Stig Brodersen  5:47  

I think it’s really hard to say Jack Welch without talking about his 20-70-10 system, because it’s been heavily debated over the years. Just to break it down briefly. The 20% of the best performers, as managers, you do everything you can to motivate them. As Jack Welch was saying, shower them with love, I don’t know exactly what that means, and shower them with bonuses. Like, they’re really the stars of the organization. Then you have the 70% that are, it’s called the meat and potatoes of the organization. That’s really the people you also need to have for everything to run smoothly. You don’t necessarily give them like a lot of bonuses, you motivate them, and you really want them to be in the top 20, and want to set a good example for them so that they can perform better. And then you have the bottom 10%, which you would basically let go one way or the other. So that’s his view on differentiation and he’s been heavily criticized for this. And I also think that the way that perhaps I’m explaining it, also seemed really brash. But the way that he’s having a discussion on this is that he is saying, that’s actually the way that corporations work. We might not say so but the bottom 10% is usually going to leave anyway. And by having this system, we’re really helping a lot of people to move on if they don’t want to be here. 

So I have a few points to this. But Preston, I’m really curious about your over all thoughts about this differentiation, because that’s probably the most controversial thing in this book and about Jack Welch. 

Preston Pysh  7:26  

Yeah, so, I’m going to come across really brash in my response. I completely agree with it, to be honest with you. I am all about if you’re not a top performer, then you probably need to move on to something else. And the way Jack kind of described it in the book, which I agree with is your personality, and what you’re actually interested in might not align with the job that you’re currently holding. And if that’s the case, you’re not going to be performing to your caliber of maybe doing something else. And so that might be the reason that you’re down in the 10%. And so I think this is such a critical point to this 20-70-10 rule that he had when he was at GE. 

I think that it’s all about expectation management and communicating with your employees and being honest with your employees of where they stand and what their performance is actually looking like. And that is so hard for people to be honest. But you know what, when you are honest, as a boss, and you’re honest with your employees, and you’re telling them like, “hey, honestly, you’re probably the weakest guy on my team of 10”. And when you can say that to somebody, they’re going to do one of two things. They’re gonna say, “holy crap, I thought I was the best or I thought I was at least middle of the road”. And when they hear that candor, they’re going to do one or two things, they’re going to get a lot better, and they’re going to try very hard, or they’re going to work even worse, which even gives you more reason to move on and find a replacement for them. And the way Jack describes it in the book, and I agree with him, is you might be doing that person a favor. They might go on to their next job and it might be a perfect fit for their actual interest and their skill set. And they’re going to go on to be more productive later on where they weren’t productive for you. It was a lose-lose situation when they were working with all of you. But then when they move on, then they move on to something that’s better, you’re able to bring somebody in that’s a better fit. You’re not talking like 30% of the population here, you’re talking about the bottom 10%. If you’ve got 10 people at your worst person. 

When I think that something else that he talks about in the book, which I think is really important is that 70% are the people that are making it happen. Your top 20% they’re just making moves all the time. But that 70% that are really in the grind making things happen, you have got to keep them motivated. You have got to let them know how much you appreciate what they’re doing, sincerely, not just to say it. But to sincerely mean it because they’re the ones that are actually helping you as a leader accomplish what you’re trying to do. Having him explain it in the manner that he explains it in the book, he does a fantastic job that really justify it.

Stig Brodersen  9:58  

Some of the criticism that you can always bring up is how do you measure performance? But I guess you can say that with any management system. It’s the same as your stock investing records, like, how are you going to measure that? I mean, it’s really hard to make it concise in terms of how to measure that. And I guess you can always criticize that. But I think for a system like this to work, you need to have a lot of people. And I think it’s something that’s hard to pull off if you’re 10 people. If you’re 10 people and need to fire the worst person, like how does that work? Because the way that Jack Welch described it, sometimes I feel like he’s describing the various business units as a family. You don’t fire a family. Fortunately, I guess some people would say you can fire someone in your family, but you can’t do that. And if you have a good team, you don’t always need to fire that worst 10%, in my opinion.

