 Good afternoon, everyone. Buenos tardes. So welcome to Creating a Culture of Empowerment. My name is Todd Neampirk. I'm a digital strategist and partner at Four Kitchens. If you have any follow-up questions or if you want to touch base after this session, that's my email address. I'm on Twitter at Todd Ross. I warn you in advance, though, it's mostly bad puns. I don't know how puns work in Spanish, but just trust me, they're brilliant English puns. So before we get started, I want to say a few words about the nature of this presentation because this is unusual for a Drupalcon talk. We're not going to talk about Drupal. We're not going to talk about the web. We're not going to talk about technology or even process. Instead, we're going to talk about how we apply an open source philosophy to management, to teams, and to people. So you're also going to hear me talk a lot about the way we do things at Four Kitchens. I want to assure you that this is not intended to be bragging. The presentation I'm about to give is the result of nine years of trial and error and many, many, many failures. We don't have all the answers. We're also trying to find them. But I think we're on to a few things, and I want to share them with you. And also, I want to be attuned to the different customs and cultures in the room as well. So a lot of the opinions and a lot of the experiences that I will discuss are based on things that we've done in the United States. So I recognize that the culture of work varies from country to country, sometimes even from city to city. So I do acknowledge that not everything I say will apply to everybody in this room, but I hope that everybody can take something away from this. So why am I here today? I am here to help people run better companies by making teams and leaders happier. So how many of you are business owners or leaders within your organization in some way? Excellent. That's about right. I want to tell you a story that was the inspiration, really, for this whole talk. So this is the two-snacks-a-day story. In 2000, I worked at a startup just before I started college. And this startup was like any other startup during the dot-com bubble back in 2000. They had a lot of money, and they had no idea what to do with it. So they thought that the best way to spend their money was on benefits for their employees. They did all kinds of unusual things. One of the many, many, many things that they did that cost a lot of money was they had a lot of snacks and drinks and things for everybody to eat and be comfortable throughout the day. A lot of companies do this. But at some point during the six months or so that I worked there, somebody sent an email. And the email said, everybody can only have two snacks per day. We used to have unlimited snacks and cokes and whatever it is we wanted to drink. But now suddenly we were limited to two snacks. So what do you think that did to the team? Everybody started wondering, are we going out of business? Why can't they afford for me to eat three snacks a day or four snacks a day? How much does a snack cost? Is it $0.50? Is it $1? How many people work at this company? 40. So if 40 people are spending an extra snack a day, an extra dollar a day, that's $40 a day. That's $200 a week. That's $800 a month. Are we going to go out of business? Because of all the snacks we eat? Is $800 a month really going to help a company survive if they have to cut back by that much? Who's in charge of policing the snacks that we eat? Is my coworker going to tell on me when I eat three snacks? Do I get to carry over snacks if I eat only one on a Monday? Can I eat three on a Tuesday? Is that OK? This stops making sense pretty quickly, right? So it changed the entire culture. People thought we were going out of business. People started telling on other people because, oh, Todd had too many snacks yesterday. Cost $0.50 for a snack, right? That's an example of a bad culture. That was a big mistake that was made at that organization. And towards the end of my time there, they were bought and they eventually went out of business. So let's start by defining culture. What do I mean by culture? Culture is defined as the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a social, ethnic, or age group. So your company, where you work, is a social group. You spend about a third of your life there. That's about as much time as you spend with your family. But culture also affects how you think and feel about a group. When you think about a culture, you have some positive feelings and some negative feelings. So I want to run a little bit of an experiment right now. And I've never done this before. So bear with me. The experiment is, what is the culture of the United States? Let's just think about that for a moment. I'm going to show you some images. And I want you to think about what culture means and how these images make you feel. How do those images make you feel? Like America? American. What else? You will not offend me, I promise you. I put some kind of disturbing images in there. I kept it pretty light. But what are some other thoughts? What do you think of when you think of the culture of the United States? Very what? Very familiar. Where are you from? You're from Columbia. Anything else? Focused on ego, egocentric. The class struggle is very much a part of the culture. One last one. Yes, sir. Dichotomy. A dissonance between the image that's portrayed and what's actually happening in society. These are the feelings that we have around the culture of the United States. But this culture has many layers. So we focused here on national culture. But there are many different layers to what we define of this culture. There's human culture, for