What 2025 Taught Us About Leadership Under Pressure

Cole Abbott

[0:00:06]

Happy New Year.

Mark Abbott

[0:00:07]

Happy New Year.

Cole Abbott

[0:00:08]

We took a little break.

Mark Abbott

[0:00:10]

Yep.

Cole Abbott

[0:00:11]

On the Founders Framework side of the podcast.

Mark Abbott

[0:00:15]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:00:17]

Not that it's too related, but launched the Impact Owens podcast on a. On a new channel. Then we'll be supporting all of our EOS related and supporting content on the. The new channel. And so you'll see this channel go under a little bit of a rebrand from, you know, 90 to founders framework and really just focus on that stuff. And the. The new channel will be everything for the foreseeable future. We. Everything related to the EOS world and the product 90io that supports companies running on Eos. So we'll link to that below. Exciting with Chris Snyder and Christine Watts. And soon look out for a crossover event of the decade between Founders Framework and Impact moments. And in those episodes, we'll get into the thought behind the split and what we're trying to go for and what the audiences look like for those two podcasts.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:27]

Looking forward to it.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:28]

All right.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:28]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:29]

So 25. Yeah. Was an interesting year for us. It was.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:35]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:36]

I think we, we had some, you know, we say it was a win or a learn.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:42]

Yeah, definitely a learning.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:44]

We learned a lot. Yeah.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:45]

Learned a lot.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:45]

We'll say that.

Mark Abbott

[0:01:46]

Yeah. I. I learned a lot. Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:01:48]

Yeah, I think we all learned a lot. Yeah. Which is. I'm very grateful for now that it wasn't without some real struggles and really a few hard decisions along the way. More than a few. Right. So to summarize where your head is as a segue that you like to employ during our weekly meetings, where's your head coming out of 20, 25?

Mark Abbott

[0:02:15]

Well, number one. Geez. So many different things. I'm extraordinarily excited about the work we're doing. Number one, I am humbled by some of the experiences that we had in 25. I always try to be a learner, and by definition. Right. When I think about humility, I say humility is the recognition that in three short years you'll be a little bit embarrassed by who you are today. So I think I've always known that I'll be embarrassed by who I am in a few years. And so in some respects, you know, I think relatively speaking, I've embraced humility for a long time on the one hand. On the other hand, sometimes it's a little bit, you know, the lessons you learn are a little bit harder than you think they should be. Given all the experience that I had 44 plus years of, you know, being in the business world and 41 years of actually Being a leader, which is crazy in the business world, but, but, you know, I think that last year, as I said, I've learned and we learned some stuff that was, that was hard. I think one of the things that, you know, I struggled with is it felt like we had a lot of change that we needed to make and that there was a pretty large spectrum of people in terms of comfort with the changes that were going on. And that pushed me down a rabbit hole on culture. You know, I'm. It seems like I'm constantly learning more and more about culture, even though I think I've studied the heck out of the idea.

Cole Abbott

[0:04:25]

It's fun having a rabbit hole that goes on forever. Forever.

Mark Abbott

[0:04:28]

Right. And so, you know, we've, on this podcast, we've talked previously about the two primary cultures being agreements based in relationship based, and that a higher order version of those two cultures is principles based. Right. So basically you have those three cultures, the two primary cultures, and the one which I would say is the more evolved version of either culture, although the agreements based or the prince or the relationship based cultures, because they tend to end up having sort of authoritarian or single state sort of parties, sometimes it's hard for them to get to the principal base because sometimes the principles don't work for them and they just want to shove them aside. And so that kind of makes it all kind of fall apart. So I think you get more principle based, healthy cultures coming out of the agreement side. But I digress. But with regard to going deeper on culture, what became clear to me is that when you think about company culture in particular, I ended up sort of developing this sort of nine box framework which has to do with levels of intensity and levels of ambiguity. And the levels of intensity are, you know, super intense. You call it like crank cultures and you go all the way down to lifestyle and. And then in the middle, just call it balanced. And then the reality is, is that, you know what, if you think about what drives culture historically, right. From an evolutionary perspective or the development of human societies, it's the environment, right? Right. If the environment's great, easy to live in, you can wake up and go out and go fishing and bring it home and enjoy it with your family, and the next day go do it all over again. That's a relatively simple, very easy to live in environment. And you don't need to do a lot of planning, you don't need to do a lot of savings, you don't need to do a lot of things that you need to do when you're 30,000 miles north and winter's coming and harsh conditions and you need to worry about not just protecting the elements, the food from the elements, but the food from people who, tribes who potentially didn't prepare for winter like you did. So it's just much more complicated in sort of the agreements based cultures. So what I sort of experienced last year was that our culture, we always sort of tried to have a balanced culture in the middle in terms of ambiguity and intensity. But I think that with everything going on we had, we have a lot of ambiguity in society with AI and everything that's going on. And I also think with everything we're working on right now, there's stuff that we're working on, it's really super clear what we need to do and there's things where we're, we're experimenting. And so I think the level of ambiguity within the organization increased a little bit over the last year. And for some people that's hard because they'd really like things to be very super clear and understandable. So you have these nine core nine box right, which is the upper right hand corner is high, intense, high ambiguity. And then the lower left hand corner is sort of lifestyle, low intensity, low levels of ambiguity. It's all pretty straightforward. And I feel like, you know.

