 Hi there, good evening, good morning, good afternoon wherever you are joining us from and do tell us in the comment box where you are joining us from because it'd be lovely to hear from you. Today I have someone who's going to talk to us about this whole business of whether the employee experience actually has some kind of an impact on great customer experience or is that a myth, do we really know that such a thing exists and to do that I have with me someone who for me is a terrific marathon runner and a marathon enthusiast and we are going to sort of pick his brains on what got him hooked on to that but first let's get started with my friend Brent Peterson and welcome to the show how lovely to have you here where are you joining us from? I'm in Minneapolis, Minnesota right now the warm sunbelt of the north and in the winter it can be minus 20 Celsius so we get every end of every end of the spectrum for weather minus 30 to plus 40 Celsius. You have the entire range so this is a great ROI of the thermometer you know so you know that both ends are working well. We can literally walk on water in January because it's a meter thick. Thank you so much for joining us. Brent I sort of said that you are you know you're into marathon running but there's so much more to your work what you've done with Magento and all of that tell us about you know what is Magento and explain to our viewers what that is for you know walk us through that. Yeah so I'm a co-founder of a digital agency called Wajento and as you can guess by the name we derived their name from Magento. We'd simply turned the M upside down and it turned into a W and I started that with a partner in 2010 and have been running that ever since. I recently have sold the company and now I am the president of Wajento. My previous title was chief evangelist so my passion has always been to tell people about Magento tell people about about what it can do for you as a merchant and even what it can do for an agency and a developer. So that's that's what I talk about. My side passion has always been customer experience and how the customer sees a project as it goes from start to finish and their experience within that and I think today what we're also going to touch on is how the employee really drives that experience and without good employee experience you will never have good customer experience. Okay so you know it's quite interesting when I see all the people who've joined us from various places from you know Baroda, Kashmir, Pune, Bangalore you know so we've got a bunch of people from various parts of the country and you know I wanted to really get started on a common definition when we say that it's a great experience and I see so much of that word it's a great experience. What does it really even mean? What does that mean and why does it even matter? Yeah so we we've recently gone through some branding exercises and in this branding exercise the person has asked us to put some words against what would be the feeling of the company and they put the word my cuss we're having a happy experience during the rollout of this software platform and I think well how many people have a happy experience when they're implementing an e-commerce or an ERP system is that an experience that they will have but is it something that's attainable and should they have and my answer is yes and really if you think about it the customer is up against something that they're not familiar with they're having somebody help them do something and there are probably going to be frustrated in parts of that experience however the employee who is doing that thing many times they know what they should be doing and then what they know what is going to happen next and the reason they're doing it hopefully is that they enjoy doing it right so that the employee experience is always good where that melds into the customer experience which you would hope by transference or whatever the the logic is that moves into the customer and they also are happy in that experience so when we say experience we're talking about the what is the relative what is the the client feel about it like it is going to be a subjective thing because everybody's experience is different but the objective outcome of that would be they're satisfied with whatever is happening at that time and then the outcome of what's happening so you know when you look at this phrase a lot of times we hear this phrase when they say that people do not buy products or services they buy an experience yeah what are they really saying when they say that what do they mean when they say they're buying an experience well I'm going to just say first nobody ever goes and buys Microsoft Office thinking I'm buying Microsoft Office because I want to experience making spreadsheets and putting numbers into cells right but the experience of doing it is the is the is is what is the intangible thing that you never think about and the customer and that's also the reason why people continue to renew their license for that software so I would I would argue that the intangible part of experience and what a lot of what a lot of companies overlook is how important that experience is while the customer is going through it especially in in so our industry some our typical install would take three months or the the installation of the product or the development of the product would say take three months that three months is the time that we have to really make that experience a great experience and the client doesn't know that they are going to get a great experience and if you don't deliver a great experience they are going to come out of it even if it really went well they are going to come out of it thinking oh this wasn't great I didn't really like this and I'm going to try something else so is it fair to say that you know when you are talking about experience we are necessarily talking about the feeling that gets generated in me while I'm using that product or service or whatever it is so back to the Microsoft example that you gave already software as I'm using it what happens is when I'm using it you know and the thing hangs or you know it's slow and it's does all that it's a bad experience because it frustrates me so when we say bad experience we are really talking about the bad feeling so I'm annoyed I'm angry and frustrated that's a bad experience but terrific experiences that it's seamless it's intuitive it's all of that could one summarize that as the