Brian Elliott v2: AI, Experiment, Outcomes, Trust | Work 20XX Ep28

Brian Elliott v2: AI, Experiment, Outcomes, Trust | Work 20XX podcast with Jeff Frick Ep28

English Transcript 

Cold Open
You got your water, right?  
Got my water.  
Super. 
All right, I’ll count us down, and we will go in three, two, one.

‍

Jeff Frick:
Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick coming to you from the home studio for another episode of Work 20XX. We're just about ready to turn the calendar. Summer's coming to a close. Fall is just around the corner, and right there with Back to School is something that comes every year—‘Back to the Office’ and ‘Return to Office’ mandates. So I had to reach out and call the number one guy that loves to celebrate this anniversary. He’s Brian Elliott, coming to us from San Francisco. You know him. He's the co-founder of Future Forum. He's the co-author of ‘How the Future Works’. He worked at Slack and Google and BCG, and now he's advising everybody. So anyone who needs a little assist from Brian can reach out, and he can apply his knowledge to your problem. So, Brian, great to see you today.

Brian Elliott:
Good to see you again, Jeff, on the fifth anniversary of the post-Labor Day return-to-office battle. Doesn't that seem like the most auspicious moment? But, you know, I always love talking with you because your give is as good as your take.

Jeff Frick:
I know. So what is... Is it still the reality? I mean, we're still seeing this stuff in the paper. It's funny, I dug out your book just for shits and giggles. And I noticed you've got some really great forwards and recommendations, but one of them is from IBM.

Brian Elliott:
Yep.

Jeff Frick:
I think they had... I looked, they had a return-to-office mandate, I believe.

Brian Elliott:
They did.

Jeff Frick:
Then the other one is obviously from Salesforce. And it looks like I just saw a headline they’re wanting everybody back October 1st or whatever it is. So, I mean, when are we going to escape Groundhog Day?

Brian Elliott:
I'll give you a couple of these. And here's what's going on more broadly. Tech definitely has more of this than almost anybody else. Everything else is sort of an exception to a rule, and usually the exceptions are a company who's under performance challenges with a CEO who might be under Wall Street challenges, who's honestly sort of grasping at straws, often looking for something to push on and basically driving a deeper mandate. We should get into what happens when you do that. Tech’s a little bit of a different animal. There's two things going on there. One is a lot of these are re-announcements of things they've already announced before. Apple, I think, announced its return to office. They just sort of stopped talking about it, but they re-announced it and re-announced it several times. Even Zoom, when it made the news about that two-day-a-week if-you-live-within-50-miles thing. They made news this year on something they actually announced last year. And I've seen that hit the news cycle like three freaking times because everybody's like, ‘Ahh, it’s Zoom,’ so it must be a big deal.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott: 
There is one element of truth in this, which is big tech firms that were more fully flexible, like more employee choice broadly speaking, several of them have moved into some form of structured hybrid, meaning two or three days a week. I actually think in a lot of these cases, they're actually not doing it in a completely obnoxious fashion. There's parts of that I actually agree with. So, for example, IBM says, "Hey, look, the broad guideline is three days a week, but we know that's not going to work for every team. Because we've got teams like in I.T. that are broadly geographically distributed. It just doesn't make sense. But we want every team to figure it out at the team level. Even some of Salesforce’s stuff I think makes sense too, because there's sort of a collaboration element to it. I think where some of these guys run afoul, and I've heard this from other organizations too, is when you start doing things like tracking individuals’ badge scans.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott:
That's exactly when your employees' heads explode when they start going, "Now it's just a sign that you don't really trust me." And when you do it at the individual level, you're missing the fact that, bluntly, most organizations had, you know, 50% attendance in the office pre-pandemic as well. So if you're trying to hold people to that yardstick, it's really not very realistic and causes all kinds of grief. Overall though, flat as a pancake. Quoting Nick Bloom, right?

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
This is a number that has not moved for two years now. And the reason it hasn't moved isn’t just because of the employee dynamics. It also hasn't moved because the average policy, if you look at the Flex Index data, has not moved for a year and a half at this point. The average policy of all 5,500 U.S. companies, all roughly speaking 10,000 international ones, is something between 2 and 3 days a week in the office. Because fully in the office, people are moving into some sort of structured hybrid, and even the fully flexible ones are moving into something that's like employee choice in a lot of cases.

Jeff Frick: 
So is it just headlines? Is this the last time? I mean, I'm happy to call you any time we get together, but is this the last time we're going to have a return to office mandate celebration? If you're telling me they’re headlines of stuff that was announced before and the dirty little secret below the headline is return to office means three days a week, not five days a week. I always feel bad for the four days a week people.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah, I do too.

Jeff Frick:
Their whole thing just kind of got overtaken.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
Is that really the secret? Is it just it's really more headline fodder than anything else? When you look at the data...

Brian Elliott:
I think it’s been headline fodder for at least three years now. And I think it will continue to be headline fodder because we all click on the stinking headlines, right?

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, yeah.

Brian Elliott:
And quite often it's tied in with like a notable name of a big company, which is also important to keep in mind. This is a big company phenomenon, right? More so if you look at like the Flex Index data and you cut it by size of company, and if you cut it especially by like how old the organization is, you're going to find a lot more flexibility in the firms that were born after 2010. You're going to find a lot more flexibility, even in organizations that are 1,000 to 5,000 employees versus the 25,000 behemoths.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
And so this is a little bit of the, you know, how do companies continue to grow and evolve and learn to do new and different things? It's much easier when you're younger, when you're more nimble than when you've been around for three and four decades. That said, it ain't impossible, man. I love to see what companies like Allstate are doing right. Nationwide, another one in the insurance business that are, Amex and others that are like decades-old organizations that are actually willing to experiment, learn, try new things, and figure this out in ways that I'm just seeing some of the bigger companies struggle to do.

Jeff Frick: 
We're not going back people, we’re not going back. So, you know, ‘Future Forum,’ a big part of Future Forum and the book was this ongoing survey with the 10,000, with the 10,000 people. There's this constant cadence of new information that's coming out. I think Annie Dean from Atlassian released what I think is called 1,000 days of distributed work. I wonder if you could share some updates as we continue to see, kind of this cadence in support of this activity?

