Steve  0:09  
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Steve  0:51  
Welcome to the At Work In America show. My name is Steve Boese. I am so excited for today's show. You don't have to watch the news for more than three minutes to feel like, man, the world is moving so fast. Things are changing so fast. I'm not sure how I can keep up, both at work, maybe even in our personal lives. It is a crazy time for sure, particularly in organizations who are dealing with technological, cultural, markets, society, all kinds of change, all kinds of disruption. We have, I think the best person to talk about those topics and how you can help your organization, both as a leader, but also as just someone in the organization and personally manage through disruption. Manage through change. We have Patrick Leddin here. He is a leadership expert and author. He's a disruption strategist. He talks with some of the leading companies in the world about these topics and helping them manage their way through it. I got to meet him last fall at the HR tech conference when he did a keynote along with James Patterson, his co author, on the book, disrupt everything and win, which I see behind Patrick, there too, some copies. Patrick, welcome. Great to see you again.

Patrick Leddin  2:05  
Oh, Steve, great to see you. Thanks so much for having me excited to talk to the folks today.

Steve  2:08  
Yeah, we're, we're very excited when I heard we had the opportunity to talk to us. Oh, yeah, Patrick, I remember, you know, we met at HR tech, and we had a great conversation.

Patrick Leddin  2:16  
Actually, Steve, if you look, if you look over my shoulder, that's actually HR tech right there in those black and white photos. That's actually us sitting on stage there, and it's James Patterson and myself standing behind stage getting ready to walk on. And I gave, I gave him the same pictures as a gift over the holidays this year because I thought it was such a great print.

Steve  2:35  
He was great, and he was funny too, because obviously, big, big celebrity sold many millions of books, right? Super smart, funny guy. And one of the first things he said to me was, I was moderating, right, and asking you know, questions of you and James during the conference. And the first thing, one of the first things he said to me backstage, was, you know, what makes for a good moderator, Steve. And I said, What's that James? And he said, someone who doesn't talk too much. That was his advice to me. So I I tried to take it as much as possible and let you guys shine. But, but, Patrick, am I, am I wrong, or am I right about sort of setting up the conversation with I feel like the waves of disruption and uncertainty seem more acute now than even in three, four or five years ago. Is that your sense of it as well?

Patrick Leddin  3:21  
Yeah, that is my sense of it. I don't think when we started studying disruption, we would really know how big the word would be these days, because it is everywhere. And as you were going through the list, Steven the introduction saying, well, turn on the news for three minutes and you hear all these different things. Or walk around work and you see all these things, the anxiety level starts to go up. And people, my goodness, look at all this going on. So yeah, my premise would be that I would imagine that there's no doubt that our ancestors, go back generation after generation after generation dealt with disruption in their own world. I'm not naive enough to think that they didn't, and it would certainly be extremely disruptive if, historically, we were able to go over here and get food, or go over there and get water, and then something happens along the way that changes that or someone gets killed in the process of doing one of those things right? Extremely disruptive. So I don't want to like disrespect what they all experienced, but I think there's something specifically unique about what we're experiencing as far as we're such a globalization is here you see it in supply chains. You see it with covid. You see it with all these different things. Technology is moving so rapidly, as you know, you do so much work in that space is changing so quickly that, literally, you feel like I could go to bed in one world and wake up in another one tomorrow. And anecdotally, when I'm out talking to audiences about this or working with executive teams around it, I will ask them, hey, on a scale of zero to five or zero to 10, how much disruption Are you dealing with right now? Inevitably, you get the fours and fives and 10s on the scales of one to five, and on the scale of the 10, you're getting people going 20, because they're dealing with it a lot. And then I'll follow up and say, Do you think it's going to get calmer or more chaotic in the next six months, 12 months, 18 months? And even the people will say, I'm kind of low on the scale, they'll say it's going to get more chaotic. So we're we're feeling it, and feelings are kind of theplace where you start.

