Fixing the founding flaw of matrix organizations

Ryan Barry:

Hi everybody and welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappy. My name is Ryan. I'm joined as always by my dear friend, Patricia Montesdeoca and our producer Kelsey Sullivan. Hello and good afternoon ladies.

Patricia Montesdeoca:

Hello, hello.

Ryan:

So everybody, let's have a little come clean moment here. Last week, at the time of this recording, it was wonderful. I had 296 of my favorite people that all work with me at Zappi in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria. We took over a resort and we galvanized around what we're going to do together and with our customers and our partners, like Patricia, to change the industry again because we're going to do that. Unfortunately, we did it in October, which is a heightly germ season, and so if you notice a little sniffle, it's because your boy is recovering from COVID and this one sucked my friends.

I had a fever like you read about, I got stuck in a hotel room in Vienna for a couple days. Kelsey got stuck, I think in Munich for a couple days, but I'm back in Boston. I'm feeling better hugging my kids and it's a beautiful thing to be alive. So happy to be back and we'll share more with all of you who are customers of ours and what's going on. But if you notice a little sniffle, that's where it's coming from.

Patricia:

Kelsey's sounding a little bit... She's much better than last week, guys. Let me tell you, a couple of days ago she was sounding rough.

Ryan:

We won't be asking her to talk.

Patricia:

No, but she's sounding much more like her lovely self again.

Ryan:

She looks great. Her voice just hurts a bit. We'll let her [inaudible 00:01:36] have a little break. But it's good to see you Patricia. And Patricia is mad at me because I created COVID and I didn't get to have an away daya while she worked at Zappi.

Patricia:

Four years. I worked at Zappi for four years!

Ryan:

I know.

Patricia:

I mean, you could've had... I did go to Cape Cod-

Ryan:

Tsk tsk. For real-

Patricia:

It's all your fault. All your fault.

Ryan:

It is. Getting together with people, in person, whether you get COVID or not, is worth it. You can connect, you can look people in the eyes, you can understand them differently. 

Patricia:

You can hug, you can hug.

Ryan:

You can hug. I had a lot of hugs. One of our colleagues, secretly, is a comedian and she did stand up comedy and

Patricia:

She did not. Oh my god. Steph did stand up?

Ryan:

She did stand up and-

Patricia:

Not so secret.

Ryan:

It was really funny. Well, it's not really a secret, but nobody knew she was going to do it until she did it, except for Steve and I and a few other people and whoever helped her write the jokes. It's nice to be the butt of somebody's jokes in front of your entire staff. I was the butt of the joke, but I'll let her tell you the joke about me in her own time.

Patricia:

I will.

Ryan:

It's very, very funny. So this episode is something I was looking forward to doing. Clay Parker Jones is somebody who I've actually done business with a bunch of times. I think we talk about this a little bit in the episode, but we stood up this crazy thing called the Insights Alliance about four years ago, which was a bunch of different brands. Pepsi Co, Colgate, MARS, McDonald's, getting together to think through how do we build solutions that go quick but are predictive of sales that are in line with how consumers behave today, not yesterday?

We did that. We created some incredible solutions to help make better advertising, better products and Clay actually was part of the team who helped us facilitate the kickoff. And I've learned a lot about facilitating meetings. I fancy myself being pretty good at facilitating meetings and I stole everything I know from Clay. So we're at a time, and I'll be honest with you, when I was doing this interview, you might notice this on my face when you're watching. Clay said something to me that actually felt so personally close to home, that I rolled out an entire new framework to my company last week around how directly responsible individuals get. The fewest group of people together to autonomously get done.

Clay, thank you, as always, for inspiring me. Clay is a genius at digital transformation. He's going to tell you what that means. He is exceptional at getting ego out of rooms and letting the right discussion prevail, at facilitating cross-functional dialogue and he spends his time today advising CMOs on how to navigate the complexities that are their world. And you're in for a treat today. We're going to talk about all of those things in this conversation and as always, Patricia's going to do a great job of summarizing it, but I think you'll learn a lot. We talk a lot on our podcast around what we need to do. Clay's going to give you some tips on how to do it. So let's get into it.

Patricia:

Let's do it.

[Music transition to interview]

Ryan Barry: 

Ladies and gentlemen, it's an honor to bring to you Clay Parker Jones of Black Glass. Clay, hi. How you doing man?

Clay Parker Jones:

What's going on? It's dreary, but I'm loving fall. We're getting into it. Spooky season.

Ryan:

You know what I had yesterday? I had chili yesterday, which is a... It's a thing. It's a sign that fall's here. We lit the fire in the house, nice chili.

Clay:

Chili beans or no beans. What are we working with?

Ryan:

Beans. My wife is newly declared not eating red meat of any sort. So it was white bean chicken chili that she made.

Clay:

Okay.

Ryan:

I got to give her nine out of 10. Excellent chili. Excellent.

Clay:

Love it, love it.

Ryan:

So everybody, I'm really excited to have this conversation with Clay. I mean, bit of backstory, I met Clay when we were starting the Insights Alliance. A lot of you don't know about the Insights Alliance because we don't really talk about it publicly, but it's something that Zappi and a bunch of other brands created to try to rethink the future of consumer insights, build advantage tools. It was something that stemmed from a partnership with the brave folks at PepsiCo who Clay and I are both fans of. We probably both owe a good part of our houses to PepsiCo. So thank you, PepsiCo. We appreciate it.

Clay:

You better believe it.

Ryan:

But Clay came in and helped facilitate the kickoff of something that, at the time, was a bit crazy. Would you agree?

Clay:

I wouldn't call it crazy, but packing a bunch of maybe differently aligned business leaders in a room, definitely high stakes for sure.

Ryan:

And you had the pleasure of managing us.

Clay:

I loved that meeting. I mean, it was multiple days. We were in it.

Ryan:

So Clay and I caught up, and the truth is Clay will introduce himself. He's doing a lot of great work with CMOs in consulting with them, advising them, and obviously a lot of us that are on our podcast are helping inform CMOs with consumer and cultural sentiment. 

And anyways, we were catching up to figure out how we could collaborate. And this was the first idea we had was to chat here, but I forget exactly how you phrased it, but you were like, "Oh, shit. That thing worked." Because it has been a great success for many brands and has helped propel our business. But the truth is, Clay, I've learned a lot from you. I know I've said that to you privately, but really, it's an honor to have you on our show today. I'm excited to have this discussion.