example. Psychologists know that we have certain universal emotions, facial expressions, ways that we express ourselves, body language. Some of it is divided into nations or other smaller groups. But for the most part, a smile means you're happy. And a frown means you're sad. Psychologists have tested this all over the world, even among some tribes that have barely been contacted. So there's some universal human truths within a universal human culture. We also have a culture around our language. So there are many countries that speak Spanish, many countries that speak English. It spans multiple nations. Neurologists lately have found that there's an assumption we have about how language works in the brain that is wrong. Common sense says that our language exists to express our thoughts. We have thoughts, language provides them with structure, and that's how we communicate them to one another. It turns out that's actually not true. It's the opposite. If you don't have language, you do not have thought. They have found people who were raised in terrible situations where they did not have exposure to language. And it turns out that they did not really possess thought as we know it. Language physically shapes and alters our brain. So it stands to reason that the way your language works changes your brain. That the grammar and structure of Spanish creates a different brain than the grammar and language and structure of English or German or Chinese or Japanese. And that's a kind of culture that spans borders. Obviously, there's national culture. When we say culture, this is usually what we mean. We talk about nations. You also have local culture. Bogota is different than Medellin. New York City is different than Los Angeles. They're very different places. Some cities walk fast, and there's a lot of stress, or there's good public transit, or there's not. You look at a city like Los Angeles. You have to drive to get anywhere. And then there's the culture of the self. We are all individual. We all have different ancestry and family that influences what we, as individuals, behave like. So we each have our own individual culture. So here we are, the levels of culture. This is what I'm talking about when I say culture. I mean all of these things. Second part of this is empowerment. So what do I mean by empowerment? First, I mean the autonomy to decide what you will do and how you will do it. Second, the freedom to challenge without fear of reprisal. Sharing your thoughts and feelings, not being afraid to say something that somebody disagrees with, speaking your mind. The power to effect change. The ability to actually do something. To make something different. And finally, excuse me, ownership of outcomes. You cannot be empowered unless you are responsible for what happens. If you're not responsible for what happens, how can you actually be empowered to do anything? Empowerment comes from autonomy, freedom, power, and ownership. And ultimately it means controlling your destiny. What you are going to do professionally, personally. So why does it matter? Why is it important? Well empowerment makes teams happy. Teams that are empowered are more productive. They enjoy their work more. Quality of work goes up. They pay more attention to details. People want to stick around. You have higher retention. It's just a better place to work. Empowerment will make your clients happy. The positive feelings of your team and the quality of work that they deliver will feed into the work that they do for your clients. They're happy, they do better work, they deliver better results to the clients. And the clients pick up on this energy. They pick up on whether people are happy or sad in an organization. How people respond, the tone in their voice, the word choice they use in email. Additionally, if your team is empowered, everybody has the ability to do what it takes to solve the client's problems. So everybody can do something for the client. And finally, empowerment enables leadership. So for the leaders in the room, the company owners or the managers or supervisors, this means less work for you so that you can focus on bigger problems, long-term issues, planning for the future. If there are fewer things that you have to decide and micromanage, you can redirect all of that attention to bigger problems or more interesting things. So in a moment, I'm going to talk about very specific tactical things that we've done to empower our team. But first I want to talk about the underlying principles that guided those decisions. So very quickly, the guiding principles of empowerment. Build a company you would want to work for, not a company you want to control. So for the business owners in the room, why did you start a business? Why did you start your business? Anybody? Change the world? All right. Somebody made the money sign, so that's fair. Let's acknowledge that. To do what you want. To what? To work the way you want, to be empowered. To do what you want and do it the way you wanna do it. Be responsible for the outcomes. Whether you succeed changing the world, making money, whatever it is, right? You did it because you wanted to be empowered. So make that company that you want to work for. You have to empower other people. Give people control over their destiny. Treat your coworkers as responsible professionals. They are adults, they know what they're doing. They can collaborate with you. They're not children that you should manage. This leads to mutual respect. In the knowledge industry, in what we do, design, technology, development, people are very self-motivated. They had to teach themselves how to do this. There are very few schools that teach what we do. These are generally people who