Road Work Ahead

#3 - Chris Leone: 4-Day Workweek, ChatGPT, AI for Creatives & Education

• Waypost Studio | Sam Gerdt • Season 1 • Episode 3

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Is the traditional five-day workweek on the chopping block? Can we unlock higher productivity and employee satisfaction with a four-day model? In this episode, we consider this concept with Chris Leone, CEO of Web Strategies, as he details how he's approaching a four-day workweek pilot in his own company.

Join me as we dissect the implementation process, challenges, rewards, and the absolutely essential role of data-driven metrics. We go behind the scenes of Chris's pilot program, how it's challenging traditional work culture, and how he's managing potential pitfalls. Let's reimagine the balance between work and life as we continue our dive into the future of technology, the rise of AI tools like Chat GPT, and their implications on the work week.

Sam Gerdt:

Welcome everybody to Roadwork Ahead, a podcast that explores the unmapped future of business and technology. My name is Sam Gerdt and I am your host. The last few years have shown us that big changes in the way we think about work can happen incredibly fast when you have the right catalyst. Covid pushed us all to think about remote work, gen Z is pushing us to think more about culture, and AI is forcing us to think about the humanness of work. At the heart of it all is the struggle to balance work and life. Today, I'm sharing a conversation with Chris Leone, the CEO of Web Strategies, who is taking this opportunity to try something in his company that most people are still very skeptical about. It was an amazing discussion. Chris has a sharp mind for business and people, and I can't wait for you all to hear what he has to say. Chris, you came to my attention because of something very special, very unusual, that you're doing in your company. You are piloting a four-day work week, not four ten-hour days, but four eight-hour days. I'm curious how did that come about?

Chris Leone:

First of all, an important distinction, because I get asked this question a lot are you doing four ten-hour days? I'm like, no, we're doing four eight-hour days. The model is called 180-100, which means 100% of the productivity and 80% of the time for 100% of the pay. That's the model. Is there a question on how to come about? It was first presented to me by an employee a couple of years ago. It was the first time I'd ever heard of it. I had probably the reaction that most people running a business would have, which is what are you out of your mind? Right, we couldn't work in four days. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to kill the company? Well, I brushed it off, but that was the first time I heard about it. It resurfaced. We're a company that we're always asking our employees how can we be better, how can we make the employee experience better? We do a lot of workplace surveys and things like that. It crept back up. It happened earlier this year. We heard more about it from our people.

Chris Leone:

At the same time, there was some data starting to come out in some big publications about four-day workweek, the result of four-day workweek pilots. I was seeing these in my regular news feed. I'm like, okay, yeah, let's see what this found. The data was overwhelmingly positive enough so that I wasn't just going to dismiss it. I'm like, okay, I'm a believer in data, I trust data. It opened my mind up to the possibility. Now I started to noodle on it a bit. About a year ago I hired a director of people operations. Now I had somebody to talk directly and collaborate with on this.

Chris Leone:

I think the big switch in my mind that got me to really seriously consider it is to just suspend my skepticism and say, well, what if all of these benefits that these pilot companies supposedly get out of four-day workweek is real? These are benefits like reduced turnover, higher recruiting, higher employee satisfaction, better employee wellness, increased productivity, which is very counterintuitive. I was like what if that is true? What if you can actually achieve that? I started to think about all the upside. In fact, the main thing that was always hanging around my head is what about productivity? What about productivity? What about productivity? The data was saying companies maintain, sometimes even increased productivity. That was the first thing. I was like I'm really curious about that. I want to know more. We reached out to these firms that had organized these global pilots that are producing the reports and studies that you're reading about in the news. I became friendly with one guy in particular and we got into some deep conversations on it. He's like Chris.

Chris Leone:

The thing is, this is really an experiment in efficiency. I heard things like there are four-day workweeks already there, but they're kind of masked in this five-day workweek model that we're so accustomed to. Over the last at least 80 years. I think a five-day workweek came about in the 40s and before that we were working more than that. I just got fascinated by the idea of can this actually improve how efficient we are? Because now we're challenging our long-held beliefs about how much time does it take. I was exposed to things like Parkinson's Law, which says it takes as much time as you have to do something. Time expands to the time that you have to do something. I was like there are so many interesting psychological experiments nested within this.

