it efficiently? And the thesis was, if you do those four things, QORE, you will be able to look at a project, evaluate it, run through that list and the related questions and be able to say this is going well or this needs to go better without you being in the room.

RZ Exactly. And I don’t want to—by the way, we’ve had a podcast in the past about QORE. Some good articles have been written on Postlight.

PF So now you’re out in Postlight. And I am too and we are saying it’s time for QORE. 

RZ That’s right. And we presented it. 

PF I can’t show people someone with their mouth hanging open just going like what the hell is this? Cuz we’re on a podcast. But just imagine that. Imagine somebody looking at you going, ughhh.

RZ Yeah, it was a lot of deer in headlights and like, why would you do this? They’re introducing process and bureaucracy and this and that.

PF Look, they love when the process comes from the bottom up, but they hate when it comes from the top down. It’s a little organizational dynamic rule.

RZ I want to shift this setup that we just talked about, about the importance of words and how words don’t just define and are shortcuts to meaning. But they are also, they define behavior. They actually define how we’re going to behave and how we’re going to treat one another and treat the world. It’s a fascinating thing to me, because I’m backing into it—and you know who talks about this? Marketers. Marketers, like the really great ones, are like, you know what, we added an apostrophe to Dunking, and it added $16 billion in revenue or something. [Rich & Paul laugh] Like we took out the G and then all of a sudden it was your neighbor coming over with, you know, the cardboard thing that holds for four coffees at once, just by making a Dunkin’ not dunking.

PF Oh, yeah, yeah.

RZ Right? It used to be a verb! And it was a very wonderful idea, which is you take a doughnut, you break it in half, and you dunk it in the coffee. So I’m dunkin’ donuts! 

PF This ends with like Ben Affleck just kind of looking at the camera being real tired. [Rich laughs]

RZ So now we look at this pandemic, right? And here’s the moment that kind of that kind of struck me, which was three months ago, maybe May, I don’t even remember. It’s all a blur time. Time on a different continuum now because of this pandemic. But I think it was, you know, April, May, and I read an article, and it was very soundly written and essentially said this, there is no end. And boy that hits you, right? Because you’re like, okay, we’re gonna get through this. And then once we’re done getting through it, we’ll make movies about it and maybe write a play, but it’ll be behind us. And that’ll be the end of that. Right? And that made sense to us. Because the thing carried such immense, immense drama and tragedy. And I don’t mean that in a glib way. I mean, that in a real way.

PF No, it was real.

RZ It’s hard. I mean, we were in New York City, we were hearing an ambulance every six minutes, it was a ton of just this overwhelming wave of suffering and pain.

PF There is this element of like, well, we’ve gone through it, and now everybody’s gonna learn from what we went through. And this won’t have to repeat again.

RZ Yeah, humans don’t work that way.

PF No. So that was extra special. So like, New York City really buttoned it up, like we’re pretty good about our masks overall. And so then, like, you start to watch the world you’re like, oh, they just figured that it wasn’t going to apply to them.

RZ Yeah. And so why do I bring this up, Paul?

PF I don’t know, Rich, I really, I have no idea.

RZ I mean, let’s throw out the words that are tossed around a lot now. There’s the Coronavirus.

PF Coronavirus. 

RZ The word COVID. And what’s so important to do here is nobody’s going to read the paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. COVID, Coronavirus, and then the variants. I mean, honestly, if somebody had told me about variants back in March of 2020—

PF All of Delta’s internal communication, the airlines.

RZ Oh my god! Delta Airlines! You can’t say ‘hi, welcome to Delta.’

PF They’re referring it to internally by like, the number associated with it, like, you know, by like the 5975 variant with all their internal communication. [Rich laughs] 

RZ Right, right, of course. 

PF You can’t call it the Delta variant if you’re gonna get on a flight.