Brian Elliott:
Yeah. I mean, the Future Forum data which showed people want flexibility, basically got boring. Sorry. But it got to the point where like every quarter when we’d release it, the percentage of people that fell in different camps, you know, roughly changed by maybe a percentage in any given bucket. Right? There's about 15% of the global knowledge workforce that wants to be fully remote. There's about 20% that wants five days a week in the office because they need a space. The vast majority want something in the middle, usually around two days a week, maybe three days a week if you're an executive. And that we’re really talking about minor differences in some sense here across those. What's more interesting is the sort of psychology behind what happens when you put a mandate in place. So that's what's actually been coming to the fore. And a lot of what we're seeing in terms of the recent research is just evidence behind the problems that we predicted two and three years ago, which is when you put a mandate in place, people automatically have a rejection to it. You know, Ryan Anderson talks about the reactance theory. He's the one that taught me that term. That people have, which is giving me a command, is going to give me an automatic response of ‘No Thank You,’ right. You're treating me as a child when I'm a grown adult, and I can figure this out. There's tons of research coming out recently that shows a couple things. The people most likely to leave when you put a mandate in place are, unsurprisingly, when you think about it, your top performers and some of your longest-tenured employees. Why would that be? Because they probably have the most market, ability to move around right?

Jeff Frick: 
Right, right.

Brian Elliott: 
They're the folks whose talents are quite attractive. The other one, and this came out of work from Upwork just a week or so ago. Kelly Monahan and team are doing fantastic stuff. Is the fact that women are, unsurprisingly, more likely to leave as well. 63% of executives that were polled said that their return-to-office mandate when they put it in place caused women disproportionately to leave their organization. The same percentage of executives said they had problems replacing those women with other employees, and half of them said that was having a knock-on effect on their firm's ability to produce. So, like bad news all around when you put a mandate in place. So we kind of know what not to do. And I think the bigger question is what to do instead.

Jeff Frick:
Right. And just to kind of close up on the mandates before we move into some positive stuff, there was an article in today's paper in the Mercury, you know, on the cover, another thousand people expected to lose their jobs in the Bay Area because there's a reporting function that's required here locally that people have to pre-let the government know when they're going to have layoffs. I mean, every time we see these things, everyone’s kind of ‘wink wink.’ You know, how much of it is really a RIF or Reduction in Force disguised as a, as an RTO? Are you hearing, is it confirmation? Is that just people in our business like to kind of wink wink, or do you see that's part of the problem because you don't have to report a return to office mandate. You do have to report a big layoff.

Brian Elliott: 
That's right. Look, RTO is a soft layoff in a lot of situations. There's actually a couple bits of research that have come out recently that have said, you know, thirty some odd percent of executives said they did it. Patagonia said the quiet part out loud. They had a, this is a relatively small one, they had a group of I think a couple of hundred customer service employees that they said, ‘Hey, look, we know you've been scattered and remote, but we need you to relocate into one of, like five hubs, something like that.’ And one of their executives was quoted as saying, hey, look, the problem is we're overstaffed by 2 to 3x, and voluntary attrition wasn't really doing the trick for us. So we're just putting this move requirement in place. And we know that when people require relocation, they lose employees.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
It's really hard for people, even setting aside that they probably have a lower opinion of their employer in the first place. It's really hard for people to uproot their families and their lives and their networks. I had outreach from people when Walmart did the same thing, saying, ‘Hey look, I’ll give you an example. One guy reached out to me and said, ‘Hey look, I actually love my job. It was actually great. I would do the job again, but we're not moving to Bentonville because my family's here in Florida. My network is here in Florida of friends, and I can't do this, to my spouse and my kids. So no, I'm walking away, and I'm walking away with nothing, essentially, because the job got moved.’ And so that is definitely one of those examples where companies know the impact of these things.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott:
I do think that like overall in the economy, again, layoffs get headlines. The relatively good news is layoffs are sort of at an all-time low, even given all the pressures in the economy that continue to persist. We're actually not doing that bad. That is not true in tech. Tech has a bunch of challenges, not only the overgrowth that we saw back in a decade plus of rapid tech expansion, but I think the pressures of AI are also creating some of this, right. Everybody that's hot on building out new AI tooling and capabilities. It's very expensive. And if you're trying to manage your earnings, one of the things you do is you cut back in other places, which often means you're cutting back on your employees and  Hint, hint, you're also cutting back on real estate. So the same story that talked about Salesforce, you know, sort of reinforcing its mandates, also pointed out that they've shed 45% of their San Francisco real estate already. So, everybody's doing the same things, which is in tech, you're finding other places to cut back. And unfortunately, that happens to employees. And I think we’re going to see where this heads because tech has this tendency, in my 30 years in the industry, to binge and purge. We binge on employee excess, right? We give people sushi for lunch and three meals a day, and the massage table and the ping pong table and everything else that's honestly, I thought quite silly. But then when times get tough, we take the opposite extreme and it's like you're all, you know, interchangeable components and pieces, and we're going to terminate your employment without really even having a conversation with you. And all of a sudden nothing works. So that's going to stick in people's minds the next time that you want to start hiring people. And I think that's another reason why some of the big tech firms are going to continue to be more challenged as we go forward.

Jeff Frick: 
Yeah, I mean, we could have a whole episode on tech hiring and firing based on VC rounds, not based on need for people or healthiness of the company. And, you know, it's funny to think back in the day when you and I both had darker hair, you know, you had to have X number of profitable quarters before you went public. You know, you actually had to be a company making money to go out and maybe get a little bit of extra money. It wasn't a PR stunt. It wasn't, you know, Amazon lost money purposefully for what, 20 years or 25 years before they turned a profit. So I think it's more of a finance thing, unfortunately, than an HR thing. And I think the HR people unfortunately get caught up in the whipsaw. But I do want to follow up on this person you talked about from Bentonville on two sides. One, again, back when you had darker hair, and I did, you know, a lot of white guys moved every two years with their family, and they would have moved to Bentonville. They would have moved to Chicago. And they did a stint out in LA. You know, the expectations for having to do that have changed dramatically. So I'd love to get your take there. On the other hand, I had Tracy Hawkins on, and she was talking about when she was at Twitter, and they would have great employees who maybe the policy didn't change, but that person had to move for whatever reason, a life event, taking care of their family, the spouse got a job, whatever. And they’re like, why would we want to lose a great employee just because of, for whatever reason, they want to move? And then, of course, I had Sacha Connor on, you know, who's a great advocate in the space. And her straight up came from when she was having her first child, and her and her husband were from Philly, and they were living in the Bay Area, and they wanted their grandkid to grow up with their grandparents. I mean...