Chris Leone:

Then you think about all the benefits on the other side of it. What if you could actually chop out a bunch of useless stuff? You don't do meetings that are not worth it. Are we taking an hour to do this? Because that's how long we think it takes, but we can actually do it in 15 minutes, on and on and on. If we can actually be really critical of how we do things today and chop a lot of stuff off, then we get a day back in our week and then our employees are happier and more people want to come work for us. There's too strong of an argument for it to just not at least test it. That was the journey I tell people. A lot of times the switch that flipped in my head was like well, what if you could maintain productivity? Then look at those benefits. It's worth a shot. That's what brought us to where we are now.

Sam Gerdt:

I've got about 30 rapid fire questions for you now. I'll rattle them off as quickly as I can. I just want to get some clarification on several things that you said, because there's so much to unpack there. First of all, the data that you were seeing these pilot programs. Were you seeing long term data or short term data? This is a good question.

Chris Leone:

Depending on how we define it. I'll just tell you the time frames I was familiar with. Companies would create a baseline, so it would be six to 12 months before, and then the data from running a six month or three month or 12 month pilot. That's what they were comparing. What I haven't seen yet, which is what I'm really interested in, is what is the two, three, four, five year outlook look like? Because now you're out of the honeymoon phase and you can't really go and recommend marriage to somebody based off of your honeymoon trip. It's like that ain't marriage. I haven't seen the long term data yet, but comparing the actual pilot period, which is anywhere from three to 12 months, to the prior period is how people are measuring it. Obviously, you're comparing COVID times too. There's a lot of funky stuff in there.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, well, that's the other point of clarification. This sounds like this is right in the middle of COVID, maybe even going into it. This is also pre-AI tools, pre-a lot of the talk that we have about increased efficiencies with GPT or whatever. This is the idea that without these tools, you could find those increases in efficiency.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, I think the movement yeah, because these large language models like chat, GBT and Bard, those hit November, December, January of 22 and 23. These pilots were happening in the early 20s. Prior to that, they're two very separate things, although now they work very well together.

Sam Gerdt:

Are you running this pilot through an organization?

Chris Leone:

We're not. We chose not to do that. A lot of companies do where they're part of this cohort and they get, they pay a little bit of money and then they have a community that they could talk to. They have an advisor they could talk to. But we felt good enough to experiment with it on our by ourselves.

Sam Gerdt:

How long are you guys running this pilot?

Chris Leone:

The first window is three months. We're week seven right now. We started 1st of July. We're recording this mid-August, so that's how long we've been at it. We want to go three months, provided that there's or assuming that, there's nothing disastrous that comes about. Then we'll just continue to extend it. I don't expect that I'm going to say lock it in and say this is what we are now indefinitely. I think we'll. If it works after three we'll go to six, if six works, we'll do it a year and then we'll take it from there.

Sam Gerdt:

What kind of response, then, are you getting from employees at every level, who obviously are going to be motivated to keep this model? What kind of response do you get when the idea of stopping the pilot and going back to a five-day work week, when that?

Chris Leone:

comes up. I really don't want to have to have that conversation. As the CEO, I think very highly of who works in my space and has built a really, really impressive company. We were talking a couple of weeks ago and he's like.

Sam Gerdt:

You know, chris, it's really hard to take something back once you've yeah, Well, and we should also probably hear it go ahead and clarify your company is fully remote.

Chris Leone:

Yeah.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, so that plays a big part in it too Fully remote four-day.

Chris Leone:

I mean we are going against the grain compared to what's happening out there right now.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah.

Chris Leone:

Which, I'll be honest, makes me a little uncomfortable On the surface of it. But then I kind of go back to just don't, it doesn't matter what other people do, it doesn't matter what other people think. Just execute the best you can in your world with what you can control. And that's what we've had to do. But we've had a really you know, if we've had blinders on in the past, we've really had to kind of pull our hood up over our blinders so there's no outside noise, because everything else that's going on out in the world is saying no, it doesn't work. You got to go back to the office and all the blah and then stuff going on in the economy. But yeah, we are fully remote. We've been fully remote for a long time. We've gotten really good at it. So we're layering both fully remote and four-day on top of each other right now.

Sam Gerdt:

And you are fully remote, not because of what happened with COVID. You're fully remote from well before that.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, from the get-go. So we started in 2004. I came on in 2008. We've always been remote. We've had an office for a few years in there, just because we acquired another company. They had a lease. We kept it and then we were like, oh, this is kind of nice, we'll get a bigger one. But we never required people to come in. It was more of like a crashing space and hey, let's meet here, or some people just wanted to change a scenery, whatever, but never required people to come in. Some people we never saw. We had people spread out across the country not as many as we have now, but we still had some then.