Cole Abbott

[0:07:56]

For.

Mark Abbott

[0:07:56]

A host of reasons, ambiguity increased last year. It also, it increased because the, generally speaking, the economy, the business, the companies we serve, the coaching community that we serve, it's all coming underneath a little bit of pressure. I think, you know, the coaching industry, if you, we, you know, based upon all of our relationships with what, over a thousand coaches, it's just a little bit harder last year for them to go out and get clients. And, and so there's, there's a little bit of softness in terms of the new business that came into us last year from the coaching community. And generally speaking, if you look in our portfolio of companies with 18,000 companies, we can see that a lot of companies aren't hiring, they're not expanding like they used to. So the business was softer than we had hoped for last year in terms of growth. Right. We still grew nicely, relatively speaking, but we had hired for more growth than we experienced. And in the end the implications was we just didn't need everybody we had. And I hate the fact that we had to let some great people go, but it was just the thing you had to do because we always talk about having high trust relationships with all of our stakeholders and one of our ideal stakeholders is our investors. And so we need to be Very prudent with regard to our cash. We can't just throw cash away and just to keep people in the company that we don't really need anymore in terms of the number of people. So last year was hard and, and you know, and you look at, in hindsight, we could have done certain things better, but relatively speaking, you know, we did everything we could to take care of people. It's just one of those things where, you know, you can never do it as well as you would love to, but in particular, some of the stuff that we did later in the year, you know, I think we did it as well as we could, plus or minus. Right. In terms of how we did it, how we took care of people. But letting go of people is always hard. Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:10:05]

I think if you look at where we thought things were going to be a year ago and where they are, it's very different.

Mark Abbott

[0:10:12]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:10:12]

And the level, going back to the conversation of ambiguity, the level of ambiguity associated with where we were, where the vision was heading a year ago compared to, you know, what was that threshold of where people really started to struggle. I mean, half in terms, it was probably twice as complicated as it ended up being. And even as much as it ended up being was overwhelming for a lot of people. Right. Which was really interesting. And so naturally that made the first six months of last year, just looking back, crazy.

Mark Abbott

[0:10:51]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:10:52]

A lot of things happened, a lot of learns there, and it seemed like we took the middle of the year to learn those lessons and I think finished the year about as strongly as we could, given what had built up to that.

Mark Abbott

[0:11:09]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:11:11]

And so, and I'm. And I think all of that, and I think that that strong finish contributed or contributes to what feels like a. As stable and healthy of a culture as we've had in years, both, you know, company wide, generally, you know, as a whole and at the leadership level.

Mark Abbott

[0:11:34]

Yeah. And it's interesting too because, you know, we were two years ago, we were 98% score on great place to work. And, and you could, you would say that the culture was really strong there, but what it was was.

Cole Abbott

[0:11:53]

It, it.

