110: Adam Braus

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Joe Krebs speaks with Adam Braus about Nemawashi and innovation. Adam is a polymath professional and breakout expert in the fields of leadership, technology, and education.

Adam Braus is the author of the book “Leading Change” where he introduces an organic, grass-roots, bottom-up change management that uses the power of a social network.

Transcript:

Joe Krebs 0:00

Agile FM radio for the Agile community, www.agile.fm. Welcome to another episode of agile FM. Today I have an author, educator engineer, entrepreneur, product design on managerial professor and musician, author. All in one here in one episode, in one episode of agile FM, I'm talking to Adam Braus, who just goes by Braus, San Francisco based, you can reach him at Adam Braus, no dashes, no blanks or anything in between dot com. And we are here to talk about a few things. One of them is Nemawashi. We're going to explain that to him. We're going to talk about his two books, one of them is published, one of them is in the making leading change at work. That's the one that's published. And the other one, the upcoming book is called "motivate". We might touch on that. Let's see how it goes. Welcome to the podcast.

Adam Braus 1:09

Hey, thanks, Joe. I really appreciate being here.

Joe Krebs 1:11

Awesome. Yes. And congratulations to the to the book release of "leading change at work" out for a few months people can get there. The subtitle of that book is called The Secret structure. I'm always trying to say the secret sauce, but it's the secret structure of change and how everyone can make it happen. A new way to create bottom up change in any organization called piecemeal consensus. How do these two things fit together piecemeal consensus and Nemawashi? Why don't you give your our listeners here, right now? A little bit of context.

Adam Braus 1:45

Sure. Sure. So Nimawashi, is a Japanese word. And it was invented about this actually wasn't invented. It's a it's an actual phrase in Japanese, I did some interviewing with some Japanese people and said What does Nemawashi really mean? And and what what it means in business is and to agile and to lean is a it's a strategy for making change. So it's essentially the the Lean strategy of making change. And I translate it as piecemeal consensus. So that's kind of my translation of it in the past, it's been translated as consensus or kind of seeing eye to eye or it can even have a sense of kind of backroom deals. That's actually kind of the the, if you say it in Japanese, it kind of means like back almost like back channeling, but it's but it's very common. It's not it has it has a sort of nefarious sound, but it actually is very, very common and acceptable to do.

Joe Krebs 2:41

It's part of the Toyota Production System, right? It's an integral.

