Bruce Baker and Ron discuss how businesses need to approach the workforce; finding, attracting, hiring, developing, retaining employees.

I'm confused at what I just said, you know. That last blog kind of struck a note with me in that I think fear drives a lot of us in a lot of directions. It makes us anxious. It gives us stress. I think that's kind of what you were pointing at in that blog. Why don't you explain to me what your motivation was of it?

It's rather clear too, isn't it? The damage we do to ourselves. You know, one side of us is risk averse.

And we're raised that way. Be obedient. Look both ways before you cross the street. Don't touch the stove. It's hot. You know, we're kind of taught to be obedient. And in everything that we do and our parents protecting us, it's developing a risk averse persona. Yeah,

Yeah, no, it's true. And, you know, one of the things that became clear over the years in classrooms was how comforting it was for other people in the classroom who are in the same job area. Oh, and not alone. everybody's got the same problem.

And, and that by itself is a statement bothers the hell out of me. Everybody's got the same problem. How come we haven't fixed it yet is what, what drives me. But the, the other, we had a business called insight where we would bring a dozen dealer principals or owners. They were called suits if they didn't own the place. And, um, We met a couple of three times a year, shared financials. It was all about best practices. But it was amazing how the communications at the corner suite level went. They have nobody to talk to.

It's very lonely at the top. That's the other side of that blog that you posted.

Let me try and frame it a different way, perhaps. We've become problem solvers. situation fixers. We haven't been problem eliminators. The firefighter, the age-old story, the firefighter spends 5% of their time putting out fires, doing the thing, and 95% of the time avoiding the thing. And let me just play on that a little bit, because that gentleman that you mentioned, I believe, is enabling bad behavior.

On of himself, as well as the people around him. He doesn't know how to manage his time. And that's an interesting subject all to itself. Like, how do we organize ourselves? As I get older, time becomes more important because it's an unfungible asset. Once it's passed, it's over. So I try hard to cover. basically five things every day in time and see where you think this is relative to the crowd and the people and the businesses that you're dealing with. The first thing I do every day when I get up is review what I did yesterday, what I completed, what I didn't, what I have to do today, and what do I have to do that didn't get done yesterday. And that's a relatively short period of time. It's emails. It's all of the perfunctory work. Maybe it's an hour of time a day. Then I communicate with people on specific work issues. You know, are you doing okay? Have you got any problems? What are the problems? Can you fix them? Do you need any help?

Do you need more resources, et cetera? And then it's just general communication. One of the biggest challenges to me in business today is the fact that we don't communicate well. You know, we have this Friday philosophy and one of the... examples that I used was somebody who made the comment that we make a big mistake when we consider that we think we're communicating. And then a big portion of the day, I try and spend on internal processes. What do I need to do to make things easier, to make things better, to make more money, to be more responsive, whatever it might be? And the last bit is the personal side, because I need to spend time thinking of and working on myself and my family. It might be fitness, might be just going to dinner, whatever it is.

And if I concentrate on those five things every day, and I mean, all as you know, about checklists and all the rest of this stuff, if I concentrate on those five things, I have what I believe is a good day. If I don't, I don't. And I'm trying to avoid failure.

You know, I'm not trying to fix it. And I think in our industry, we have a group of people whose personalities and see if this fits. We're more comfortable if we've got problems to solve rather than problems to eliminate.

Yeah, exactly. Have you ever heard of the Arbinger Institute?

That gentleman should read his first book. It's a classic. It's about 60 years old by now, but it's still pertinent about a production company and how all of our things, continuous improvement, Six Sigma, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, they fall by the wayside. Yeah. Because we try and get too sexy.

You know, in service classes, particularly for service management, interruptions kill us on the floor. in life in any direction we want to look at. Yeah. And, you know, I was asking guys, we go through this pretty regularly. How do you spend your day? What do you do? And invariably two to three hours of every day was people coming to their door on the phone, asking questions. And I say, you're enabling bad behavior by answering those questions. And they look at me like I've grown another head. I got to answer the question. The guy doesn't know the answer. I said, how do you know? Yeah. If you're going to come and ask me a question, you better come with two answers that you want to talk about, because I'm not going to give you an answer. You better tell me what. And that's the Socratic approach to teaching, isn't it? Yes. I'm not going to tell you what to do. You're going to tell me because you do know. I just have to ferret it out of you.

And the men that you're dealing with, they know, but they don't have a structure. They don't have a discipline. There was a Harvard. professor who talked about habits. Yeah. If you repeat the same thing 20 days consecutively, it becomes a habit. And you know how hard habits are to break.