Now, we can always discuss if you need to fire 10% of 50,000 people. But if you have a small *inaudible* team, how are you necessarily going to move that bad person? I don’t think that’s actually what Jack is saying. But you need to be careful about that because you also, I think you are afraid of losing a lot of trust and a lot of confidence in the mission and the vision of the company if you are sticking to that rule. At least that was what I was thinking. It’s hard to argue with performance. GE’s track records really speak for itself. So clearly, it’s working from a personal standpoint. From an emotional standpoint, I might find it hard to be working in a corporation like that. But I agree with you, Preston, in the sense that that’s probably how most organizations work.

Preston Pysh  11:40  

And I think it’s really important to highlight the point that this is true with large numbers. So let’s say you’re assessing an organization of 10,000 people. So you know, 10% of that 10,000 are probably going to be pretty bad performers for the most part. But if you do get on a team of 10, which I’ve been on teams of 10, where every single person of that 10 were absolute all-stars. And then I’ve been on other teams of 10, or five of the 10 people needed to be fired. So when you’re dealing with a small sample size, you get yourself in a unique position as a manager. If you are trying to implement this work, it’s pretty tricky. Like, there has to be exceptions to this. But then when you look at things from a macro standpoint, probably the 10% at the bottom of a large organization might need to be moved on or 5% somewhere around there. And that’s the trouble of being a leader at his level. 

Just an interesting discussion. I like the discussion. I think the key point for me is not necessarily the firing of 10% of your bottom performers, but more of providing good candid feedback on a consistent basis that addresses what the expectation is and what the actual performance was to meet that expectation. When you’re having that candid conversation and you’re doing it routinely with each one of your employees as a manager, that is so important. And you can manage in a way that you’re steering the direction of performance instead of creating rumors within the organization and all these other corrosive and toxic behaviors that you see, in more cases than not that actually occur. 

And so that was one of the other portions of this “Underneath It All” section that we were talking about. And this was coming out of chapter two where “Candor, the Biggest, Dirty Little Secret in Business” is the way Jack describes it, is that people are not candid, they’re not honest in a work environment. 

So before I throw it over to Stig on this, I have a quick comment. I’ve seen in my personal experience that people are really, really bad at framing criticism. Let me just give you an example. Let’s say that as a lower level employee, you have a manager that’s somewhat difficult to listen to negative feedback. So right out of the gate, you’re in a bad position in order to bring this up. But think of it like this, if you frame it appropriately, it will work. But so often people don’t know how to delicately frame the idea. So you could go up to the boss, you could say, “hey, I know that we’re going in this direction, and I am completely on board. I have an idea for something that might actually be more beneficial or more fruitful in the long run. And if you don’t like the idea, no big deal, we’ll just continue to execute your strategy. But here’s an idea. I’m gonna throw out an idea for you. What if we did X, Y, and Z? And the reason why if we did X, Y, and Z, it might actually produce this result. It might, it might not, but it’s just an idea, obviously, not something that we need to even make a decision on. But if you want to think about it, I’ll be more than happy to be your action officer in order to make this thing happen if you would decide to do it. If not, I’m just gonna keep on going down the path that you laid out for us. And we’ll keep trucking along with no issues”. 

And so I think when you frame things in a manner, that is, “hey, I know you’re the boss, and you’re the person making the decisions. And whatever decision you make, I’m ready to execute it. But here’s an idea. And it might be a stupid idea or whatever”. I think when you take that approach, and you frame things, you have the opportunity to be very candid in the organization. So I guess my advice to people is work on how you frame things. Think about that discussion, how you can present it. And more importantly, put yourself in the shoes of the boss that you’re getting ready to tell this to because all he hears all day is the problem of everything, and how this won’t work, and that won’t work. That’s what they hear all day long. So scope it so that you’re seeing it from that vantage point so you can frame it appropriately. And when you do that you’re going to be so successful. 

Alright, that’s the first of the four different sections. So the next section is called, “Your Company” and in this section of the book, he talks about leadership hiring, people management, parting ways, change and crisis management. So I’m going to throw this over to Stig to open up some comments.