end goal of great experience or is there some other way that you define it I mean what would you talk about yeah that that brings up an interesting point because if everything went absolutely perfect and the customer never had to deal with anybody and suddenly they have whatever their website is at the end and it's perfect right they never had to touch anything they haven't had any experience so there has to be something in there that helps to drive that experience and it has to be interaction from the staff the staff have to be there to ask questions to get feedback to consistently communicate and our argument is always let's over communicate with the client let's make sure that every single touch point is met and let's ask let's ask the client at at many points are you happy with what's happening right now and are your expectations being met when you think about you know the so you brought out another variable really in some sense it sort of is a third variable that we are talking about which is you know does experience of a product depend on the expectation I mean for example when I go into let's say a top end luxury place you know I don't expect to see broken china broken table cloths of dirty stuff linen I don't expect it so when the moment is priced something that tells us that you are likely to have a good experience is price a signaling device or you can is it the other way around that when you have a great experience you can charge a premium how does it work which of the that's a great that is a great point I think that price creates expectations and I would argue that the lower price doesn't always change the expectation the client expects the highest experience that they expect and you don't know initially what is it they're expecting so it is it is the higher price demands a better experience absolutely but if if it is $100 an hour or if it's $10 an hour the client still expects what they expect and it's typically the same experience as the $100 an hour client they expect to have something delivered to them that is great and fantastic and works perfectly they don't go in at $10 an hour thinking I'm going to have all kinds of problems but I'm going to deal with all those problems and delays and everything else that's going to happen or even substandard quality I'm going to just deal with this and then and then be happy at the end a good example is going bringing your brand new Mercedes in to the local shop that only works on tech Mahindra tractors you are not going to get that same experience they may not have the same tools and technology they need to fix it and but they may be really really cheap and it may sit there for 30 days to get fixed that you are going to leave that in it with a poor poor idea of what the experience was in that where if you bring it to the dealership they are going to make sure that they're giving you the best experience they possibly can and it's going to be premium so I in that case I think our expectations are that we are going to get this but at the end you still want to have something that is is at some level and the level gets isn't as big as the gap between the cost I hope I answered that question in a very long yes I mean so you know I'm going to sort of what I try to do is every 15 minutes I try and summarize some of the key takeaways so one of the things that I sort of learned from the last 15 minutes of the conversation and by the way those of us who have joined a little late I'm going to Brent Peterson who's really talking about whether employee experiences actually have a final impact on the great customer experiences and how does that really play out so we started off by saying that experience is something that the user feels and it could be also dependent on the kind of expectation that they have and price always does not have the same kind of an expectation setting so if you pay a very steep price you are paying a premium of course you want a great service of product but if you're paying very low price even then there is a certain expectation that you cannot get away from Brent is that a good summary of some of the things that whatever I missed out tell me what that is a that's an excellent summary there is that sort of curve of expectation versus price and and it's much more difficult to deliver a high experience a high bar with a low price because you have less resources so in some sense you know what you're talking about is and this is really what I want to dig into now which is that you know you said that you have less resources does it mean tools doesn't mean the human skills that it doesn't mean what are we talking about less resources yeah you know that there's a mixture of tools there's a mixture of people and there's a mixture of skill set and a good example would be if you broke your leg and you went to a doctor that doctor goes through many years of school right they have a lot of experience in fixing fixing that leg and if you need a specialist they have even more experience so they maybe have 12 or 15 years at least working on people's legs the other option would be to go to your local barber shop and he just happens to know how to fix legs right but maybe he's done it for two years and he's got some remedy that works that that that tool set that one person has is completely different than the tool set that the other person has and that experience that they've had over time is also something that's intangible that you can't I mean I shouldn't say that as a doctor you can certainly measure it because you have to take an exam but as a business person you have a wealth of experience and as a developer a 15 year software developer is completely different than a one year software developer and they should there should be both an experience that comes with that an improved experience and an improved amount of skills and they should also be more efficient in getting whatever they're doing done so hopefully it takes them less time to produce something rather than the other person who doesn't have any experience doing that and is that you know related to you know the amount of number of specialists you have in the organization so the question view since you did talk about you know a doctor with 15 years of experience was a two years of experience is it then fair to say that a company that provides better customer experience is likely to have more specialists and experts than let us say something that could be you know something that could be