The Iceland Adventure: Discovering Balance and Clarity in Our Lives

Oh, I didn't know that.

Has she recovered from the cancer? Yep.

It's amazing the changes in medicine, you know, being a process improvement type of person. Medical has seen more advances in the last 20 years than any other aspect of our society. It's stunning what they're coming up with now. Yeah. So is your sister younger or older?

So she had more energy than you and your mother?

That's hardly surprising. What surprised you most about iPhone?

And that's common there. Yeah.

Well, it's also very sparsely populated. And a lot of it is just pure nature. It doesn't have electricity or running water or any of that stuff. So if you're out there, you're going to be looking after yourself. But it's stunning. It's all volcanic lava. That's a volcano that created the island. And it's in the middle of nowhere on that. You know, we've got in the Pacific, they call it the Ring of Fire, which has got more volcanoes and various fissures in the earth plate. And in Iceland, you can go see the damn thing. I mean, did you see? the place where the plates meet. Yes. It's kind of stunning, isn't it? How big it is. You know, it's, it's, it's amazing. So the way I introduced the blog that you wrote about the trip was that you never stopped your mind. You've got about a six point operational guide on how to take a vacation.

You know, it's, I'm considerably older than you are. And I relate to exactly the same thing that you do. We, I like to think that our lives are split up into three pieces. One piece is our career, one piece is our family, and one piece is us. And this proverbial balance that we look for is to have those three things in harmony. And if you look out across the country, any country, a very strong proportion of the population is stuck with their career. displacing their own personal health and well-being through exercise or diet or whatever. And their family also. And we've got more and more people anymore that are right at the edge of financial disaster because of what we're seeing with inflation and economic circumstances. So I'm really mindful. It doesn't help, by the way, but I'm really mindful about trying to manage my life. Indistractable near IL and looking at time chunking has made a big difference in my life.

But one thing that happens to all of us, and I'm sure you're in the same boat, we take on way the hell too much.

But your point is well made. We don't organize our time, our personal time or our family time with the same degree of vigor we do our professional time. That's right. And that's wrong.

Yeah, it's something else. I don't know how we... I had an epiphany, I don't know, maybe 20 years ago. I was on a cruise with my wife, and I don't know that we had been on cruises before, but it hadn't been as comprehensive as this one was. And I was on a treadmill looking out at the ocean. And I did that every morning for an hour. And about the second or third day, I said, you know, to myself, this is the only investment you've made in yourself this year. And it kind of... You know, a stark realization. I probably spend more time drinking scotch than I spend exercising, which isn't a bad trade-off, but that's a different discussion. And so I'm back in California. Our daughter lives here. Our granddaughter is taking her master's in Hawaii. My grandson was graduating from high school like your daughter yesterday. And they both have birthdays, the end of June, beginning of July. So this is typically the time of year that we'd be here. Yeah.

Our daughter teaches her last day was last Tuesday. So today is her third day of not having to get up. She still gets up at 3.30 in the morning, but that's a different thing. But her son leaves next Friday, Thursday. He's joining the Navy. Oh. Well, so they go to boot camp or whatever the hell the right word is for today. And he's got 10 weeks of that starting. This coming week.

My daughter at one point was a personal trainer.

She's a cancer survivor. And so she became a bit of a fitness freak. She's a triathlete. She does Olympic style triathlons. She's a maniac.

So she took her 17 year old son and started training him. And so they run every morning or every second day, five miles. They go to the gym every second day and do squats and everything else that you can imagine. And my daughter's doing all of them with them. She says, Dad, I'm consuming more protein now than I did 20 years ago. But she's stuck because when she was teaching, she didn't have time, but she didn't want to sacrifice her son's fitness. for what that meant for his boot camp. So she went to school. She did her teaching. She writes poetry every morning before she goes to school. She did the exercising with Declan every morning before she went to school. And she's got to, you know, cook for a family and keep the house clean and all the rest of the nonsense. And so she was running out of time every day, exhausted. Life is a treadmill that we get on and we don't challenge it. Same thing's true when we go to work. We get into ruts.