RZ Exactly. And I don’t know the etymology of flu. I do know that it probably is connected to swine flu or influenza. Right. And I guess what I’m getting at is this—hearing that it’s never gonna end, today in our minds. COVID is associated with a lot of pain and suffering and over extended health care workers and ICUs.

PF Oh, you want to know something amazing. It’s from the Latin influencia meaning influence.

RZ Oh, interesting.

PF Yeah. It also has the sense of the outbreak of an epidemic. 

RZ Interesting. 

PF It was initially applied to an epidemic in 1743. And then it became the flu.

RZ Interesting.

PF Just a little word well fun facts for our audience. Just a little pleasant distraction from the news of the day. Anyway, go on. I cut you off.

RZ Let me shortcut, Paul. Five years from now, when we’ve really gotten ahead of the curve. The boosters are great. I mean, the thing is pretty much been relegated to, I mean, I have a family member whose entire family got hit at a birthday party, but they were all vaccinated. And some kids and everyone had runny noses and weird to hear runny noses, Paul. It wasn’t like, you know, I started to feel a little this at our I was late in bed. It was runny noses, because you know that the vaccines are really a home run, right? I mean, they’ve just been spectacular success.

PF I mean, we don’t talk about it enough, because it’s been such a hurricane. But what a scientific gift. Like just a thing happened that we’ve never seen before in our lifetime. I guess polio, people were around for polio. But like, just like, actually, we’re gonna change. We figured it out. 

RZ It’s incredible. I mean, we got lucky. I mean, the studies could have come out and they would be like, guys, it’s about 38% effective. [Rich laughs] It’s gonna be a grind, guys.

PF Anyway, keep going. Keep going.

RZ Anyway, so let me ask you that and then pose it in the form of a question. Today, COVID is associated with death and suffering and a lot of pain and anguish. Five years from now, is the mother of an eight year old or the father of an eight year old calling the school and saying, oh, he’s gonna be out today, probably tomorrow, too. He’s got COVID.

PF Probably, yeah, I mean, it’s like chickenpox, there’s a vaccine now, right? You just don’t hear about it as much as you used to. But that vaccine didn’t show up until the mid 90s.

RZ It didn’t show up until the mid—is that true? I didn’t know it was that recent?

PF You know, the chickenpox vaccine became available in the United States in 1995. 

RZ That’s incredible. 

PF That is from cdc.gov.

RZ Yeah, you know, what people keep need to keep in mind related to this is that we’ve gotten really, we get really good at like the therapies to treat stuff. Like they’re still working hard on an AIDS vaccine. Like that’s actually a thing that is going to clinical trial soon and whatnot. Even though there’s, you know, the cocktails that allow people to still live with it.

PF  I mean, that’s also that’s a first world solution for a global epidemic that’s actually still going on that we don’t talk about very much. 

RZ Exactly. 

PF So you need that vaccine. You need it, like the UN needs to be giving everyone HIV vaccines.

RZ I think, even though hopefully more and more of the world to get vaccinated, and everybody’s got runny noses, but people are still going to react to it, because they’re going to associate it with a mental definition that they file away, because they had witnessed 2020 and 2021. And how do you undo that, Paul? And here’s what I mean by that. My guess is the world’s going to lag, we’re still going to close the factory for three weeks or two weeks, even though everyone in the factory has to be vaccinated.

PF No, that’s right. We’re in a COVID society right now to different degrees, right. And so society changes slowly, it changed very, very rapidly when everyone quarantined. Because it was absolutely critical. It was an emergency. And now we’re in this kind of long, slow emergency. And we’re kind of back to the mean, where it’s just society is going to be like, well, hold on, you know, we updated the HR system with the quarantine protocol, and I don’t have another button to press. In general, people would rather have consistency, then they would have the exact right reaction. And this is the weird part. I mean, especially if the consistency eres on the side of safety. Unfortunately, even if the consistency doesn’t, even if it is unsafe, but not completely critical, and people are just like, just let’s keep going, okay, all right. We’re going to follow our protocol. Yep. What’s the CDC say? 