working with less a number of specialists or more generalists is that a fair assumption yeah I mean that that is a that is a fantastic point and I would I would directly correlate that to a size of an organization and the type of solutions that a client wants compared to going to a single developer that can maybe do everything that that you need but maybe they're not as strong as you on UX UI or making designs or doing Photoshop or even doing implementations onto a server if you go to a company that has all those specialties and it has all those expertise you know that when you when you want to make your brand you want to make some kind of a brand image they're going to go to their designer who's really good at that and they're busy doing that because they have a lot of other customers that are also asking for a brand experience and then when you want this Magento developers that's that's really good at Magento and they've been doing it for 10 years that this person is going to help you with that part of it and then you need an architect that kind of oversees the whole thing that helps to put this solution together those are so many different roles and each of those each of those people then can make sure that in their own individual role they've become an expert in that role and they can help you even more in that than that little vertical that little piece of thing that you need as a client rather than going with the generalist who's gone with with a single developer to try to try to give them that solution and I'm not saying that the single developer can't give them that solution but they can't give it as well as this bigger team. So you know one of the things therefore you know what if you are looking at that focus you're talking about you know when we look at B2B experiences is that a lot fuzzier to experience understand than let's say B2C experience and the reason for that being when you are looking at the experiences that we have as customers our consumers B2C you know this is a great product or a great service I go to this restaurant I like it B2B is a lot more diffused that it's good to say that we have great experience because somebody could be happy somebody may not be that happy doesn't get more diffused when you're looking at B2B customer experiences. So this is now we're going to go into subjective opinions I feel as though the experience well number one they're completely they are different they're not completely different but the number of the number of touch points on B2C is going to be much greater because inherently if you're a busy client if you're a busy B2C site you could potentially have millions and millions and millions of customers if you're a busy B2B site chances are you have thousands of vendors that could have lots of employees but there is a central person who's sort of arc or who is dictating how that experience should happen within that company. So it's one company talking to another company a good example would be the experience between Adobe and Microsoft. So there's two big organizations that have a lot of employees each but that central sort of pipe that connects those two companies together is that experience that somebody has to agree on so we've watered it down a little bit it's going to look I think a little less at UX but more at functionality and because that B2B is also doing that same repetitive thing over and over again they are going to draw their line more at does this function the way that I want it and is the functionality in there is it the most efficient way to handle that particular transaction that's happened in between our two companies. That's not to say that UX and UI is important but it is I was almost going to say it's easier. There is less there is going to be less there's going to be less diversity in the amount of needed components to change the UX UI experience because there is there's going to be less people involved in that transaction overall across the enterprise and you know I think you gave a good example I sort of you know when you mentioned Microsoft in Adobe I mean that is exactly how let's say when I write something on a Word document I write an article and I have to send it to let's say a newspaper so then when I save it as a PDF that's the seamless Microsoft to Adobe you know so PDFs are made by Adobe and then Microsoft is doing the Word document but through this you know interface it's a see experience in same as a Word document or as a PDF and that gives me the ability to send a document securely for example mirror office space. I know Brent you know you should probably first explain your India connection because you know well a lot of my listeners may not know that you know Brent is very familiar with India Brent comes to you know India events when when will you last in India Brent just before the pandemic if I remember right. Yeah February 2020 we were in Mumbai and in Omnibod. There you go. Right before the pandemic. Just before the pandemic sort of closed all this stuff and you've been coming to India you sort of looked at multiple things it is in this context with your familiar idea whatever is your view of India. I'm going to sort of ask this whole question that you know you know that in India sometimes you have something called Jogar. Are you familiar with the concept? No. Okay Jogar is you know this whole thing that you find a frugal innovation you find a frugal way to reach the same goals but you know do it in a more creative fashion. My belief is that when you it may be a great idea that you know you piece together you know a little transistor you you get together some of the plates and you put it together fix it together with rubber band and it's working and the light close. It's great when you're doing something in a home hobby kind of a situation but when you are looking at creating something it's it can be a great prototype I mean don't get me wrong I think it's a fantastic way to build the first working prototype but when that's where you stop innovating and that's where you stop investing in design that's where you stop doing that then I think that it's it's just you lose the opportunity to design a really outstanding experience and you fall really short and I think sometimes organizations do that not just for their products but also for their human capital you know they buy and one of the first things that happens is people stop investing in you know the skill building part of it when there is a slowdown. This