Stig Brodersen  16:06  

So the first thing that I would like to talk about that is what great leaders are doing. And I think that Jack Welch has a really great metaphor for this. He’s saying that a great leader, he’s really like a gardener. He nurtures and grows it. And clearly he refers to people. And then he says, and only seldom they throw out the weed. And I think that’s a nice way of looking at a leader. I mean, he’s not the one in focus. He’s there to build self confidence. He’s there to coach people, but he should not be the one in focus. And then he goes on to talk about how you should give credit when things are good and take responsibility when times are bad, which is not fun. 

But most importantly, leaders should show that they care. Because leaders simply set an example for the entire organization. And this is one example, it is actually not one of Jack Welch’s example, but this is one example that I thought a lot about, especially because when you have not just an online organization, but really any organization today, you receive a lot of emails. So I’m definitely in position, I think a lot of other people’s on position where they get too much email traffic. And what should you do about it. But I have this one rule that I found to be really helpful, is that if you can really feel that you have someone on your team that spent a long, long time writing an email, and it’s evident that something is extremely important to them, you should always, always respond to that email with the same passion as the team member. That doesn’t mean that because that team member spent 30 minutes or 2 hours writing the email that you need to spend the same amount of time. But you should show in your correspondence that you really, really care because there’s nothing that kills motivation, as a leader that shows that he doesn’t care. Nothing will succeed.

Preston Pysh  18:02  

I want to start off my comments with just the titling of the fifth chapter, “Leadership, It’s Not Just About You”, because what he’s really getting down to is, are you a leader with a lot of ego? Or are you a leader that’s really humble, and it’s all about your people. 

I have worked for a lot of different people through the years. Through the military, and just all sorts of different circumstances. And I have worked for some really, I mean, amazing and talented people. And I have worked for some really bad people too. And when you have a big ego, the leadership role, the perks, all that stuff, it’s all about you. It is all about you. It’s all about those people coming to you and briefing you, and the focus is completely on feeding that ego. The person who is humble and it’s all about the people that they’re leading. They step into this role where they’re a resource manager, that’s their greatest strength is they’re sitting at the top of this organization that has enormous power and potential. And what they’re doing is they’re saying, “hey, I’m going to distribute all this authority down to the lowest level possible”. And what I found is when you charge people with responsibility, they take responsibility. But you have to give that to them. And when you do that, you’ll be amazed at how creative they can be. If you give them an end state and you give them the authority to execute, it’s amazing how creative they will be in order to achieve that end state. And a lot of times they’ll actually achieve a level way higher than the threshold that you might have even set.

Stig Brodersen  19:44  

One of the things I really enjoyed about this chapter was his discussion about how to hire people. And he said that that was probably because Jack Welch is traveling around the globe and he’s having a lot of Q&As (question and answer) with business leaders. And he also gets a lot of questions he tells in the book about how to find the best people because that’s something that all leaders struggle with. And there’s really no finite solution to go about how to find the best people. But he was asked at some point in time, “if you could only ask one question, what would you ask the candidate to a position?” He had like no, one question that he would ask. And he said that he didn’t have a chance to actually say it back then. But he thought a lot about it. So this was his answer, “I would always ask candidates what they liked the most about the previous job and what they disliked the most”. And he said that that was actually a lot more powerful than what a lot of people thought. Because, if you’re asking candidate what they really liked about their previous job is not the same as you know, the very generic question, “what’s your strength?”. It’s very, very different because what do they like? What do they feel is their purpose? What is really motivating them? Because at the end of the day, that’s what you should focus on. You’re not hiring people based on what they can’t do. You’re hiring people on what they can do or what they’re motivated to do. And this really relates back to what Preston said about happiness and freedom. There’s purpose of them being there. And you can really pinpoint that if you ask them what they like the best. 