So one of the other things I like to try and do with my little life is to find out those habits that I'd like to get over sitting around, you know, eating chips or having a drink or whatever and make it more productive, being exercising or something. That goes by the wayside pretty quickly. But you get the drift. I believe the owners are struggling day to day with what they do and they need help with somebody strategically to help them about tomorrow.

Yeah. Amen. Yeah. We have way too many repeats of the same. It's one of the banes of my life. It gives me a living. It gives you a living. You know, people, how do I look after this warehouse design? How do I look after this territory coverage? How do I look after this salesman who's gone awry? You know, they're all, and they know the answers to all these questions. These are smart people, very talented people. But at the end of the day, nobody is a rock. Nobody is. you know, custodian of all the answers for all time. Last guy that started that didn't get the top of his feet wet when he walked across the lake, you know, but there's very few of those guys and I don't want to end up like he did.

And I believe the reason it's tough is because we don't allocate time to it.

That's the piece of time that at the end of the day, if I've got time left over, I'll get to it.

And I want to switch that. I want to have everybody spend at least one hour of their day, one hour uninterrupted, thinking about making something better. eliminating a roadblock. It's the old industrial engineering, Bruce. It's very fundamental stuff. And we don't do it. I was talking with Metz Kramer the other day for an upcoming podcast, and we're talking about a similar issue. But he used the example of Amazon, how they're a data-driven business. Anything and everything that they do is all aimed at. the customer, making it better. Whatever the process is, information base is. So if you buy anything from Amazon, they know every time you look and within the next 30 days, you'll get a suggestion

they know what you bought. And in the next 30 to 60 days, you'll get a suggestion. And they just, they, they're manic about it. They do it all day long, incredibly deeply with. disciplined people. Yeah. And look what they've done from replacing bookstores in the 90s to the largest retailer in the world.

Wow. And they did it on systems, Bruce.

And that's so fundamentally flawed. It's unbelievable.

I was lucky. I don't want the conversation to be about me, but when I was hired, it was on a one-year contract to fix a specific problem with a computer installation in inventory management that nobody could fix.

And they hired me for a year, said, okay. And it wasn't very much money, but it was a job. And in the 60s, it was tough to get a job. So right from the get-go, my upbringing, if I can call it that, my habit is to find problems and fix them. Right from the get-go. Not just find them and present them, but find them and fix them. And I was given the opportunity as an individual, because I guess not very many people do that. that wherever there was a problem, they put me and said, go fix it.

So my bias is always, what's the problem? How do I eliminate it? What's the traffic jam? How do I get out of it? And I don't know that we have enough people thinking that way today in our industries.

Have I ever shared with you the story of me, my fundamental drive is to work myself out of a job?

The 12 noon on going home story?

The other one that we talked about the other day, Mets and I, was Google. Yeah. where their capital investment strategy is 70% on what we do now, making sure it's tuned and the best it can possibly be, then 20% on systemic changes to that process, fundamental shifts within it to advance it. And the one that I like is 10% on moonshots. I have no idea if this is going to work or not, and it doesn't matter. But they create an environment just by that one little deal, in my opinion. They create an environment where every employee is challenged. If they don't like something, if they think they have, bring it, baby. Yeah. Let's go.

It's a fundamental piece of your culture that I want us all to get so good at what we do that we don't have anything to do.

Yeah, absolutely. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. That's another thing that people fear. Exactly what he just said. What do I do when I fix everything up? The implication is that there is an end. Right. There's no such damn thing.

The end is the beginning of something else. It's really, truly unbelievable. Yeah.

100% correct. We have an opportunity. you and I and other people that work with businesses and people to influence them. But the fundamental block is, in my opinion, fear is one piece of it. Comfort is another. I'm okay with how this is now. I make enough money. I have enough customers. I satisfy enough people. I have good enough people. And in this world today, I can't imagine that being anybody's thinking. at the top of the company. Change is so rapid now. Unbelievable.

Yeah, the statement I give to people is, what would you do if you weren't afraid?

You know, and they look at me and, you know, I worked in a prison for a while with juvenile delinquents, so I did all the personality profiling training. Yeah. And after answering that question, the room gets very quiet and I don't speak again until, you know, they ask me another question. I'll just flip it. But I want them to tell me.

What it would be. that they would do if they weren't afraid of the consequence.