is the time when you should actually invest in more of the skill building process because your employees have the time and the bandwidth to be able to do it you invest in them you are a differentiator and you can provide outstanding service why is it that people don't see that connection help me understand that why don't people and that's really the crux of what I want to talk about today that you know does great customer experience really depend on great employee experience what is your view of it and you know I would really love to hear and draw your experience on that. Yeah I think first it's important to give it's important as a culture that you give those employees some space to be able to come up with some creative solutions to problems and that has to start from that has to be a top down thing there has to be space in which everybody is enabled to solve and help come up with solutions for problems and in that space that's where people want to learn something new so I think your question was specifically around what when somebody doesn't have a lot of work to do they should be working on on making on making their own skill set better so they could take some training they can they could get a certification but again I think that has to start at the top down that management has to enable those people to be able to do that and they need to give them the time and space to do that and then when there is some downtime and hopefully you can see some of that downtime looking forward that is a great time a great space to say okay why don't you take a month to get this specific certification and we'll check in with you we'll make sure that everything's going all right we'll give you support and all the tools you need to get that certification but while you but you you know at the end of this month we would like you to be able to get that and again the employee and the employer should agree that they can both do this in this time frame but that's the kind of space and the kind of forward thinking that an employer should have for the employee to help them when there's that low productivity time or not productivity when there's not a lot of work to do for that for that employee because you're exactly right when there isn't a lot of work that is a great time to reinvest in the employees to make sure that they've got all these new skills that they need and then going back to the space to giving that the giving those employees some space to be creative they are also going to know and hopefully in in community so in magento there's a large community that drives innovations moving forward in that community are new things that have come out there's new technologies there's new features that can be that can be integrated into magento those features and technologies are driven from the developers and the developers are the people that are most they're the most introverted they talk with themselves but they don't always express themselves overly so giving them that space to be creative and then giving them a let's call it give them in a platform in a vehicle to help bring those forward into into both the with the with the client or with the agency but also bring it to the client fabulous so you know rent this is a lovely segue into the next part of what I want to talk to you about just you know just for the benefit of all our viewers we I'm talking to brand Peterson he's talking to us about this whole question that does great employee experience finally get reflected in great customer experience and you know employee experience and customer experience are very clearly related and we have you know so you've seen that I initially thought that a lot of our listeners are from India but we have listeners from Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Japan, they've all joined us so thank you very much for doing that and all the listeners from all the different corners of India and seeing all your places thanks a lot if you have a question or a comment do share that I will bring it up on the screen so Brent can also see that yes this is a question you have and you know feel free to post tough questions to him if it's an easy one then I'll try and answer it if it's a tough one I'll pass it on to Brent but having said that I'm going to segue into a different element of you know experience design would you say that an involved community is really the sign of great customer experience or does great customer experience create a community of users what has been your experience stop walk me through the whole process of building a community how do you do that I mean you're very very good at doing it and which is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show was to learn from you how does one build a community of users whether you're a community of employees it can be a community of customers what are some of the common features how does one get started imagine that I've just launched a new product what should I be doing to build a great community of employees or users are they different if you can just walk me through step by step what should I be doing so I think to start with there has to be some recognition from leadership that community matters that is the that is the number one most important step if leadership is never on board with community community will never happen so I well okay I shouldn't say never but it won't happen and it won't be supported by leadership and it won't get to the level that it would that we would like to see it express itself you know across meetups and in events and get-togethers and all those things that happen in community that happen organically without leadership so community I think first starts it starts as a grassroots but it's supported by leadership so you know an example was that uh yoav roy and bob were some of the founders of magento recognized early on way back in 2008 2009 that there was this community of people that were were very entranced and enthralled and excited about this new software called magento and they enabled us as community members to participate in the community so they gave us a platform they gave us uh tools they gave us a voice I think the biggest thing is giving them a voice so um you know with adobe we have this inside adobe insider program so we have a voice in the adobe community now to to sort of shout out not not everybody's going to want that voice but that voice is there for those who want it um the new um there's an ambassador program