Steve  5:00  
Yeah, Patrick, I think you're right about that. Like, I've, you know, been around the business world a long time, and navigated myself and companies I was with through various waves of disruption, right? And I did feel like there certainly were there, much as you say in, you know, going back through history, right? There was always been disruption and uncertain when the first folks encountered things like the steam engine and electricity, right, powering the factory, right? Those were, oh my gosh, like, what are we going to do kinds of things. I maybe I'm wrong, but I felt like many of those prior disruptions that we've worked through played out over time. You maybe had a little bit more time to prepare for them, you had a little bit more time to react to them, to understand them. I remember, I feel like for a long time, advice was given to leaders like, Hey, don't be on the bleeding edge of XYZ, right? Be a, be the next wave. Wait it out, see what happens. And I'm not sure is that is it? Is it even just faster than before, too, and leaders not having as much time to strategize and react.

Patrick Leddin  6:03  
You know, it's a really great question. You were and I were talking earlier, I believe you said you're in the Midwest, and I grew up in the Midwest, and I remember as a kid, everything kind of started on the coasts in the United States. So wherever people are listening to this from around the world, they probably know there's places where the kind of the fashion trend started, or whatever it might be, the cultural train started, and then they worked their way to where you lived at. And for us, it started on the coast. It was starting the east coast or the west coast, and kind of work its way into middle America. And it's kind of, it is a little bit like you're standing at the water watching the waves come in, and you have a time to kind of time it, and realize, okay, I need to turn the surfboard around right now and and ride this wave. But now it's just one after another, and they don't necessarily come all from the same direction. They come from all over the place that the cultural shifts or the fashion trends are popping up everywhere these days. And the same thing with the waves are coming from everywhere. I do think we're we're kind of experiencing that. So when you think about adoption or innovation, you will typically see that that processes as well. Some people are on the bleeding edge, and some people are fast followers, and others are laggards that are further down the trail. But I think that everybody is kind of nudging their way up that continuum, whether they necessarily want to or not. It's just the it's the reality that as disruption comes more rapidly and technology advances more the expectations among employees and among customers and just among any stakeholder in a business, begins to begin to escalate as well. And you'll see that where things that in the past were kind of cutting edge ideas are now table stakes. And it doesn't take long for something to quickly become table stakes. I like to say it this way, it's the ones that are going to do extremely well over the course of time are the ones who can redefine what extraordinary looks like faster than anybody else.

Steve  7:45  
Yeah, and I think that's a great point. Patrick, right? Because it's, it's happening faster and faster, right? You know, obviously the simple example, and the one that's on everybody's mind is, is AI and how AI is kind of taken over so much of the conversation in organizations and the tech organization. Certainly, it really wasn't that long ago, right when these really disruptive technologies were introduced, really talking about just a couple of years, and now it's kind of, you know, the number of, I love those stories you read about how many times a certain word is said in corporate earnings call transcripts right with CEOs and CFOs, right giving the earnings call. And all of a sudden, you know, generative AI is mentioned 25,000 times, right, in a given year, when two years ago was never mentioned, hardly at all. Right? And so I think everybody recognizes now, certainly leaders right, of organizations recognize, hey, this is what's happening, and I've got to face this. But how do you fight against, or how do you advise against, sort of wanting to, oh my gosh, I this is a lot. I, I want to avoid some of this. I like, you can't take it all on, right? If that makes sense, like, I guess my question is, how do you avoid being overwhelmed, right, as a leader, and then, then through the at the organization by some of this.