want the freedom of freelancing, of being contractors. And they often only get a job when they feel like they can't make it as a freelancer. But they still want that freedom. They want to do what they want, how they wanna do it. And most importantly, let them succeed or fail. You have to let people fail. It's the best way to learn and it's authentic. And finally, make trust the center of your culture. Trust facilitates empowerment. So you can't actually empower someone until you trust them. And they won't act on that empowerment. They won't believe you until they trust you to let them succeed or fail. This means that you, as the manager or business owner, have to be the first to volunteer your mistakes. You have to be vulnerable. You have to explain that you made a mistake, explain why, explain how you're going to fix it, and expect that from everybody else. So for the rest of the presentation, I want to talk about very specific things that we've done in order to try and achieve this. Now these are just a few. There are many, many, many other things that can be done. And I also wanna turn this into a bit of a conversation. So I want to leave plenty of time at the end for comments, questions, arguments, whatever. So I've already talked about language, how important language is, because language shapes the brain. It physically alters your brain. So the words you use are very important. It's a bit of a corporate cliche to say there is no I in team. But it's a cliche, and we all laugh at it, because most people who say it don't mean it. But it's still true. And if you mean it authentically, it's very powerful. Language is thought. It doesn't express thought, it is thought. So when you say we instead of I, you're demonstrating how you actually think, not just the words that you're saying. We are a team. I don't like the E word, employees. I don't like that word. It immediately creates a structure, and certainly never say my employees. You don't own them, they aren't yours. They are there because they want to be there. And if you keep treating them like that, they won't. So we, not I, team, not employees. Ask for input every day in big ways and small ways. People want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. I'll say that one more time, because it's really important. People want to be heard more than they want to be agreed with. It doesn't matter if you, it does matter a little bit, but it doesn't matter that much if you agree with them. What matters is that you heard their problems. You really heard them. You listened to them and you thought about them. A lot of people also have an open door policy. That's great, you should have that. But having an open door is very different from inviting somebody into the room. You have to actively get people, bring them into the room and talk to them. You have to set aside time well in advance with an agenda to say this is what we're going to talk about. I want honest feedback about this, this, and this. So they have time to think about it and they're not put on the spot. Ask the right questions. Don't ask, how are things going? Well, what does everybody say? You're fine. How are you? I'm fine. What'd you do today? Well, not much. Ask specific questions that elicit important answers. What's the most proud you've been in the last month? If you could change one thing about this company right now, what would it be? What's the most difficult challenge you've overcome this year? Suddenly those answers go from everything's fine to oh, well actually there's all these things. Now that I'm thinking about it, now that you've activated that part of my brain, I have all kinds of stuff to say. And even when I was creating this presentation, I took a poll of our team to ask, are we actually doing these things? What are some things that we're doing that I didn't mention? What are some things that I'm saying we're doing and we're not? So even in this presentation, I got input from our team. Provide feedback channels that are accessible, non-argumentative, and genuine. So half of that is corporate speak and half of that are just really big words. So I'll break it down a little bit. Feedback channels, ways to communicate. They should be accessible meaning if you want to get feedback through email, you should be checking your email and responding to it. It should be easy for people to get ahold of you. There should be a system. There should be expectations. Non-argumentative meaning you're not gonna fight about it. When somebody gives you feedback, they should not expect a fight. They should expect it to be heard, not necessarily agreed with, but heard and understood. And in some way, acted on, even if that action is to do nothing. And finally, genuine, you have to really mean it. You can't just say, here's a survey, please fill it out and then not look at it. You have to actually look at it and think about it and analyze the results. What does it mean that these four people said this and these 10 people said that? It's really important. How many of you have heard about Toyotas and Don Cord? So Toyotas, the car company has a manufacturing line, right? And they have this cord that runs all along the line, the entire stretch of the line. Anybody can reach up and pull it at any time and it stops the line. The entire production line stops. Now, if this were, say, an American car company, like Ford, something like that, you cannot stop the line. The line keeps going. It doesn't matter if you saw something that's broken. You just say, hey, that's broken. I'm gonna put a note on it. Keep going. How many times have we done that on a project? Oh, that code doesn't look good. That CSS doesn't make a lot of sense, but gotta ship it, keep