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Hey, what's up, Toby? We're kicking off the five minute process debt podcast.

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And today we are talking about knowledge work.

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We're talking about how important it is to make it transferable.

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And also discoverable.

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Chris, that sounds very counterintuitive based on my business

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undergrad and graduate degrees and 20 years of consulting.

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Discoverable and transferable is not how the consulting industry works,

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nor corporate America, I think.

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OK, question. You've been doing consulting for a really long time.

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If they're knowledge workers, discoverable and transferable work,

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would there be a consulting industry?

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I think that the biggest value that consultants can bring,

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sometimes it's so many more often than not.

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It's the wisdom of ignorance and not understanding

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the personalities and the political landmines and using explore it.

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So I think there's flavors that would exist, but oftentimes,

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you know, we bring in consultants as a forcing function.

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I have not being heard.

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Let me pay inappropriate amounts of money to those really good,

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exceptional consultants.

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Yeah. But but no, I mean, bring somebody in from the outside.

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If folks were focused more on the longevity,

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and the transferability of what they had in their brains,

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that would be landscape change.

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I mean, what do you think? I had it in that you've stayed more

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in the corporate world.

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What's interesting is if you go out and pay Bain or McKinsey

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and you drop a million dollars, you know, it's discoverable and transferable.

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There is one other thing that you can always discover, though.

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And all you have to do is open up your bank balance

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and discover that you're now a million dollars.

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So no, these are some of the smartest kids.

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You'll say go on to lead companies like Enron and MCI

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and some of the biggest brand.

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No, Dak Blockbuster.

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If it's driven by near term numbers,

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if it's only with an eye towards the next quarter or the next,

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then what you're doing is you're putting off all the heavy work.

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And I think that that's where discoverable and transferable,

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you know, in the in the immediate moment,

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the people are touching it, they're thinking about it.

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Now you've got a headache. Right. Yeah.

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So you and I were talking last week, I think, about your Excel channel.

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You can spell VBA.

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You know, a thing or two about it.

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But we both built financial models.

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We built a variety.

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You've done a bunch of like operational automations, you know.

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And I don't know if you spent 100 hours building the tool.

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Oh, did anybody know or care to ask for documentation?

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It's funny. It's OK.

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So funny, funny story at work. Right.

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One of my coworkers finds my channel at work because he's doing some VBA.

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And he's like, oh, my gosh.

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He's like, he's like, dude, you're you're just down two floors for me.

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I'm like, yeah, that's me.

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He's like, this is amazing.

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So anyway, what's so funny about that is like he's like the guy that wrote the code.

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Super smart dude.

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He left his comments in Spanish.

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Right. As as you should know, this kid's smart.

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So he probably got it translated.

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But at the same time, like that, that like the only reason.

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So this is a guy that is a guy that, you know, that was in IT

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Oregon, went to the HHR Oregon.

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So he's definitely the most technically skilled there.

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But again, that goes down to like the guy that wrote the code.

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And that goes down to like, how are you going to transfer this?

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Right. So one little thing change or broke 100 percent.

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And then the whole thing is broke.

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And most of the time, most companies, at least in my experience,

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there's like one super technical person.

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And no one knows no one knows that that person's work except for that person.

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And when that person is gone, you're only as good as their coding and their error

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handling, which is not prioritized when we're being asked to build the models.

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No, or flexibility.

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We're being asked to get it done faster.

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We're at five minutes and 20 seconds, and we're going to get to five minutes,

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but it's going to take practice for early listeners.

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Thanks for hanging on.

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But I do think I think the place where we might leave this, Chris, is knowing that

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we have several examples of what does it really mean for it to be discoverable

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and transferable. And I want to unpack that in some of our future episodes.

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But I think that the part that really resonates with me and the concern that I

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have is twofold. There's two things that big macro trends.

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One, some 75 million baby boomers are supposed to be retiring in the next blink

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of an eye, give or take.

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And then the other piece is private equity is eating the world.

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Oh, yeah. And private equity plays an important function in a number of ways.

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But this is also where some of the brands you and I grew up with have have imploded.

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It's because when we take a purely financial look at how an organization runs,

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there's a world of other choices we don't make.

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And what happens if there's one critical piece, one critical person?

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That leaves an order and doesn't want to come back like you're in big trouble.

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I think some of the next topics that we should talk about is like

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to have something to be discoverable, it has to have a home.

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Right. And if you think of like one of my like personal pet peeves, which is dumb,

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this is a stupid pet peeve, but I have a pet peeve of where people use their

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bookmark bar to find corporate things.

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And so you have as many ways to get to something as you have people that have

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bookmarks and they because there's because there's literally no like there's no whole

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like I just want to go to the glossary and click on where I'm supposed to go

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and see what's funny is like, you know, companies, we use October, whatever.

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It doesn't really matter, but I'll actually go to like Octa.

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Didn't we buy a multimillion dollar product that we then paid ten million dollars to

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implement? Yes.

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No, I think I love the point about home.

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I think also, you know, one of those elements that will touch on is because often it's

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going to be people process.

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We're making hard trade-offs.

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Right. And the other one that I think about, though, is like, you know,

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one that I think about, though, is is we will run in the land of layoffs.

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We've all been through a couple.

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You know, if you're in your 40s or 50s and haven't been through one, you're probably

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independently wealthy or unemployed your entire life.

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Otherwise, you probably went through this motion.

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The hard part is you don't know who has made their knowledge transferable and

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discoverable. There's a lot more that we can talk about and also maybe talk about

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some ideas about how we get ahead of that.

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Yeah. Owner, writer, picking up some of those

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businesses that baby boomers are trying to.

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Well, and the thing is, is it's it's like finding a place and having that culture

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where you're going to do that.

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It flies in the face of.

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What we perceive as productive.

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You said something on a call today earlier with the group of us to the effect of

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and I'm going to ask you to restate it, but this idea that looking busy may not be.

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I say that most businesses like to do businessy things.

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In order to alleviate stress.

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And not to actually solve problems.

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I will say I appreciate that people in general have found that culturally

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appropriate versus public masturbation, which is another way that I know a lot of

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people relieve stress.

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Yeah, we're neglecting it.

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So we're sure.

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Yep. Doing businessy things.

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Yeah, it's everything. Right.

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And it's everywhere.

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Right.

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It's the QBR.

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Yeah.

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It's monthly reviews.

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It's status reports.

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It's like stuff should have a purpose and the purpose can be as simple as we're

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doing this to build camaraderie.

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That's fun.

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But.

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What was your degree?

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What school did you get, pull your degree from?

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The Harvard of the West Boise State.

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Yeah.

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All right.

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We were way over time.

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Broncos.

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That's all right.

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This may become the 10 minute podcast.

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Now we're going to we're still going to talk incremental improvement.

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Thanks, man.

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All right.