Clay:

Awesome.

Ryan:

All right, so let's get into it. So you, over the course of I think three or maybe four companies, worked with a lot of marketing and growth leaders in big businesses to help inform change management digital transformation strategies. Talk to me a little bit about that experience and I guess to the extent you can, codify what the hell digital transformation means for everybody.

Clay:

Yeah. So that journey started around 2009 when I moved to New York City to work for a company called Undercurrent. That journey lasted until 2015 when a few of us undercurrenters went out to start our own business called August, which is where I came into contact with you. And then I started working in 2019 with a couple businesses inside of the Interpublic group, so RGA and then Black Glass, where I've been working since 2021. 

And along the way from 2009 to 2015, this was still in the era where there were mom and pop shops trying to convince big businesses to get on Twitter, convince them that Facebook was a thing. And gradually during that era, it started to become clear that this obviously was going to be something massive for marketers, something massive for business. And that it wasn't just something that was a side show for getting your brand out there or a cheaper way to go about it, but that this was going to have the transformative effect on the world that we all thought it would.

Now, a decade on, it's looking a little bit scarier societally, but the effect on business has been transformative and powerful and positive. But along the way, the kind of interesting thing that we noticed was that it wasn't a strategic problem like we thought it was. We thought that we needed to move up the food chain from the people working on digital to the CMO, to eventually the CEO and actually build "digital" into the strategy of the firm in order for it to have an impact.

And we were able to do that. We got lucky. We had connections. We made our way into those boardrooms. And the language of digital and the philosophy of digital started to make its way into corporate strategy. And things still weren't changing. There was something broken in the system, in the infrastructure, in the mindsets, in the beliefs, in the aspirations that people have for what they can do at work and what work looks like.

And it wasn't until we had that observation that we started to work on the organizations themselves. So when I think of digital transformation and yeah, it's a really good thing, a banner to sell under for sure, but it's also something that I think is misunderstood enough that it's getting in the way. But in general, the idea is that you're using the beliefs and practices of the digital era in your internal operations and the customer experience. So you're just applying the things that work. And I think the internal operations and the customer experience thing is the really important dimension there that you actually have to fundamentally rethink how the enterprise works if you're going to take advantage of the stuff that we've now put in front of consumers.

So most big businesses have been pretty good at figuring out how to change the consumer experience, some coming slower than others, but they're doing it. Inside the organization, that's where it's still falling down. It still looks like, I don't know, 1970, 1950 in some cases inside of these organizations in terms of how easy it is...

Ryan:

Unless you're in the Brooklyn office.

Clay:

Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. No, that's a good point. An innovation lab downtown where you can attract the best and brightest and keep them on staff for 18 months before they're like, "I can't get anything done around here and I never will be able to. So I need to go do something different." And by the way, that's not just big old companies that were invented before the internet. That's big technology companies too, name brands that we all know and trust. Yeah, it's widespread.

Ryan:

We do forget 2004 when Facebook rose, was nearly 20 years ago.

Clay:

Yeah.

Ryan:

They're a big conglomerate, too. That was a long time ago.

Clay:

It used to be that we would use Amazon as an example of, "Hey, here's how to go to work or how you can work differently." And people in big CPGs would go, "Oh, but they're kind of small potatoes, e-commerce." Now they're bigger than all of them by a lot. Yeah. So it's in the water supply now.

Ryan:

I love the way you broke this down. I've never heard it this way. So customer experience and internal operations, fundamentally rethinking both. So you think by the time we have this conversation in October of 2022, customer experience is something that it's landed operationally, some people lagging on and their internal ops is a bit behind. I want to unpack both with you a little bit.

So what do you think is really working in customer experience being digital today? Where are companies still struggling? It's interesting that you say it's come along because I have really big customers who are still trying to figure out how to understand their customers' needs in a digital omni-channel, whatever words you want to use, experience.

Clay:

Yeah, yeah. This is where actually getting into the beliefs, the practices, the principles, the methods of born digital organizations and connecting those to the felt reality of the teams working within the business is the challenge. So one of the challenges when you talk to a big CPG, a big automaker, a big telco, although that's a little bit different, the struggles that they have are in enabling teams, enabling individuals, enabling business units to actually ship at the pace of the world around us.

It's really hard for a CPG to go make a new product and put it on shelves. It requires a lot of buy-in from distributors, from the folks running the routes. There's a lot to do there. It's not the same as shipping a new feature to Facebook or changing the button color on Amazon. Those are big meaty things that take a long time and touch a lot of people. It's still not the same.

So reducing that time to live or time to customer interaction is, I would say, the fundamental challenge in helping large organizations actually pick up the pace when it comes to customer experience and operate at the pace of "digital". So that's where they lag behind. And there's also the meta layer around that, so the service layer or the experience layer, that is going to be more digital, that is about someone logging onto a site, experiencing some digital experience, branded experience that gets them to convert or hand raise or what have you. And businesses tend to treat that stuff in the same way that they treat the big capital expenditure stuff that's on the other side of the equation. So changing the website is the same as changing the factory. And that kind of model I think is where we get stuck and that's where digitally native employees that come in thinking, "Wow, it's got to be easier for us to change this thing over here. It's literally picking a color for a button."

Yeah. That can't go through the same process as changing the formulation of a product or deciding the pricing of it. Those are fundamentally different things, and we have to treat them differently. So that I think is one of the core challenges that prevents large scaled operations from being able to apply these ideas to the foundation of the experience or to the internal operations because they see them as fundamentally similar. And the people that have been promoted into leadership have the same... 

Those worldviews have worked for them. They've been very, very successful with them. So why change now? And it's hard to prove that the other thing is possible, that the other thing is viable even though we're seeing it every day and we know that these things are the right ways to go.

Ryan:

Such an interesting paradox. It makes sense. In some cases, bottling company A, we won't pick on anybody, their biggest strength is their infrastructure, their supply chain, their sales team, their reach, but applied to a digitally native experience, it's the complete opposite approach. So have you ever read that book Humanocracy?

Clay:

Absolutely. It's right up there on the shelf.

Ryan:

It's one of my favorites. They have that tension of balancing exploitation versus experimentation. That paradox is what you're describing because the same thing it takes to ship a soda can that you've done for 20 years is not the same set of steps to produce... Example that's top of mind, and I think they did a fantastic job, I had no involvement in this. Home Depot's app is designed to make your in-store shopping experience more seamless. And I'm the least handy guy you'll ever meet. But I just wanted to try it just because I felt the advertising was so clever. And however they got there, it was a wonderful combination of their physical asset meeting their digital asset. But how many companies do that that well? And what I don't know underneath it all is did that take them five years to ship that thing? Because who knows?