as well with adobe that helps give voices to people who want to uh engage in the community but without all those initiatives from the top the bottom's never going to get pulled up there's always going to be a community of people that engage and and are excited about something there's there's a there's probably a community of people who love uh some particular car or or some particular shoe or whatever there's a community but it's never going to get passed a local meetup or some some small thing it's not going to happen until you have leadership embrace it and the community come together and that they participate together in this community and with that that's that's where sort of this magic happens like we put a little bit of this stuff in there we get some soda and we get some masala spices and we put it into a bottle and suddenly you have spicy uh you have you have a spicy soda drink which spicy thumbs up yeah exactly spicy thumbs up um without those two magic ingredients it's never going to happen uh you know it uh it would be yeah so i i think you have to have an you have a you have to have some investment from both sides the leadership investment only has to be to give them space and a and a vehicle and there can be leadership from from from the organization there can't be overhanded leadership i think the problem in community is when leadership decides this is the way i want the community to go and i am not we're not going to we're not going to stand for any dissent in this community the community is saying they don't like something the leadership needs to hear that and that's how real big change happens beautiful and and i also think that you know when you i've seen that very often with learning communities you know i've seen that when naturally when people learn something uh you know they want to share it with somebody else you know so which is how you notice that when people have figured out how to say play the guitar yeah then they will want to create a community of learners and they say well here is let me break it down here is how you play the first chord here is how it moves so i always also think that uh wanting to teach somebody else and bring them on board is the sign of a great healthy community that you know you kind of want to say that okay you know i'd be here and i see this in um sort of all kinds of settings i recently shifted home and then moved into a new community one of the ways that uh you know i felt very welcome is you know a set of people got together and you know they sort of helped out in multiple ways the neighbors that some staff and you feel welcome and you also feel on boarded they said okay you know if you have a problem with this let me know i'll i'll pitch in but so i think those are some of the signs of a very healthy community and um so you make an interesting element uh if i were to just go back and link all the things that you said together you say that a good experience is a good feeling that you know i feel good when i use your product service when i do that i also like to when i find a number of people um you know who have had positive experiences you can form a community but in my mind you put something pretty interesting that if the employees are happy they enjoy doing what they do they want to work together and make that kind of happy customer experience happen so in some sense the sign of a strong community of users happens because of great employee experiences you know if you have a company where the users are or the employees are very very happy users they are really very thrilled with their experience of working there they will naturally go out of the way and say hey guess what come over i'll help you do this and then over a span of time those users start bringing in other users and so on and so forth so you're right i mean i think um building a great community so maybe the topic that we should be discussing today is that when there are happy employees uh and you have happy employees they will bring in happy customers and as these number of happy customers increases it forms a community so maybe the chain that we are sort of really looking to build is great employee experience great customer experience great community experience what do you say that is that a conclusion absolutely you hit the you hit the nail right on the head you you can force you can always force good experience on a client by making somebody do something and that will at the end be successful but uh you can never on you can never sustain a forced experience upon upon an organization or a client meaning you can't make somebody do something because they have to do it uh it's not sustainable if somebody loves to do it and they're in there doing it it is it is then sustainable if your clients you know if you're at starbucks and you're getting coffee and your baristas are all happy and they're giving you great coffee and they'll be the same people there for the next five years that experience is going to be consistently better than having a model on which you can just plug somebody in and they're going to give you great customer experience because if you don't you're going to get fired like that's the worst thing you could do for an employee um there should be an incentive that makes them want to give a great experience and part of that has to be what they're doing is what they love and if they don't if they're not they're doing it what they love they should go somewhere else they should find a job everybody should work in some way something and do something that they love and they shouldn't be stuck in something that they don't love so uh this all this comes together and creates great great experience for the client um you know one of our listeners nana actually uh you use this phrase saying that um evangelizing the experience you know and that in my mind one of the things that happens is when you have people who are their own experiences uh you know poor that means they are just being paid to do the work and go home they feel no sense of bonding with the organization pretty unlikely that they are going to go above and beyond and my submission to you Brett is until people decide to go above and beyond they don't actually create great experiences for uh you know the customers either because then they are going to do the minimum which is required not to get fired yeah so they do the minimum but uh you know so I can you know uh do that same piece of work without engaging in relationship