I told you this earlier. When we hit the age of 25, our brain starts to age. It starts to atrophy. Our capacity diminishes unless we exercise our brains. Now, some people are curious. Most people aren't. But if you aren't. You need to find something to get your brain moving. Otherwise, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and everything are in your future 30,40 years from now. Yeah. We don't pay enough attention to any of those things. It's our crazy world, isn't it? The world is changing very quickly.

Well, we grew up, my generation grew up, and I'm going to call a generation 20 years. And it's more than one generation between you and I, but I'm going to say it's one generation. My generation, we had weekly TV shows that we watched. MASH, as an example, every week it's on. Seinfeld, every week it's on. Or various days of our lives during the day and things like that. So we all got conditioned to that kind of brainwashing on this is what you do Tuesday night. You know, you've got chairs, you've got blah, blah, blah. Right? That's your evening. So now cable TV is dying. Yeah. So there's a metaphor now for business. Why did cable TV die? Because it stayed with that model and it didn't look to modify it. Here comes Netflix. They were the first ones. Actually, it was Blockbuster. And we've had a bunch of iterations.

But it was change in technology, change in thinking, change in delivery, change in customer service, change in tools that are available to people, which is in all aspects of our lives. Cell phone's a good example. 10 years. So now you've got binge watching on Netflix or on Amazon Prime.

or on Clue or Freebie. And on and on we go. So now all of a sudden we're having this fight across our entertainment, personal entertainment piece. And at the same time, here comes Bezos and Musk. with low altitude satellite coverage, which is going to make our streaming instantaneously. Yeah. So what happens to AT &T, Spectrum, Frontier, and those boys?

it's true. We've got Spectrum here in California. We have it in Hawaii, and I'm not happy with either of them because my data speeds aren't good enough. So when you were on vacation, what were the iteration? What were the things you wrote about in your blog that we put up that you is, you know, what were those steps?

Um, was your sister warming up?

Okay, so the preparation that you, it actually helped you, that piece.

What else in your preparation helped you?

I hate to tell you, but it's about time.

You know, what you can do on a tablet today, what you used to be able to do on a mainframe. Yeah. It blows my mind.

Well, what you found is software development has changed just as radically as hardware has changed.

Well, not just that, but coding today, you know, I took computer science in the 60s at university. So I learned how to code Assembler and Fortran and COBOL and all that crap. And it is crap. It's iterative. It defines every damn position on a print page. Yeah. And the machines today, you can basically just talk English to them.

And it writes code. Yeah. I was in school, Sarah. What they said was the clerks of tomorrow are the programmers of today. And it's pretty much turned out to be true, like a long number of years ago, actually.

In the capital goods industries, we've got... JD Edwards, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Infor, XAP. The two private guys now are merged, so they're now over a billion dollars. There's a bunch of little guys, but all of those big ones are doing the same thing. And a friend of mine coined this. All we've done is we've taken our processes. We've gone from paper to glass. We took a form and we put that template on the screen. So instead of writing on the form, now we type on the screen.

Of course it is. And the card decks, this is where I started. I know a lot of people, they don't know what it is in many cases. But we had three cabinets and in many cases, three cabinets tall. Women, because they're much more detailed. better at detail than men are. Plus, men would go crazy trying to do this thing, sliding up and down, noting on cards so we knew instantly what the availability was out in the warehouse versus we had to wait two weeks for the piece of paper to come back to tell us what was there. And today, you can write, you know, Dealer data processing at Catechlear in 1968,65, put together the first, to my knowledge, data center that took forms from their distribution. We would send part sales documents, work orders, all that crap would go down to Peoria. It would be key punched into a computer, run through a batch report. The report was sent back to us.

We double checked, made corrections, sent it back, and then the final came forward. Took probably a week, excuse me, a month to six weeks to get that whole process done. So our data accuracy went from being instantaneously looking at the card to six weeks old.

So talk about demotivating every damn employee with the arrival of a computer.

It was unbelievable.