Clay:

And what's the store experience for the frontline employee? Are they contributing to that or is that something that's being kind of dropped on their lap from corporate? That's where the digital can get in the way of the real or vice versa. And companies that are able to test, learn, experiment and then exploit the opportunity that they've created, that's just a fundamentally different mindset because that's something that happens in the span of months rather than happening in the span of a decade. 

So it's just a different time scale and it is connected in some way to career ladders to the way that we see strategy implicit and explicit. It's easy to talk about financial incentives and those are obvious ones. And you see that in promotion-driven development as a buzzword for how things happen at some large tech companies where the promotion cycle is coming up, so we're going to come up with a new feature. We're going to launch it, promote it, and abandon it.

Notably being talked about right now around Google and Stadia and shutting that down. But you see that everywhere. It's not just in companies that can quickly ship a feature or create a new business and get it off the ground. It even happens in the middle of an Insights department where we're trying to come up with a new methodology for identifying, codifying, spreading and utilizing insights. And it's hard to know whether or not that's something that someone is doing because it's a career goal and it's something that they want to achieve and they saw somebody else present on stage at the executive board and that's how they got ahead and they're just trying to follow in their footsteps. Or if that's actually really necessary for the business.

What we're seeing today is incredible burnout on teams. People are at their wits end, and they're feeling overworked. And yet executives are like, "We don't really have a whole lot to show for it. We haven't gotten a lot done." And it doesn't make sense. As an empathetic leader, I'm thinking, I'm embodying the voice of a CMO right now. I'm thinking, "Yeah, I want to help these people out. This is terrible. We can't have this experience in our business." But it also feels like everyone is just going from meeting to meeting to meeting and nothing is really getting done.

So I need to get these things done. I need to tell them to work harder or I need to figure out what the problem is. And I have literally no playbook for doing that. And that's what we're hearing. And the teams are saying it too. "Hey, we're not getting anything done. We are not doing the stuff that we need to be doing and it's the company around me's fault. It's all this stuff that we have to do in order to get our things done. And there's no way that I can change that. So we're all feeling just super duper stuck right now."

Ryan:

All this stuff. All right. I want to come back to the assembly line versus the new website and how you're breaking it down, but we're here. So let's stay here right now.

Clay:

Yeah. Okay.

Ryan:

Look, I run a small business. We have 330 people, and it's the same issue. We've gone from vibrant in an office to working really hard to figure out the balance of synchronous and asynchronous work. The punchline is, most businesses have a total of four hours a day where the whole company's awake at best if you're a global business, and you don't have the got-a-minutes. I mean we're a B Corp, which makes it even harder because it's like, I got to be really thoughtful of jet plane emissions and everything else, and it's really freaking hard.

One of your superpowers is getting the most out of synchronous time. I've seen it firsthand and I've stolen so many things from you, which I appreciate. But then even if you are good at that, which I'm hoping you could share some wisdom with everybody, if you're a CMO, that persona you were just describing, to codify that around your entire organization while meeting Wall Street demands, I mean, it's hard work. So I guess, drop some knowledge on us. How are you recommending businesses combat this? Because there isn't a playbook. No one had a playbook to run a business through a pandemic.

And this new, I hate to use it, the normal we live in isn't freaking normal. So it's tough. So I guess how are you helping companies navigate that today? What are some tips you're giving out?

Clay:

Yeah, really quick on the synchronous time thing because that's an important factor that is totally overlooked, and it's so easy. It feels easy once you try it a few times, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong because we had two meetings together that were big. You stole a lot of that and went and used it, which is awesome. So you've got probably even more experience trying to apply this stuff internally than I do because I come in from the outside. You're doing it internally as a leader. So there's something for you to kind of bring to this for sure that is unique.

Ryan:

For sure. Yeah. I'll definitely share some stories in a minute. Absolutely.

Clay:

Yeah. Yeah. So it's just facilitation and facilitation is weird and wooly and it gets better with time. And it's just about pushing a few really good first principles on how people can think and work together. So conversations are really tough with more than three people. So split your group into groups of three maximum, two people is fine. Three is a little bit better because you can have a diversity of opinions, more ideas brought to the table. But for a conversational setting, it's three. We've seen it before and we know how it works. In a big meeting, there's usually three people that are talking the most. So try to break your group down into groups of people that can work well together and give them a task. That's number two.

So people need a task that is fairly well-defined but doesn't have a prescribed output. You do need to have some parameters for what you're looking for, but you don't want to tell people how to get there.

Ryan:

It's such a tension. I found prescribing the outcome, this is the business needle we need to move, and if there's an agreed problem statement, happy days. If there's not, you've sort of got to start there because then you're ideating without knowing what the hell you're trying to solve.

Clay:

And then number three, so we've broken people into groups that make sense. We've given them a clear goal. 

So number three is knowing that people are really bad at brainstorming and giving them a moment to think, to write and then to share out is critical. So when you give people a prompt in a brainstorm and you're like, "All right, let's think about the future of the potato," people are just going to sit there and go, "Well I'm going to wait for the boss to talk, or I'm going to wait for my friend to talk. Or I really need to say something, so I'm going to say the first thing I can come up with." And that's going to be the thing that drives the conversation.

Instead, tell people to pause and respond to a prompt and then share their thoughts. So using heads down time to allow people with different ways of thinking, different ways of showing up in the room to actually think and participate is absolutely critical. That pause, gather your thoughts, share out, hear from everyone, and then move forward with the conversation is absolutely critical. And letting the conversation go is something that I wasn't as good at in my earlier facilitation career. I wanted to make sure that it was going by the plan that I'd come up with. But letting it flow and letting people have the disagreement and letting that be out in the room and really just being attentive to the points that are being made, the disagreements in the room, the person who hasn't said anything and trying to think of yourself as a leader, as a facilitator of the important dialogue that will help you make the call, make the decision, that's key. That's what we use our time together for.