On the other hand, when you talk about what they really dislike. First of all, if they’re saying that they can’t come up with anything, you know that they’re lying. And I want to say that in the best possible way, but I never heard about a job where there weren’t like something that people didn’t like. And I don’t think that job exists in the world. So if they’re saying they can’t come up with anything, that’s really a bad sign, because that means that they won’t have candor, which really could mess up your organization in the long run. I think it’s very important because you can figure out if you have a good match if you’re honest about yourself and your organization. If there’s a good match between that employee and your organization. And it’s just so important, this is something Jack Welch stresses, and I completely agree with, that if you can’t find that match, you shouldn’t be working together in the first place. And the way to figure out if you can work together before you actually work together is really to ask them, “what didn’t you like about your previous workplace?”.

Preston Pysh  22:23  

So I have a really quick comment before we go on to the third section here. And it’s really kind of some of the points that he’s making in chapter six, which is, “Hiring, What Winners are Made Of”. The thing that he really quickly here talks about is this concept that ideas are nice to have but the people that are really great within your organization are the people that can take those ideas and literally execute them, make them happen. He kind of makes the comment that you know, I can find any person within the organization. They’ll have 100 different ideas on how to do whatever at their level, but It’s very rare that you find the person that can just knock it out and make it happen. And so that would be my advice to the listeners. And even, I mean, just anybody figure out a way to become that person that makes things happen. And it’s hard to do. It’s very hard to do. But if you can start developing that habit where you’re just constantly knocking things down and making it happen, I’m telling you, you’re going to take your level of your game to a whole new level when you start taking that task on. 

So okay, let’s go ahead and jump to the third section here. It’s called, “Your Competition”. And this has broken down into five different chapters. It’s “Strategy, Budgeting, Organic Growth, Mergers and Acquisitions, and then Lean Six Sigma”. So Stig, over to you to kick off this section.

Stig Brodersen  23:49  

So I thoroughly enjoyed his discussion about mergers and acquisitions (M&A). And I know that this is something that a lot of people probably aren’t working with from an executive point of view. But really as an employee, it’s really interesting to observe. And the thing is that he talks about how a lot of mergers and acquisitions on paper seem to be really good. And there seems to be a lot of synergies. Because he’s saying, if you read like mission statements or looking at the values, the corporate values, use your buzz words like, great customer service, high quality products, but does that necessarily mean that you can merge or acquire another company that also focuses on high quality products? Rhetorically, he answers, of course not that’s two very, very different things. And he’s talking about how at the end of the day, it comes back to culture. If you can’t really adapt to that culture or merge those cultures, especially if you want to have like a full integration, it really doesn’t matter what it says in the mission statement. He’s really practically oriented when it comes to this. 

And I think the way he’s looking at this is very different that for instance what Warren Buffett is doing. It’s very clear from this discussion that Jack Welch is thinking like a CEO. And even though he has different business units, he’s talking about having the GE corporate culture, and how he’s growing his business, and why there’s a need to be similarities and synergies, best practices across an entire organization. This is very, very different from what you hear Warren Buffett is saying. And he’s talking about how he’s decentralizing everything he has like no people in his headquarter, and he lets everyone have their own unique culture whenever they’re doing an acquisition *inaudible* or whatever that they’re doing. And if you look at the pure numbers, Jack Welch has done very, very well in terms of growing and building GE and how he has been working with culture. But he has been dwarfed significantly by Warren Buffett and all the capital allocators in terms of providing shareholder value.

Preston Pysh  26:03  

It’s really important that we stress in relative terms because Jack Welch was what at a 20% annual return and some of these other guys were in excess of that.

Stig Brodersen  26:12  

Yeah, exactly, Preston. It’s actually good that you said that because we’re going to do another book soon. I actually really laughed when I read that because I think the first chapter that was all about how Jack Welch was actually not that good.

Preston Pysh  26:24  

No, you’re right. So here’s some context. So in a future episode here, it’s probably going to be the next one we do. There’s a book called, “Outsiders”. And this book starts off with this idea how good Jack Welch was, but these eight people were this much better than Jack Welch. And so Jack Welch was really kind of the baseline for the start of this book. And it’s just pure coincidence that we read a Jack Welch book before the other.