Brian Elliott: 
Exactly. Sacha’s a fantastic example.

Jeff Frick: 
It's such a completely different value equation. And she pulled it off and made it work and changed the whole company.

Brian Elliott: 
Yeah, so you used exactly the right words and the wrong words to kick it off, which is, Back in the day when white guys would uproot their families and move them around. And that's kind of, you know, the single income family is sort of a thing of the past in a lot of ways. But also this is a big part of it, right? Like it is much harder. And I am actually really proud of the fact that I've learned over time how to be better at being, you know, a very engaged and involved parent. But it wasn't always that way. I was actually listening to somebody else's podcast, and they were talking about how proximity still matters, and you have to be in the office. And the guy, because it's always a guy, went on to describe, you know, my dad, when I was growing up, left the house at 5:00 a.m. in the morning, didn’t get home until 7:00 p.m. at night and put in the hours and punched the clock. And you realize that's actually the freaking problem in the first place, right? Punching the clock, showing up, that sort of evidence of hustle culture is exactly the kind of signals that too many senior executives are still relying on, as is somebody really dedicated to the corporation, which is why so many women are the ones that are leaving when you put in place a return to office mandate. There's such an opposite effect to this though, too, right? Like Slack was an in-office culture pre-pandemic, we were hugely focused on hiring people in certain locations, and we were struggling like mad to do it. And Cal Henderson, our CTO, was the one who was pretty concerned about us even experimenting with remote work pre-pandemic. But once we actually got, I think literally three months into it, his eyes opened up, and he's like, wait a minute, this is actually working. And so what this means is I don't just have to hire people and try to get them to move to the Bay Area, a little bit into New York, you know, Vancouver, Melbourne, and Dublin. I can actually open the aperture. And do you know, geographically bounded teams that are within a couple of hours of each other and hire people in Boise, Idaho, and North Carolina, and Texas and not sweat whether or not we have an office there and get them together with some frequency. And all of a sudden you’re like, God, what an amazing opportunity to attract more talent. And then you start thinking about it and go, wait a minute. All of the people we've been trying to attract who are also more diverse, who are not going to uproot when, like if you think about demographics, San Francisco, there's literally a movie called *The Last Black Man in San Francisco* right? We are not a diverse city. I’m sorry. And so if you're trying to hire more diverse talent, it's easier to help people do so when they don't have to uproot, and move away from where they grew up, from their networks, from parents that can support them as they're having kids. So I think this is a massive opportunity as opposed to a potential downside. If you actually put the work into it.

Jeff Frick: 
Right, right. And as you said, even with the layoffs and maybe tech’s over-indexed but still inflation or unemployment is very, very low and, you know, talent, the demographic talent trend is in one direction and it's going to get harder to get, not easier, that's for sure.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah.

Jeff Frick: 
Talk about kind of the changing power dynamics. I think that's an interesting play. And I remember when I was talking to some of my junior reports explaining to them the way it used to be, you know, I used to come in before the boss was there, and I wouldn’t leave until he drove away and was at least around the corner. And they're like, ‘Why?’ And I think I was listening to one of your recent podcast episodes where it's, you know, finally the opportunity to just say, why? Why are we still doing it in a way that we did it from before there was—forget about Slack—before there was email. These are behaviors that go back to where we had to go to where the paper was, which was only in one location, and we all had to drive to get there.

Brian Elliott:
That’s right.

Jeff Frick: 
So if you think about kind of the power dynamics and how you redesign work and those relationships to build the trust. And the other piece that you've talked about is, you know, you need to get everything out of everybody because it's a hyper competitive world. You need input from those people that you wouldn't necessarily have chosen or picked or even hired before to actually be able to compete in today's crazy VUCA world.

Brian Elliott:
That's right. And part of this is, you know, think about this not only in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, but generational differences as well, right? If you really want to bring people in who represent different points of view from different perspectives, because, you know that it's going to take work to build a really inclusive organization, but you know it produces better outcomes because there's like every consulting firm out there has a set of studies, right, that show that diverse organizations and diverse leadership builds better outcomes, faster growth, more innovative, more resilient, all the rest of this. But you then have to think about like the power dynamics and how they work, and what are you doing to make sure that you're actually starting to shift your mindset away from that traditional elements of hustle culture and traditional elements of "I learned by sitting next to my boss and emulating him" to outcomes-driven measurements. And I think there's another bit of like magic sauce in there, too, that I'm seeing more firms grab onto, partly because they had to the past couple years, which is we got away for way too long we got away with very loose forms of performance management.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
We got away with very loose forms of even understanding what outcomes we’re trying to drive. The number of organizations that are trying to figure out right now, in the past year or two, how are we going to implement something like an objective and key results [OKRs] process, some form of organizational-wide stratification of what are our priorities? What are our key results? How are we going to measure them? How do we take that down to the team level? It does two things. It actually helps solve some of these issues of "are people really working," which is a core concern. I'm still hearing this to this day all the time, and God forbid it drives better organizational performance because it forces you to have the conversation cross-functionally about what are the most important things we're going to work on and how are we going to measure it. And that's actually what drives organizational performance. That's the better outcome out of this. And moving it away from, you know, the way you advance in this organization is you get close to your boss and you show how hard you're willing to work by how fast you're willing to respond to a message. That was one of my favorite bits that came out of Atlassian recently. Some absurd percentage, like 60 some odd percent of people, said it was more important for them in their organization to respond quickly to a message than it was to focus on their work priorities. That's just nuts. But it’s true.

Jeff Frick:
It's not surprising at all, right? Not surprising at all.