Ryan:

Yeah. So I'll share because I'm glad you ended with time together because there's two tensions, getting the most out of live time and then keeping that momentum when everybody's back in their apartments. Or two people are in the office and one person's in South Africa and one person's kids are sick and there's soccer practice. So on a personal reflection, what I've found... So I've stolen those three plays from Clay because I've watched him do it beautifully. I think the truth is, if you are a leader or if you're facilitating a meeting, it's a lot of hard work to think about what Clay just said because you need to do a lot of thinking before you get in that room to get the plan, the thinking, the groups curated, and then the thing you said last resonates and then be willing to fuck it all up because the natural energy of the group sometimes is worth derailing your whole plan for.

So the silent writing thing is one of the biggest unlocks I've ever seen because it levels the entire meeting playing field. I'm quite energetic. You've had to facilitate me. I've got a lot of ideas. I'm energetic. Once I get excited about something, the hands get going. I'm on the fucking whiteboard. But if I'm writing on a post-it note that's as small as our introverted CTO, guess what? Same opinion. He's going to go and I'm going to listen and I'm going to go and he's going to listen. We were experimenting, I think this is right around the time I met you, with this thing of dot voting, particularly when you're trying to get around problem definition because then it's not about hierarchy, which I do think, to go back to our previous discussion, that linearity of hierarchy in big businesses does hurt some of this.

So you have to be willing to not be hierarchical in the meeting. And as the leader of the meeting, your job is to just set the goal and let the rest of it sort of happen. So the one other thing I would add is particularly with live time or offsites, I've been experimenting a lot with doing them in places that are out of the norm.

Clay:

Absolutely, yes.

Ryan:

And then build the pressure. So we've rolled out our four year company roadmap. In July, I took our executive team to Cape Cod and we had some pretty intense vulnerable meetings as you're describing. And then once the pressure builds, get out of the room and go do something as humans. I did this last year in Iceland. I did it this year in Cape Cod. What I found is the discussions on the walk up the sand dunes or this, "let's go have a quick side beer or side coffee" or breakthrough dialogues, but the meeting enables that to happen. So those are just a couple of things I've picked up since I started working with you on this stuff.

Clay:

That's awesome. Yeah. And there's all these little things that kind of flow out of that. And I think the thing that brings them together is understanding and paying attention to detail when it comes to relationships and power dynamics. You sent me an email before this episode and you had highlighted frictions in innovation, in alignment and execution. And I love that kind of framework of things to unpack. And this one is on the alignment front. It connects deeply, deeply to it. Why don't we align? 

Well, we don't align because it's painful. So we will do it infrequently to avoid that pain. And alignment tends to require going in with divergent opinions and coming to a cooperative agreement. But you have to have a difference going in.

Where does that difference come from? It comes from your role. It comes from your title. It comes from your background. It comes from your hierarchy. It comes from a variety of different places. And we have to deal with that. So people aren't spending what we notice inside of organizations of size, and I would say 300 is still, yes, it's smaller, but that's a lot of people. That's too [inaudible 00:29:01]. Yeah, for sure.

Ryan:

It's complex for sure.

Clay:

Yeah. So insufficient attention to detail when it comes to team trust, relationships. And for leaders, to me, CMOs and insights leaders, anybody that has a handful of direct reports with all those people having a handful of their own direct reports and all of that. Leadership teams need to spend more time building relationships with one another and building trust and becoming personally aligned or at least aware of their points of misalignment so that we're not just coming across them randomly when we're deciding on our four year roadmap. We need to know about those things going in.

And then the second one is just a profoundly analog organization. Most people's org charts and decisions are in PowerPoint. Congratulations, Microsoft. You won that battle.

Ryan:

You did it. We gave up.

Clay:

And even though they are technically made on a computer, so they are technically digital, you can't use them for anything. They can't really be searched effectively. They don't turn into a handy record because it's Zappy four year plan, final V13 CPJ edits. Is that the one with the decision or is it final, final? Where is the decision? Where is the organization chart? Where is the job description? 

All of those things are basically in analog. They may as well just be in books on a shelf. And we can't use the organization effectively. So we don't. We just rely on our personal network of relationships. And maybe for a month after the new org chart is rolled out, we remember it well enough to know where to go talk to the person in charge of the website or in charge of the supply chain. But otherwise we have to wait for an email or we have to ask somebody else who knows more than us that has been around for longer.

So the analog nature of organizations is a major problem when it comes to alignment because none of their alignment is written down basically in a way that anybody can use it.

Ryan:

Well, I think there's two things to pick up on from what you say. By the way, we could be talking for hours because now I'm having way too much fun. Alignment. Clay's not talking about surface level alignment, people. Customer centricity, agile tools. That's bullshit. What do you actually mean should be coming out of your mouth 15 times a day. 

The amount of times I have people say a word and the rest of the group is either uncomfortable being vulnerable or is just like, "Yeah, yeah, I agree with them," and then you find out six months later, Tom and Jessica had completely different definitions of that word, but nodded their heads in status meetings for six months like this. And I would encourage everybody not to do that. Can you please be specific? What does that word mean to you? Can you please articulate that for me?

Because there's so much subtle misunderstanding that leads to a profound dissonance of employees or a lack of innovation or progress. I mean, I'll give you an example. I spent the whole day with my team getting weird. You as a human, what are you trying to work on? What relationships are you trying to... And for some people that's really uncomfortable. But that group today is a different dynamic than they were eight weeks ago because of that work. Ask people to be specific because of the alignment thing, you can't understate that. And that's where a lot of big companies slow nose, they stem from a lack of alignment.

Clay:

Absolutely. And we had this one trick that we loved, which was... I guess it's two kinds of related tricks. One is writing the decision on a whiteboard or writing it on a big post-it pad, or just writing it in a shared Google doc that we're all looking at while we're all on Zoom. Write the decision down, have everyone look at it and then ask why people are out or why they would block the decision. We always ask, do we agree? Everyone was like, "Yeah, yeah, totally. For sure." Ask why we shouldn't do this. And treat those outages, those nos with respect. Okay, cool. What gets you in? How can we make this easy?

Ryan:

What are the three things that need to be true? What gets you in? I love that.

Clay:

And from a wordsmithing perspective, because frequently you see with groups, they will look at a customer-centric vision statement for the department and they will wordsmith it until it means nothing. And they all agree that it's not very good, but they're willing to live with it. Instead, find out why we shouldn't make this decision, do this, make this choice, decide to spend this money, decide to work with this partner. Be clear about the decisions that you're making and be willing to get into the level of detail. To your point around individual people, it's a level of detail about the people that you're working with. 