Stig Brodersen  26:47  

But just really to round up this topic. And I think, this is just another approach. If you’re a really good capital allocator, you can have great results. Apparently better than Jack Welch. If you acquire a successful company and just leave it alone and just have the management send back a fat check to the headquarter and have that brilliant capital allocator allocate that capital to something else, that can be a really, really successful strategy. But thinking like Jack Welch, thinking like a CEO, you need to have focused on how to merge those cultures. And I think the discussion he has here in the book is very interesting.

Preston Pysh  27:24  

I think it was a really good discussion that he put in the book. And the thing that I really liked about the discussion was the fact that he really acknowledges how detrimental acquisitions can be for a business. And how, I forget what the stat was that he threw out, but more of these fail than they add value to a company in the long term. And he talks about “deal heat”, and how once you start marching down this path of an acquisition, it’s really difficult to kind of reverse that. And I immediately whenever I started hearing this discussion, his book, I immediately thought of that psychological impact in the book, “Influence”, where when you make one small commitment to do something, your likelihood of doing a larger commitment later on greatly increases. And I think for a lot of these CEOs that aren’t necessarily attuned to these psychological behaviors, they start at a very initial phase, start going down this acquisition path with a certain company, they start eyeing it up, or they start running numbers on it. And then they become so committed to this thing, that no matter what, they’re going to make it work, and they’re going to somehow figure out a way to fit it into their organization. 

In the first three years, it kind of works. They’re still seeing the top line from the company. But then 10 years later, it’s a total disaster and not something that was ever really creating real value. And Jack talks about it in the book, he talks about this idea of “deal heat”. He doesn’t necessarily tie it to a psychological piece. But I think it’s a very, very good discussion, and it’s something that you don’t necessarily see from a lot of CEOs talking about it.

Stig Brodersen  29:01  

So one high point of this section that was the, “Mergers and Acquisitions”. The other thing was “Six Sigma”. Now Preston, I know you have a black belt in this, so I’ll just kick it over to you and have you outline the benefits of this concept.

Preston Pysh  29:15  

The essence of Lean Six Sigma is this, it will take a process, and it will improve the process. And the thing that it’s really focusing on is mitigating and minimizing variance within the process. So, you know, you think of a Rube Goldberg machine, it’s like this super complex thing that makes a marble go from one end to the other and it pops out some toast or something crazy. That would be a process that is something that is very complex. It has all these different moving parts and at the end of the day, you have all these “non value added activities” inside of that process. And as a Lean Six Sigma person, your job is to come in, assess the process that currently exists, in practice, and you got to find those non value added activities, and you got to eliminate them out of that system. Because over time, people come in, managers change, more people are added, they’re taken away. This person is given a task. And next thing you know, you have this big giant, awkward moving process. And some of those steps inside of there are not even required at all. 

So Lean Six Sigma is a tool to go in there and identify all these areas and remove them. So you become very efficient over time. When you do this, your variance, let’s say you’re a company that’s producing tools or something on a manufacturing line, and you have every thousand parts, there’s a bad one that has to be thrown out in the materials wasted. In Lean Six Sigma, your job is to reduce those number of defects and decrease your variance through statistics. And I’ll tell you as a person that’s been trained in this stuff, it is insanely powerful. It has a very negative connotation within business for the simple reason that a lot of people see these Lean Six Sigma people coming in and they immediately start thinking, oh my god, there’s going to be cuts, so I’m going to get laid off because they’re going to think that I’m a non value added activity inside of this process. 

And I think that at the end of the day, the really important part is if the company would implement efficiencies, and it would be human labor, that can now be resourced into some other area that might need to be plussed up. And so I think people need to look at this with a maybe different vantage point and really kind of embrace the idea that this is a value creating thing, especially as a shareholder. Oh my gosh, this is big for shareholders. But I can see why I can kind of have that stigma from an employee standpoint, but very amazing, useful tool that is completely based in statistical proof on proving out a new and improved process. 