Mark Abbott

[0:11:54]

Was a culture that was filled with people who loved working at 90, number one. But there were subcultures and those subcultures were, were created by, you know, it just happens when you bring people in from other organizations, they come in and they, they start to sort of, you know. Yeah, we all have the same core values, but they have different emphasis. And in particular, one of the areas we've talked about, maybe we haven't on this podcast is sort of high care versus high performance. And so we had some subcultures that were more about high care than high performance. And then you had other parts of the organization that I think were really balanced about high care and high performance. And so you started to have tension and it started to show up sort of late 24, early 25, in part because we'd gone from a hundred to almost 200 people. And so all of a sudden you're like, ooh, what's. Like something's, something's not working anymore. And, and so that started to come out and we started to see it and feel it and appreciate it and then started to address it. And that's when, know when you started to clean that stuff up and really say, no, this is one company. We're high care, we're high performance. And then you start peeling back the layers and realize that we had, you know, parts of the organization that were, you know, running super hard in other parts of the organization that were running at half speed and where we just didn't need all the people we had.

Cole Abbott

[0:13:28]

You start to have silos form culturally when that happens, because you're gonna have the performance oriented teams or it in our case, and I would imagine this is probably the case of a lot of companies, individuals. You're gonna have more high performance individuals than you're gonna have high care individuals.

Mark Abbott

[0:13:48]

Right, right.

Cole Abbott

[0:13:48]

That doesn't social. That doesn't have a necessity for socialization like the care stuff does.

Mark Abbott

[0:13:54]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:13:54]

But you'll have individuals and teams in the high performance category that just don't want to interact or work with the high care teams.

Mark Abbott

[0:14:02]

Yeah, yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:04]

Which is something we're still working through in terms of, you know, on turning over stones and seeing if. If that's something that's still an issue.

Mark Abbott

[0:14:14]

Feels pretty cleaned up. Feels pretty clean.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:18]

And there's going to be. There's always an element of, well, what's the lowest rung?

Mark Abbott

[0:14:22]

Right, right.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:23]

That's just always, always going to get higher. And so where is it now? And I think that's a good thing. Right. It's always like, what's, what's the big issue? Go address that issue. And if we keep doing that, we'll be in a really good spot. You know, you always say the fire drills. Do we have any fire drills?

Mark Abbott

[0:14:37]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:37]

And in my perspective would be, what's the biggest fire drill? There's always something that's bothering you.

Mark Abbott

[0:14:42]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:42]

And if something's not bothering you, then that's an issue in itself.

Mark Abbott

[0:14:46]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:46]

And what's that thing when. Let's go, let's go fix it. But for a while it felt like this is objectively bad and it's causing pain.

Mark Abbott

[0:14:52]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:14:53]

And now it just feels like it's a little. In some places if it is still there at this point. Right. It's just a little bit irritating. Right. And it's like, what was.

Mark Abbott

[0:15:03]

Sometimes it's like, why can't we go faster? Why can't we get through this more swiftly? But you know, the reality is, is this company is a collection of, you know, people we love. And you. Sometimes it's, you know, you have to either say things seven times. Right. Or you have to work on things.

Cole Abbott

[0:15:24]

Three or four times because.

Mark Abbott

[0:15:26]

Okay, yeah, this is kind of what we're talking about. But no, we need to go a little level higher. And then you have like the effort we're doing right now in terms of documenting the three core journeys which took us well over. I think, I think we started it in September.

Cole Abbott

[0:15:51]

It depends on defined start the thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:15:53]

Right. Well, that exercise with the third party that we brought in. Right. And they just finished the work on that. And we know that that work is going to be important for a couple of other things that we want to work on right now. And so these are examples of where, you know, it just takes time.

Cole Abbott

[0:16:17]

There's times where it's very important to think things through and talk things out. And there's times where it's very important to just get stuff done. And being able to discern the difference in any given scenario is very important.

Mark Abbott

[0:16:27]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:16:28]

And what's the one?

Mark Abbott

[0:16:29]

It's a, it's a two way one.

Cole Abbott

[0:16:31]

One.

Mark Abbott

[0:16:31]

It's a two. Two way, one doorway door concept as an example. Yep.

Cole Abbott

[0:16:37]

And. And that's a thing. But we, you know, all that says, there's are some of us that tend to just be impatient with slowness.

Mark Abbott

[0:16:47]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:16:49]

And it's like maturing in this world is realizing that some things just take time.

Mark Abbott

[0:16:55]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:16:55]

But also some things don't really need to take that much time. Right. And you need to go figure those things out and really get your hands dirty and those kind of things and have possibly uncomfortable conversations. And historically it was it a year ago.