If it's the platform, it's the investment. If it's the design of the packaging, get into the details. And especially as leaders, be willing to go there with your teams for the really important stuff. So we've noticed too, maybe it's just all PowerPoint culture, maybe that's the ultimate problem, but there's this obsession with attitude like, "Oh, that's too detailed for the CEO to see."

Ryan:

I hate that shit. I have no time for a leader who's not willing to engage in detail.

Clay:

Yeah. I mean, to bring Amazon back into it, you go look at their goal setting process. And this is pretty detailed in this new book, Working Backward by Colin Briar and Bill Carr. 

And they get some examples of the kinds of goals that get attention from the senior leadership team. And the level of detail, I would say is pretty astounding when you compare it to maybe compare this to some of the things that maybe are in your annual plan. So one of them might be something like, ensuring 99.9% of all calls to some software service are successfully responded to within 10 milliseconds. That's pretty specific, very straightforward. There's no ambiguity there. That's a decision that we're making as a leadership team to pay attention to something that's happening several levels down in the organization. And we believe in it so much that we're going to follow up with it, that we're going to care about it, we're going to put it in our executive report, in our dashboard.

And there's this funny thing that happens related to that in most organizations where the career path that we're all on puts strategy and ambiguity, abstraction above execution, specificity and realism. It's more valuable to tell people what to do than to be the one doing it. It's not cool to be in the details. If you're in the details, you're not making the big box.

Ryan:

You're junior. This is something that I've learned a lot from studying what Bezos was doing in those early days. If you really think about it, they didn't have fucking PowerPoints. That was a six page memo. Everybody sat quietly, they read it, they determined if they were going to have a dialogue. And let's pick on PowerPoint. How many hours? We were talking about how many hours a day we spend in meetings, but how many hours a month are fucking wasted by people iterating on a deck about a deck and having a meeting about the meeting before the meeting about the meeting and the meeting. It's insane to me. And then I'm of the view, you can make anything look good in a deck. You can make anything sound compelling in that thing. And so that whole culture of...

So I'll be honest with you, one of my biggest triggers, Clay, and really, you can ask my team and my colleagues this using an hour of my time live to talk at me, chances are I'm going to ask you to stop 20 minutes in. So write it down in detail, send it to me, we'll iterate in a document and then maybe we don't even need to talk. I mean we are fighting that in a smaller company. Think of the debt culture that pervades a lot of publicly traded businesses. It's really difficult for them.

Clay:

And this is related to, I would call this, the founding flaw of matrix organizations. So every single organization that you and I work with is set up more or less the same way where they have product lines or geographies at the top as the line managers and then functions along the side. And all those people from marketing, HR, IT insights, product, supply chain, are matrixed across. They're dual reporting.

And it's funny, this was a way of organizing people that was created for the space race. So it was created basically to have the formal control of the organization be driven by the permanent capabilities that they wanted to have. Taking care of people in space building and launching rockets, maintaining the ground facilities, blah, blah, blah. And then they would have temporary programs along the side. So Apollo would be one, Mercury would be another, space shuttle, be another, et cetera.

And you had to have that because you had hundreds of subcontractors. So people building the rockets, people building the capsules, people building space suits, all that. And there was no way to get them to work together and come to a consensus basically. So they had to make this system where, and this is a quote from one of my favorite papers about this, the Matrix organization is a system which tends to diminish the visibility of authority and emphasizes consensus as the operative mode. So make authority go away, make it kind of fade into the background and everyone has to agree before we move forward. Fine. That makes sense if we're launching rockets. I get it.

Ryan:

Consensus there, you need.

Clay:

Right. Does your thing work with my thing? But if you go...

Ryan:

Will people die?

Clay:

Yeah. If you go and you contrast that to high performing teams and teams are the best social technology for getting the most out of somebody's hour, be on a great team. 

That's the way to do it. You go and you look inside of these large organizations and there aren't teams anywhere. They just don't exist because it's too costly. It's too challenging to organize teams across multiple different people that are all incentivized to follow in their boss's footsteps somewhere else.

Ryan:

Who go follow their boss and leave.

Clay:

Exactly. Exactly. So we just don't do it. So we don't work as teams. And what does that mean? We have to spend all of our time aligning, surface level aligning, not the kind that we were talking about, but aligning through a deck within marketing, let's say even, with other functions inside of marketing, like insights, media, innovation, design, analytics. They're all working with the brand team and trying to get something done.

Meanwhile, this is real numbers from a team of six, they're spending 170 hours on that kind of admin and 70 hours on real work activating the brand, writing the PowerPoint sometimes that needs to go in front of the distributor, coming up with a new idea, naming a thing, managing an agency, what have you. So it's mostly on admin.

Ryan:

Two and half X on admin relative to the actual innovation work. And your CMO wonders why that's the outcome.

Clay:

Nothing gets done.

Ryan:

It makes sense.

Clay:

That's right. Well, we aligned. We are very aligned. We're not really, but it feels like we are.

Ryan:

We're not aligned even though we think we are, but we've actually done nothing. One part is breaking the back of it in a meeting. The other part is holding space for better meetings to not be had. And that does start with leadership holding space for this kind of crap not to happen. How are you helping companies navigate the reality of the fact that they need to form small, empowered teams around problems that might pervade a work charter of bonus structure or what have you. This is really what the nub of you're describing, which I agree with.

Clay:

Yeah. So it starts with looking for executives who think that something is wrong. If they don't think that something is wrong, nothing's going to change. It's going to keep being the way that it's been and it's going to be as successful as it's been, but it's not going to be particularly adaptive, resilient, fast. It's not going to be very efficient. We're not going to do more with less because gosh, it takes 170 hours to just kind of align with people.

Ryan:

Just to talk. Yeah. Okay. So let me ask you a pointed question. So for the people listening who say, "Sally, our CMO, has no clue." Any tips on how to have that dialogue with Sally that aren't, go find a new job? Because if I've had two Bud Lights, that might be my advice. But how would you approach that dialogue to be like, "Look, there's got to be a better way to do this. Frustrated, we got to go. We get it."

Clay:

Yeah. And you have to weigh the career risk in all of this.

Ryan:

It's real.