Yeah, I used to. I used to, you know, it was a bit of a throwaway. I can't motivate anybody. You either come self-motivated. I can't give it to you. Now, I can demotivate all of you, any of you, easily. Yeah. And why leadership tends to do that, I don't know.

That's the only books, and you know that I reference him a lot, but his three signs of a miserable job. Anonymity is the first one, that your company doesn't know anything about you. Yeah. What the hell kind of people are we working with? that they don't know each other. Are we not talking with each other? Irrelevance. They don't understand where their job fits into the overall process. And what the hell is the matter with the boss or the leader or something that is explaining, you know, here's where it goes, who's depending on you, you know, that kind of thing. And then finally, a measurability. And this is the one that gets me the most. Blue collar production type jobs, they know what kind of a job they did today. They know how many widgets they made or didn't make or whatever, how many errors. White color, we've never paid any attention to that. And, you know, performance reviews, it's all an opinion.

I remember a piece four to six weeks ago with interest rates going up and inflation being what it is and the recession coming out. The Wall Street Journal had a front page article. It started on the front page that companies are going back to performance reviews to find out who to let go. That's not why you have a performance review.

I love it. How can I help you get better? I

I still do that a lot with a lot of people. There's a lot of people don't know. You know, my grandson's 17. He's going into the Navy. I told you that. But he wanted to take astrophysics. It would have been 250 grand for four years at the University of Purdue where he got accepted. And he said, that's funny. I can't afford that. So he joined the Navy. So he's going to get his education paid for by the Navy, which is cool. That's good thinking.

Yeah. So he's going into what's called the NUKE program, which is a very exclusive club. Apparently, there was only two people selected this year in the United States to go into the new program. He's one of them.

And I said to him, I don't believe that because you're not that special. This is his grandfather talking to grandson, right? And he said, yes, I am. He said the world changed on July the 5th or whatever it was, July the 1st of 2005, because I was born and it's everything's about me, dad. You know, you got to understand that. That's true. What was the second thing on your list?

So think back to the office setting. Think back to your GE days. It's not unprofessional to hear laughter in a business, in an office. It's not unprofessional. Yet so many people, keep your head down, be quiet. Don't let anybody know you're here. It used to drive me crazy. Come on, have fun. Yeah. You know, there were three things. One of my first consulting clients. He was a cancer survivor in his early 30s. He lost one of his legs. And, you know, he could have rolled over and got upset and angry about the whole damn thing. And my daughter called him the, what was, there was a TV show where the guy could get the $6 million man. Okay. Except she called him a $6 man. And he was all sweaty. That was the icky part of it. But this kid said, every single day, you have to make money. You have to have fun. And then this one is the one that got me. You have to be effective. He didn't say efficient. He said effective. And I said, OK, fine.

I understand the fun. I understand the money. But what do you mean by effective? He said, you have to concentrate on doing the right things, not doing things right. Doing the right things. That's profound. I think that's an interesting twist as well, because I don't know that we always do the right things.

Well, just get up and go for a walk. Yeah.

We're, we're walking right through that right now with the pandemic. We had a lot of people working from home. Yeah. Now we're seeing the pressure to get back to the office. Well, if we were able to work from home or somewhere other than the office for the last two and a half years, why is it important to go back to the office? Now, I can understand maybe a day a week, two days a week or something.

be back in the office all the time? We get, again, fat, dumb, and happy, right? We get comfortable with how this thing... I had one boss say to me, an owner of a business said, I don't know what they're doing when they're not here. I said, okay, you don't think they're working? He said, well, I don't know. And I said, sure you do. You know what's happening on their computer. Oh, I don't know how to do that. Oh, okay. So that's fine. And then the second thing I said, well, if you don't think they're working, that means you don't trust them, right? Yeah. Oh, I trust them. I trust them when I see them.

So my daughter, who's a teacher, the first year of the pandemic, they had the teachers go to the school. to conduct virtual learning instead of being able to do it from their home. Talk about lack of trust.