Mark Abbott

[0:17:13]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:17:15]

Those hard conversations were really hard. Like those would be taxing conversations.

Mark Abbott

[0:17:19]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:17:20]

Now I don't get that feeling. There is an issue, is something challenging. We can talk about it.

Mark Abbott

[0:17:27]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:17:28]

I don't. There's not anyone in the company where I would feel uncomfortable having that kind of hard conversation.

Mark Abbott

[0:17:33]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:17:34]

And that's really, really good.

Mark Abbott

[0:17:36]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:17:36]

Because that is inevitable that those are going to happen and you're gonna have to make hard decisions.

Mark Abbott

[0:17:40]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:17:41]

And ideally, right, we want it to be a two way door. We like, all right, we go this way. Doesn't work, we can walk back. But when it is a one way door and sometimes you know there's a fire coming and you need to go through that and it's like there's two doors, which one are you gonna go through? You have to make the decision very quickly. Right. And you have to be in the right head space and everything to be able to make those decisions with conviction and with the trust of the team.

Mark Abbott

[0:18:01]

And I think a related issue has been, which we've talked about a lot here and elsewhere, is that back to the high care versus high performance. One of the things that we over indexed on, I believe, and we're still not clean with yet is, you know, we. Everybody loves to understand what's going on. Everybody loves to be involved, everybody loves to be heard. And so, you know, you end up sometimes with meetings with 20 people in the meeting and that's just not right, the best way to run a company sometimes most the time, obviously there's meetings where all hands, where we're explaining, taking questions, et cetera. But when it comes to actually getting work done or getting solving problems. Solving problems. 20 people in a room. Right. Is usually doesn't work out well because every, you know, because either they're, they're. Because it's important for them to be there and their voice matters. But if you have 20 people whose voices matter, how do you, how does that all work? I mean just, just time wise in, in a, in a, in a 60 minute meeting or a 40 minute meeting or something like that.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:15]

When you. And, and I think the time wise thing is more objective than most people would give it credit for because if you have 20 people and you try to divvy up the time between 20 people, well that, okay, so now 15 of the people are just going to be sitting there for halftime in silence and then they're going to be uninterested. And if you're not engaged and present in the meeting and you shouldn't be in a meeting.

Mark Abbott

[0:19:35]

That's right.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:36]

And so it just, that rule should force you to think things through differently, like really evaluate do we need this many people?

Mark Abbott

[0:19:44]

Why? Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:44]

Why do we break this into two things? We just stagger it out like, and then what is the purpose of it? Yeah, the leadership meeting I feel like is basically Just to get you on the same page and be able to have those conversations.

Mark Abbott

[0:19:56]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:19:57]

And so that is a larger meeting, but it's 16 people, which is, you know, kind of what I think is the cutoff. And that's not why it's 16 people, but it just happens to work that way at this point.

Mark Abbott

[0:20:06]

But 16 people on this.

Cole Abbott

[0:20:08]

16 people. Because it's the two pizza thing is Bezos, Right?

Mark Abbott

[0:20:11]

Yeah, exactly.

Cole Abbott

[0:20:12]

You can't feed a meeting people in a meeting with two pizzas. It's too big.

Mark Abbott

[0:20:15]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:20:16]

And so usually pizzas are eight slices. So that's 16 slices total.

Mark Abbott

[0:20:19]

There you go.

Cole Abbott

[0:20:20]

16 people, right? Yeah. Which is dumb. But that's. I like that. And it works. And a lot of these things and I, I feel like a lot of people in our audience and more so in, in the EOS deep audience. It's just a lot of it is discipline. Not like you want to do this thing. This feels better. But it's like I got to do this. You got, you got to do this way. It's gonna suck.

Mark Abbott

[0:20:41]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:20:41]

Just gotta do it though.

Mark Abbott

[0:20:42]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:20:43]

You wanna have more people in the thing. You want people to feel engaged, whatever. It's like that's not the right method to do that.