going. Somebody else did it, but I don't have time. More stuff is coming down the production line. Gotta keep going. So Toyota has this cord, the Andon cord. It's a Japanese word. What makes the cord powerful is that pulling it does not mean you get in trouble. When you pull the cord, supervisors do not come running over and say, why did you do that? What are you doing? You realize how much money we're losing? We're losing a million dollars an hour because you pulled that cord. They don't do that. If they did that, nobody would pull the cord, right? One person would do it once and they'd react like that and that'd be the end of it. Nobody would ever pull it ever again. That's what I mean by accessible, non-argumentative, and genuine. When somebody pulls the cord, a supervisor walks over and says, what can we do to fix this? What did you see that was wrong? How can we improve it? And they will keep that line stopped as long as possible to fix the problem. They lose a lot of money doing it, but ultimately the team is happier and Toyota cars are very reliable. Hire the right people. This is kind of obvious. So I'll dig into it a little bit. You want to make sure that the people you hire share your values. And those values should be defined. You can't just say they're not a fit and not have the criteria for what a fit is. So think about your company and what you stand for. What do you want your company to be? What are the things that define your culture? Write them down. Make them meaningful and genuine. Publish them. Put them online. Be held accountable for them. And now you have rules that help you decide should I hire this person? Should we spend money on this event? Should we accept work from this client? If there's ever a question, go back to your values. They should help you answer those questions. So in hiring the right people, there's a little bit of a test I like to do. I call it the airport test. And credit where credit's due, that name was invented by a guy named Greg Nattison who is still very well known in the Drupal community. The airport test is the idea that you are stuck in an airport for three hours, for five hours, for 10 hours, with this person. What does that feel like? You're waiting for your flight and it's late and you wanna go home and you've been working all week. You're tired and you're irritable. What is it like to be with this person? Are they gonna start saying things that you don't feel fit with your values and they have certain attitudes that you don't really share about how to treat other people or are they gonna get really angry about the fact that they're sitting and waiting and you're not the kind of person that wants to get really angry about waiting? Think through that. This is one we did a couple years ago. We went virtual. So this means a lot of different things. Some people call this distributed, distributed team or I guess those are the two big ones. Some people don't like the word virtual because it makes it seem like your company isn't real. It's virtual as opposed to real. What it means is you don't necessarily have an office and you don't all necessarily come to the same place every day. How many of you work for distributed companies or virtual companies, right? And of, and keep your hands up if you don't mind. And how many of you really like it? All right, did anybody's hands go down? I didn't see any. It works, right? When done well, it works. It's great. Why? Because you're empowered. You can live where you want. You can set your own schedule to some degree. If you want to move to a new city or if you have to move to a new city for family reasons or whatever, you have the freedom to do so. You don't have to give up your job to do that. That's really important. So it allows them a lot of flexibility. If you work with people who like to travel in unusual ways, like get on a boat and go up and down the coast for six months, but as long as they have an internet connection and a certain number of office hours where they're working and they're doing good work, what does it matter if they're on a boat or in a house or in an office? The fact that you can grant that person that freedom is incredible and very empowering. Very closely related. Let your team set their own schedules. Allow flexible work schedules. Where possible, consider something like an open vacation policy. Some people call this an unlimited paid leave policy. The idea is take as much vacation as you need when you need it. That's it. Nobody's tracking it. That seems a little crazy to some people, I know. But here's the thing, if they abuse that policy, they're not the right fit because they're letting their teammates down. So work with your team to schedule flexible time, to figure out when you can take time off and take the time off you need. That's very empowering. Again, many people in our industry want to be freelancers. They want to be contractors. Why do people want to be freelancers? Because of this. They can work only in the morning or only in the evening or four days a week, not five. Or take a month off in the year to travel because their whole family takes a month off. You should invest time and money in your team's success. Time and money. This means giving people a budget for professional development. Allowing them to travel to events like this, if you can. And the time off to have these conversations. How many people in the last two days, because we're almost at the end of the second day here, how many people have learned something here at DrupalCon in the last two days, right? Everybody, even if you didn't raise your hand, I know you did. That was worth it. That was worth it. You're going to take back the inspiration and the energy and the