RZ So here’s what I propose. I think if you are vaccinated, and test positive, which is still a thing, you should have a different condition. You should name it something else. 

PF Ohhhh, okay.  So now into branding efforts. This is great. This is what everybody is tuned in for.

RZ Paul, back to QORE. Everything is a branding effort.

PF I mean, you know, I’ve got NOVID. I’ve got QOVID. QOVID is pretty good.

RZ Little cuter. This thing is practically harmless if you’re vaccinated. I’m thinking you brand it with a little mascot, and you name it Coco.

PF Yeah, I’ve got the Coco. I always like—someone referred to it once is the round boy. I still crack up thinking about it. [Rich laughs] Got the round boy. You know, it’s just that little guy. He’s a little guy, a round boy and he gets inside your body and you breathe into his little guys get in there and you’re just like, uh oh. Okay, okay. So we’re gonna rebrand COVID. I mean, this is this is planning ahead. I mean, they started planning for the end of World War Two really relatively early in the war, because they wanted to know what that society was going to be like, they knew they had to get a plan. We’re gonna get on the other side of this, and we’re gonna get in, I’m gonna come into work and be like, man, I gotta get home. I think I might have the round boy. [Rich laughs] 

RZ Don’t ever say that to me ever again. I’m just gonna throw that out there. Do you know what words do Paul?

PF No, actually, Rich, I don’t. I’ve never—

RZ I’m asking Paul Ford what words do.

PF Never had any experience with words. Let me just step in—

RZ Oh here we go, with the name dropping titles. 

PF It’s okay, it’s fine. I’m just a columnist for Wired. But you go ahead and tell me how words work.

RZ I view words as tools. Sad. That’s a very sad aspect of my life. 

PF So did Shakespeare. Anyway, go ahead.

RZ Words help you avoid decision trees. They’re shortcuts. 

PF This is true even for the people who use words in creative ways, right? Like you’re moving out of the conversation by saying something and very often people aren’t. Most conversation, most communication is actually relatively low commitment. And so what you’re saying is we’re going to create, like if you want to make change, and you name things, and this is really we’re back to branding. See, branding to me is a fascinating discipline, because what gets out into the world is like, oh, they made their logo yellow. And, you know, just like we’re gonna engage with brands and all this absolute nonsense, but everybody—like I’m looking at the CDC website right now. They have a brand they have an identity that stands for something and it actually embodies the mission and it embodies the goals. And if you go to the CDC website, there’s actually quite a bit of stuff around the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, one of the darkest moments in their history, one of the grimmest moments in their history, and they had to own it, right? Because I’m going to say something that sounds really, like almost disrespectful because of the way that branding usually gets pushed. That was off brand. That is a public health organization that did something that literally just ruin lives, right? And so like, that’s just because that’s the one in front of me. And when I look at this, they’ve got it’s blue with stripes, and the letter CDC, it means nothing. Okay? I’m sure they could tell you what the stripes mean. But I’m looking at that. And I have 20 or 30 associations with the CDC, related to looking at that logo that guide me in the relationship I could form with this organization. And that’s when you’re talking about terms and including really, really bad stuff and really, really good stuff. We hold these orgs to account, right? Like a good example is The New York Times—I have a rule for myself on Twitter, which is I am not allowed to talk about the New York Times on Twitter, because I know a lot of people that work there, it’s my hometown newspaper, and it occasionally sends me into an absolute white outrage, just blank. And actually I’ve written for them, I have a good relationship with lots of people over there. They’ve asked me to do more stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And what you got to do is you got to take a step back and be like, what is this institution represent to me? Why am I in this relationship with it? And it’s a very, like, pseudo social, right? 