Chris Leone:

But then it was 2021 and the lease was coming up and I'm like this makes no sense and so I just I say we're not renewing. I actually took a picture of the empty office space and I posted it on LinkedIn and said we're letting our lease go, we're going to continue to be fully remote. Yada, yada. And it went viral because I think that was kind of the big conversation that was just starting to happen at that time and it was 21. Yeah, it was months after the start of COVID, but if you kind of think back, there were these kind of ebbs and flows of how comfortable people were going out being in the office, whatever. And 21 was kind of the first pushback. But I mean it went viral on LinkedIn. It kind of became the hub of conversation around remote work versus in-person. So that was a really interesting experience. But, all said and done, it's something that we've always been remote.

Chris Leone:

First, we have a co-working. We have co-working memberships now so people can pop into. We're in Richmond, virginia, and we have co-working memberships at a place that has like four or five buildings in the area. So people live all over the town. They can go into that. And then if you're out of market, if you want, we'll pay up to a certain amount for a co-working membership for you if you like that change of scenery. But I mean I don't know that we've gotten any requests on that. Meanwhile I've got somebody who's local who can go into a co-working space here. She's been working from Europe the last couple months with her family, so she's just she's taken full advantage of it and we think it's awesome.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah. Yeah, that's the flexibility that you get. What I'll be curious now is maybe we catch up in a couple of years. What happens, I guess, with that four-day pilot combined with working remote? But I'm also curious what happens? You talked a little bit about trimming fat, hacking things off that aren't absolutely necessary. What happens if six months, 12 months down the road, you recognize a drop in quality, Not just a drop in efficiency with time, but a drop in quality? How do you measure that?

Chris Leone:

Yeah.

Chris Leone:

So there's, we kind of have a combination of leading and lagging metrics on this, and then, of course, the kind of subjective ones, anecdotal ones, that we could look at to along the way. The quality one I think that's one that's going to take a little bit longer to see and it's going to show up in a couple of different ways, I think. So we survey our clients every quarter and we ask the net promoter score question, which is how likely are you to recommend us? I created a metric called net value score, which is still a one out of 10 question, but it asks how valuable do you consider the work we do? And I've got years and years and probably thousands of data points on that over time, so I can see how that's trended over the years, both for clients that are still with us and clients that have left us. So I have good baselines for all that stuff.

Chris Leone:

I think we're going to look at that, but of course that's coming from the client perspective. We're also going to track how long it takes people to complete tasks. We've seen a drop in that so far, which is good. It's not big, it's like a 9% drop in time to complete tasks, but that's just the billable work. The non-billable work could also see reductions in time. But that doesn't speak to quality. It says how long did it take to do something.

Chris Leone:

So I think we're going to see it show up also in client retention, in the net value, net promoter scores, and then just being able to go in and look at the work and say what are we doing for this, what results are we getting? We use a tool called Gong that records every conversation between an account manager and a client and it transcribes all of that and we can search it so we can look for certain trigger words like concerned or results or whatever, and then go back, look at those transcripts and say is the client raising more concerns around this than they used to? And then, of course, senior level people can go in and objectively look at it and say is this good work? Are we getting results? Pull up analytics, pull up looker studio, look at the reports and say are we consistently getting good wins compared to before? But of course marketing is always this moving target, so you know that there are the ebbs and flows of your success rate.

Chris Leone:

But yeah, I guess, long story short, there's kind of this potpourri of things that we have to consider and look at. That paints the broader picture.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, and I'm going to go ahead and guess here that most business owners, most agencies in your case, don't have the data that you have. You seem to be somebody who is something of a data geek. You're constantly looking for ways to record and collect and measure data. I know a lot of agencies don't do that, so would embarking on a pilot program like this be less maybe easy to undertake, more difficult, simply because they don't really have anything to measure against? How valuable do you feel that data is in a program like this?

Chris Leone:

Yeah, it's a good question. So there's like a couple of ways to approach that. All right, thank you. Thank you. First of all, I have a lot of empathy for smaller firms that are just trying to like get the job done. I mean, I've right, I joined when we were like five or six people. I know what an agency of that size feels like. We're 45 now, so it's it's got a different feel. We've got more redundancy and things like that. Look just, if you go, you know, just so the signs 101 like if you, if you design experiments poorly, you're not going to be able to trust the results right.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah.