Clay:

I would say for that person who is languishing in an organization and feeling like, "Man, they really don't get it," I would bet you a fair amount of money that the person that you're talking about actually does get it. And they're feeling like they don't have any solutions to this problem that just will not unstick itself because no one has seen... If every single one of these organizations is set up as a matrix, then that means nobody has seen anybody work as a real team except for in a very odd situation outside of normal working hours or outside of normal business operations. So why would anybody know that there's an alternative? So they're just sitting there thinking, "Gosh, I wish I could do more and better for my team, but I don't have any options and I can't pay a consultant for this because budgets are tight."

I would, number one, know that they're seeing it too and they're wondering what to do. And then number two, I would start to form team-like objects, team-like arrangements with people around critical efforts. So it doesn't take a lot of time and effort to sit down in a room with people that you're going to be working with and write down and agree upon your team charter. What are you going to be responsible for? What am I going to be responsible for? You can just do that. And it's just going to be in PowerPoint anyway, so you don't really have to tell anybody, but just get those things on paper and start making agreements with one another and getting into the details about how you want to work with each other, where things are going to show up, what the rules of engagement are on the team. So do the important team kickoff work, even if you're not going to work officially as a team or be known as such within the organization.

And I would track obsessively what it was like beforehand. How much time are you actually spending on admin work? How much time are you spending on real work. For all the people that you're working with, just go take a little survey, not a digital survey, just make a Excel or write it down on a notepad.

Ryan:

Give me a soft thing. Yeah.

Clay:

And then after you start working as a team, try to capture the difference. And for teams that we've worked with, it's wacky. The numbers are ridiculous and people are like, "That can't be true." For example, that same team that I was talking about, when we started coaching them and having them actually work as a team outside of the Matrix working environment, they spent around 24 hours on admin. So admin is still a thing. And that meant that 216 hours were spent on real work. Meanwhile, by the way, admin work tends to cut up your day into little pieces. So if you're doing a lot less of it, that means you have a lot more actually quality times. Those hours are a lot better. So now we've suddenly done the campaign strategy in two days. That used to take us six months.

Clay:

Yeah, yeah. Passing it back and forth. "Oh, did you update slide five?" "Oh no, I forgot to do that one. Next meeting. We'll get to it next meeting" have some higher standards and go bring the executives those numbers that show what it's like to work currently and what it could be like to work in a new way.

Ryan:

I love your message. It's super empowering because it is easy to sit and say, "Look, there's a fire, there's a fire, there's a fire." What I love about your advice is if one team does that and it works, that gets an audience. From 170 admin hours to sub 30 from six months to two weeks, that CMO's problem just went away. They're going to listen, but you've now just done it. So it's like... Again, break the PowerPoint culture. Don't make a 60 slide deck that says we have a problem. Start with your own problem team and just make it happen. I love this advice. So Clay, we're over time because we're riffing.

Clay:

As usual.

Ryan:

Yeah, as usual. Next time we're going to have veers. I have one more question for you. You are in your current role at Black Glass, are an advisor to CMOs. You're meeting with them and just you're serving as a set of eyes and a coach and you're giving them this feedback. You're hearing raw stuff nobody's hearing. What are the top few things on a CMOs mind today? What are some of the biggest pressures that you see? I mean, you shared one of them about lack of velocity, but what are some other things that you're hearing?

Clay:

So I think one of the kind of deep things that people aren't talking about so much is for CMOs and their direct reports, what is their personal brand platform and how can that advance the business? So this is really a thought leadership question, and it's something that I didn't expect to be part of the work going in, but it relates back to this same hierarchical concept that we're discussing.

So as executives graduate up the food chain, they have more and more of the deep research, insight development, thinking work consumed by other parts of the organization, people that report to them and the people that report to them and so on and so on. And they're not doing a lot of their own original research in the way that they probably would've been doing earlier in their career. So we lack some things to talk about in public. We can only talk at maybe the surface level about the trends in marketing.

And this isn't for everybody, and I'm kind of generalizing here, but having an IP platform to stand on, something that you believe in that is different from every other CMO that's speaking at CAN is critical. And that extends all the way down the leadership food chain. So what does the insights leader think about insights? What are they bringing as a unique point of view? And it's not anybody's fault exactly. It's just the way that we've been siloed into these matrix organizations that prevents that or frustrates that deep work that everyone would like to be doing. So personal brand platform is a big one. T.

His team issue, dealing with change is massive. So something that we've been talking about the entire time, but then to your B Corp point, congratulations. B Corp stuff is not easy. We did that in August and I would definitely do it again, but it is a lot of work, is impact. What impact are you having, not just on the world around you, but the people within your business. So are you providing great career opportunities for people? And these are all things that the CMOs are leaning into. They're not feeling like, "Oh my gosh, what do I do?" It's like this is a thing that's really important. We need to have great IP. I need to have a great IP. I need to have great teams. I need to be able to prove that I'm having a really powerful impact on the world around me. And those are things that, again, I don't know that I would've expected those things.

Ryan:

No, I wouldn't have expected you to say them frankly, but that makes sense now.

Clay:

And then the other one is a great partner. Who do you know that's great that I can work with? So that's a big one.

Ryan:

More evidence for the power of advocacy and social proof. All right. Last question, this audience is a lot of insights people. When insights comes up, what are you hearing?

Clay:

Yeah, so the real-timeness of the insights, the validity of the insights and the predictive nature of them. So are you able to tell me where my business needs to go? Are you a good business partner, not just to me, but to the lines of business that marketing may work for, or in some cases lead as a PNL owner? So are you able to give me a conclusive way forward, whether that's for what we need to do with media or new channels that we need to go into, or even new product lines that need to be opened up. So I would say it's probably not changed a ton, I would imagine, over the last several years, but the powerful or trustworthy business partner aspect is one that keeps coming up because insights is one of these functions that gives marketing leaders credibility within the organization to say, this is where we need to go.

And when I've done workshops with Insights leads, all the stuff that we've been talking about keeps coming up. We want to do that. We want to be a trustworthy business partner and we want all of our people to spend most of their time supporting the brands and supporting where they're trying to go and getting out ahead of what they need. But actually what we spend most of our time on is aligning to the global agenda, admin and just figuring out what the basics are when it comes to the insights, not actually getting into strategy, commercial planning, innovation, and the like.

Ryan:

Clay's got to go. If you're working on a brand insights team, take the media partner, the brand manager, the insights and the data person, and set up a team charter tomorrow. There's your tangible insight because that from two is real. That's why we're still talking about speed, quality, and predictiveness all these years later. Clay Parker Jones, my dude, thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Clay:

It's been great.

Ryan:

It's been really fun.