RZ Well, it is a relationship, right? I mean, and trust, and goodwill are aspects of it, right? And if the CDC tells us to do something, for the most part, look, there’s a whole population out there that just questions everything, oh, government is trying to control me, blah, blah, blah. But for the most part, we’re like, oh, they said, that we have to now wear masks. Or don’t wear masks! [Rich laughs] And that’s the implications of that. And you can even argue that they’ve kind of fumbled it a bit, not in failing to understand how confused people get, because they’re gonna just read the headline. And that’s what branding is. Headlines are branding.

PF Yeah, to a point. Headlines are kind of supposed to get you into the piece. They’re much more disposable. The brand, QORE, let’s go back to our thing and get away from talking about disease. It’s a marketing podcast, QORE is a reference point for how we relate to our clients. Postlight, as a brand represents that relationship, you’re listening to the Postlight Podcast. Postlight is something you write a check to. Postlight stands for really good technology and, and deep connection to client challenges, and really good design and product thinking. And we’re also very focused on like, events in New York City, and kind of like, we want to connect to humans. Do we think that that is the root of technology. And I think anyone who is listening to this podcast, none of this comes as a surprise, you’ve heard these things about us before, because they, you know, ideally, they represent who we are, but also because we have chosen to emphasize and communicate them. Because we think that’s good for the world and good for our business. We’re going to have it all together. That’s the goal, right? And so like, QORE is a subset that’s internal to that, but it’s actually deeply connected to it, which is how do we deliver the quality, make a good, sustained, successful, profitable business, make sure the clients are being taken care of, and also grow those relationships. Not in a like, hey, do you have anything else for me, but like, drive a lot of value by living those values. And so you’re actually, when you’re creating stuff like this, you’re creating a baby brand under the other brand.

RZ Yes, you are. And, and it is a shortcut, and back to the decision tree for a second, should a different set of behaviors occur if you are vaccinated versus if you’re not obviously. That actually is playing out. But it’s very messy. You know, what does QORE do? You can either sit next to us for five years and internalize everything and all the instincts. 

PF You don’t want to do it. Trust me. I’ve done it, and you don’t want to do it. I’ve sat with myself for 47 years. Trust me.

RZ Yeah, you don’t want to do that. And so what you do is you externalize it, you try to simplify it. Is it perfect? No. You know what I wish they would do, the CDC more of? Frankly, visuals, like something like a food pyramid or something that gives people simple, simple guidance that they can internalize.

PF I’m getting more and more into the world of data science. I’m getting more and more into the world of visualization. It’s the hardest thing.

RZ It is the hardest thing.

PF It’s essentially product development around abstractions.

RZ One of the trickiest skills, it is. Because your audience too, like scientists love presenting really dense data to other scientists in different visual ways. But if you’re trying to get 300 million people to behave a certain way, based on certain criteria, that’s very different and very, very hard to pull off. 

PF By the way, I will make a recommendation which I think our audience will like. There’s a person I follow on Twitter, I’ve chatted with once or twice, named Kieran Healy, he’s sociologist at Duke University. He’s a big fan of the programming language, R. And he wrote a book called—looking behind me because it’s right here—Data Visualization. And it’s pretty good. Like, it’s just all about, you know, graphs and charts and how to do them. But, but it’s very much about like how to truly communicate visually, and like he makes some good charts. Just some good ass charts. And so like, just a little something to think about, because it’s actually related to the sciences related to Sociology related to sharing a kind of information. It’s not the practice, right? Like it’s not the practice is to publish a paper somewhere with a couple charts, and not to make something that is really accessible to lots of people as your baseline. And you know, the CDC, I think, you gotta remember to like it was communicating to the media, and it was communicating to doctors up until the internet. And now the cultural change for it to be like an internet organization is basically impossible.

RZ And not just an organization, but an organization that’s supposed to talk to everyone in clear ways.