Brian Elliott: 
Not a bit. This is back to Cal Newport’s hyperactive hive mind stuff, right? And I disagree with Cal on getting rid of email and Slack and everything else because I don't think that's going to happen. But I agree with him on the problem. And the problem is we've trained people to be high response on the digital tools because it's the digital equivalent of being in the office all hours of the day and night, right? It's the digital version of showing that you're present and you're dedicated and you're hard working. The problem with it is it's not actual work. It's all the sound and fury signifying nothing at the end of the day. What we really need is for managers to actually take the reins a little bit and say, hey, look, I'm going to help you figure out how to carve out more time to do deep focused work. And I'm actually cool if you shut off notifications a couple hours a day as long as we all align on when we're going to be available to each other. By the way, I hear that problem from people all the time. 

Jeff Frick:
It's funny, I had Maribel Lopez on, and she talked about specifically in the context of email, which is built as an asynchronous communication platform from day one. And suddenly, because of whatever, there's now this expectation of this turnaround that used to be, you know, gentleman's business was 24 hours or whatever it was. And now suddenly, you know, there's this expectation of responding immediately, especially if you don't have your communication norms. And that email is then quickly followed up with a, with a missed call or a voicemail and then a text and then a Slack message, all saying the same thing, which don't even tell you what they want. Just, "Can you call me right away?" Can you call me right away? Which, you know, is disruptive and not productive, and crazy.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah, I had a team at Google. It was about 500 engineers and operators and product managers. And at Google, and this is now seven, eight years ago, we had a problem and it wasn't caused by Slack or by chat. It was caused by people who felt like they had to sit there in meetings with their email open to be responding to one another while in the meeting, same people on a different project, trying to solve something with people who weren't in the room. Because if you didn't, by the time you got out of the meeting, the decision had gone on and escalated because nobody was clear about what, you know, what was prioritized and how we were getting things done. So the basics of this have been sort of a mess for a while, unfortunately.

Jeff Frick:
You know, one of the kind of the big themes I think that overarches a lot of this is really a change in perception and treating people like people instead of treating people like resources. Because if you treat somebody like a piece of steel or a car or a truck or a factory, you know, there's pretty prescribed kind of ROI ins and outs and they all act the same. And the first piece of steel acts just like the second piece of steel, where people are people, they're messy, they're sloppy, they're driven by emotions. They have stuff going on outside of work. It's a very different type of animal. It sounds like finally, in pursuit of having that person do their best work and thinking about the why, which you would never tell a car or a piece of steel the why—you just stick them into the process. I mean, that's I think a pretty positive output of this whole thing that people are realizing that it's people that work for us, not robots. And it's a pretty fundamental difference in how you get. And the good news is, you do it right. You get the marginal effort, you get the intrinsic motivation, and you get them going the extra mile for your customers, which is ultimately what you want at the end.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah, we all know this because we've experienced it, right? We know great managers because they're the ones that make us feel like we belong on the team. They're the ones that show some degree of personal care and concern for us as individuals, as human beings.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott:
They're not treating us as a cog in a wheel and a resource, you know, to be used. They show care. And I do think one of the challenges that people have grappled with, and I hear it from managers and leaders regularly, is the concept of vulnerability. And I bring it back to Brené Brown. Which is, it's vulnerability with boundaries, right? It's how do you help people understand, and how do you have the conversation with your team about what's okay to bring to work and what’s actually not okay to bring to work. Because I do need to know if you've got a personal situation that's impacting you. And if you want to share with me what it is, that's cool, but you don't have to. But also, I'm not your therapist, right? I'm not here to help you manage the stressful relationship that you've got with a parent. So, like, how do I help you find that boundary condition? And how do I be clear with my team? And how do I, as a leader, go first and say, hey, by the way, here's the stuff that's going on in my life that might affect my availability or might affect even my mood to some degree, if I'm willing to share it so that people feel like, okay, it's okay to share that kind of stuff here without traipsing too far into places that really we shouldn't try to go as managers and leaders.

Jeff Frick:
I had Sophie on, Sophie Wade. She's like, yeah, I'll bring my whole self but not my whole, whole self. You don’t need that.

Brian Elliott:
That’s right.

Jeff Frick:
You don't need the whole enchilada, right? There are edges and barriers and boundaries that you need to kind of keep in mind. 

Brian Elliott:
And we need to respect that for our teams as well. Right. Like there are people that have things they do not want to share with you at work. They don't want their coworkers to know about. And that is perfectly cool.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, yeah. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about kind of a hot button topic right now. It's in the news for probably all the wrong reasons. And that's DE&I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).

Brian Elliott: 
Yeah.

Jeff Frick:
And there's been, as budgets have been crunched a little bit, and, you know, there's certain groups that are the first to see the cutbacks. And unfortunately, a lot of the DE&I initiatives and individuals in those roles responsible for them have seen some cutbacks. And I know it's a big issue that you think is just not going the way it needs to be. And this is not the way that businesses are going to get to better decisions, better outcomes, and be more successful as businesses.

Brian Elliott: 
I'll tell you, I actually think there's some good stuff coming out of this, which is there's a lot of organizations that basically bent in the wind. They bent in the wind back in 2020 and 2021, and the wind was blowing in the favor of more diversity. And so they talked the talk, right? They put out advertisements about Black Lives Matter and saying that they support it. They said that they support diversity, equity, and inclusion. And because that was the thing to do. And I do know from some leaders that even at the time, some of them thought it was a mistake because they weren't sure that they were fully committed and they weren’t putting the resources behind it to make it happen.

Jeff Frick: 
So like green washing and sustainability washing?