Mark Abbott

[0:20:47]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:20:48]

And it's gonna be harder for you. Cause I know you'd love to just have everyone in the meeting and so you don't need to send out a cascading message and do all this stuff and send stuff over and have a follow up. But no, we need to be tactical in that sort of situation. Obviously if it's an all hands or you know, going to the state of the company or something like that. Yeah, no, we're here to just share, share. You will go through and take questions. It's more of a forum than a. Yeah. Probably situation room kind of thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:21:16]

Yeah. But I think going back to the sort of lessons learned last year and where we are right now, as I say, I think the. One of the things that we're still working a little bit on is, you know, is getting down to less than 16 people in certain meetings. We don't do it a lot and anymore. But we still have them. Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:21:36]

We're still going to have issues of multiple people being accountable for stuff. Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:21:40]

Hopefully not. We do.

Cole Abbott

[0:21:42]

It's a thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:21:42]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:21:43]

Came up last week.

Mark Abbott

[0:21:44]

All right.

Cole Abbott

[0:21:44]

From. From, from people who know the thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:21:47]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:21:47]

And it's just, it's. It's going to be a thing of. It's a hard rule and some people with a lot of Rules. There's exceptions.

Mark Abbott

[0:21:55]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:21:56]

And sometimes it's. I, I view the accountability thing like being directly accountable for something. Yes. That's not really a rule. That's more of a principle and a natural law.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:05]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:05]

In terms of someone has to own the thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:07]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:08]

We don't have two kings or two presidents or whatever.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:11]

Right, right.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:11]

Pick your situation.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:13]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:13]

And then any, you know, show about business or movie or whatever, or politics, like. No, put two people in the seat and see how that thing like CO CEOs, that goes great.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:23]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:23]

Never works. Right. And there's a reason it works. It never works. And usually there's an element of insecurity and lack of having to make a hard decision there that leads to that sort of thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:32]

You know, Goldman used to have. Right. CO CEOs, but the reality was there's.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:37]

Different functions for those.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:38]

They were, they, they play different roles.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:40]

Yes, right. And you can have the same sort of thing and it's like, then you're playing more of a status, like we're equal status but we do different stuff.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:46]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:22:46]

And it's like, sure, sure, you can, you could do that.

Mark Abbott

[0:22:49]

But ultimately, you know, I think even I'd have to go back, but you know, there's probably sort of the equivalent of a visionary and an integrator, even back in the, in the Goldman days when they were doing this. Right. And obviously in the eos world, we all know that you have the visionary and the integrator and you need to make sure that they're really well aligned in terms of, you know, what each person is accountable for. That's a good example of things last year where, you know, I personally was shocked to see some stuff where it's like coming from very senior, very experienced people where they're like, well, we're both accountable. Like we've been talking about this for years. How can you both be accountable?

Cole Abbott

[0:23:35]

I don't know about it for years. We don't need to get into that. Yeah. But I do think that was the thing we. Earlier on you were doing a lot of research on high performing companies and one of the frameworks they use, that being one of them. You know, Apple's big on the directly, as they say, directly responsible individual.

Mark Abbott

[0:23:53]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:23:53]

Other companies have their phrasing, but we say just you're accountable or more specifically, who's the directly accountable individual.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:00]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:00]

Because that really gets the point across because you, you can't spin that into multiple people. Right, right. Fundamentally there was a lot of lessons learned like that.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:08]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:09]

You know, meeting size Care versus performance.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:12]

Accountability.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:13]

Accountability. I think racy.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:16]

Right. We got. We're still.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:18]

I. Yeah. You know, I re. I have my issues with racy.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:20]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:21]

Don't think it's a fundamentally bad thing.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:22]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:23]

I just think it's. It's just not where it needs to be as a framework to be super useful. I think R C A R CI I think that solves a lot of problems.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:32]

Yeah. Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:33]

It's descending order of.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:34]

I, I agree with you.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:35]

Ownership.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:36]

Yeah. Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:37]

To I guess bring this rather short episode to a close.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:42]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:24:44]

What would you say, you know, from. From your perspective, three biggest learns or let's not, let's go three biggest struggles for you as a founder and CEO.

Mark Abbott

[0:24:56]

Last year, I believe the culture deteriorated because of this conflict between some parts of the organization over indexing on high care and other parts of the organization trying to do a good job of high care, high performance. Because I don't believe any part of the organization's ever been low care, period. Right. I think we. I mean, we. Everybody in the comp. I can think of one person, maybe, maybe two in our entire history. We. I think we said this before. Right. That was just a bad cultural fit. Right. So we've. So the cultural fit side for the. For the vast majority. Right. There's always. Care's always been there, but it was the over indexing on care, protecting people.