Chris Leone:

So I think the better you can set up the experiment, the more reliable the results are. We yes, I am a data nerd. I love connecting spreadsheets and and to our project management systems and pushing them into a report. It's like literally one of my favorite things to do, as sick as that sounds, but I just I I Feel good knowing things and like if, if something is ambiguous, it creates anxiety for me because I'm like I don't know, I can't feel like I can manage this. Well, I don't know if this is the right decision to make, because I don't know if this is really happening, because we don't have good data on it. This is, but it comes back to. One of the things I just love about this four-day work week experiment is that it creates a forced constraint, and Any creative person will tell you if they've got two weeks to do something, they do their best work with two hours left Before that deadline, because there's something about that kind of pressure that that just activates the creativity in your head.

Chris Leone:

And While we were very data focused as an organization prior to this, the experimental design of setting up the pilot forced us to come up with Even better metrics, metrics we never had before. So, for example, I'm not crazy about build time, okay. And so what? When we're saying, when we're looking at, well, how would we measure whether or not it's People are as productive, you say, well, is there build time, the same. But at the same time, we're also trying to incentivize people to Try to incentivize people to Figure out how to do things in less time.

Chris Leone:

Yeah so if we're saying success means you're still logging your 30 or 35 hours a week, but you need to figure out how to do things in less time, like those two things Contradict each other in a way, right, or at least kind of pull against each other. So I said, you know, what really matters is that we're still doing the same number of tasks per week. Okay, yeah, so I'm like, okay, that's something we should measure. I Want people to take less time doing those, but we should still be able to do the same amount. If you figure out how to do things in a lot less time and you got more time back in your day, what that's that you've earned that right. My opinion. So we created number of tasks completed and Then, as I was, I've got this really Brilliant person helping with me Helping operations. She's my like manager of ops and she's really into our, our tool that manages, like our project management tool, and so we're collaborating on that and we're looking at it. You're, like you know, turn around times another one, right, because if, if a four-day work week and if people are doing less work in those four days, turn around times are gonna increase, because now work that you would have done on the Friday gets kicked to the next week, and then there's just things continue to get pushed out. So I said that's another metric that should stay the same. Turn around time needs to be within the acceptable window, whether it's seven, fourteen days, whatever you've defined for like that type of task.

Chris Leone:

So then we went through and we started to create new ways that people send tasks throughout the organization and priority levels, and Then we got a really great, brilliant developer. We have to find ways to push that data into a spreadsheet. Now I'm manipulating it, putting on a scoreboard. So now we're looking at Average turnaround time of tasks. We're looking at the percentage of tasks that are marked as urgent, which create a lot of chaos because that's like stop what you're doing, you got to work on this now. And then the percentage of tasks that are considered that are like long-term planning tasks, which we want to see more of. That means an account manager is looking two to three months out and getting work on the project sheet now, which helps everybody, you know, versus, hey, this needs to get done quickly. So now I've put that onto our main company scoreboard and and we'll see, is our more urgent tasks coming in, our Account managers starting to plan further out, and then what's the turnaround time? And then I can break all this out by department too, because that's going to vary quite a bit.

Chris Leone:

The point is, is that even for us, who are very kind of data minded with our operations before, because we were challenged to prove the effectiveness or the success or the failure of four-day work week, we had to come up with new metrics, and so we did, and now we're even better for it, right?

Chris Leone:

So I just I love the effect of a forced constraint on these things and I and that's what I one of the reasons I think this experiment so powerful. But I, just circling back to your question, I, when I talked to a lot of, I talked to a lot of CEOs who had done four days, or piloting it or whatever, and I had these very specific questions how do you measure this track, this, this, this, this? And like I was never really satisfied with the answers, like I'd get vague answers, and I talked to somebody who's just like, yeah, we don't measure it. I'm like, eh, it's not good enough for me, you know. So there are people out there who are just like, hey, if clients are happy and they're still paying and we think we're doing good work. Great, all right that I'm not that loosey goosey someone else maybe and I think they've made it work, but I need something more conclusive than that.

Sam Gerdt:

So the goal of the work week, the four-day work week is, is a definite goal. You're not satisfied to just give this to your employees and have revenue remain sustainable, have work remain adequate. There's there's a definite goal. What and how is how? Is the pilot affecting things like your growth goals and your, you know, percentage, year over year increases in revenue, things like that?

Chris Leone:

Yeah, I mean the, the top level metrics that need to be protected, and I was very clear about this when I said we were even considering four days. We have to continue to hit our revenue goals. We have to continue to continue to hit our gross margin goals and we share those percentages and numbers with people so they know what they are. We have to continue to hit our retention goals, our upsell goals, our client satisfaction and survey goals. Those are untouchable. Okay, yeah, and again in my mind, if you can hit all those and people say that they like four days yeah what else is there to talk about?