Brian Elliott: 
Yeah. It’s green washing, diversity washing. Right. Which is I'm faking it in order to get a check mark that I think I need to have. And the fact that some of those people who were faking it are not faking it any longer, I'm actually kind of cool with because you should be real about who you are and what you're doing and what you're not doing. There's the opposite side of this now that's happening too, which is there's a backlash to DE&I that's honestly B.S. I'm less disappointed with some of the firms that are doing this than I am with organizations like SHRM (Society for Human Resources). And I'm not a SHRM member. So I got no right to gripe, honestly, as a boundary. But when you're sitting there saying, look, we're the firm that has actually put out definitions and training of what the E stands for and it stands for equity. And what it stands for is we create a level playing field for hiring. But at the end of the day, you hire the best candidate. And by the way, that's not just a statement. That's like in the laws of the United States. There's a great piece that Sarah Carmichael at Bloomberg put out about a week ago about this. Like quotas are not legal. You can't do quotas. You cannot make hiring decisions even in a tie condition on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity. It's just not legal.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott: 
So all of us that have gone through corporate training know that the thing we're told is build a bias-free process, have a diverse slate of candidates, have a bias-free interviewing process. Make sure that you know, you find ways to do it, but make the hire on the basis of who's the best candidate for the job. And that's what's under attack, which is honestly absurd, but it's also being driven by politics, because why not? Everything else is being driven by politics these days. So that's why I'm more disappointed, honestly, sometimes with the professional organizations who should be sitting there saying like, hey, look, this is not about quotas to one side and to the other side. This is actually not about equality. I'm talking about equity, not equality. Businesses are not actually here to solve all of society's issues. I'm not a big fan of, ‘Your company is like a family.’ I think that's a horrible thing to say.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott: 
Families don't lay people off. I’ve had to lay people off enough times in my career that I'm never, ever going to be somebody who says that. At the same time, businesses as the biggest force for social good. I don't think that's the primary job of business. I think the primary job of business is to serve its customers, to grow its business. I do think it's in the best interest of business and its employees and all of its stakeholders to do a lot of these things. But I think you’ve got to be realistic in terms of where you're going to strike that balance.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, it's interesting. You look at... I just think of what's the alternative, right? And cronyism and taking care of your loyal friends.

Brian Elliott:
Exactly.

Jeff Frick:
And we see that happens in Russia. I follow a lot of the Russian-Ukrainian war stuff and, you know, you get your body armor pack and you open up the envelope and instead of a steel plate, it's got a wooden plate in it. And that's what happens when you go with, you know, cronyism and just go with your favorite guy instead of the talent.

Brian Elliott: 
Or Jeff, you get a Cybertruck. I'm sorry, but you get to a point in an organization where, you know, the senior executive team, no one will say, you know, the emperor has no clothes, right?

Jeff Frick:
Right, right.

Brian Elliott:
If no one's willing to speak truth to power in an organization, eventually the organization goes sideways. You know, you can look at some of the recent, like, debacles that have happened to different organizations and what gets trotted out in certain aspects as well. That's because of DE&I hires. When the root cause of this is often just mismanagement. And often it's, you know, leadership that's not listening to its own employees or is telling them there are some really core root problems going on here.

Jeff Frick: 
Yeah.

Brian Elliott:
That could have been solved if they'd gotten ahead of it. I mean, Boeing literally has whistleblowers that have been telling them for years about the problems they're having. So don't look to DE&I hires as the problem. Look to management and leadership as the actual root cause of a lot of these issues.

Jeff Frick: 
Yeah. It's interesting. You know, Clayton Christensen, who's famous for ‘Innovator's Dilemma,’ towards the end of his career, he talked a little bit about, you know, what's the purpose of your life. But he also had a big theme on finance and where in the finance world, to be able to compare Slack to Ford, the finance analysts came up with all these funny ratios that really are not a valid way to compare Salesforce to Ford. They're completely different companies. And his hypothesis, right, is a lot of the bad behavior is to drive those ratios to hit bonuses. And that's where you see stock buybacks and lack of investment. And you see some of the culture change in a place like Boeing that just really shifted radically more towards a profit when they merged with Lockheed. I'm sure you've seen the documentary, which is a really scary, scary watch.

Brian Elliott:
You mentioned Clay Christensen and you briefly mentioned it—it’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’ I've gone back and rewatched that a couple of times over the past couple of years. It is fantastic. It is also dated a little bit. Clay was a fantastic human being. I almost got my PhD because of Clay. I actually worked with him, at one point, very briefly at Harvard. In that, he talks about something that I wish more executives honestly thought about, which is how will you measure your life at the end and how you measure your life through the impact that you have on the people around you? And that includes your family, that includes your kids, that includes your partners, that includes your coworkers. And just that lens alone, as opposed to what's my title? What's my millions? How many people am I working with? That's what lasts and that's what persists. And I wish more executives went back and watched that video by Clay. 

Jeff Frick:
It's a great one and we can even bring it back to a really simple thing, which I think is kind of this whole force multiplier effect, which is if you take that attitude in just your day-to-day work, you know, what tasks can I do within my job to make your job easier?

Brian Elliott:
That’s right.

Jeff Frick:
What task can I do within my job to make your job smoother, to remove barriers, and then you get this kind of force multiplier effect. Because within my work, I'm actually getting leverage on your work and other work. So I think it's a great concept, but very powerful speech. It’s still my all-time favorite business book. And I didn't even know that whole chapter towards the end until I was actually going to do an episode on it, on those ratios and, you know, quite an interesting character. Yeah. I would love to have had the chance to interview him, great guy.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah, that TED Talk he gave was after he had a stroke.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott:
And it's just heart-wrenching.

Jeff Frick:
All right, so let's shift gears and talk about AI, both the positive and the negative. So first off, as a tool, you know, everyone is telling everyone to use AI, use AI. I use ChatGPT every day. I bought myself a paid subscription this calendar year because I really wanted to learn it, and I found some ways to work it into my workflow. And I tell people, use it like a calculator. Just like an HP calculator, you're not doing square roots by hand anymore. At the same time, it's kind of this whole, it's just, I'm scared of the unknown, you know? What's it going to do to my job? And then I suppose there's this little element of, am I training it to take my job?

Brian Elliott: 
That’s right.