Patrick Leddin  9:05  
Well, it's interesting when we talk about disrupt everything, and the book is called Disrupt Everything and Win, we it becomes pretty clear to people at some point when I'll say something like, you notice we didn't call it change everything and win, right? And there's, there's a difference between changing everything in my mind and disrupting everything, because sometimes the most disruptive thing you can do is say no to change. So there's a really key part that says, you know, sometimes I'm going to say yes to change, and I'm going to run where all my competitors or the rest of the industry is going, or whatever the customers are asking for, or my employees, and other times, I'm actually going to say no, because if we change chase that thing, we forget who we are. So and in both cases, that can be disruptive. Going toward change is certainly disruptive to people. You're changing things. Saying no to it when people feel like, oh, we should go do that, can be disruptive as well. So I want to give people a little bit of agency as they think about it. Say, you know what? Disruption doesn't mean change everything. The second thing is, so that if it doesn't mean change everything, it means change some things, and which things are the ones to change. This is why people get paid the big bucks. Just try to figure out, you know, which ones do I change? Which ones do I live leave alone? I would say that if there's certain things that you would want to leave alone or double down on or recommit to, are things that are part of the ethos of your organization, the values you've committed to, maybe the long term mission or vision you're trying to achieve. Why you why you have a why in the first place? These are really critical things. But then there's other things where you say, you know, these are enablers of that better, why? And I need to explore those disruptions. So you're right. Sometimes people in the face of disruption, they'll freeze, yeah, they'll just pause. They'll get stuck. Sometimes they fight and they push back on it. Sometimes they flee. But that shows like in organizations, is people quit and leave. Sometimes they quit and stay, which is even worse. Yeah, sometimes they kind of fawn because it feels uncomfortable so they start just kind of trying to ease the temperature a little bit and in the process they kind of ignore what's actually going on. And sometimes they fold. They just give in whatever it's going to happen. So I'm just, I'm a cog here in the system. And what we don't want people to do is any of those F words there. We want them to focus. We want them in those moments of disruption, to say, Okay, what's going on here? What should I do? What's the organization trying to achieve? What is the organization asking me to do? What do I feel compelled to do? And reconcile those things through what we call discerning, which is basically saying, Okay, what role should I take on in this moment? Should I say yes to it? Should I say no to it? Should I do it on my own? Should I do it with others? Should I get some more information and help them think through those type of steps? And that's exactly what I do with whether it's working with an individual who comes up to me. I've had those come up and say, AI is changing my job, and I'm really nervous about it. I had one not that long ago. It just stuck in my mind so strongly. He came up and he said, You know, I think I'm going to lose my job because of AI. And I said, Oh, tell me what's going on. He said, Well, I'm a writer. I write I write copy for my companies like marketing, web pages and things like that. I even write speeches the CEO gives. And he said that CEO just gave a speech that was probably 80% chat GPT generated. Am I going to lose my job? And I said to him, I said, well, yes, you might lose your job. Because one thing about being a positive disruptor is you don't avoid it. You go look at it for what it is. And they say, yes. I said, yeah, you might lose your job, but before you leave or work on your resume or whatever fold or whatever it might be, do you think there's a way that, in the face of AI existing, you could be more valuable, not less valuable to your company? And he said, Yeah, I think I could. I said, Okay, which of these roles should you take on? So it's all about discerning what to do, whether it's discerning individually for your own career or discerning as an executive team. What we don't want people to do is just go, I'm going to ignore it and hope it goes away, because it probably won't. You mentioned AI, Steve, and I've had people who say to me, kind of, essentially, they're saying, I'm X years old. I can wait this one out. It's like, I don't think so. I don't think you could. It's moving really fast, and it's not, you know, is AI, people are in their minds saying, well, is AI, is that like the internet being created, and people who are creating web pages, and you better get on board and get involved, or is it, for those who might remember, is it the Y2K bug, which turns out to fizzle into nothing. You know, which one is it? And I would say I think it's more the internet than the Y2K bug. So you better figure this disruption out.

Steve  13:09  
Yeah, gosh, I'll do someday, as an aside, I'll do like, a whole Y2K bug show, I remember it. I'm old enough to remember it pretty well, like what I was doing at the time. And, oh my gosh, what a colossal train wreck. Some of that was.

Patrick Leddin  13:28  
Yeah, I think that was one of the few times I've actually stayed up till midnight on New Year's Eve, because I want to see everything not work.