Adam Braus 2:46

That's right. That's right. So I was really fascinated to find, well, maybe I can tell the story of how I, I kind of came up with this idea in this sort of book. And then I was encouraged by my peers to, to write it out. They said, that's such an interesting story. And like, that's such a great theory, you should, you should, you should write about this, this should really be something you focus on. And so I took it upon myself to write it, I was working at a at a company called Epic, which is the leading software for healthcare records, electronic medical records company, and it's based in Madison, Wisconsin, shout out to Madison, that's my hometown. And so I was living and working there for Epic. And it's a large company, it's, it's always listed as one of the best companies to work for, because it's kind of got these quirky office buildings. And it's got these sort of fun perks for the employees. So I was working in the dungeons and dragons themed building. So I was I was living in an elven forest. And working in my office there and an elven forest. It was quite, quite fun. And my friend and I, who were kind of little intrapreneurs, right, we were kind of entrepreneurs inside the company. And we were always thinking of new ideas. He was working in HR. And he actually used the EPIC system as a new HR system. So instead of he took the patient records, and he turned them into candidate records, and they were doing all their their HR through the EPIC system, which was like this fantastic, just brilliant thing. And he got that launched. And, and I was I, we would have these little idea jams like I think a lot of people have or they're, if you're kind of an intrapreneur, you might have your pal that you're kind of saying, hey, what can we do to make this company better? And I had this idea that it would be great to launch a question and answer platform much like I was becoming a software engineer at that point, while I was working full time as a consultant. And there's a website called stackoverflow.com that all engineers and probably all PM's know. And I was like, Well, why don't we have this for the questions about the electronic medical record every day? Clients asked me these questions and I've heard them 100 times what if they could just find the answers on this, then I could focus on other things or you know, it could be better for the company better for healthcare, which is ultimately better for patients. Since right because efficient and cheaper and better for everybody. So I said, Let's launch this thing. So we made every mistake in the book in retrospect. And we did exactly what I think a lot of people do, which is we went and tried to ask permission. Yeah. Can we get permission? So we went to managers, we went to different sort of bossy sort of type higher up people than us. And we say, Can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this? And of course, we got all kinds of different answers, most of which were very encouraging, but then gave us a bit of the runaround, right? So I named these things in the book. So one, we basically encountered what's called permission paralysis. Yes, we kept on asking permission, and we didn't move forward at all, because we kept asking for permission. And then the bosses they did what we called yes to death, the yes does to death. So they just kept saying, yes, you're great. This is great. You're so smart, you're so great, please, you know, do this. But you've got to do this, and this and this, and you've got to talk to them. And you've got to get their sign off in their sign off. Anyways, long story short, eventually, we just did it. We just created it. And we launched it, we didn't ask it, we just stopped asking permission. And we just made it. And then we had to, but then it was just sitting on a server and we needed to get a get people onto it. So we actually started to have to do almost like an internal marketing kind of growth, word of mouth kind of viral campaign inside the company. It was quite it was quite a a kind of exciting ride. And to this day, it's one of the proudest things I've ever done was I launched and it successfully grew to being used by everyone in the company. And it was never sanctioned or announced by any kind of higher up person, it just organically grew inside the company. And to this day, I can say to Epic employees. Oh, yeah, I built I built Beetlejuice. And they go like what I thought an engineer built that, right like the mythology of who actually built it has kind of been forgotten to the Sands of Time. But but but in when I started to tell the story, more and more, I realized what we had done was really different from what a lot of people try to do when they're trying to make a change. Because we stopped going and asking for permission. And we started to just take action. It really created this, this different strategy. So I started to write that up. I started to teach that in my courses. And and then and then I started to research more seriously, what is this? And well, you know, who else has done it this way. And that's when I came across the Toyota way in the Toyota Production System, and especially a tiny, tiny chapter in that system, which is this Nemawashi. And I said, Oh my gosh, this, this tiny kind of forgotten sort of sideline thing. That's actually critical for doing Lean and Agile properly. And it's been kind of ignored and forgotten. This is what I did. This is what me and my friend Nico did. And so that was really an exciting moment to kind of realize a kind of kinship across 1000s of miles, you know, and decades of years and across industries, from software back to kind of a lean manufacturing. That was a really cool moment to do that research and find that, but

Joe Krebs 8:09

it's also like, isn't that a great moment? If you read something and then you hit that section? It's like, this is exactly what we did. So the confidence in the book at that point must be going through the roof, right? You're like, this is exactly what we did. And it also tells you that you're on to something like very similar to the patterns movement, we have like in Agile, etc, where we it's like, this is a proven thing I can I can talk from my own experience that this is what we did. And and it works. It's not a theoretical concept. But why do you think Nemawashi or as you call it, like a piecemeal consensus is so unlock so much potential in organizations out there, the ones that we're using? Why do you why do they see once they do it like what you did, right? In a in a similar fashion? And why do they hold on to it? A lot of Silicon Valley companies are using it.

Adam Braus 8:59

They are and actually what's interesting and kind of funny is they're using it without knowing what it is. And so there's this there's this weird kind of spectrum of people and companies using it and not using it and none of them no, no, that it exists really. Yeah, there's very few people who know Nemaashi. And then if they do know it, they know it as a kind of weird Japanese thing. They don't know it as actually something you can use today to make change very rapidly and very peaceably inside your company. So it's a very, very sort of peaceful, kind of, it's not like a, like a kind of conflict conflict, not a conflict based change system. It's a very harmonious based change system. And partly you might say, Well, it's because it was invented by Japanese people and their culture values, you know, harmony, and and and there is a hierarchy to their, to their companies and to their to their to their work, but they're able to change within the hierarchy, which is kind of the exciting thing. So I wasn't I was isn't really satisfied to just say, hey, this works, believe me, I promise you. So in the book, I go into the actual mechanics of why Nemawashi works, why? Why does it work to build a piecemeal consensus out of one on one conversations with a lot of different people. That's kind of the way Nemawashi works. One on one conversations, instead of a big meeting where you present what we're going to do, right, instead of going off to your off site for three days, deciding what would it be strategically best, and then coming back triumphantly, and telling everyone what we're going to do, which is kind of the main way that change happens in a company. Instead of that, instead, you stay in the office, you don't go into your off site, you stay in the office, and you talk one on one with a lot of people. And you say well, what's our biggest challenge? What do you think we could do? What do you think of this idea? What do you think of that idea to one on one little one on one conversations, they don't be long, they can be 15 minutes long, you get a lot of information. And as you're doing that you're getting information and building consensus at the same time. So you're actually building the solution. I mean, you might already have a pretty good idea what the solution is already, but you're coming in open minded to those conversations, you're, you're getting more information, you have the ability to still change the idea as you go, because you haven't announced it to 1000 people to say what you're going to do, as soon as you do that, you can't really change it, or you don't look very good, right? Like I came up with this thing. And now I have to change it. So as you have these one on one conversations, you're you're you're you're you're tweaking or changing, maybe even totally changing completely 180 degrees, changing your idea, but it doesn't really matter, you're kind of moving along getting better and better. And every time you have a conversation with someone, that person becomes an ally to your idea. They go like, wow, I have to really give my my buy in or my input, therefore I have a lot of buy in. Yeah, so it's this, this kind of one by one. And people might say, well, how can you do one by one that's too much time, that's too expensive in terms of my time or in terms of the time of the company? Well, it's not actually true. Because if you have an hour long presentation, to present your new idea to 100 people, right, then that takes an hour times 100 plus you that's 101 hours. But if you only but if you build this Nemawashi consensus by having 1015 minute conversations with 100 people, and it's just you and one other person, that's 30 minutes times 100. That's only that's only 330. Right?