It blew my mind. They changed their mind after three to six months. But, you know, these so having fun is an important prescription, but you've got to find a way to have time to have fun. Because unless we allocate time to it, I don't think we're going to do it. Yeah,

Yeah, one of the mentors that I was lucky enough to have, he was the president of the company, and he was a very normal person, with the exception of the fact that he fired me half a dozen times. But he had a way with people. You know, I keep saying this all the time, we're people first. We forget that eyeball to eyeball is really what goes on. Customer services. created by two people. Yes. And it isn't the owner. No. It can be, you know, somebody in the back door of the warehouse at the shipping dock. It could be, you know, a cook in the kitchen could be, you know, it doesn't matter. It's whoever touches the customer and serves the customer. Yeah. You know, it's okay. So that's two out of the list. What was three?

There you go. Did you pick that up or do you believe that? Where did you get that from?

with my kids.

There was a video probably 30 years ago now called Fish that was from a store, a fishmonger in the Pike Place Marketplace in downtown Seattle. Okay. And it's famous. And one of the four rules was be there. And that's exactly be present. And, you know, we all go in and out of the conversation because our minds are moving too quick for what's happening around us. So our kids, our wives, our husbands, our co-workers, friends in a bar, wherever the hell you are, you're going in and out. Yeah. Educators have found. I used to give 45,75 and 90 minute lectures. And it was, you know, sage on the stage, you're talking and there's a couple hundred people there or 500 people or 50 people, whatever the hell it is. They found in learning that if I can break it into 10 minute blocks approximately with tablets, laptops, phones, the professor now puts a question up on the screen, waits 60 seconds, it gets an answer, real live feedback.

of how they're paying attention or not. And statistically, there's been enough of this. They found retention and learning has gone up by 50% by doing that. That's the same thing as chunking time, isn't it? Yeah. So we did that in all of our classes, eight minute to 15 minute blocks with a quiz. And remarkably, when we started this, it's months now, but when we started it, the first quiz questions. A third to a half would get it right. The second, then we have between 40 and 60 segments in a class. The second one, they got between half and two thirds. And the third one and on was 90% or higher because they knew what the deal was. Yeah. And they paid attention more. Yeah. So in the classroom, I used to, you know, I'd be asking questions all the time. That's my checkpoint. Yeah. Well, it wasn't a 75 or 40. And I have small enough classes typically that I can do that with maximum.

But the other, even, you know, for women, it's a different presentation than for men. For youth, it's a different presentation than for age. It's remarkable. So the be there or be present, it really requires discipline and focus. Yeah. Because we do go elsewhere. I've heard that from my daughter, you know, and I used to say this all the time to people because you get into a discussion. Have you noticed this? You can notice in their eyes they've left you.

Right. So when I see that, and people that have been in a classroom with you, with me, will tell you this has always happened. Somebody in the class is going to get embarrassed. What did I just say? And I'm right in their face.

And they have no idea. I said, you weren't paying attention, were you? You were trying to think about what you were going to say back to me in this discussion, which a lot of us do. Don't do it. It's hard to change that, Sarah. It really is.

Yeah. And if you don't focus, you're dead meat. And if you focus, guess what? You get tired.

So you need more breaks. Yeah. You know, it's a big circle. So that's three. Yep. What was four?

So how do you do that from the office?

So, again, let me use that as a platform. From the Industrial Revolution, when we move from the farm to the city, when we move to steam engines, typically it takes a generation for a technological change to bite, to truly be in place. That's not true anymore. It's like Moore's Law was every... 12 months,18 months, now it's down to six. Things are changing so quickly. Why don't we have a situation where we can get up from, a lot of the tech companies have this, most businesses don't, where we can get up and go outside for a walk and still be working. Just flush your head, get rid of whatever that noise is that's there, get out of it. Because you get into ruts and traps, don't we?

Yeah.