ideas and everything else that you learned to your organization. Whether you teach them what you learned or if you just go back with a better attitude, it was worth it. So allow them the time and give them some kind of a budget, if you can, to invest in their own development. This is a really important one for us. And I think this one actually scares people more than anything else. Encourage personal brands. See, he didn't like it. A personal brand is the idea that you are really good at what you do and you are known for what you do if you want to be known. And people recognize you and they want to talk to you. And if you like to write blog posts about what you do, you can do that. Some employers, some company owners get really afraid when people they work with start to become famous because they're afraid they're going to leave. And if you're afraid that the people you work with are going to leave because they're going to get too good at their job and too well-known, then there's something wrong with your organization. Because then what are you doing? You're deliberately holding them back. You're not allowing them the time or the budget to get good at what they want to do. You're stifling them. And that's a hard truth. People don't want to hear that. But if you're not allowing people to grow and allow them to leave, if they really do get too good at their job and you can't sustain them at your organization, absolutely you should help them find another place, another career because they're not going to be happy with you and their work will suffer. This is, we have an expression in English, I have no idea if it translates. If you love something set it free, right? So if you really want people to succeed, you have to let them go if they want. But the benefit is if you're the kind of organization that allows people to do this and celebrates it, they will almost certainly stay because they're happy there. This helps eliminate the I am not my job divide. In what we do, knowledge, work, web, technology, we are our jobs. We actually are. We do take it home with us because we're passionate about it. And for some people that's not the case and that's fine. But for some organizations it really is a passion. And for people who are passionate about it, they want to build a personal brand. And one final thought, there's a lot of talk about work-life balance. So I want to work some amount and I want to have a life outside of work. And that's very healthy and everybody should have that. That's very, very important. But at the same time, I don't necessarily believe in work-life separation. I think that there are two things that should be in balance but they're not necessarily entirely separate. If what you want to do is innovate and do really cool things at your organization and change the world, you're doing it 24 hours a day even in your sleep. If that's the kind of organization you want to be, you need to be that. Own it. And if you don't want to do that, don't do that. That's okay. Adopt agile methodologies. Scrum, Kanban, extreme programming, parapro, you know, anything that allows you to work on a project in a more agile way and work with your clients in an agile way. Built into the core of agile development is the idea that teams self-organize around projects and problems. They self-organize. The team decides what it's going to do. Who's going to work on it? When it's done, that's a lot of empowerment, right? You're giving the team the control over what's going to be done in the project, to some degree. Also, very important, built into empowerment is the idea of getting feedback, right? Always ask for feedback every day. Constantly understand what's working and not working. Agile methodologies has this idea of retrospectives or retros, so you do a retro at the end of a period of work, like a sprint. What went well? What did not go well? How can we improve? You're asking those every week or every two weeks, always getting feedback. Don't tell people how to do things. Give people goals. Set goals. Let them figure out how to do it, right? Do what you want, how you want to do it. The technology and the tools that you use at your organization should be decided by your team, not a manager. The team is the one using them. So if they don't like your project management tool, if they don't like JIRA or name a million others, if they really don't like it, work with them to find another and switch, because it's something they have to do every hour and every time they go into that thing, they hate it. And then they hate you a little bit more because you picked it. Let them pick it. And if you try a new thing and it doesn't work, throw it away, do something else. Yeah, it's painful. But the team sees how much you care about their input because you genuinely do. You've invested in a new tool or a new technology. You spent all the time migrating to it. You're working in it. It didn't work. Well, okay, on to the next thing. Set boundaries beyond what the person currently feels. This is a little complicated. Here's what I mean. Some people take power. Some people need to have their expectations set beyond what they currently believe in order to find that power. So some people will say, you know what, I'm gonna learn this thing over here because I wanna get better at my job. I'm gonna do this thing I've never done before. I'm gonna take over this story because it's not getting done and somebody needs to do it. I'm gonna do it. Some people are like that. Some people are not. So if you really want to build a culture of empowerment and demonstrate that everybody can do this and it's not just up to the people who go out and take it and then they get praised for it, create opportunities