Joe Krebs 12:27

On you on the way and not necessarily on all the other participants, right?

Adam Braus 12:30

The whole company, right? And you can you can delegate Nima washy to someone else. So you can say, hey, we're a team and I'm the executive, your job is to go these numerosity conversations, your doesn't even have to take if you're a leader, if you're a real executive level, the cool thing about this is it works for anybody, you can be the guy in the mailroom, or you can be the CEO and you can use Nemawashi to the advantage of yourself and to the advantage of the company and to the profit margin. It's a really quite a tremendous gains of, of time and money. And, and you see it in Toyota, I think Toyota is probably the best place to see this ability to change if using Nemawashi.

Joe Krebs 13:12

So this would be an example of how much you would scale because that would have been my next question to you, right? So I can see that on a small scale, I could get involved. I might learn a lot in these Nemawashi's myself about my solution, I might actually shape the solutions while I'm going through those 15 minute conversations. But how does it scale?

Adam Braus 13:33

It's actually it's actually built for scale. So it's actually it's actually was invented in a huge car company, right? I mean, it was invented in Toyota. And it's actually built for big companies in a small company, it still works, it still works. And it's still worthwhile doing. But it actually is built for scale. So if you're if you're listening to this, and you're thinking maybe I can use Nemawashi, you work at Philips, or you know, Pfizer or something you can like it's built for that size. The way that it scales, to understand it, the way that it scales. The I guess the way that it works mechanically, just to understand it is it works because of social networks. And there's been there's been growing research ever since the 90s. About the power of social networks, in companies, right. And you know, you have the kind of hierarchical org-chart of your company, which is great. I talk a lot about in the book, how hierarchies are fine. A lot of people kind of want to especially creative guys like me, generally want to kind of say, oh, hierarchies are bad and don't have hierarchies. These are great. Yeah, yeah, people always want to be doing that. I don't really think that's necessary hierarchies are good because they do a different job hierarchies are execution. Okay. The creativity aspect or the intrapreneurship or the change aspect actually happens inside the hierarchy. So Through the social networks between the individuals in the hierarchy. Yeah, that's so that's how Nemawashi works is instead of trying to operate your innovation inside the hierarchy, which is what most people do, they say, Oh, well, you if you have a new idea, go talk to your manager, like, well, managers jobs, it's kind of hard to ask managers to both be the gatekeepers of innovation or the promoters of innovation and be the executors of the kind of the goals and wheel of the company. That's I think that's kind of unfair to managers, I have a soft spot in my heart, especially for frontline managers, because their jobs are very difficult, probably some of the most difficult in the company, and to ask them to then do both those jobs is like, you know, it's like having two masters this Yeah, it's nuts. It's, I say, don't go to your manager. Yeah. Don't go to your manager, do Nemawashi, start talking to other people in the company, start talking to your peers, start talking about to your peers in other division departments. Right, you know, it's, and then and then build up through the social networks of the company.