But you weren't running on concrete. No, no. Why are you running on concrete? I do

Yeah, my body is not built for running. My legs are too long. My waist is too short. So I can't run. My daughter laughs at me. She's a runner. I look like a gazelle, you know, taking, you know, let's go for a run, dad. But I can swim for hours and it's just boring. You have no company. Your head's in the water. Who am I going to talk to? So you got to play with yourself in here. So it's a different thing. But I don't know that the, let me call it three years of the pandemic, gave enough of us. enough time to reevaluate how we wanted to conduct our lives, whether it's work or home. But it gave us an opportunity to think about it. Sure did. And today there's less than 50% of the people working. I think this was in the United States a couple of weeks ago. I saw 48% of the people are still working from home.

That's pretty stunning. Yeah. And there was a fifth. I don't remember what it was though.

What is it? What is it that you love?

What does that mean? You love adventure.

So the other, the question there is why do I have to listen to a podcast when I'm walking?

Yeah, there we go though, right? Yeah. How does that fit with being there or being present?

That's my point. My wife and I, you know, we. We go for walks, but it's pretty hot here during the day still. So we have to get up at 6 or 6.30 and it's still low 70s. So that's pleasant. So we go out walking. She says, you've got your phone. I said, I need that to open the door. She said, this has gotten crazy. Yeah. Because we control our thermostat and our lights with the phone, right?

Everything we're doing is going against that brief present or prioritize things that are important to you. Yeah. You know, it's really, really interesting.

Are you going to act on that? Sure

It is hard. It is incredibly hard. You know, the whole routine of work. is, you know, it's a four-letter word deliberately. And as we've evolved as a society, we still have leaders that are checking on everything that we do. We still have leaders that are making sure we're in the office, that we're attending. We're not late. We're not sick. So here comes artificial intelligence. A lot of people are getting nervous about it, right? And Mike Rowe said an interesting thing the other day. If you're not, working with your hands and you're not building something, now that could be software, it could be a house, whatever,50% of the American workforce will be replaced by robots or artificial intelligence. Okay, so my little pea brain says we got about 180 million people working in America. 90 million people won't have jobs. So then my B brain goes a little further and says, okay, we spend hundreds of trillions of dollars on technology.

What have we spent on sociology? Like what are we going to do with that 90 million people if they don't have jobs? Are they going to go to school? What are we going to do with them? Who's going to pay them? What does society look like then, right? Down another track with another of our contributors, Ed Gordon, he wrote a book called Future Jobs a long time ago, early 2000s. And he said by 2030, half of the workforce in America will not have the skills to be employable. Different track, different source, different perspective, different foundation, same point.

yep. So, you know. Maybe 2030 is too early, but 2040 for sure. Yeah. That'll be true. So what are your children going to do? Because that's going to be the life that they live with.

So find something that you're passionate about that you can monetize. Yeah. That might be delivering newspapers. Why not? It's fine. I'm amazed here because we have the ice cream man still here. Goes around with the ice cream, with the bells and the umbrellas and all the rest and stops in the neighborhood. The kids come running out, they buy their ice cream, they go back and everything. And he still does it at 110 degrees.

Isn't it though? It's the same two or three guys. They obviously are making enough money. They obviously enjoy it. What's the enjoyment? It's seeing kids. Yeah.

Yeah, it's not the truth.

I make my own and that's disgusting because it is so rich.

Tomorrow I'm making salty caramel gelato.

It is. You're welcome. Come on over. But the other part of all of that, I'm in Moscow with a guy who's a manager and he's got an MBA. And I ask him, you know, if you could change anything to make your job better for you, what would you do? He says, don't ask that question. Just tell me what you want me to do. There's a different perspective under communism. So all of the things that we talk about, you go on vacation, you make a list. You do your job and you're saying you're going to become a master black belt shortly?

That's no mean accomplishment. Congratulations. Thank

We have the same thing on every class. We have to put a learning outcomes page. What are the people that are taking this expecting, needing, wanting to get out of it? So it just causes you to do things the right way. Do the right things. It's simple. But, you know, that's industrial engineering and it's been around 200 years. We just call it a different thing and we've got different ways of playing with it now because we've got better tools today.

But that's the traps we're in, Sarah. All of us.