building process with the customer and I can just yeah what do you want yeah I have a self on my face and I do that now you can't fire me because I am doing what you just wanted me to do but I am doing it in a manner where I you can really clearly see it written large on my face and suffering so great customer experience actually comes when you go above and beyond for the employee they go above and beyond for the customer that delighted customer actually talks about the experience in multiple forums today because that's how it works and those multiple happy customers create a community of really delightful customers when that happens the leaders actually facilitate create the space and encourage that thing to grow as a movement so this is the storyline that I've constructed from our conversation today um make sense yeah no and and I think there's there's there is a piece in there that is the motivation there there's an underlying motivation to to develop and and create that experience that everybody can see through so for example and and part of this is how do you explain it so let's go back to the making sure everybody's putting in the hours that they've worked on on a project uh there is there's one view there's a view of oh they're just making me punch the clock I'm and and this is why I have to do it right there's the other view of how much did we invest in this client and can we make this can we make this experience or this uh this journey more efficient and are we doing things that the client doesn't even want us to do so there's all kinds of things that we can get from that time and from a leadership level how you explain those things to the to an employee is as important as the employee doing those things and logging their time so a great example is if you're a project manager and you would like we would like to know how much time a project manager spends on any one particular project if they don't feel like they should ever log their time then what if the employer decides well since I don't really know what they're doing all day I'm going to give them 20 projects and now suddenly because you're not logging your time you have so much work that you are pulling your hair out which I have done very effectively and um and you are now more stressed than you were when you had to be when you were made to log their time so if you communicate to the if your team knows that inefficiency if if I have so much work that I have another team member that can help me and that we're going to spread this workout over the entire team and the only way that my other team member knows that I'm spending all of this time on this one project is to show that I'm spending all this time on this one project and as we as we dig into that a little bit more if that if that person is spending all their time copying and pasting rows in excel and then somebody else says well you already have this tool that can do this automatically what you've been taking two hours should take you 10 minutes and here's how you do it right now the team has come together they've become more efficient and they've given the client a better experience everybody's happier and the and the the client is happier because they have uh they're they're they're represent like the so the employee employee who's representing the the employer is giving them a better experience because they're happy I know I know it just completely makes sense because I think one of the you raise a point and I'm going to ask this question to all the viewers there you talked about this whole thing of logging time yeah and I have seen a range of you know companies places where I worked and you know also planned situations where there is almost an obsession to ensure that I'm paying you for eight hours are you working for every minute of those eight hours and in a scenario like this and this is my question to you the viewers that you know many companies install these uh softwares where they can track that okay I can see how many hours you've actually looked at that screen uh how many key strokes you have put and that means that you work to not work is that a great way to ensure good employee experience my belief is no but I don't I would love to know what you think if you were the employer would you install software to track if this person really taking how many breaks have you taken and I know some example which are going through that in this pandemic scenario because everyone is working from home and in which case the some of the employees are going crazy they are worried that maybe the employees are having a really good time and they are not working and good time is fine is not worth my belief is this is going to lead to an overall decline in the customer experience because eventually it shows up there because that is the final truth I would sort of really yeah and we have some of the you know people responding already to that um but I think building trust in the employees is step one therefore you design great experiences for the employees which results in that you know so I think the sequence if I were to now reconstruct it I would start with step one which is what is the mindset with which you view your employees do you really care about the employees do you care whether they are happy are they you know comfortable are they trained well are they being prepared for the future because I see a number of companies and you read about it every day that many a times they just simply you know they've used the employee for as long as they had the skill and then they get rid of that employee so is that process if you don't build continuity in the employees does it impact customer experience yeah I mean I I think the answer is absolutely that is the driver of customer experience and having we we've already I think established that having happy customer having happy employees creates happy customers and it should be as simple as that but I know there's a lot of avenues to get there um and I think we've established that um the motivation of why you want to get there is very important and the communication that you have with your employees is as or more important than the communication you're having with your with your clients so I'm a big proponent of report writing I know that our project management team used to hate the fact that I wanted to report every week or whatever every every so often to say here's where we're at where here's what we're doing so that that same diligence