Jeff Frick: 
So it's, it's a very kind of dodgy situation. And, you know, I think the managers are probably in just as dodgy of kind of a mental state around it as well. So how are you seeing people? a) First off, just getting people familiar with it, training it, adopting it, using it, thinking as a tool, not a threat. And then on the other side though, how do you see it kind of changing the way that work gets done because the same roles, tasks won't necessarily be as they were.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah, absolutely. So there's a big gap, and a growing one, between small companies that I'm working with and talking with and big companies in their adoption of AI. And it's not surprising if you think about, like, what's the root cause of what drives AI adoption? And there's a couple of factors, fantastic work by the way, recently out of BCG, Slack, and Upwork all point to the same sets of things, which is, knowing the direction we're heading in the first place. Like, as we free up capacity, what will we do with it? Really simple thing. But really important thing, because it sets a mental note in somebody's head that says, hey, look, if I get extra hours back in the day, if I'm in a small company that's growing fast and has a backlog of work because we always had a backlog of work, I know what I need to work on next, and I have no worries about job security, right. Because I know that together we're just going to produce more and continue to grow. There’s an amazing amount of big companies, and BCG put this at about 50%, where they're putting the tools out there and saying to everybody, use the tools. But they haven't said to employees because they don't have a plan for what am I going to do with the capacity that I free up? So what do you think happens to people in that situation? They sit there and they freeze up and they go, wait a minute. A matter of fact, a lot of them do use the tool or tools and they do it sometimes surreptitiously. They don't even use the tools the employer gives them, or they use something they're not supposed to be using, but they're not going to tell anybody about it because they're not sure what's going to happen next. Right? They might get unemployed or there might be layoffs because of it. So that's a problem. Number two is how people learn. People learn in teams and in groups through this, and they learn in teams and groups because their managers give them some time and some incentive, and they do some stuff together to actually get into this. There's plenty of evidence behind this. And by the way, Helen Kupp, my old coauthor, has a fantastic program called Almost Technical, where people do this where if you give people chunks of time during the day for them to do even just a little brief snippet exercises, 10 or 15 minutes of watch a brief video, try something out, experiment with it, and then do it with your team. Compare notes. This worked for me. This didn't work for me. Hey, I built this thing. I tried this thing, it worked. You get kind of communal learning and you're getting a really important other thing, which is you're getting the support of your manager to do it. And I've heard from too many big firms where the answer, unfortunately, often is we're too busy. Our Q1 or Q2 goals are too important to let up on them. Therefore, everybody needs to learn on their own and on their magic time. And you're surprised that you only get to maybe 30% or 40% adoption. You shouldn't be surprised, right? So that's the second thing that comes out of this—there's, you know, the time and the training. There's the team-level norms around this. And then the other one is this is about experimentation and iteration. There's a J curve, right? The J curve is the traditional description of what happens when you introduce any new technology. Productivity actually goes down first before it goes up because any new technology requires adoption—not just of the tool but rethinking your workflows and how work gets done. That takes time, and that takes energy, and it's a distraction. Unless you make that investment, though, you never get out of that negative period and get into the positive things that can happen on the other side of it. And too many managers under pressure, executives under pressure, to drive, you know, the era of efficiency are not allowing for that initial period in the J curve to happen, which means they're going to do one of two things. They're either going to figure out they have to do it because their neighbors are all doing it, their competitors are all doing it, or they're going to sit there and say, this is just too expensive. We're not getting the return on it. We're going to pull back.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott: 
And then your competitors—and the smaller competitors especially—are going to continue to iterate and experiment, find new ways, get more efficient, get more effective, build more new cool products, and eventually lap them.

Jeff Frick: 
Yeah, it's an interesting concept. You bring it up a lot, and I wonder if it's a challenge for people that you talk to. Because I know you talk to a lot of companies, this concept of the manager giving you permission to turn your notifications off for some period of time to do work, not ‘this is our work time’—turn notifications off—an active statement like that, which I think is pretty wild. And then the other thing that you just touched on is, is learning. And there seems to be a cutback in the investment of learning. I don't know that that's backed with any data from what you're seeing, but really pulling people out of the flow. It's this old adage, right? Sometimes you gotta stop whacking at the tree and sharpen the saw. And when you just keep whacking at the tree, the saw gets dull, your efficiency goes down, and you can actually get more if you pull back for a minute. And then the final thing is, is people come, and they're curious, and they want to play. And you just told me to do this, you know, how do you get to a bias for yes. How do you get to a bias for action? I think that's one of Amazon's superpowers. And Andy Jassy used to talk about it—when I come into a meeting, I'm looking for a way to say yes to my people. I'm not coming in predisposed to say no and find problems because we can all—that's not hard to do, but actually try to find a way to help encourage them. Because I know you talk about having a culture of experimentation, and that's so, so key, but it's really hard to do if you're not willing to let people ultimately make mistakes because what's going to happen in some percentage of time.

Brian Elliott: 
Exactly right. Oh my God. Let's talk about notifications and time. And there's, there's sort of two versions of this that I'm seeing. They're almost equally bad these days. One is your classic like meetings-driven culture. Right? And the meetings-driven culture companies are typically the bigger ones who, you know, you passed on information by literally being in meetings, and, and being in the meeting is important because otherwise you have FOMO and all the rest of it, and you don't jam like every hour full of meetings, but you jam enough of them into different parts of the day that you then blow the ability for teams to have time to be in sync.Like because you and I and five other people that are working on a thing need several hours a day to be able to trade notes back and forth, to try to solve problems in real time. And you turn also the day into Swiss cheese for me because I have no focus time. So when you say to somebody, hey, by the way, I know you're a meetings-driven culture, but I need you to allow people to have two hours a day with notifications off during the workday, they're like, "That's insane. It'll never work. We can't do it."

Jeff Frick:
Right. 

Brian Elliott:
And the answer is, you've got to find a way to experiment and iterate into making that happen. Not for everybody in the organization, but at least start off with like ICs [individual contributors], frontline managers, and senior managers—just those layers in your organization and find ways to do it, you know, for the people that need it the most and that are the most burned out. The equally bad and sort of insidious one is companies that have done too much of the free-for-all, right. The individual freedom and choice sounds great, but doesn't really work when it gets to the level of like, how do teams work together. And so concepts like core collaboration hours and things like time zone banded teams end up being really important. And I've talked with so many organizations, they got a lot more flexible in their hiring aperture that are now finding that their issue isn’t place, it’s time. It’s that they had to get a lot more crisp on you know what 10:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. west coast time are core collaboration hours. You're expected to be online and available for meetings, for chats, for calls, for whatever else during those hours. Outside of those hours, you can have focus time, and you can turn notifications off, it becomes a lot more feasible if you can do that, right?

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
But either way, you gotta put some constraints on the calendar, as a starting point.

Jeff Frick: 
It's interesting, you see, the more progressive companies, they have such an active, kind of time management philosophy because not only that, but just on meetings in general. And they've got, you know, all their auto responders are set to, you know, please respect my time. I don't get back to this channel, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, it's such an active way to aggressively, to manage your time or ruthless prioritization about what you're going to actually spend time doing and not doing. And it it's tough. And you got to get the boss to support it, right?