Sam Gerdt:

You know, yeah, that that does simplify it.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, but we just I, I don't want to just lean on those metrics because those are lagging metrics, so I need leading metrics I can look at on a week by week basis to say all right, we still executing the way that we expected to, and and have it be somewhat predictive of the outcomes that we, that we want to get.

Sam Gerdt:

Right and so, end of the day, I'm picturing the average business owner hitting his growth goals, hitting his revenue goals, hitting his margins. He's he's for whatever reason, because the average business owner's not going to do this, but he's done a pilot program like this and it's working and people are happy. Most people are still going to say, okay, well, if I had five days, I could crush those goals and we could grow revenue even faster and we could have better margins and we could have, you know, all this other stuff. So there's still a philosophical, people oriented motivation behind all of this. Regardless of how the numbers pan out, you're still you're still boiling it down to the quality of employment. Is that that's accurate? You?

Chris Leone:

know that's a good way to put. Yeah, that's making me think for a second here. Yeah, I mean because you say, well, let's get the benefit of the four-day work week, which means we're more efficient, we're more protective of our time, but then let's expand it back out to five. Now, first of all, practical terms, that would be hard to execute, because you're going to give something to people, You're going to get all the benefit and then you're going to take it away. Go back up to five. Also, I think once you go back up to five, you can lose, like you can't retain some of those things you could take. You could retain the lessons and the new systems and automations and whatever you set up, but from an employee wellness perspective, I think you're going to lose that, the retention, the recruitment, just employee satisfaction, all that kind of stuff. And keep in mind, too, the, the.

Chris Leone:

It's not compression of time, right, Because we're not. We're not doing four, 10 days. Sometimes that's called like the compression model. I think we're doing four, eight days. Those eight hours are more intense, Right? So to then do that over five days, I think it starts to become counterproductive, right? So just from a practical standpoint, I'm not sure. Good luck. If you want to try it, maybe it'll work Right.

Chris Leone:

But so but your broader point. But your broader point like why still do it and is it employee focused? Yeah I would say. I would say it is, because I think it's. It's really interesting.

Chris Leone:

I was doing this. I was on this panel earlier today and there was a historian on there who was taught this was like for the four day work week and AI. And there was a historian on there who was talking about number of hours worked per day over the last century plus and he had a really interesting graph and it was showing that the number of hours worked decreased. It was a steady slope downward from the late 19th century, so late 1800s, all the way into the early 20th century, around the 30s and 40s. It kind of moved up and down. But the point is that downward curve stopped and then went flat at eight hours a day, 40 hours a week or I think it was measured days per week work. So, yeah, it stopped on five days and then it was flat and I was fascinated by that.

Chris Leone:

I was like why, if you look at the first part of the chart where it's moving downwards kind of steadily, you look at that and conclude that's the result of several variables market forces, innovation, technology, laws and regulations, all these things working together. That is showing gradual improvement in the worker experience. Over time Things are gradually getting better and the employee gets rewarded for that because they don't have to work as much every day. But then around the 40s and the 50s it stops and it goes flat and I think, well, that looks like it's a result of something maybe more singular that's controlling the situation, because it doesn't look like it doesn't even flow at all, it's just flat five days. And so if you look back in history you think, okay, what's going on here? I mean, there's a lot of cultural things that could explain it. This person suggested it was a switch from prioritizing leisure to prioritizing luxury. Consumerism started to take off, madison Avenue took off and now people wanted more and they wanted to work All these things really interesting. Also, is it more of like corporate culture or this certain work ethic that was kind of drilled down.

Chris Leone:

But point is, it seemed artificial that all of a sudden this chart stopped going down and flattened it five days.

Chris Leone:

So it's really challenged me and my employees to think what are we ultimately trying to do? Get back to first principles here. There's nothing that says thou must work five days a week in order to provide for your family, like this is not a law that came about when earth was created. Right, this is all made up, but it doesn't seem like for the last 80 years that we are working based off of what is actually required, based on what we're trying to do. It seems like there's something else at play, that's kind of an invisible hand on it, whereas prior to the 40s, technology was getting better, regulations were getting better, everything was getting better and, as a result, we didn't have to work seven days, then we didn't have to work six days because we were benefiting from that. So, yeah, I think there's something philosophical about this which is like let's just throw out this notion that you have to work five days in order to do really good, interesting things and build really good, successful businesses.