Joe Krebs 16:01

Right? It's interesting, right? Because I've never met people in organizations. And I looked at the org chart, and that was exactly how they ran their business where the org-chart is, like, more like a general guidance, and like how we talk and then when you start to like groups that made and they have like this innovation group where they do this, and they do this, and none of them is depicted in an org-chart, right. So it's organic, that there is a different one, a lot of dotted lines, a lot of you know, sometimes they call them tribes and things like that. So there's a lot of things going on that is not even remotely represented in the org chart. And I think both of those things are very, very important in this, but why do you think these top down companies out there, right, obviously, all of them would be interested in your book right. Now listening to you, because it is intriguing, and there is a lot of there's a lot of it makes just makes sense. Because it's not a formality. It's organic. It's the whole process of piecemeal consensus here is why do Why do many organizations struggle, especially the ones with the top down to open up to these techniques? Why is that? I mean, why? Well, I

Adam Braus 17:09

think I think I think I think the reason why is because they're presented with a choice, that is a false choice. They're told, you can either be a extremely efficient hierarchical, top down organization, which I will not for one second tried to deny the efficiency of that system, right. That's why the military's run that way. That's why business businesses that have very, very clear goals like like an insurance business, like you just take the actuarial tables, you charge the customers, you, you filed the claims, I mean, it's just, there's not really that much. I mean, you might be able to adopt IT or something. But the business model is not going to really innovate, you really just need efficiency. So the hierarchy and the top down makes a lot of sense. Those people are then told, Oh, if you want to innovate, you have to throw out the efficiency of that hierarchy. That that's wrong. I think, in my opinion, that's wrong. I think it's, it's important to understand that there's a third way, there's a third way you don't have to go be what's called a holacracy, right, where there's no hierarchy, and everyone's just kind of like floating around like amoebas. And in a petri dish, you can still have the hierarchy, and you can have all the efficiencies of the hierarchy. If you add Nemawashi, and you train people in Nemawashi, you will also be able to have extremely rapid on a dime change that isn't rash and isn't done without without checking with everyone. Because through Nemawashi, you check with everyone, you get a lot of information, and you are rapidly able to build buy in and do a change in a moment, even in a large company. Great examples Toyota itself. I put in the book The story of the development of the Lexus engine. So when the Lexus Lexus, as you know, is a brand of Toyota, it's just a separate still Toyota, but it's their luxury brand. And we all think of Lexus has probably been around forever. But actually, there was a time when Lexus didn't exist. Toyota was just the kind of Volkswagen for the it was a kind of car for the people. And it didn't have a luxury high end brand. And there was a there was a what Yeah, and then yeah, in the 90s, I think, yeah, there was a there was a young there was a man who said in Toyota who said, You know what, we can build an engine to the specifications of a BMW or Mercedes engine. And everyone said, You're crazy. And he literally was crazy in a sentence because the machine the level of precision that he that would need to be in the engine was greater than the tools they were currently using in the factory. So he was suggesting building an engine with a higher degree of fit, reference, refined tuning, then the machines themselves that they were using the machines that you use to build the machines. And he said, You know what, give me the Give me, the top engineers from each department to come and work do a working group with me for a little while and we'll hand build an engine. So we'll sit and we'll hand grind each valve and we'll hand you know. And by doing this hand build engine, all the engineers figured out solutions to all the problems of building an engine to this specification in mass and in production, a production line, and they were able to build it and so that they were able to do something that that, you know, Toyota is not we think of Toyota is an innovative kind of agile company, because they came up with the hybrid, and they can they and they, they're able to change and do things fast. But actually, Toyota in Japan is known as an extremely hierarchical conservative, extremely strictly delineated kind of, you're the lower down, I'm the higher up, I'm the manager, you're the suit, the you know, the, the lower, you know, worker. And even with that extraordinarily strict hierarchy and conservatism, I mean, the top leaders of Toyota are not, you, they're not wearing like, you know, pink sweaters to their, their daughter's graduations, you know, they're like wearing black suits and black ties, and, you know, even then that company is able to, it was able to turn on a dime, and continues to be able to make extremely innovative moves, right, because they use Nemawashi. And they say, let's use Nemnawashi. To get this across the line. Let's use Nemawashi. Let's do that.

Joe Krebs 21:22

Yeah, so that is super interesting. We're gonna see obviously, now the automobile industry is in turmoil again, right? So we're going to see what kind of company is going to turn on a dime again, why? Because there are certain changes that disrupt the industry right now. So we're going to monitor those things as well. Now, I want to take you a little bit into your neck of the woods in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, you probably have better insights on, you know, these kinds of things, how they're being applied in that region. And we do know that out of the Silicon Valley, there is a lot of innovation coming out innovation that is influencing the world, not only the United States. So do you see a relationship between these techniques, as well as the rate of innovation, the rate of change?