Brian Elliott: 
Exactly, and Dropbox is one of the first ones to sort of put out, you know, their quote, ‘collaboration hours’ on a global basis.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
We put, there's a copy of it in the book. And it's like literally here's the graph of what they did around the globe because Drew (Houston) wanted the—Drew, the CEO, wanted to understand from Mel and others, like, how is this going to work? So they had to figure it out and literally show global. Like we have teams in Tel Aviv, we have teams in Dublin, we have teams in the US, West Coast, East Coast, we have teams in Asia. How do we make sure there's some, you know, overlap even among those teams in order to make this happen?

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott: 
But once you do that and once you start getting into like what Atlassian is doing, what Shopify has been doing, you get a lot more efficient and a lot more effective because you're getting out of sort of the no man's land of shoving all people's individual work into the evening after kids are in bed and asleep, and you get more time back during the day to actually do dedicated heads-down core work. It's just... It's one of the things where too many executives are like, ‘nah, the calendar problem, that’s too hard.’ It's just too hard. We need to be more asynchronous. Nah, it's too hard. Well, would you rather focus on that problem, which actually could drive much greater efficiency, or like putting in place a mandate on how many days a week somebody needs to be in the office? I mean, one of them actually yields you a positive outcome. And I know which one it is.

Jeff Frick:
Right. The thread that just weaves through all of this is trust, right? Trust that even something as simple as I'm happy to not attend the meeting because I trust our system so that I will find out what happened in that meeting.

Brian Elliott:
That's right.

Jeff Frick:
I mean, so even just something as not even personal trust, but trust in the communication systems. Most of whom people don't trust. Which is why I feel like I have to be in the meeting in case something's going to happen that I didn't. I just need to be there because if I'm not, you know, what if something happens and I'm not, I'm not even going to know what's going to happen. So it's like this, you know, the fact that people still ask, ‘How am I going to know if people get their work done?’ I mean, are you kidding me? Like, do you not talk to them? Do you not, are you not—did you not give them a task? I mean, it's amazing to be, you know, kind of the lax management practices that were developed by just management by, you know, back of the heads. 

Brian Elliott:
The scary thing is, I still do hear this. I had somebody a couple of months ago say to me, a very senior executive say to me, ‘I don't know that they're walking their dog four hours a day at home, but I do know if they're in the office, they can't be walking their dog four hours a day.’ And yeah, we had this conversation. I said, okay, I get that. What percentage of your employees do you think are actually doing that? And he goes, I know it's not big—you know, it's probably not even 10%. Maybe it's 5%. 

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
I'm like, okay, cool. When you put in the mandate, then that says three days a week or four days a week, you have to be in the office. I get that that does something to that 5% or 10% that's maybe positive for you. How do you think the other 90% of your employees are going to react? And he goes, Yeah, I know they're really pissed. 

Jeff Frick:
Right, right. But also if it makes a person happy to walk their dog, If it makes a person happy to walk their dog four hours a day, maybe that's what gets their Juju. Maybe that's when they think about things. Maybe that's when they, you know, they solve nuclear fusion. I mean, are you kidding me? What are you grading them on? And are they getting their work done on time?

Brian Elliott:
Oh, a lot of that comes down to a couple of things. One is, look, executives are under a lot of pressure. They're under a lot of pressure these days to adopt AI to get more efficient. There’s a lot, a lot of pressure from a broad variety of forces out there. This is not to, you know, let them off the hook in any way, shape, or form. But in doing that, that pressure causes them to have reactions and to grab for something that instinctually worked for them. And the thing that instinctually worked for them isn’t the thing that works for everybody else, because more often than not, they are somebody who looks like me and you, Jeff. It is an older white guy who's not a primary caregiver, who can come into the office and be there more, who has done that in the past and probably came out that way.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
I ticked people off with the piece that I did about Lou Gerstner in *The Wall Street Journal* saying that remote work is horrible for managers and people need to be in the office at least four, preferably five days a week. And the reason I got ticked at Lou wasn't because he said that, it was because he started off his storytelling with, when I was first in the workforce, the way I learned how to prioritize my inbox was by sitting and watching how my manager prioritized his inbox. Lou actually did some fantastic things at IBM, but Lou's first job that he's describing was 1962 at McKinsey and Company. And you know what you had? A physical inbox.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
No one’s had a physical inbox, Jeff, since 1990 that I'm aware.

Jeff Frick: 
That's what I keep telling people. And I'm not that old. I'm like, I was there before email. I mean, literally, work was at the office. The files were at the office, the phone at the office. Your messages written on a piece of paper that the admin put on your desk, and this little spinny thing. Like a lazy Susan with everybody else's.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah, Oh God, I’d forgotten about that. 

Jeff Frick:
I mean, literally, you had to go there. I mean, the collateral. You want some collateral to send to a client. All the collateral’s there. It comes in a box of paper. I mean, it was different, and it was necessary. And it's not that way anymore. And I'm curious, your take from the technology side—you know, you’ve seen kind of some of the evolution. You've seen something like Slack, which really changes the way that people communicate. What do you see kind of going forward with more of the digital natives, the mobile, and just behaviorally, the way that people exchange and share information and connect as people? And that impact—I mean, we're still stuck with a hierarchy within organizational structures that's been around for hundreds of years with marketing, and business development, and sales, and engineering. Do you see some of these really kind of other core operational principles start to blend and meld and shift as we integrate? Because I think it's exponential curves in your face. I mean, I think that's ultimately what this is all about.

Brian:
It is. 

Jeff Frick:
It's technology, exponential curves in your face. That you can talk to a supercomputer on your phone with OpenAI is ridiculous. It responds to you as a person within, you know, seconds. And this is just crazy technology. And it's only going to get faster.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah, I'm gonna give you two parts of that answer. One is, there's definitely generational differences at work here, right? Gen Z and millennials are both digital natives. They're both used to using these tools to build and conduct relationships and to conduct work. Gen Z also, by the way, wants to be in the office. They just want to be in there on a flexible basis. Executives are the ones that are the most resistant to this, right? Executives are the ones most likely to walk back into an empty office and feel like ‘The Vibe’ is off because there's not enough people in the office and under pressure, they kind of freak out. And they're also the ones who are least likely to be in the tools their teams are using. I've had too many of them say, "Yeah, Teams or Slack. That's for the teams themselves. It's great that they're using it. But if you want to find me, I'm in email or text me.

