Hey, what's up, Toby? We're kicking off the five minute process debt podcast.
And today we are talking about knowledge work.
We're talking about how important it is to make it transferable.
And also discoverable.
Chris, that sounds very counterintuitive based on my business
undergrad and graduate degrees and 20 years of consulting.
Discoverable and transferable is not how the consulting industry works,
nor corporate America, I think.
OK, question. You've been doing consulting for a really long time.
If they're knowledge workers, discoverable and transferable work,
would there be a consulting industry?
I think that the biggest value that consultants can bring,
sometimes it's so many more often than not.
It's the wisdom of ignorance and not understanding
the personalities and the political landmines and using explore it.
So I think there's flavors that would exist, but oftentimes,
you know, we bring in consultants as a forcing function.
I have not being heard.
Let me pay inappropriate amounts of money to those really good,
exceptional consultants.
Yeah. But but no, I mean, bring somebody in from the outside.
If folks were focused more on the longevity,
and the transferability of what they had in their brains,
that would be landscape change.
I mean, what do you think? I had it in that you've stayed more
in the corporate world.
What's interesting is if you go out and pay Bain or McKinsey
and you drop a million dollars, you know, it's discoverable and transferable.
There is one other thing that you can always discover, though.
And all you have to do is open up your bank balance
and discover that you're now a million dollars.
So no, these are some of the smartest kids.
You'll say go on to lead companies like Enron and MCI
and some of the biggest brand.
No, Dak Blockbuster.
If it's driven by near term numbers,
if it's only with an eye towards the next quarter or the next,
then what you're doing is you're putting off all the heavy work.
And I think that that's where discoverable and transferable,
you know, in the in the immediate moment,
the people are touching it, they're thinking about it.
Now you've got a headache. Right. Yeah.
So you and I were talking last week, I think, about your Excel channel.
You can spell VBA.
You know, a thing or two about it.
But we both built financial models.
We built a variety.
You've done a bunch of like operational automations, you know.
And I don't know if you spent 100 hours building the tool.
Oh, did anybody know or care to ask for documentation?
It's funny. It's OK.
So funny, funny story at work. Right.
One of my coworkers finds my channel at work because he's doing some VBA.
And he's like, oh, my gosh.
He's like, he's like, dude, you're you're just down two floors for me.
I'm like, yeah, that's me.
He's like, this is amazing.
So anyway, what's so funny about that is like he's like the guy that wrote the code.
Super smart dude.
He left his comments in Spanish.
Right. As as you should know, this kid's smart.
So he probably got it translated.
But at the same time, like that, that like the only reason.
So this is a guy that is a guy that, you know, that was in IT
Oregon, went to the HHR Oregon.
So he's definitely the most technically skilled there.
But again, that goes down to like the guy that wrote the code.
And that goes down to like, how are you going to transfer this?
Right. So one little thing change or broke 100 percent.
And then the whole thing is broke.
And most of the time, most companies, at least in my experience,
there's like one super technical person.
And no one knows no one knows that that person's work except for that person.
And when that person is gone, you're only as good as their coding and their error
handling, which is not prioritized when we're being asked to build the models.
No, or flexibility.
We're being asked to get it done faster.
We're at five minutes and 20 seconds, and we're going to get to five minutes,
but it's going to take practice for early listeners.
Thanks for hanging on.
But I do think I think the place where we might leave this, Chris, is knowing that
we have several examples of what does it really mean for it to be discoverable
and transferable. And I want to unpack that in some of our future episodes.
But I think that the part that really resonates with me and the concern that I
have is twofold. There's two things that big macro trends.
One, some 75 million baby boomers are supposed to be retiring in the next blink
of an eye, give or take.
And then the other piece is private equity is eating the world.
Oh, yeah. And private equity plays an important function in a number of ways.
But this is also where some of the brands you and I grew up with have have imploded.
It's because when we take a purely financial look at how an organization runs,
there's a world of other choices we don't make.
And what happens if there's one critical piece, one critical person?
That leaves an order and doesn't want to come back like you're in big trouble.
I think some of the next topics that we should talk about is like
to have something to be discoverable, it has to have a home.
Right. And if you think of like one of my like personal pet peeves, which is dumb,
this is a stupid pet peeve, but I have a pet peeve of where people use their
bookmark bar to find corporate things.
And so you have as many ways to get to something as you have people that have
bookmarks and they because there's because there's literally no like there's no whole
like I just want to go to the glossary and click on where I'm supposed to go
and see what's funny is like, you know, companies, we use October, whatever.
It doesn't really matter, but I'll actually go to like Octa.
Didn't we buy a multimillion dollar product that we then paid ten million dollars to
implement? Yes.
No, I think I love the point about home.
I think also, you know, one of those elements that will touch on is because often it's
going to be people process.
We're making hard trade-offs.
Right. And the other one that I think about, though, is like, you know,
one that I think about, though, is is we will run in the land of layoffs.
We've all been through a couple.
You know, if you're in your 40s or 50s and haven't been through one, you're probably
independently wealthy or unemployed your entire life.
Otherwise, you probably went through this motion.
The hard part is you don't know who has made their knowledge transferable and
discoverable. There's a lot more that we can talk about and also maybe talk about
some ideas about how we get ahead of that.
Yeah. Owner, writer, picking up some of those
businesses that baby boomers are trying to.
Well, and the thing is, is it's it's like finding a place and having that culture
where you're going to do that.
It flies in the face of.
What we perceive as productive.
You said something on a call today earlier with the group of us to the effect of
and I'm going to ask you to restate it, but this idea that looking busy may not be.
I say that most businesses like to do businessy things.
In order to alleviate stress.
And not to actually solve problems.
I will say I appreciate that people in general have found that culturally
appropriate versus public masturbation, which is another way that I know a lot of
people relieve stress.
Yeah, we're neglecting it.
So we're sure.
Yep. Doing businessy things.
Yeah, it's everything. Right.
And it's everywhere.
Right.
It's the QBR.
Yeah.
It's monthly reviews.
It's status reports.
It's like stuff should have a purpose and the purpose can be as simple as we're
doing this to build camaraderie.
That's fun.
But.
What was your degree?
What school did you get, pull your degree from?
The Harvard of the West Boise State.
Yeah.
All right.
We were way over time.
Broncos.
That's all right.
This may become the 10 minute podcast.
Now we're going to we're still going to talk incremental improvement.
Thanks, man.
All right.