Steve  13:29  
I know, we did, but yeah, I'd agree with you, Patrick, though, because I can even remember a couple of previous technological waves of disruption, certainly, where even folks who are experienced in the organization, had a lot of institutional knowledge, right, which is super valuable if they were slow to embrace things like personal computing and things like sort of digital communication and digital publishing and some of the things we were doing at the time, they they got left behind. They didn't necessarily lose their jobs over it, but they became less important, right? Honestly, less influential in the organization. They were left out of conversations. They were left out of exciting projects. They were, you know, they were just left out and the folks who were willing to dive in and embrace and learn and adapt, you know, they continued on, and many of them really thrived. And I think that's probably, I mean, the baseline advice I'd give anybody right now in an organization who's like, like that, that person who came up to you to talk about the AI disruption.

Patrick Leddin  14:26  
Yeah, you become less relevant, right in the conversation. And let's face it, most conversations that happen about happen about us or about someone else in the organization when it comes to their career advancement or their promotions, things like that. They're not in the room. You're not in the room when that conversation happens. That's just how it typically happens. It happens about you, not with you. So that means that you need to be relevant and your value needs to be seen so that is carried into the conversation. And that's just for like, individual success, right? But you go beyond that to just organizationally, you know, what are the conversations in the marketplace going on about your business or your entity or your nonprofit or your governmental organization, and are those, are those conversations saying that you're falling behind, or those conversations saying you're on top of things? And it's a real I spoke at this and I've made some friends with people who are at the event. I spoke at this event for corporate board members, and it's kind of interesting to hear what they're concerned about, and talk to them more, because obviously they're concerned about governments and governance and ethical related issues. And, you know, are we, are we putting ourselves at risk in the process of all that? And then you talk to CEOs and senior leaders, and they're thinking about, where do we make our strategic bets? And you think about individual contributors and saying, where's my job going? Everybody's thinking this thing through at their own level, yeah, about what it means to, for lack of a better phrase, it's kind of corny, but what's it mean to, you know, thrive, not just survive in this particular moment?

Steve  15:48  
Yeah, sure thing. I mean, I don't want to lose sight of that. I think that's super important inside organizations, both for individuals and for the health of the organization, right? It can't be just about, what do I get to do today to make sure I don't lose my job, right? I mean, of course, that's the very practical matter facing lots of people, and they worry about and they rightly should, but, man, just that baseline survival. Man, that's not good for you. It's not good for your long term mental health. It's not good for the organization either. If two thirds of the employees are just trying to, you know, hold on to the floating, you know, piece of wood in the after the Titanic's gone down, kind of thing, right? And some of this is communication, too. One of the other topics I wanted to talk to you a little bit from a leadership perspective and how it flows throughout the organization, is in these times of uncertainty, in these times of disruption, where leaders really are faced with, hey, having to figure out where to make these strategic bets, where to embrace, maybe, where to pull back from. What kind of things come up now with? What are we telling employees who are worried, right, like that person you spoke to, right about the marketing copywriter, that person has a manager and they have a director and they have a VP, right? What are the kinds of things you're working with in terms of helping leaders communicate through these times. Is it just Hey, be transparent, be honest, and let the chips fall where they may. Is it more nuanced than that?