for people who don't take power to receive praise. So tell them, hey, there's this story in the backlog, this user story in the backlog that nobody's touching. Why don't you give it a try? You can do it. Oh, but I don't really, I don't know much about that. I bet you could learn. Give it a week. I bet you could figure it out. I know you can figure it out because you figured out a whole bunch of other things in the past. They'll figure it out. And they will volunteer again in the future. They will take that power in the future because you have empowered them. A lot of business owners and managers take a long time stepping out of the work because they feel like, oh, but I know all this stuff and I've been working with this client for two years and but I don't know, this person's not really up to speed on SaaS or on whatever technology you're using, except the fact that they actually know more than you do because you hired them and you should be hiring people better than you all the time. These people who know more about your work than you do because you're a manager now, you're not actually doing the work anymore. You're doing a different kind of work. You're doing this work. They know more about it. They're in the weeds. They're working every day with the client. They should have a lot of say in what the company does because they see what clients need, what projects need, all the new technologies that are out there. They're trying new things. They're failing and succeeding. Ask them about their vision for where the web is going or technology. They know more about it than you do and finally, you have to constantly reaffirm this. Constantly exemplify, pursue and praise empowerment. When somebody is empowered, you say, hey, they did this really cool thing. Point it out, celebrate it. If people don't feel like they're empowered or they say they're not empowered, you have to figure out how to solve that and constantly work with them. Reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. And one final thought about this. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength. It's a sign of knowing what you don't know and being comfortable with that. So people should never feel like, I don't wanna ask for help because then it's gonna seem like I don't know what I'm doing or everybody else is really busy or because what's gonna happen is that thing that you need help with, it's not gonna fix itself and you're not gonna be able to fix it because you need help doing it. So it's going to fail and then everybody's gonna wanna know why. If you ask for help, you're actually showing that you are strong, not weak. So this idea of empowerment changes everything. When empowered, a person benefits the company, not the other way around. Here's what I mean by this. Traditionally, the company is this big thing with lots of little people, right? The company is big and powerful and there are lots of little people there. And the people, they all rely on the company for everything. The company gives them a salary. The company gives them a job. The company gives them professional development and career growth. But when they are empowered, the company becomes smaller in a way. In this case, the people are allowing the company to succeed, the people are giving to the company and that is in fact what's happening. We spend a third of our lives at work, a third of our lives at work. We are giving a third of our lives to our jobs. They give us something in return, but the company, the job, should be more grateful than we are, always. That is empowerment. And empowerment makes everyone happier and better at their jobs. The teams are happier, they like their work more. Quality goes up, people stick around, they stay, they don't quit. Clients are happier because quality is up. People aren't leaving. Clients never like it when a client leaves, or when a person leaves a project, right? And you have to explain like, oh, our lead architect just left, we're gonna have to replace them and it's gonna take them a month to ramp up. And finally, leadership. It's less work for business managers. It actually takes a lot of the work out of their hands so they can focus on the future and facilitating and empowering their team. So this change is worth it. Briguntas? I don't know if there's, Mike, I'll repeat the question. So, Todd, I completely agree with you. What I would say is some of the challenges that we have also talking from your perspective about culture. The culture in Latin America is a little bit different, of course, than from the US. So some of the challenges to apply some of the concepts of like free time or open door schedule or take any vacations when you want it. It's hard to imply when the culture has been very different, especially in a culture like the US that is very eccentric and individual versus the culture of Latin America that is a bit more like group-wise. Do you have any suggestions or any experience on how to handle that based on your distributed team that has to do with it? Very good question. I don't have a lot of suggestions, actually, on how to implement this in areas or cultures where a lot of these things are difficult. I'll give you an example. So the idea of, I'll put it this way, these are challenges in the United States. This, the stuff that I've talked about now is really unusual. In the United States, this is not a typical thing at all. This is very forward thinking. When you think of something like the open vacation policy, people can take off however much time they want. There's some really unusual legal problems with that in the United States. So everybody's experiencing this, specifically the state of California. The state of California is a problem in