Cole Abbott

[0:25:53]

And I think that there's a narrow scope of care versus a broader scope of care.

Mark Abbott

[0:25:56]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:25:57]

I care about my care about the team, the company. Right. All these things. And I understand how all these pieces interact.

Mark Abbott

[0:26:02]

Yeah.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:02]

And I'm going to make this work accordingly. So if there's someone on the team that's not performing, it's like that's not high care for someone on the other team and whatever.

Mark Abbott

[0:26:10]

Right.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:10]

That's just you caring more about the people in proximity to you and more than. More importantly the perception of those things. Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:26:20]

And. And it's because of this that we came up with. I came up with the succeed or escalate concept last year. Right. Which is, look, if there's an issue in this company, Right. We need to take care of the boat.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:31]

Right.

Mark Abbott

[0:26:31]

We're all on that boat. That boat. It's essential that this boat is properly maintained and heading in the right direction. And if it's not heading in the right direction or it's not properly maintained, we're going to have problems. And so no one in a boat would walk by a hole in the side where water's coming in and not figure out how to either fix it or go get someone to help them fix it. Because you know that if you don't do anything, you're all screwed.

Cole Abbott

[0:26:58]

I think a lot of people would do that, but not, not at 90. I would just say general population. There's a lot of people, like, I don't want to deal with that. Screw it. I'm going to hope someone else discovers it. Yeah, but because they, because they're not.

Mark Abbott

[0:27:08]

Sitting on a boat that'll sink if.

Cole Abbott

[0:27:10]

They, if they are. I, I genuinely. There's a significant population that would just go down that is not my job. And then just keep walking and hope somebody else will, will find a thing. I think that that is a. Okay, I, you're, you're probably right. Group of people.

Mark Abbott

[0:27:24]

You're probably right. So. But the point is, is that, you know, there were a bunch of issues in terms of the cultural stuff. And you know, in hindsight, it was like, come on, guys, you know, you should have said something, right? Whether it was, you're basically, you're not even working, you know, 50% of the time because you don't have any work to be done when everybody else is scrambling, right. I mean, it's like, come on, right? Tell us if you have extra capacity. We've talked about this for a while, right? And so you had, you had that stuff. And, and, and so succeed or escalate came out of all that. And so, so I would say succeed or escalate was a thing that we really dug into last year. I would say really getting back to high, high care and high performance and getting there. Really. The another thing is that is a part of this whole exercise that I went through on culture. You know, one of the things that kept nagging at me was I've always, always for years and years I've been fascinated by employee archetypes. I discovered James Roots book on employee archetypes and really understanding that if you want to build a healthy culture, you are going to have his six archetypes. And so how do you create a culture? How do you create a learning environment? How do you create a place where people who genuinely are just artisans, they just embrace them, but don't make the artisan feel they have to become a team leader or 50 plus? 60% of the people out there don't want to be managers these days. So how do you, how do you embrace and, and, and, and respect and help people grow who are, you know, really of the artisan archetype or of the operator archetype? Because both of those are really more about just relatively straightforward work where they don't want to take on a lot more responsibility, which is. Which is awesome. So I think there's a number of things sort of that. That I learned last year. The archetypes thing, we haven't really fully rolled it out, but I think it's an important thing. We've obviously done work on racy and directly accountable stuff. We've worked on understanding the nature of the culture and then helping people understand that, you know, our culture does have ambiguity. There's a reason why resilience was one of those core values from the. From day one and helping people understand that, especially today with all the things that we're working on, that there's a reason inquisitiveness was a core value from day one. Right. You know, learning velocity, especially in a company that's embracing AI and incorporating AI into the platform is very important. So, you know, I think that, you know, the cultural stuff, several different dimensions, the accountability stuff, several different dimensions, the getting tighter on, on, on, on, on who needs to be involved in meetings. Right. Those are three off the top of my head. What else can you think of off the top of your head?

Cole Abbott

[0:30:35]

I think that's a good way to end it. Sorry to cut your monologue. It's fine. Yeah. But now we are unfortunately out of time. All right, so, yeah, short and sweet. Happy New Year.

Mark Abbott

[0:30:50]

Happy New Year.