We get comfortable with a certain... deal. You know, one of the things Steve Clegg, who does internally, he does a lot of data analytics using artificial intelligence, very intelligent guy. We were both swimmers younger. And he said, you know, one of the things that was really telling to me, and also to me was my coach could get me to move my hand two inches in one direction, and it made a four second difference in 100 yards. Wow. And to know the subject matter that well, yet I, as the athlete or Steve, we didn't know it. Because we don't see the whole picture. So you're in a project. I don't like using the term project anymore. I call them engagements. Because the project has a beginning and an end and engagement is never ending. So I get a project and I'm going to call that level one. And there's always a level two or three or four or five. There's never a level one. That's the end. Right. Level one is the new beginning.

And then, you know, so all of the tools that we see today, I tried hard and I don't succeed, but I try and look at all of the new stuff and see if it applies to me. Then I asked my daughter if it applies to me. And I asked an IT guy that I trust in a long time if it's something I should do. And not always are they in agreement with me where I say, no, that's not, oh, that is important, dad, or that is important, Ron. And that forces me to rethink things. So putting data analytics together in the research side, it's only sensible. Yeah. The argument that you and I used to have, or not argument, but a discussion in database data analytics, the quality of data has always been the biggest bugaboo, hasn't it? Yeah. Who owns that piece of data? In the old days of database management, who owns that data element? Who's the one that can make changes that nobody else can make? Right. You still don't have that damn discipline.

You got miles of work to do, kid, before you can rest.

That drives me crazy.

I can list three or four dealers right now that do that. They have multiple software packages that have common data elements that treat them differently or updated differently and they don't talk to each other. Yep. Drives me crazy.

And APIs are simple. Yeah. In the old days of computer back in the 60s, our programs had to be 4 to 8K max. And it was always a call. So you do iterations, step A, step B, step C. Here's the entrance, here's the exit. Here's the entrance, here's the exit. Here's the data element changes. I mean, it's fundamental as hell, but it's been true since the beginning of time. And it's still true. I don't care how advanced technology is.

So when are you going back?

So my. How old is he now?

Well, that's six years. That's too long. Oh,

Does he know?

And they had a ball with it, didn't they?

And You know, one of the reasons that that's difficult is a lot of us view that as being abdication, not trust. I'm abdicating my responsibility of being a parent by letting them have the freedom to come up to their own decisions. There's a great book about six,40 years ago, something called The Fifth Turning by a professor from MIT. And a turning is a generation. And Peter, it'll come to me before the author. There was a point in there that I found really interesting. Parent to child is a competition. You're trying to impose on them rules for their safety and well-being. And at a certain age, they start pushing back saying, you don't know Jack.

Grandparent, grandchild is totally different. It's all love. And I had one grandparent that was alive, but I was blessed to be raised by her. Most of my parents worked. So up until the age of four, I think, maybe a little younger, she was my daytime parent. So my sister's two years,26 months younger. And when she was mobile, all of a sudden, granny had a hard time keeping up with two kids because I was running everywhere. So she convinced a school to let me go to kindergarten at the age of three.

Obviously, I failed kindergarten. I repeated it because I was too young.

But I, you know, I could say I wasn't smart enough, too. That would work just as well. But my grandmother, I can't believe that she had the chutzpah. Go to a school and convince the principal that her 30-year-old grandson deserved to be there and he better take him. Pardon the expression, that's leadership, isn't it?

is. You know, as usual, this has been a wonderful conversation. I'm so glad you enjoyed Iceland. I did too. I didn't get as broad a base as you did. I didn't stay at farms, but I love the place every minute of it. It's amazing. It's really unique. I can't wait to go to Greenland when it's green. Any closing comments there?

yeah. And clarity is a word that I like a lot of because I don't think we have a lot of clarity on much that we see anymore. Everything's very murky in a whole bunch of directions. Well, I'm glad you're back. I'm glad that we chatted. Thank you very much. I look forward to the next blog. And, you know, we've got to constantly evaluate how we do everything because we've got tools today that we never dreamt of. It's just phenomenal. So thank you, Sarah, for your attention and your comments and input. And thank you, everybody who's listened to this candid conversation. I hope you'll join us again at the next one. Aloha. 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!