Adam Braus 22:08

I do I do. And I think it's, we have to be kind of careful when we talk about there being like a lot of innovation, quote, unquote, yeah, I always like to think of 1910 as actually when there was 1910, the year 1910, as when there was actually a lot of innovation, right? Because we went from having no planes to having planes. And we went from having no telephones to having telephones, right. So these are, you know, these were monumental, total revolutions in people's lives. Today, innovation is you know, phone plus one, right? iPhone eight, iPhone nine iPhone 10, it's just phone plus one cheer. And, you know, we have this kind of, there's this promise of the internet of things, but it really, it hasn't really materialized to be something super. Anyway, super. And I would love to see massive innovation, like the completely transformed the way we do healthcare completely transformed the way we do transportation complete, but we actually are not seeing that really so much. We're really just seeing a kind of, you know, and maybe that'll come with AI or it'll come with other other things. But anyways, there is a relationship between the rate of change though, so for example, Amazon, is I put it as a poster child for Nemawashi in the book. So Amazon uses a, a system that is it's sort of it uses the same processes, Nemawashi, where it pulls the best ideas up from the bottom of the company, all the way up to the top. And it's the six page reports, you maybe you know about this, each so each year is at your at each yearly report, all everyone writes the six page reports and then managers summarize their reports, reports, and then they push those up. And then those managers summarize those reports and then push those up. And it ends up at the at the top, you know, with Jeff Bezos is in his in his, you know, crew at the top, looking at, you know, something like 40 reports and trying to pick where the company's going to move in the next year. And then by doing that, it kind of pulls all the best ideas up through the hierarchy. And that makes it be able to have the best ideas acted upon. That's why they beat Google to the Alexa they beat Google to the home assistant and Siri, they they beat both Apple and Google to the punch with that. They also, you know, developed Amazon Web Services before, it was cool to have web services they took over. I don't know how much something like 30% or 60% of the internet is is Amazon Web Services. And they did the same thing with on same day delivery. And, you know, now Google's running to catch up with Google Express. And so So I think Amazon is is I think a great example of this. They don't necessarily do pure what would be called like a pure Nemawashi where people are really doing these kind of one on one conversations and but their system of decision making is based on bottom up, change which which was a kind of Nemawashi-esque style, they could I think they could be even better if they adopted like a full, decentralized Nemawashi where they really told people, Hey, start having these conversations, start building consensus piecemeal around your ideas, I think new things would come even faster for them. Google, I think is unfortunately a sort of example of kind of a down a downward spiral of innovation. You know, we remember Google back in the day. And, you know, back, maybe when it launched in the first probably, you know, five or eight years sent when it launched, being extraordinarily innovative. And if you read if you read about the and it is in the book, actually, if you read about the policies that were put in place, they were without knowing it, because they didn't know the word Nemawashi. They didn't know about piecemeal consensus, but just by Larry Page's and Sergey Brin's intuition, they put policies in place that supported Nemawashi that instigated one on one conversations and people building little cadre's that then would, you know, would emerge into products or emerge into changes. And now Google ever since essentially, ever since Google Plus, they stopped having, they kind of got rid of 20% time in practice, and it's still on the books, but they kind of got rid of 20% time, at least people I work there that I know, say that's not really a thing, really. And then ever since really, Google X emerged, you know, Google X became, oh, that's where all the innovation happens, which kind of meant, hey, don't do innovation at your desk anymore. Because Google X is doing it. You know, that's where the weather balloons and the self jet, which is all cool stuff. But when you go for those moonshots like that, I think you when you separate that's called a skunkworks. When you separate out innovation from your company, and you say there's a skunkworks over here, that kind of gives frontline managers this way to brush off new ideas that people are having, because they're like, well, this isn't Google X, like go do your, you know, go keep making the Google ads better or go keep making the search better. Don't tell me about your like crazy idea. Because this isn't Google X, that's Google, like you'd have to apply to change over to Google X, right? So it kind of separates innovation out of your company. And that's a bad, that's bad, I wouldn't recommend anyone make a skunkworks, I would say leave everything happening inside the company and create space inside the company through people's 20% time, well create space for people to be doing that work

Joe Krebs 27:30

to your point, right? So that would be not organic anymore. But do you want to be organic in one element of the company? It's just a piece of it. Right? So how would you get change into other parts of the organization? Exactly. This is really fascinating. Listening to you about some of those ideas and how you make the connects to the book, people can obviously pick up that book leading change at work. There is another book and just by the end of our podcasts, we're recording this in December 2020. There was another book on the horizon is called motivate. Just just to maybe cliffhanger here for people on the listening to this podcast. What is this all about? It's it's a book the science of yeah, great and success. It's going to come out soon. What can you tell about the book? Before we close out?