PF And they’re pretty good. I mean, it’s like, I go to the At a Glance page. It’s like who needs chickenpox vaccine. And it’s a lot of bulleted lists. It’s well designed, somebody has done a good job here. But that’s not—humans don’t work in bulleted lists. And this is actually back to the bad acronym right, like back to the silly thing, where you’re like, what do I need to know about chickenpox? Well, there’s three things and it’s actually spelled chicken. C is for chicken pox. H is for hepatitis. I don’t know what it is, but like, you got to boil it down. You know who does this tremendously well? The United States Government. every single like thing that is proposed is called like the Patriot Act, but it stands for something. [Rich laughs] It is mind numbing, and it’s shameless, shameless. They will give anything—it could be a program to take candy away from toddlers and hit them in the head with a baseball bat. And they won’t call it the you know, CHILDHUD. C H I L D H U D—or whatever—Act.

RZ I want to close this with a an example of just the whole world that is consistently been able to pull this off. But you really have to brand right to do it. Right? And that’s diets. 

PF Oh yeah.

RZ Every three years. So there is the keto, are you keto? Like they’ll ask—I’ve had people walk up to me and say, are you keto? 

PF Was that the one that was all meat?

RZ I think it’s just all meat and maybe you get a piece of cheese like once a week? I think?

PF You get cheese, and you don’t get like vegetables.

RZ No, it’s no vegetables. And I ordered once I said, okay, I’ll try these keto doughnuts. I kid you not it was essentially just round shaped sticks of butter. It was one of the worst things I’ve eaten. Keto diet, Atkins diet.

PF Atkins was all meat. 

RZ But the point is this, the point is, when you’re when you brand, you create almost a funnel. Like if you can wrap it up into one word, and then send them to the website where they can learn about it, what you end up, you end up recruiting advocates who start to echo that language and echo the protocols around it.

PF Are you ready for a word that has changed America? 

RZ Yeah, go ahead. 

PF CrossFit.

RZ CrossFit. CrossFit is an actual brand! The guy who went ahead and created a brand called CrossFit, you have to buy it from them, you have to get a license to use it. Yeah, exactly. And you know, it’s literally just ropes and flipping tires, there’s nothing to it. There’s no science, there’s no nothing around it. I want to bring this back to we often give advice to business leaders and people in the technology and design world and whatnot, just to punctuate how effective this is. When you walk up to your team and say, look, one of our goals over the next 12 months, is to really fold in accessibility into our design thinking, right? And then you can do that one of two ways. You can repeat what I just said again and again every week, and in every email, and just beat it into people, or you can name it.

PF Well, and it’s even better if you give it a name that has like where the each letter stands for something. Because what you do is you just say—you want to become management? Here’s what you do, you write an email, and you send it to your team and say, here’s the way I’ve been thinking about some initiative, and you give it a name, where each letter stands for something. And you say, you know, I know this is kind of silly, but I’m gonna bring this up because it really helps me think it through. Three out of five times other people will start using it. 

RZ Yeah, no, no, I think that’s right. 

PF And it’s like, you could read a lot of books about you know, creating beautiful journeys for people and how to lead and if you make up a bunch of stuff with letters, you’re gonna actually succeed.

RZ Last piece of feedback. When you do this. You You name it something corny or you name it after an acronym do not expect anybody to stand up and clap at all. 

PF No, no, no, no!

RZ Don’t expect them to expect anything. 

PF No, this is a subtle point, this is actually a real thing. It’s not just that they’re kind of annoyed. It’s that, and this is real, you are claiming a little territory, you’re saying, I think we should think about it this way, using this organizing principle. The great benefit you have is that almost invariably no one else has done it. Right? And like so they go, okay, fine. Now it is on you to keep bringing it up though. You drop that acronym in, don’t expect people to take it seriously, you’re now going to have to talk about it for the rest of your life. [Rich laughs]

RZ This is true, you better commit. It’s hard. It’s not a trivial thing. Don’t just throw these things out. Also, don’t read the airport business book and then come back and start throwing catchphrases at people without really buying into it yourself. Please, please, please. Really internalize it, understand it, and believe in it, don’t just echo it. Like echo gets sniffed out by your team’s, by people, they always do.