should go from leadership to employees that that that expectation that we have for an employee is similar to the expectation that the client has for us and those expectations have to be communicated and the shorter you can make those communication gaps the shorter amount of time that our expectations can veer off in vastly different directions the better you are going to have and the better experience you're going to have as an employee so a good example would be uh a and a you know an employer would say I want to get this done in three months and he just gives it to the employee and the employee goes ahead and does it in the end of three months the employer doesn't get anything he wanted he doesn't he was expecting something he never checked in to make sure that that that they were on track and they were on on on this journey together um and now the employer's happy the the um the employee who thought this is exactly what the employer wanted is unhappy because they've they've let them down and now they're getting yelled at uh so all those things that could be solved by frequent communications are exactly the same things that happen on the client side that are also solved by frequent communications fabulous yeah so that sort of keeps the flow from uh employee to employer to community to customer community and flows back into you know the employee so I think yeah that's a great sequence um Brent uh you know I'm going to uh talk to you about something completely different now which is your passion for running uh you know and uh I want to know you run the marathon is that is that right yes so which is how many kilometers help me I'm uneducated in this in every sport I know very little about it yeah it's 42,199 so 42,199 kilometers you've run so much that's each each marathon is 42,000 or 42k 42,000 42 kilometers right and if you're wow that's a lot that's a lot I just you know sort of thought about it how long does it take you to run 42 kilometers between three and a half and four and a half hours on a good day when did you last run the marathon uh November I did I did one an organized one and when so is it possible for somebody to start becoming a marathon runner at any stage of their life uh you know do you have to be you know 19 years old to get started when did you get started I started when I was 40 so a little more than 10 years ago and I think a lot of runners start in in middle life I know that I'm part of a running community in Ahmedabad and a lot of those runners are professionals and they've they've learned that as being a professional they sit in their chair a lot and they've suddenly maybe put on some little extra kilos around their waist and we know good in Gujarat they like to eat a lot of sugar so that helps to put on some extra kilos and and and running helps it not only helps your physical body but it helps your mental body so I'm a firm believer in changing lives through running and I'm involved in charities that help do that that help uh that help to change a mindset and both physical and mental through just a simple act of running and if you talk about the marathon uh the the big my experience in the marathon is that we we typically take 16 weeks to train for this so now we have 16 weeks of journeys that we're taking every weekend and I would do it with a group of people and uh you know it can be anywhere from two to four hours of just talking uh with with these people and in that journey you are learning things you're you're experiencing things you're seeing things so I've had some I've had a lot of great experiences just running in cities so in Mumbai or or Amnabat or Berlin or wherever it is in the world that I've taken this journey uh of hours of running in in around and seeing things there's so many parts of that that that are good for your mental health and your physical health that I can't I can't stop talking about it you know the uh physical health part of it is um you know relatively easier to understand walk me through uh you know how running whether in marathon or maybe even shorter distance how does it impact your mental health talk to me about that yeah I you know there is definitely some stress relief in both work well so if you if you're on your own there's some stress relief and and just doing something physical and then if you do that something physical for a long amount of time your brain has to do something so either you're running and talking to somebody or you're running and in your you're processing information in your head to to work that out there is also a um a part of it that's uh that is meditative so I have friends in India that in this pandemic that they've run a marathon in their apartment or they've run seven hours in circles you know in inside their apartment and in that is training to to maybe work within yourself to find to find something in yourself that is a challenge and in the marathon there's always a point in which you say to yourself I hate this I'll never do this again I'm not going to run anymore I'm going to walk for the rest of the time and I absolutely don't care when you start you're like I'm going to finish this thing in four hours and it's going to be the greatest thing of your life and then suddenly at 20 miles everything is crashed down around you and you hate everything and all you want to do is walk and absolutely nothing else happens now if you can work on your mentalness your mental strength to get past that because it is mental in the marathon in training I always say it's it's uh 90 percent mental and the other 15 percent is in your head I say that joke when when we're in a long run because it's a math joke and it doesn't add up but um it is almost always mental and getting through that and then learning how your own self works at that time in which you're going to break will help you in your real life journeys as well it'll help you to um maybe work differently differently with a client when there's a button that they can push that's going to set you off that will make you do something that maybe if you're in a better mindset you wouldn't have done there's just there's a lot of things that you can work on internally and meditatively that would help you pass that point so uh so what I hear you say is Brent that it is possible for you to build your mental resilience through this whole process of running because it gives you time with yourself yeah which otherwise you know because it's so easy you know you could be home and you're