Adam Braus 28:17

Yeah. Well, it's a book about essentially, I came to education. late to the game, I didn't get an education degree. I wasn't the grade school teacher outside of college, you know, I became a software engineer first, I became a product manager. First, I became an entrepreneur first and then I came to education. And when I arrived in education, I said to myself, I had the intuition that well, obviously the best way to educate people would just get to get them as motivated as possible, and then get the hell out of their way. I just thought that that seemed like the best way to run a school to make a school to make you know, my classrooms. And so I started to research around all the theories of education, you know, John Dewey and Montessori and, and and and you know, Waldorf, and all the different kinds of you know, Piaget all the different theories of education and nobody said that nobody said, how just motivate people to the roof, just through the roof. And then you won't be able to stop them from learning a lot. Anyway, so I realized well, this is not this is like something that needs to be said this is something that needs to be sort of described how to do this and so I so I decided to write this book and and explain how I do it because I was able to be the lead of a small college called make school which is open for admissions. Please, if anyone wants to go to college and learn how to be a software engineer come to make school, go to makeschool.com and sign up. But I still am an instructor it make school but I was the program lead and I got to design the whole school and so I designed a school based on this idea of motivating people, just to the to the just to the roof and and We've had great success, we have 90% placement rate within six months of graduation with an average salary of $100,000 a year, which is I think, better than probably any college. That's like a pretty absurd level of success that we've had. And we don't, by the way, take the the creme de la creme, I mean, our students are great. But a lot of our students are saying I, you know, I want to go to this alternative school because I'm not, I'm not going to go to a more traditional school that might say, Oh, you need to have a high SATs, or you need to have a high GPA, a lot of our students are saying, Oh, I don't actually have that high of grades, I don't have that high SAT, I'll go to this kind of alternative school and even then we're able to turn them into total rock, just total rockstars and total slam dunk successes. And I think a lot of that goes back to the structures that I put into the, into the school. So yeah, it's an exciting book, it's coming out probably by, you know, February, March. If you're interested in education, or if you're interested in motivating people at a in a work environment, I think it'll still have a lot to say about that. And especially if you're running a kind of corporate training, or a kind of educational thing for for your workers. This is a really, really, one of this is a new book, like you will not read what I put into the book anywhere else. It's really, really a stunner. It's kind of one of it's kind of a magnum opus, I've been writing it for a number of years. And it's quite good, fun to read to

Joe Krebs 31:24

Adam, I really think this is the it's the key link you just made to corporate learning. Like if you're thinking about change, change to something new, at least for the people involved in the change. And that was the aspect we just talked about and Nemawashy and etc. Right? But what I really think and just want to build that bridge, and maybe we can talk about this once the book is out. One more round on on agile FM, I think the real thing is, you know, with change comes education, and how do you motivate through education. And I think there's a great link to corporate learnings. So even if your book is about schools, if somebody puts the glasses on and read through those things in terms of corporate learning. Fantastic. So I can't wait to see that

Adam Braus 32:06

even even more. Yeah, especially in a knowledge based work environment. I mean, even most of the work I think a lot of knowledge workers do is learning. You know, like you have to learn about your employee, you have to learn about your customers, you have to learn about different industries, you have to learn. And so and so creating a company that is a highly motivational learning environment is exactly what knowledge based companies should do. And so yeah, it does have connections to that as well. But you will have to put it put on the lenses a little bit. Because unfortunately, I'm not. I feel like I read about how to be a good author. And they say write three books about the same genre, you know, and I go, Oh, but I have so many. I want to talk about all these different things. So

Joe Krebs 32:48

that's not your job. That's the job of the reader to put on and read through that. So awesome. Yeah.

Adam Braus 32:56

Yeah. If you become a fan of my writing, it'll always be something different. I hardly ever go back to the same thing, you know. So it's kind of a fun, kind of keep things fresh. Right.

Joe Krebs 33:07

Adam, this was a was a pleasure to speaking with you about all these things can't wait for the next book. And again, AdamBraus.com If you want to see learn more about him. Thank you, and maybe we can follow and continue the conversation about motivate coming up soon. Sure.

Adam Braus 33:27

Sure. Thanks so much, Joe. This has been really great and I love the podcast. Keep it real.

Joe Krebs 33:32

Thank you. Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www.agile.fm. Talk to you soon.