Clay:

Cheers!

[Music transition to takeaways]

Ryan Barry:

So, I had a lot of fun doing that conversation. It's the second podcast in a row I recorded from our office. The acoustics of my friends might not be as good, so I'm sorry. And I decided to put on shades for this outro because it's Friday when I'm recording this.

Patricia Montesdoeca:

Because it's Friday and you're so chill.

Ryan:

And I'm so chill stuff Janice.

Patricia:

I'm Wellesley today.

Ryan:

Yeah, and she's bougie from Wellesley. For those of you who don't know, there's fewer places in Massachusetts, more bougie than Wellesley. Only Weston.

Patricia:

This is Wellesley Univer- Wellesley College, not the-

Ryan:

Wesley College. A little different,

Patricia:

Which is just as bougie. My daughters happen to go there.

Ryan:

Nothing but love for the people who live in Wellesley, Massachusetts. But you guys got your 'bouge' on. Us peasants here in North borough, Mass, not as much.

Patricia:

I'm a Wellesley mom. I didn't cut the grade to make you a Wellesley student, but I'm a Wellesley mom. That counts for something.

Ryan:

Exactly. So I hope this video lives up to the hype. Before we talk about hype, I was made fun of about my hat today. For those of you on YouTube, you can see it. It's from Franklin Barbecue. I was made fun of by Steph Gantz, Chief Insights Officer at PepsiCo. And I gave him the middle finger because we're friends and he gave it back to me because that's what he does. And he actually learned a truth about me that I never was able to put into words. This is the truth about me. He said to me, "Do you know every time you mention a place, you then quickly follow up with what food is good there." And he's right. And he's like, "I think it's your way of feeling at home." He's like, "You know, go to some city and you're like, "Yeah, Steph, the pizza's really good.""

And he is like, "Yeah, the pizza's good in Connecticut. I don't need to go anywhere." And I said to him, "Okay, you're right. But few things in life live up to the hype, right? Is New England clam chowder in New England, actually, that good?" "Not really. It gives you a stomach ache." "Are lobster rolls that good?" "They're okay." Franklin Barbecue.

I went there in Austin, Texas. I waited in line with Mark Resnick for two hours to get barbecue and it was so damn good. I bought this hat because it was the best brisket I ever had. Shout out to Franklin Barbecue. And I hope that my conversation with Clay Parker Jones live up to the hype because he lives up to my hype every time I talk to him. I love that man. He's so smart. 

Patricia, I think you've got four takeaways for us today. Don't you? Talk to us.

Patricia:

I do. And they're like... One of the things that, in my opinion, makes Clay so smart is that he's able to take really complex things and simplify them. That is like an art form. But before we get started, Clay, if you're listening, I hope you're listening. Your name is like movie star Clay Parker Jones. Doesn't that sound like it should be like... It's the name itself. It's like Clay Parker Jones. I love that name. Anyway, moving right along. Four things. But before we get started, I need Jillian's white bean chicken chili recipe. Just saying, please send them along.

Ryan:

Oh yeah.

Patricia:

I need it. A nine out of 10 for a chicken chili? I need that recipe. Anyway, let's go now.

Ryan:

And delicious.

Patricia:

I need it. So now we can start on the work stuff. Now, the first one, what does digital, you said, "What the —," but anyway. What does digital transformation really mean and why are we struggling? Right? I mean it's a really valid question and I've heard it. I've been talking digital for years and years and years. But he started saying it's misunderstood and that's getting in the way, because it's misunderstood. "In general," he says, "It's about using the beliefs and experiences and practices of the digital era in your internal operations and the customer experience."

That's it. It's simple. Applying the things that work for you. Then you pause and you say, "It's simple and complex and that's why companies are still struggling." Now, the challenging, connecting beliefs and practices of the past with the future and with even the present. That's what makes things hard because it's very different from a company that was born digitally native, to a company that has to transform, which is why it's harder for the big companies who didn't just sprout up overnight, to transform.

The word transform is hard because it's all about enabling teams and individuals and the business itself to make new products and put it on shelves with less time to live. That's the fundamental challenge. So using everything in the digital era to make that happen. And that's changing the website, the supply chain, the everything. But that's not the same as changing a formulation, which is what we know. It's about looking at things and rethinking everything. Going just digital, not just adjusting.

Transformation in this kind is revolutionary, not evolutionary. So it's changing the mindset, testing, learning and experimenting in order to exploit the opportunities. Now we don't have enough time for these takeaways and these takeaways to say how, but it's all about understanding that it may look similar, but it's not. It's not the same as changing a formula. It's changing the way your company functions, works and employs things.

And what I loved is that he talked about the product, the customer experience, but he also talked about the inside of the company and that was essential. So you can't forget the inside of the company when you do digital transformation. I love that one. Very simple, very complex.

Ready for the next one?

Ryan:

I can't wait.

Patricia:

Number two. Give us tips on getting the most out of asynchronous time. And as an ex Zappi employee, and now a new Zappi partner, I have been privileged to participate in his tips on getting the most out of asynchronous time so I can testify that these things work. So he talks about conversations being really tough with more than three people. I never really thought about it that way until he said it. And then I started thinking about, "Yeah, my best conversations are with three people."

And as an Insights person, I linked it immediately to the fact that I love working with many groups of three to four people. I like only that. I don't like it more because that way I can get in deep and personal contact with those people. And he completely validates that thinking because he's like, "Give him a task. It doesn't have to be cut and dry everything, but has to be pretty well defined but not prescribed. Give them parameters, what you're looking for and let them go to work. Make sure that internally, they have time to think, they have time to absorb what's going on, absorb the problem, share their thoughts, write their own thoughts down before they share them, because people have different ways of absorbing information. People sometimes are just quick on the run." I take a little time to read, think, process, and bring up all the archives I have in my brain. So it's different. So give that time.

And three, if you're the leader of one of these groups or a group of these groups, a group of threes, make sure you prepare, prepare, prepare. Whether you're the leader or just the facilitator, prepare. Get the plan, get the thinking, get the people that you're wanting in the specific smaller groups, get that all curated. And after you do all that, be willing to scrap it all if you think you need to during the meeting. That is so hard to do because people are like, " Tatatatatata." You are there, you prepare so that you can scrap it if you need to because it's the vibe and energy of the group that he talks about that is so important. So you have to be willing to do that. You also have to be willing to make sure that if you're the boss, like in your case, make sure you don't have any hierarchies in mind.