Patrick Leddin  17:11  
I think it's a little more nuanced than that, in that when I think about leadership, and I've seen it throughout my career, in my own experiences as leader, is that there's always these tensions going on, right? It's in being a leadership role oftentimes, is navigating tension you think about, is your first role leading a team? Is it? Do I lean in? Do I help them through every task in which can become micromanagement? Do I do I pull back and kind of keep a distance from them? And if I do so, at some point, will they feel abandoned by me? And even though I call it empowerment, you know what? There's a dynamic going on. Could they be my friends? Or are they right now my am I now their leader, and even though I used to be their colleagues? So there's all these tensions, you know, you start to experience them pretty early on, and they keep going on, and they don't, they don't stop. They keep going. So when you talk about, what should leaders do, and senior leaders do, what am I seeing them do around communication, there's, there's, there's a challenge there in regard to what you can and cannot tell and when you can and not cannot tell it. So I think if there's some things that you feel like employees are asking for, they'd like to know, or you'd even want them to know, to help make better decisions, you try to lean into those moments and be very candid and say to them, there's some things I can't tell you right now. As soon as I can tell you, we'll have that conversation, but until then, I just can't. I think there's value in doing that. I think being candid and direct and open like that. I think it's okay to I think it's not okay, it's beyond okay to do that, and also to be open for questions and ask answer as much as you can. I think there's other times, though, as a leader, where you have to say, Okay, why am I being too forthright or open in this moment? And there's, there's a discussion that's going on there, in general, about out there in general, about vulnerability. I think vulnerability is a very good thing. I think it's good for leaders to, you know, show that they're not perfect, and to be open that they don't know how to do things. But the question becomes, when, what are we being vulnerable to what end state? Am I being Am I being vulnerable because I feel like I need to go in there and have a open conversation with my people to make me personally feel better, right? Or do I need to be in there to have this conversation to help them pursue whatever it is we're trying to pursue collectively. In other if I go and I say to them, you know, I'm not exactly sure how to do this, but as a team, I think we need to work our way through it. That's a way where I'm being open and vulnerable to them to accomplish something that's valuable to them, yeah, as opposed to if I just go in there, because I feel like I need a therapy session with my team. Yeah, that might be something you could do differently, in different ways. So I think there was that tension of, like, what do I share? What do I not share? What am I open to talk about? Not open to talk about, I think at the end of the day, if you think, if you look at it through the lens of what's best for the team, it can be helpful to the team. When I started teaching college, so I've been a professor at Vanderbilt for 12 years, and when I started teaching college, actually started teaching at a place called University of Kentucky, and I remember reading this article. It said, here's here's what new professors deal with, or new teachers deal with, or new facilitators or presenters. And they said there's kind of like three levels of concern they go through. And the first level. Of concern is essentially, do I look the part? Do I look all right? Am I standing up here? Do I look foolish? Am I dressed right? Am I carrying my all those type of things? They're very, very shallow, quite frankly. But they're all kind of important, because if you feel like I'm not looking right, people might not even listen to me. That's what's going through our heads.

Steve  20:17  
They may tune you right out if they say oh who's this fool up there?

Speaker 1  20:18  
Yeah, exactly. Then the next step beyond that is, do I know my stuff? Yeah, before, after, I make sure I'm like, dressed appropriately, do I know my stuff? Do I know the content? And then the third thing is, are they actually learning? And what the article is saying is, like, that's completely backwards. You shouldn't be worried about those that you should be worried about are they learning? Yeah. And I think about that same type of approach when I think about working with teams or working with leadership and helping them think through these moments, I say, you know, get beyond the point of, do you look the part and get beyond the point of, do you know all the answers and just focus in on, are you giving them the information they need to make informed decisions? Because it's almost a little bit like every time I don't give that, I'm taking I'm taking choices off the table for them, and I have to trust that my people are going to make some of the best choices. There was this article in Harvard Business Review years ago. It was called who's got the D and it was just talking about how organizations executing strategy will bottleneck if they don't have the decision authorities at the right level, right they try to keep it all up at certain levels, and if you're not giving people all of the information to make informed decisions that you can give them, it's almost like you're crippling their decision making authority. So how do we push it out there in appropriate ways? I think that's the attention people need to navigate.

Steve  21:34  
Yeah, and I think it's probably going to be more important in times, in uncertainty and in disruption, you might feel forced to act faster, right? Oh, yeah, closer to where they need to be and empower people to act faster. You know, some of it's cultural, too. This is a weird example, but I was just reading a piece about what's it like to work in Germany, right? It was a American person gone off to work with some big German company, and they were talking about, at least in their experience, right? Pushing the envelope, taking risks. All those, you know, embracing change was not rewarded one bit. Right? They were very hierarchical. They were very hide bound in some ways, and they were very, you know, don't take a really risky decision. If you're the person who points out the four reasons why this might be a risky decision, you'll be more rewarded versus the person who's who's driving to the decision. And that was maybe a bit of an extreme example, a bit of an outlier, but I do think there are organizations, I know, I've worked in a couple of them, that the default is slow, it's conservative, it's not, it's not push, right, it's, it's and I think in these times, particularly for leaders, that's got to be one of the challenges too, to say, hey, that might have worked for us, even if we're 100 year old company, perhaps, right? And because it can be easy to say, Hey, we've made it for 100 years being really successful at XYZ thing we do now, we have to operate a whole lot differently. I don't, I don't, I don't. I don't believe that, right? And I don't know that could be a recipe for problems, too.