Risk analysis. Well, I'm risk averse. I don't need to analyze that. I don't want to do that. Wait a second. You're cutting off a big portion of the world. Oh,

Yeah, no, absolutely. And the other part of it is it's giving you permission to sit there and think. A lot of people, you know, I'm sitting at my desk in a bullpen in an office and I'm looking at the ceiling. Yeah. And the boss comes by. What the hell are you doing? You know, or I remember in Montreal early in the game, I'm supervising a counter telephone and counter sales group. There are eight guys. And, you know, the drill when it's busy, it's like hair is straight back and the phone stops. Don't stop ringing and there's people stacked up. But there's other parts of the day where there's nothing happening at all.

Invariably, my boss would be walking by whenever there was nothing happening.

You know. Now, what the heck's the matter with you, Ron? How come you got so many people? You got to be able to do this better. We lose sight of fundamental things, fundamental truths. I used to ask three questions and I'd ask people to take a subject. Give me five things, three to five things that will make your life better related to the job. Give me three to five things that are a pain in the butt to do. I think you've heard this routine. Give me three to five things that will make your job easier. And I used to do that pretty regularly every six months. And I would ask at the end of the exercise, everybody would share. And in a lot of cases, I'd do this in the same company. And there'd be two or three that were on everybody's all three list. Right. The question is, why haven't you fixed it? And then there's a lot of, you know, heads dropping. Don't want to catch your eye. You know, well, nobody gave me permission to do that.

Whoa, that's interesting. That's true for the most part. Yeah. Because if I'm caught looking at the ceiling when the boss comes by, that's not going to be a happy moment. What's the matter with you, Bruce? Nothing to do. Let me fix that for you.

No, absolutely true. In our favor. I think it's in our favor. You know, it's we're like salesmen. How many calls do you have to make before you get a sale? It's a lot. How many no's do you have to hear before you hear a yes? It's a lot. Right. We can't weaken because we don't get people saying, yeah, I'll sign up for that. Yeah. Because it's going to take some time. So if you get the one person, I agree with you. Yeah. It'll help. But here's something that's happening. That millennials. 40% of the millennials buy things on the internet. Right. By nature. 72% of the people that are responsible for purchasing in businesses today are millennials. That is going to change how business responds to the market.

So we have all these pointers out there. Smart people see these same pointers that you and I talk about and see. But they're not doing anything about it. Either comfort or risk averse, fear of failure. There's got to be, and you're doing it with your groups, there's got to be a vehicle that people can use to get them past the fear of failure, to get them over being risk averse. Recognizing, like Jack Wells said, if the world around you is changing faster than you are, the end is near.

Yeah, it's like an insurance program, isn't it?

You know, I've always believed, and I've said this, and I'm sure somebody else said it first, but man is like the turtle. Yeah. In order to get ahead, you've got to stick your neck out.

You know, it's with other people that write blogs for us, and we've got a talented group of people that you're a member of that I call thought leaders. Yeah. We're starting to get traction. It's not that many people that listen to the blogs. Our blogs are about 45 minutes each. That takes a little bit of discipline to hang in there for that length of time. Slowly but surely, and each of these things, which we've done today so far, we've given three or four or five different examples of things for people to try. What would be one of the major things that you would have people want to try? to help their businesses be better? Is there anything that sticks out more than the others?

Yeah, I agree with you 100%. I'll go a little bit further. Get yourself a small book, like a notebook, and create a diary. Yeah. In that time, whatever time you give it every day where you think on things that need to be fixed or changed in the business.

Write down what you came up with.

And if you can do this every day, that's terrific. Don't look at the diary. Turn the page after every day and write a new one in. At the end of the week, then go back and review the five diary entries.

And that also. will provoke interesting thought pattern changes. Yeah.

That goes back to your original comment that you're a business therapist because, in effect, that's exactly what you're doing. Yeah. Providing therapy to the people to make them comfortable doing what at the moment they're not comfortable doing, but they know intellectually that it is required to be done.

Yeah. So I think what I'd like to do is put a bow on this. podcast with that suggestion. Take whatever time you can each day,15,30, one hour, and think about things that could be done, need to be done to make the business better, to make your life better, to make the customer's situation better, the employees, the vendors, everybody. What can you do? Diarize it and then see how that went. after a week, after a month. And I think you're onto something pretty big. If people will have the discipline to do that, they will get pretty successful change results. Did I say that right?

On that then, let's leave it there and pick up on our next podcast, the next specific thing. So Bruce, I'd like to thank you again for your wisdom.

And for those of you listening, I hope you enjoyed this podcast and look forward to having you be with us at another one in the near future. Mahalo. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.