PF Well, it’s also a lot of times, like guidance comes and then people come back, and they’re like, I know what you’re all doing wrong. [Rich laughs] They just saw the light, right? And you just came back—and often they’re telling their managers, their peers, people who work for them. Just like you’ve obviously perceived everything wrong your entire life, I read a book over the weekend, and I’m gonna set you straight. And that doesn’t go well. And it actually goes incredibly poorly. I’ve been on every side of that, and I’ve been guilty of it, it turns out that people will let you do, they’ll let you do all the work you want to do. Like they will get out of your way for that. And they’ll use the words if it’s convenient and good organizing principle. And that’s kind of where everybody stops. And that’s, that’s fine. That’s humans are humans. Okay, so I mean, look—

RZ Words matter, is maybe the name of this podcast? But I don’t name this podcast, Paul. Somebody else does.

PF Somebody else. Somebody else who’s good at words. Look, yeah, the key takeaway, right is like brand your initiatives if you want them to be internalized by other people. You don’t have to do this if it’s your to do list.

RZ We could have saved 40 minutes Paul and just said that to people. And that would have been the—that’s why you’re Paul Ford. This is why you’re good with words. 

PF My brother was in the Navy. Whenever we do a visit, we give it an operation name like Operation Possum.

RZ That’s amazing.

PF I swear to God, then you’re on WhatsApp like and you create a channel for Operation Possum. Operation Possum was about getting my mother approved visit. And it’s just, you know, like, it takes minutes, who’d gonna pick her up. There’s a lot of coordination, Operation Possum. While there was a hurricane, Operation Possum was only a qualified success. But nonetheless, Operation Possum was a go. And, you know, again, my brother is in the Navy. So he earned the right to call things operations. So okay, that’s it, I’m gonna go make up an initiative and give it a name. See what happens?

RZ Well, we should tell people about Postlight. Or did we kind of do that for 40 minutes straight just now?

PF Yeah, look, okay, you all know the deal at this point. But if you don’t, Postlight builds amazing software. And we’re also very good. And we backed into this, but boy, are we good at it. We’re very good consultants, we’ll help you figure out your digital strategy. And we do it because we’re really good at the digital part. And we really know how software can change an organization. So you can get us in there. And you can say, what are we going to do? And we can go, well, here’s what I would do. And I think we can really make some change here. And you can go, that sounds real good. How do you kick that off Rich? A beautiful relationship like that with initiatives and all kinds of stuff.

RZ All kinds of wonderfulness. Postlight.com. Check us out there. There’s a contact form on every page. But also you can see our work some of the projects we’ve done. There’s some great case studies.

PF Yeah, is this is how Bane does their ads?

RZ I think so, they don’t do it. 

PF Oh, yeah, you’re right. You’re right. You know, they don’t like break out. We got to go listen to the Bane podcast. And hear what they say.

RZ No, we don’t. 

PF Ohhhh, yeah. We do. Oh, yeah. No, I want to hear that thing. I love it. I love it. [music ramps up]

RZ It’s a softer sell. Yeah, we’re just coming right at you. Coupon code, transform2021 and you get 20% off.

PF We have slightly blue collar tendencies. We see what we do as a craft, not as God’s gift to everyone. So that’s the only way we’re we do management consulting, but we’re different than management consultancies. 

RZ We sure are, damnit! 

PF We don’t think we’re the smartest people who ever lived on earth. [Rich laughs] Anyway, alright. 

RZ Be safe. We are still in the middle of this pandemic. I’m going to go ahead and say it, Paul, if you’re not vaccinated, and you can get vaccinated, go get vaccinated.

PF That’s a strong bold move. But you know what, God! For God’s sake, get vaccinated. Unless you can’t for medical reasons. Medical reasons do not include that you read something on Facebook about how you should put horse poison in your veins. Alright, well, onward we go.

RZ Onward. Be safe everyone. Have a lovely week.

PF Bye!

[music ramps up, plays alone, ends]