watching the screen all day you know and even when you finish your work you're watching another movie or something so there's just only screen time that you are spending uh and whereas here you have the ability to really think about something different think about trying out something you make your resolutions you plan your day multiple things depending on what yeah what is the way please go ahead yeah it helps build your mental health but it helps build community because you typically well you're not always doing it but most of the time you're with a group of people that are doing it and with that you can meet people all over the world yeah I sort of noticed that it's a bit like what a number of people do with many sport you know they will say that I know chess players when they go to a city they'll do a meet-up with you know so who are the chess players in the city and they'll do a meet-up and golfers do that they go and play golf in the city golf clubs you know runners of course do it you are a great example of that you know you run all over the world and I keep seeing your Twitter posts Brent what's your Twitter handle you know so if people want to sort of follow you on Twitter where do they do and I'm going to sort of type it into the text box as well so so what is your Twitter handle just tell me again it's Brent W Peterson Brent W Peterson there you go and it is a mixture it's not always just running it's it's a mixture of a different thing is this the correct spelling if I got that right that's good perfect okay perfect so that's fantastic and what I'm also going to sort of look at is when you think about somebody wanting to get started in running you know somebody who's never run before if you're an experienced person then it's different you already are part of a community you are motivated to run you know a lot of times people feel that I am not that fit where do you get started what is the best way to do it uh the first thing to do is get up and move get up and walk walk as far as you want to walk that's that's a great way to get started there's all kinds of plans they call it couch to 5k so they're in that plan it gives you it gives you a way over time maybe eight weeks to get to running a 5k and again time doesn't matter so maybe it's 40 minutes or maybe it's 30 minutes or whatever that timer or maybe it's an hour that you that you do this and in that you would do some you would start maybe doing some mixing of walking and running and then eventually you're going to run and eventually you run a kilometer and then two kilometers and um the hardest part then is just sticking with that and and making that a habit and doing it I always used to joke that my original plan was I'd run for two weeks and I'd take two months off so the running in two weeks is just miserable because you know your muscles a little sore you're getting used to it and you're out of breath all the time once you get past a certain point you can run you can't you can run indefinitely you mean you could run for a long time you could run for seven hours or whatever um but just getting to the point in which you're moving is the first step get up out of your chair and take a step and walk around that's that's step number one and then the next step is to move a little faster and it's all it's it's I wouldn't say you have to run uh you know you don't you don't whatever that pace is that you're running is the pace that's comfortable for you and there's no best pace it's just getting and moving if it's walking and that's great if it's if it's if it's running that's great you asked about the age there's a there's a man in England I think he ran his first marathon at age 80 and he ran the london marathon at like age 100 so yeah um it's never too late oh that's that's super inspiring um you know what has been your most uh unique incredible memorable experience uh you know as a runner talk to me about the most unusual experience you've had the most unusual place you've run whatever it is yeah so I mean I've I've run in places like Bolivia uh but I think this last year my experience in in in landing in India so I I learned at the airport in New York that I needed to have three open spaces in my passport and they weren't going to let me onto the plane so I had to go I had to go to the passport office overnight and and and I was one day late delayed in getting to India which meant that I landed at uh 10 30 at night and the marathon started at 4 a or 5 am in in Mumbai so I arranged with my friends to get my number and then amongst uh 20 000 people we found each other using WhatsApp and I got my number and so basically I landed at 10 30 we got through customs and I got to my hotel at 12 30 and I woke up at 3 and I got a taxi to the start line and I did my race and it was it was it I was completely exhausted but the people that I met and after the all the different things that happened I met a very nice gentleman from Delhi who was in the army and he had one leg and he would he'd been running marathons and do doing run marathons for charity uh um through you know having a handicap to show people that he could run marathons uh you know you meet these people and you do these things and and you have these fantastic experiences that I mean that's just one of them I can just say that there's there's dozens of others but recently that's one of my most memorable thank you and we are coming up to the air I just want to say thank you ever so much Brent for a fascinating conversation you're not talking about all the things that you did was about employee experience and ending up talking about your experience of running a marathon after what three hours of sleep so very inspirational thank you so very much for those of you who want to follow Brent it's a B-R-E-N-T-W Peterson there's a W in between which you can't see on the screen but when you look on you would see a number of his jokes which are there you know Brent puts a number of jokes there you can see one of them that he's put retweeted this morning which I thought was hilarious I like that so I'm going to request you to go and find out but all in all thanks a million for being there and thank everyone of you for joining me out here and see you next week don't miss it we've got a great entrepreneur who's going to come up watch out for that announcement and I will see you next week thanks a lot for being here goodbye good night have a nice rest of the day wherever you are Danny Abad Danny Abad