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott:
And because they're not in the tools, they actually don't see what people are doing. They're not aware of the work, not aware even of the vibe.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
And you've got to, as an executive, get into the tools and the junior people will help you do that. If you ask them to, right, they'll tell you where to go and what to do. And it ain't that bad, but you've got to invest the time to get there. But the other part about this is like the technology's not slowing down, and the technology adoption, especially around AI, the things that are going to drive success in it, are exactly the same things that drive success in flexible work adoption. Number one, am I willing to experiment and innovate? Am I willing to give people time to try out new ways of working, and am I willing to put the resources behind making that happen, right? Not a huge amount of resources, just a little bit to do the experimentation, innovation, to figure out what works in my team, in my organization. Second is trust. You don't get that experimentation and failure, and you noted this already, without giving people a little bit of trust in terms of where, you know, letting them fail a little bit along the path, that trust actually helps drive greater adoption of these practices as well. And the third really big one is an outcomes-driven way of managing people, right? If I know what outcomes I'm trying to drive, people are much more likely to be successful in flexible work. They're also much more likely to be successful in AI adoption because people know what to do next if they get some degree of efficiency out of it, right?

Jeff Frick:
Right.

Brian Elliott:
And most organizations, when I talk to them, what they really want, what they get in efficiency gain, especially out of product development or marketing organization, is not that they're going to go cut the staff. It's ‘I want more.’

Jeff Frick: 
Right, more.

Brian Elliott:
I want more product. I want more customers. I want you to do more with these tools to build the business faster. If that's true, let's put the outcomes out there that we're trying to drive and then help people get there.

Jeff Frick: 
Right, Amazing.

Brian Elliott: 
All of a sudden, those things align.

Jeff Frick: 
Yeah. It's amazing how much more success you have in getting someplace if you actually map out where you want to go before you start your journey, I just want to close on a couple thoughts in terms of helping people out. And specifically, one is for the leaders who have embraced this, not because they're digital natives, but they're smart enough to know that they don't know everything. I wonder if you can share a couple of tips and tricks from them. But then the other thing that I think you talk about quite a bit is not necessarily banging your head against the wall, but looking for the teams within the organization that are executing well, whether that's remote work, whether that's integration of AI technology, whether it's whatever it is, and really the concept of doubling down where it's working internally. And then letting that spread, you know, like a mushroom in a cold, damp space rather than trying to dictate it from on high.

Brian Elliott:
Yeah. You got it right there, Jeff, in terms of both those two things, and they're actually related. If you actually look inside of any given organization, you're going to find teams that are already doing a lot of this work, right? Maybe it's a team where the leader came in from someplace else or has a different set of ideas. Maybe it's an M&A thing where you bought an organization that's actually operating somewhat differently. Atlassian, interestingly, bought Trello, who actually was a fully distributed remote-first organization way back before the pandemic. And some of what Atlassian’s done has been built on stuff that Trello had actually done a long time ago. So there are always parts of your organization. The other part is there are usually those led by people who are highly respected in two directions. They're highly respected by executives. They're highly respected by their employees, their own employees.

Jeff Frick: 
Right.

Brian Elliott:
And those are the people that you can turn into champions. Second thing you need to do, though, is you gotta put some support into this. It doesn't have to be huge. I've talked to so many HR leaders that are just under tremendous pressure, especially in like tech and financial services. Their own teams have been cut, right? They're under pressure, and they're basically reverting back not into a compliance mindset necessarily, but into the basics. And they're like, where do I get the resources? And as an executive team, you need to fund this. Take the cutback that you've done in real estate and redeploy it into the redesign of spaces, into travel funds for people to get together, and into a limited number of heads. Like Zillow has a team of like 5 or 6 people that are doing fantastic work. Atlassian has a core small group in this. So does Dropbox. All these firms have built like a handful of people who are really good at helping progress how work gets done. And it's not just around flexibility; it's now turning into stuff around generative AI as well. So that kind of investment is something that leaders also have to do. And the third thing as a leader is you just kind of get in and listen to your own people, and you got to understand some of the stories and what's going on from a different perspective than your own in order to really get at what's going to drive and motivate people and what the real problems are inside your own organization.

Jeff Frick: 
Right? Right.

Brian Elliott: 
Ask.

Jeff Frick: 
Ask, they’ll tell you. So powerful, right?

Brian Elliott: 
They'll tell you. You don't have to hire. You know, consulting firms can do great work. You don't actually have to hire them. If you actually listen to your own team sometimes, right? They will help you understand and move in the right direction.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. Put the pen down and listen. I have it on a post-it. 'Shut up and listen' right here on my computer.

Brian Elliott:
Oh, yeah, I have ‘Wait.’ 'Why am I talking?'

Jeff Frick:
Why am I talking? Very good. All right, Brian. Well, hopefully, hopefully a year from now, when we get together, maybe the headlines will have faded.

Brian Elliott: 
I don't know, they still have to sell clicks.

Jeff Frick:
So probably not, but it sounds like we are actually moving away from the mandates beyond more of the headlines and the world is changing. Surprise, surprise.

Brian Elliott:
One would hope. I think we're actually getting to a point where flexibility is the norm. It's just, how are you doing it? The people are still figuring out, which is actually a good place to be.

Jeff Frick: 
Yeah. All right. So, you’re independent. How could people get ahold of you?

Brian Elliott:
LinkedIn. I'm all over the place on LinkedIn, you can find me there. I'm easy to find.

Jeff Frick:
All right, well, thanks a lot for stopping by. And, and, maybe we should put it on the calendar for next year, but hopefully we won't be talking about RTO.

Brian Elliott: 
You and I will talk between now and then, I'm sure.

Jeff Frick:
Exactly. All right. Thanks again.

Brian Elliott:
Thank you.

Jeff Frick:
He's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching Work 20XX. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. We'll catch you next time. Take care.

‍

Cold Close
All right.
Woo hoo. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Brian.