So let’s go ahead and move into the last section, “This is Your Career”. This section is broken down into four different chapters, “The Right Job, Getting Promoted, Hard Spots, and Work-Life Balance”.

Stig Brodersen  32:09  

I think almost every work in this session I disagreed with from a personal standpoint. But I want to say this from the best possible way because that doesn’t mean that it’s nonsense, or it’s wrong what he’s saying. It’s just very important to understand that when it comes to careers, it’s really a question about what your personal values are. And Jack Welch is very honest about his own approach. And he’s talking about how he never really saw his family whenever he was building his career. And he actually expected his employees not to see their families either for that simple reason that he couldn’t understand that someone would rather be with their family than being at their job. I just found that to be so profound that that was his point of view and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, from personal standpoint, I think it’s weird that you want to have kids if you don’t want to raise them. Clearly that was how Jack Welch was looking at things. It was nice that he had some kids and that’s all going well, but okay, let’s get back to work.

Preston Pysh  33:11  

So I agree with you on everything you just said 100%. When I got to this last section, let me make sure I say this correctly. Everything that he said, I agreed with as far as how you would achieve success in becoming an executive from lower management to the executive level. What he said you’ve got to do in order to get there I completely agree with. Is it something that I’m interested in going down that path and acting in this manner to achieve? Absolutely not, like, not even close. In fact, I want to kind of do the exact opposite. So I’m with you, Stig. I can understand it, that doesn’t mean that it’s right or wrong. But for me, I listened to this last part of the book, and I was kind of nodding my head like yeah, you’re right. This is what it does to take to get to that level. This is what these people are looking for. This is what you do have to do in order to get that promotion. And it is giving you good sound advice if that’s something that you really want to achieve. But if you are a person who really wants to spend a lot more time with your family than you do at work, and all those kind of trade offs that some people make, and other people don’t, I could see how you could take the last part of the book in a very negative connotation.

Stig Brodersen  34:25  

Yeah, I think it comes down to what we discussed here at the beginning of episode, Preston, in terms of, do you think like an owner or do you think like an employee? And what he’s basically saying is that, well, as you’re saying, how do you go from that lowly employee to the CEO? And yeah, he probably has a lot of great advice for that. And just to mention, some of them, he’s talking about how you should make it a purpose for you to make your boss look smarter. I think a lot of people will probably have a hard time feeling that would be their purpose, whenever they get up in the morning. But he said, if you do that, you will probably get ahead and he’s probably right. He’s talking about how you should have a positive attitude. I agree with that. And he’s talking about how you should make other people like you. And he’s talking about the likability factor. And different things you can do, so more people will like you. And I conceptually disagree with this in terms of living your life in a way that you want to impress other people, and basically doing it for so many other people other than yourself. Because he’s talking about if you consistently are doing that someone will figure out how good you are, and reward you, and just think that’s a thin straw to hold on to.

Preston Pysh  35:36  

It’s almost like if you want to achieve this, you have to change who you are to this model in order to do it.

Stig Brodersen  35:43  

Yeah, because he has this entire section about promotions and that is how promotions work. You’re waiting for other people to like you and to reward you, and you are waiting for permission from other people. And I think if that’s the way you work as human being I think it’s probably okay. But you should also just be very conscious about not being a victim. If you’re into the corporate structure because it’s easier to be a victim saying, I’m doing everything I can for my boss to make him look smarter, but I’m not getting a reward. I guess it could be easy to become bitter if that’s the approach that you want to have.

Preston Pysh  36:17  

So that really wraps up our comments for the book, “Winning” by Jack Welch. This is a good book. 

All right. So at this point in the show, Stig and I are going to do something a little bit different than what we normally discuss and do. With that said, Stig and I are actively trying to think of ways that we can actually add some extra value to people that listen to the show. And we’re trying to design products and services around our platform. And one of the ideas that we both came up with that we feel is really going to be a win-win, not only for us, but also more importantly for our audience, is this idea of consulting. And so up until this point in time we’ve been doing the show for the last two years, but we really don’t have any major products or services that we offer outside of people listening to our show each week. So the idea that we came up with from a consulting standpoint is we think that an area where we can add a lot of impact is on the job interview market. So him and I were talking, and this is the one thing that we think is really somewhere that we can focus. 