Patrick Leddin  23:06  
Yeah, Ithink every organization, and people know it as they listen to say, every organization has its own cadence, its own rhythm, of how it goes about doing things and the speed it works at. And we usually don't pick up on the cadence of the organization we're in until we either first show up at it and we're like, wow, this is really fast, or wow, this feels kind of slow compared to what I was at before. And then we start to get used to it. It's kind of like, you know, fish discovered water last, you're in it all the time and you feel that rhythm, until either you leave that organization, go someplace else, or you have a opportunity to work in a different culture, a different part of the world, or places that are a different organization, even different industry that moves at a different pace. So I would suggest that first of all, is being attuned to that Steve is really, really important, because that is, it is real when you bump up against other entities and you feel the move that they're moving at. But I would also, in general, say that when we're in moments of disruption, it can feel very crisis like and when crisis happens as our heartbeat goes up and we start to sweat and we move, we feel like time is of the essence, because it often is. But I think one of the things we need to do is we think about moments is, am I just feeling like I need to move faster right now, or do I really need to move faster right now? And sometimes, sometimes our emotions can make us feel like we need to move faster, people start to look at us more because they're like, What are we gonna do, boss? Because in moments of disruption, we deal with ambiguity, and ambiguity makes people kind of freeze sometimes too. So I think that what we need to say to ourselves is okay. One is, do I feel like, do I need to move faster? Or do I do I really need to move faster? Or do I feel like I need to move faster? And then secondly, is to say is this one of those moments where actually slow is fast, which is those moments where you say, you know, what if I spend the time thinking this through a little bit more, will I save a lot of rework and problems and all these other issues I could run into? And I think that's, you know, that's part of being mature, and not that. I do it all the time. I get caught up in things as well. But I taught a class to Vandy. Oh sure I taught a class at Vandy for years called leading business through times of crisis, which I think I didn't know it was doing it for me, but it was really preparing me well for this type of experience that I'm going through with this disruption content. Because I would bring in, we had one section of the class Steve, it was crazy, crazy, cool. We had different guest speakers come in, and I'll just give you like one example, but it was like this every class session. So we write up, we'd write unique case studies with these people only for that class, it would never go anyplace else. So these case studies exist just in a couple places. They don't go anywhere, and they'd come in and they just be a little unvarnished and share with the students. So imagine 25 students in a room in walks Doug Parker, the CEO of American Airlines, and Sarah Nelson, the President and the flight attendants Association, and they sit down together in front of 25 students and talk about how the airline industry, labor and management work through times of disruption. It was like one after another. It was like it was a master class. I can't imagine having that moment as an undergraduate student, which is what the students were, great experience. Well, the one guy, Doug Parker, from American Airlines, he said this line that stuck with me. He said, a crisis is never the time to start making introductions. I was like, That's brilliant, because what he was saying, obviously, is, you know, when Covid hits, as the CEO of an airline, I better know all the other CEOs. I better know the legislators. I better know the people who are in charge of labor. I better know these people really well. But I think about it even in different ways, in moments of disruption or uncertainty where it's like, gosh, it's not the time to start introducing myself to myself. I better know my strengths. I better know how I handle pressure. I better be willing to talk about it and spend some time reflecting on it. I better not be now introducing myself to the team. We should know each other and my boss and my stakeholders. These are investments I need to be making every day that will help me to better discern in those moments of disruption.