If you're the facilitator, manage the hierarchies in the room. So those things are really important to get this done because that's what we use our time together for, to align and to be together and to understand. That leads perfectly into number three, which is alignment. Alignment sucks. Alignment is hard. It's painful. Why? Because we don't do it that frequently, right? Because why? Because since it sucks and since it's painful, we avoid it.

Ryan:

Yeah, we don't want to have hard convos.

Patricia:

Exactly. We don't. I mean, whether it's in the personal or in the professional, it's hard because if you think about it, alignment implies, needs, people going into a situation with divergent opinions. And if you have an opinion, you're going to stick to it and you're going to defend it. I was in a meeting yesterday, this is really important. And we were aligning on the next steps forward and we were sharing, we were talking.

And so I was thinking in my mind, I'm pretty certain I like option left. And so I said, "Okay, wait, hold, stop, open your brain. Listen to what she's saying instead of depending on your own ideas." So I was listening, listening, listening. And she stopped talking and she looks at us and I said, "Okay, I want you to know that something just happened in my brain. You changed my mind. This is where I was at and this is where I'm at now. I totally see your point of view. I've changed position." And half of the people turned around and said, "Me too," right? Because we were in a frame of mind to align. We were not in a frame of mind to defend our position. So that's why alignments are so difficult. I loved it. He gave us a really nice alignment. Tips, tricks.

When you make a decision, write the decision down. Whether you're on a whiteboard, whether it's a piece of paper, whether it's a screen sharing, write it down, let everybody read it. And then ask, "Why would you block this decision?", right? Then he said, "What are the three things that need to be true to make this decision happen? What gets you in and how can we make this easy. Ask with the decision in front of you. Very clear decision." And I like that. I like that very much because it makes everybody level set so that we can get the most out of our face to face time, our synchronous time. And so we can all be on the same channel. Because many times, and you asked him to define things, many times we have the similar word or the same word, and we all have different definitions. So having this tip, I love this tip. It was so clean and so easy.

My last one. Number four. What's the top few things on the CMOs mind today? Now, why should we as Insights people care about this? Because we're Insights. We're the CMOs partner, we're here to help the CMOs life. We're the president as well, the brand managers as well. But we have to make Insight's teams and Insight's leaders have to help... No we don't have to. Our role is to enable things to happen and to enable insights to be actionable. So it's important for us to know what's on our CMOs mind.

Now, the first one really surprised me. The fact that the CMO and their direct reports are concerned and have on their mind heavy, their personal brand platform, surprised me, right?

Ryan:

Me too. A lot.

Patricia:

So it surprised me. But then when he said it, I thought, that makes sense. And he said, "As you go up in the organization, you read less of your own stuff. You see summaries of summaries, of summaries, of summaries. And they lack, perhaps things to know about in depth. They lack things to talk about in public. They lack information enough to have a stance of their own. So they need to have something like everybody else. 

Something to believe in, something different from other CMOs. Something to make them bring out who they are as people. And that personal brand platform is a big one that's weighing heavy on their minds. As Insights leaders, you will decide how you're going to help your CMO with this. But I was really surprised on that one. The second one was not so surprising. Dealing with change, Dealing with change is massive for everybody. But if you're anybody on the C-suite dealing with change is massive.

You're always thinking about, "Okay, what is the change? Is it necessary? What impact is it going to have? Is the pain worth the change? Are we going to improve enough or is this change inevitable to actually go through the work? And all these things are weighing on CMOs minds, right? This is not just for the business, but also for their people because remember, a CMO is not only responsible for the business, but for the people that they run, the people on their team. So they have to think business and career opportunities and those things weigh heavy on their mind. The last thing that he said made me smile because it spoke to my heart because finding great partners, that's what I want to do. That's what my mission in life is now. It used to be, my mission in life and Ryan and Kelsey know as well, helping things grow.

I've tweaked it a little bit now because I'm on my own. It's all about helping things grow by being a great partner. So he says that CMOs are always thinking about, "Who do I know that's great to work with?" And this is not just people that they can hire or partners, as in coworkers, but it also means people that they can join forces with.

Whether it's people in similar situations that they have a similar problem in another company or non-compete. Or it can be people that are suppliers that become partners because they're more than just suppliers. And I thought that was fantastic and I was glad to hear that in my little part of the world, I was helping with that. And those are my key ones.

Ryan:

Patricia, thank you. Wonderful take.

Patricia:

You're welcome, Ryan.

Ryan:

As always. Yeah, I learned a lot from listening to your takeaways because it reminded me of the chat with Clay, which is profound. Folks, this shit's hard.

Patricia:

Oh yes.

Ryan:

None of us have figured out this "new normal." I mean, I'm privileged to lead a very agile, fast moving business. We haven't figured it out. We're burnt out, we're working harder than we want to be and don't feel like we have innovated enough. My takeaway, I've never given a takeaway.

Patricia:

Oh, do it, do it, do it.

Ryan:

Anyone can start small with this. Get your core five people that you need, in a room. Fuck the hierarchy. Get in a room and figure out what you need to do and build contracts with each other of how you're going to show up and spend more time doing than aligning. Spend more time in the work than on Zoom calls, chatting about the work and let's share with each other. Let's figure this out. I mean, I'm just off the back of such a riveting, inspiring time with all my colleagues and I've been on Zoom for six straight hours. And that's not natural, right? We've got to figure out how we maximize doing time and minimize alignment time, our time in person, our synchronous time, our live time is a premium. Let's share notes and let's work together. 

On our next episode, we're going to change it up. And I'm excited about this interview. I met this woman in Austin, Texas, actually, the day before I bought this hat. Shout out to Franklin Barbecue again, best brisket in the world. And she is the Head of Insights at Hymns and Hers, which is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very fast growing telehealth business that's invested in Insights before they reached a hundred million in revenue.

We're going to talk to Lauren about how she's standing up Insights from scratch without all that we've always done it this way. How that's great. And also why that's challenging. Tune in for our next step episode.

Patricia:

I can't wait.

Ryan:

It's going to be a lot of fun. Thank you all for listening. Clay Parker Jones, thank you for your infinite wisdom that you've dropped on us. Kelsey, thank you for showing up. Kelsey's voice, please come back soon, we miss you. And Patricia, have fun with your daughter this weekend and all the pups. Everybody be kind to each other. Happy fall. We'll talk to you soon.

Patricia:

Chowder.