lots of ways. I love California. The state of California. The state of California has a policy that says if you leave your job or if you're fired, your employer has to pay all accrued time off. So if you have saved up three weeks of vacation, they have to pay you three extra weeks of salary when you leave or are dismissed. When you have an open vacation policy, is that infinite time? This is a real legal question in California. And I don't think it's been tested in court yet. But when people have, Netflix has this policy, for example, they're kind of famous for it. When somebody leaves Netflix and they're mad, are they going to sue Netflix and say, you owe me for the rest of my working life? I don't know, we haven't tested that yet, right? This is a new policy, this is brand new. Also in Finland, there is, I've heard this sort of second hand, so I may be ruining the story, but there's some kind of policy that says there is a minimum amount of time off that is enforced by criminal law in Finland. And I think it's five weeks. Even if you are a business owner and you want to work, you have to take time off. So guess what everybody does, they lie. All the business owners who have to work because this is the job, they have to lie and say, yeah, I took five weeks off, or I took two weeks here and three weeks there, and they were working secretly on their own company, right? It's kind of silly. So these are big ideas that are new for everybody, really. In places where it's especially difficult, which may be Columbia, I would suggest that you should see this as maybe some inspiration or a way to start thinking a little bit differently about work, or find the things that you feel really touch you emotionally, like what you like about this, and see if there are ways that you can maybe work with the system you have, or even in some cases work against it to change it. Because there are things even in the United States that we have to work against. Here's another example. The airport test that I talked about earlier. Can you sit in an airport with this person for five hours and not hate them? I wrote about this. I wrote about this, I forget where, on some business magazine, and I was all excited. So I got published in this business magazine. It's really cool. Like, oh, time to read the comments. I made the mistake of reading internet comments about my own article. And luckily, this being a business website, it wasn't like YouTube. They were actually thoughtful, but they kind of ripped me to shreds on the policy, because they said that the airport test sounded like a way to enforce discriminatory hiring practices. You're just gonna hire people that you get along with. And chances are that means they're people that have the same background as you, that speak the same language as you, that are a lot like you, probably look like you, right? And then all of these other biases come into play. And you know what? They're kind of right. They're kind of right about that. So I've headed shift the way I think about the airport policy, because it's more about values now than it is getting along with somebody. It's do you share the same values? Do you have the same goals? That's what you wanna think about. Not necessarily can we tell each other the same jokes and we'll both think they're funny, you know? Any other questions? Just one moment, we're gonna pass a mic to you. In Argentina in 2001, there were social upheavals. Many factory owners tried to close their factories. And they would, what the workers did in many cases is they took over the factory. And they made the factory work on their own and became successful within certain limitations. This has happened in Chicago with a glass company and in France also I believe with a watch company. In that sense, that's a kind of sense where I wanna tell you exactly what I feel. I think that it's a very courageous presentation, very fresh ideas. And if your company is implementing half of this, you know, where's the job application for? But on the other hand, given the fact, I think what we're heading for in this presentation is to optimize a difficult situation. And I have to say in true honesty, my impression that I wanna share with you is that there's a dialogue going on in all of the language statements. It's a dialogue with the manager, which is fine. I mean, nothing wrong with that. But what we're doing here is trying to design a benevolent dictator. And the root problem will not be solved until there's no dictator. So it has to be, I don't know, there are experiments in cooperatives, there are experiments in different kind of designs of companies. I guess a benevolent dictator is better than a non-benevolent dictator who ruins the company and all the projects fail and so on and so forth. But since there is a fundamental difference in that the manager or the owner owns the means of production in the knowledge factory, it's an insurmountable, I mean, there's a problem there. So in any case, I just wanted to share that with you. I do think I've just given a presentation on lean approaches and evidently I agree with you. I mean, these techniques have to be put into operation because that's the state of affairs right now. So, but I did get that feeling that the dialogue is with the manager only. And even though I'm owner-director of a small group of people, I didn't, I mean, why would that be, why isn't the dialogue also with the people who work at the company? So, but in any case, it's the rules again. So I just wanted to share with you my feelings about listening to you and thank you very much. Well, thank you. Well, a couple of thoughts. There are a lot of interesting things that we could talk about as it relates to power structures