Steve  26:43  
Patrick, that's a great story and a great example. That gets me to the I think the last thing I wanted to ask you, which is a little bit about preparation and anticipating change, while we can't anticipate often, the specific nature of the disruptions that might be heading our way. Like very few people knew, say, generative, AI, chatGPT type things was coming before it arrived. A few people did. People were working on it. Yeah, most of the rest of us didn't, but we could, in some way, I think, better prepare ourselves. And that example you gave from American Airlines was great. One of the ways to prepare is to make sure you've got good relationships with all your key right stakeholders in your environment. Are there other things you talk work with organizations of hey, we can't, we can't know specifically perhaps what's coming next. But here's some advice to better prepare yourself, so when the next big thing hits you, you're better prepared to deal with it. 

Patrick Leddin  27:39  
Yeah, that's actually where I spend most of my time these days, Steve. You and I were talking ahead of time, I said I travel pretty much every week. I usually work with senior leadership teams that will bring me in and basically go through three steps of a conversation with them, which is, one is all right, let's scan the macro environment. What are the issues going out there? And of course, I have my own little tools I use for it, but anybody can think it through, like, what's going on demographically, what's going on with information and technology, what's going on with the labor force, what's going on with, you know, list all the different things. And what are the challenges or things you're hearing about out there, what are the disruptions kind of on the horizon? And they can start coming through, and they may not know exactly what AI is going to do next, but they know it's something or they might know the next thing coming. And then you say, Okay, let's, let's just prioritize these. This is what I do with the teams. I'll say, Okay, let's prioritize these. Let's pick a few of them, and then say you took one of them, disruption A, and we say, okay, disruption A, how is that shifting the marketplace? And there's five forces of shift I talk about with them. Are things like, where's power going? Who has more power in this situation? Where's leverage going? How is it, how is it shifting customer expectations? So we go through the process of saying okay, and how is it changing the environment we're working in, and then we go one step closer to home, which is saying, Okay, how is it shifting what we should do internally? Is it shifting how we should organize? It shifting how we develop and attract and develop and position talent. Is it shifting how we make decisions differently? So it's kind of like just saying, Okay, we don't know what is coming next, but it's an exercise worth doing, which is to spend some time thinking about it and then saying, okay, where might this take the industry and reshape expectations of shareholders and those out in the broader community, and then how is it reshaping the organization we need to lead going forward? And that exercise of just thinking through that with a few things starts to build a new muscle, I think, for organizations that says to them, you know, I don't know what the next thing is going to be, but we've gone through the process of thinking about how to think about it. Yeah. And that's really informative to us.

Steve  29:38  
Yeah, Patrick, that's a great way to break that down. And great example, I think that would be also just super fun, right? As a geek, that exercise, I think would be fascinating to do, right? And going through like your process with a team would be awesome. I'd love to do it someday, Patrick, that is maybe a good way to wrap this conversation, to have folks think about, Hey, bring this back to your organization. Let's. Think about how we need to prepare, how we can and not always be chasing our tails right, or not always be that, that that anxiousness, right?

Patrick Leddin  30:10  
Not always be reacting. We want to kind of get out in front of this as best we can, and if nothing else, we might not know the thing, but we can get prepared for the next thing.

Steve  30:19  
Yeah, that's awesome. I totally encourage folks to check out the book, Disrupt Everything and Win and take control of your future. This was Patrick co wrote with James Patterson, who's a really cool guy as well. We always tell my James Patterson story every time a chance I get, but Patrick, this was super fun, and I'm so glad we were able to take some time. Today was so great to see you after a few months. And hopefully we can check in together in the fall as well, you know, maybe, like, six months from now or so, check in and see how your how your travels have been going, and what kinds of things maybe, maybe the world will be turned upside down again six months from now. And we can, we can talk about that some.

Patrick Leddin  30:42  
It will be turned upside down, but we'll just continue to try to stand on solid ground, that we've created for ourselves. But I'd love to do it, Steve, yeah, let's let's plan to do that.

Steve  30:19  
I love it. All right, Patrick Leddin, thanks so much for joining us today on the At Work in America show. Good to see you. I want to thank everybody for listening. Go to hrhappyhour.net for all the show archives. Subscribe. Get your podcast. Check us out on YouTube, blah, blah, blah, all the places. Patrick, thank you. We will see you next time, everybody and bye for now.

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