So you got all these people all around the US in particular, and I’m sure this is happening internationally as well, that are doing these things called case studies. And what a case study is, is when you go in for a job interview, you’ll sit down with your future employer. And now this could be for a big consulting firm like a Bain & Company or McKinsey & Company, or it could be for any Fortune 500 company. But what a lot of these companies are doing now are things called case studies. So I’m gonna throw it over to Stig. He’s gonna talk to you a little bit about what a case study is.

Stig Brodersen  37:56  

Basically, companies are testing your ability to think like an owner. So let me just give you an example of a case study that you might be asked. So this consulting company that might have a customer, and you will basically just get the case that they have used with the customer. So basically, they will just replace the name with some generic name, but it’s a real business problem. The client might have problem with a declining gross margin for a given business unit. And you asked to provide solutions for that. Or there might be even more specific and say, well, we’ll have a decline in the gross profit, and it’s because of problems with managing our inventory. And then based on very limited information, you’re asked to outline two different approaches of how to fix it, and then how to present to the management.

Preston Pysh  38:43  

And so I just have something to piggyback on to what Stig is saying here. So the thing that’s hard for I think a lot of people that are maybe coming out of their current job and they’re looking for a new job, and they’re served one of these problems, one of these case studies in the interview for the new company is, they might have a difficult time with that owner’s perspective of being able to tie marketing with finance with operations and kind of mixing all that stuff together in order to provide a really good response. And that’s the stuff that Stig and I really focus on every single week is is that mindset, that owner’s mindset. And so that’s why we really think that maybe this is a great direction for us to be able to provide a service, a consulting service on an individual one-on-one basis with people that are interested in us providing you a case study, interacting with you, and providing feedback on how you can improve and better prepare for these types of interviews. So if you’re an MBA candidate at a college right now, or you’re somebody that’s just looking to go get employed at a Fortune 500 company, I think this is something that is going to add tremendous value as you go through that process.

Stig Brodersen  39:54  

And Preston, this is really an interesting part in terms of solving these cases because I remember back in the days when I was applying for a job, and I was in finance. So I was kind of sure that I would be asked a lot of finance question and clearly, yes, I mean, if you are applying for a position in M&A, you are asked a lot of M&A questions. But the thing is that if you have a client they don’t think of you as a student, I mean, you’re not thinking, “oh, you are a marketing consultant, or you’re solely an M&A consultant”. They’re like, we have an entire company as compiled by a lot of different departments, you need to solve our problems. And basically that might be outlining eight points that you need to factor in. You might have two issues in accounting, two in marketing, and then of course in M&A. And you really need to be able to think like an owner, and that’s really where we think can help you.

Preston Pysh  40:46  

Alright guys, so this is the new service that Stig and I are working on and it’s one-on-one coaching. So if you are looking to have some one-on-one coaching, go to tipprep.com. That’s TIP prep, as in preparation dot com. And you can get more information by going to that domain. We’ll also have links on our navigation bar if you’re interested in learning more about this service. And we would love to see you guys come over to the page and check it out. And more importantly, if you’re not in the job market, or you’re looking to transition, but you have a friend that is, please do us a favor, we would greatly appreciate your support by giving them that person a hand off to that domain.

Stig Brodersen  41:27  

So before we run off this episode, I would just remind you that if you want to read our executive summary, you can subscribe to our newsletter. Not only will you get the executive summary of “Winning”, you also get that for all future books that we’re doing here on the podcast. We don’t send any spam. The only things that you’ll get from us that’s the executive summaries, and our thoughts about the current market conditions. Also, if you’re interested in listening to the books on Audible like Preston and me, you also have a chance to subscribe for free on a website and you can download your first book for free. 

But guys, that was all that we have for this week’s episode. We will see see each other again next week.

Outro  42:02  

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