and hegemony and all of those things. And that's the kind of stuff that I love to talk about. But I'm gonna focus it very tightly on just this presentation and just some of the ideas we talked about here. Because I will say that I'm, there's a lot of political ideology that goes into that as well. And I think it's all well-founded. And I would describe myself personally as sort of a weird mix of like a capitalist and an anarchist. So I know that seems maybe like they're at odds, but that's just what I'm like. So the audience for this presentation, it's interesting and I think it's very valid feedback, very constructive, critical feedback to hear that you feel that it's more directed, it's almost exclusively directed at managers. And true, usually when I give a presentation like this, it is to managers and other business owners for sure, because I'm trying to change their minds about things. But at the same time, I want to have enough information in here for people who are not in a management position or an ownership position to make them think, hey, I'm not being treated fairly. This doesn't, you know what? There's some suggestions I could make in my organization to do this. So I think maybe casting that, like there is definitely some intent, but it may not be clear. So I take that to heart and I hope to expand on it in the future. We're about one minute over time, but I'd like to take one more question and then we'll wrap up and then I'll be here and I can talk for a few more minutes. So yes, sir. So I have two questions. The second one I will just do it there, but I guess this one is, you have all these philosophy and this, you know, in a way really a manifesto, right? For people how to be a colleague with their people, they might not show supervised or vice versa. But when you see the examples of really bad management, I mean, kind of like even like dictatorship style, like Steve Jobs, right? And these companies are so successful or, you know, keep naming these people like Bill Gates and all of them have this kind of like dictatorship style and like my way or the highway, right? And they are so successful. So what kind of message is this and how, you know, it's kind of like question, you know, it's like you're so successful is because you're a dictatorship, perhaps. Yeah. I think about that a lot because I think a lot about Steve Jobs in particular and it's interesting that you mentioned him as an example because he's the opposite of all of this. And yet Apple is the wealthiest company in the world. It has more cash on hand than any company has ever had and they continue to innovate and do all kinds of impressive things. It's, I don't know yet, I don't know enough yet about Tim Cook to know what his style is like. I think they're still kind of feeling that out over there. I imagine he's probably a lot like Steve Jobs though because why else would he hand off the company to anybody other than someone like himself? I think there are basically two kinds of companies in the world. There's the Steve Jobs kind of company and there's what I think we're aspiring to be here. And I think that looking at the, and this goes towards your question from earlier, looking at the political questions around power and structure. In our world we live in a very capitalist world. So companies like Apple through a dictator like model and I'm using that word very loosely. They succeed really well within the system that has been built. At the same time I think that some people are actually really motivated. I don't understand it myself because I'm not motivated in that way but I think some people are genuinely motivated by fear, by being constantly pushed to go farther and farther and farther until you feel like you, look at how athletes train. Athletes train because they are constantly pushed beyond their limits and then they heal and they get better and they keep going. If athletes were trained because their coach said, hey, that's good enough, I'm your buddy, let's go get beers. Would they ever make it to the Olympics? Maybe not. Now that may not be a fair comparison. But some people are motivated by being pushed really hard and really far. And those people really like working at Apple. I know people who work at Apple and they love it and they love that kind of stuff. I would not do well there at all. What's interesting though is that companies like what we're aspiring to be aren't usually very big. We're pretty small. And we get into some really interesting political discussions now about, well is that because the system that we've built that is even outside of business, that is social and cultural, is it because companies like this can only succeed so far? Because other companies are eating up the rest of the pie, right? Like the Apples and the rest. It's almost a philosophical question. And it's something that I do think about a lot because there are things about Apple and Steve Jobs that I find very inspiring. Their design, how forward thinking they are, how most people think, let's figure out what the client wants, what the consumer wants and give them that. Or let's take something that they have and make it better. But what Apple has done is they've said, there's this thing that you don't even want yet. And we're gonna make it so good that it's gonna be the thing you have to have. That's kind of incredible. Because it goes against all other logic. They can't look at surveys or reports or sales numbers or anything when they try to do something completely different. Anyway, lots of things, I could start talking forever about this because I find it fascinating. So I'll wrap up now because we're a few minutes over. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.