Sam Gerdt:

Right. Well, what's interesting when you talk about that point in history, that's, that's industrial revolution, right, there, right, huge upheaval, huge disruption. And it seems to me like what was happening is there are increases in efficiency and you get to pick which of these variables are going to be constant and which are going to be variable. So in this case you had an unsustainable you know, 80, 90, 100, 120, 130 hour work week for the average person, and industrialization allowed that to decrease steadily till you got to 40. And at that point I don't have a chart in front of me, but my knowledge of history tells me wages and average wealth of the middle class greatly increased when when number of hours work flatline.

Sam Gerdt:

So it seems to me like you have business owners and just generally, we get to pick which rates are going to be constant so that other rates can be variable. And in this case, what you have is let's, let's make the amount of time that we work constant and increase the value that we generate in the wages that we earn in that amount of time. And this is interesting to me because now we have AI tools coming on and they're starting this new discussion, similar to probably the discussions that people were having during the industrial revolution. And you get to, you get to almost take a step back and you get to say, okay, well, let's say that the average workers output increases dramatically as a result of artificial intelligence. That's going to generate more revenue, more wealth, that's going to increase efficiencies. It's going to decrease the amount of time it takes to complete tasks. So in that case, what do we want to do?

Sam Gerdt:

I almost feel like there are a lot of business owners out there who are recognizing this and saying what do we want to keep constant and what do we want to make variable? And what you've done, it seems, is you've said I want to make total hours per week worked variable. And what a lot of other people are saying is let's make revenue variable, let's make more money, or let's make overhead variable, let's reduce our costs. And there's there's all these people kind of playing tug of war with these ideas. So I guess what? What leads you to want to emphasize and prioritize amount of time worked per week, when, when you could have feasibly, when you could have even more revenue, or when you could reduce overheads?

Chris Leone:

Well, you know it's. You can get pretty philosophical on this too, which is like what, what is this all for? What are you trying to do? What's your goal? Right, I know someone running a business. I have our short and long term goals. I know how big I want us to be this decade. I know where I want us to be this year, next year, and then I'll set up my next three year plan.

Chris Leone:

We'll come, we'll finish our current three year plan next year and then we'll create another one and I mean, look, it's like, if I can, if we can continue to grow the business the way I want to, because I want us to continue to grow. I want us to be bigger, because your other, I have a vision for what I want this company to be able to do, and it requires more folks, more expertise, things like that. But also, you know, if I can hit those revenue goals and I can have happy people, that and I say this to everybody who comes in when I hire them, because I meet with everybody we hire on the first day I said, look, I realize you're not going to be here forever, but my goal is that you always look back on your time here as being a force for good in your career and in your life, right? So if we can create a great employee experience where they grow, where they're learning, where they look back and say I enjoyed that time in my life, I'm glad I did that and I can do and I can give them some opportunities that most places don't, which is that extra day in the week to go be with your spouse, go out for like a you know a lunch date because you got little kids, or take care of that.

Chris Leone:

You know you have the baby that day while your partner goes out, or you're able to pick up that hobby. Are you able to go shopping so you can be more present with your kids on the weekend, or do your hobbies on the weekend. I mean fast forward to the. You know when you're done with all this and you're retiring, or you know you're on your deathbed and you're like, did I do good things in this world? Did I do good things for people? And I'm like, yeah, that I feel like I would be able to say that if this model works, if I can continue to achieve the goals that I have for this company, I just don't think those two outcomes are mutually exclusive. Right, we got to get better. We have to challenge ourselves to accomplish both, but I think it can be done right and that's that's kind of a big motivator for me.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah. What do your clients think of it?

Chris Leone:

So not many of them know about it. I post. I post quite a bit on LinkedIn and I have said that we're doing this and a couple clients have brought it up because they follow me on LinkedIn. But we make the conscious decision not to tell them and the reason for that is kind of the knee jerk reaction as well. It's not your business, but the real answer is we.

Chris Leone:

We don't want to bias our clients in one way or another because they know we're doing four days instead of five, because you know you're going to have someone out there who's like this is anti-American, totally work four days, right, or something. I don't want a partner who only works four days a week. That's lazy. And so then when they start answering our surveys, they're biased against us. So we didn't announce it because I want their feedback to be honest and pure, to the work right and nothing else. And you know they're account manager in the relationship with the company and the number of days we work per week should have nothing to do with it, because we don't sell them on that. We don't say we're going to work this many hours for you. We say this is work we're going to do in the results that we want to get for you.

Sam Gerdt:

So the clients that you have heard from, are they okay?

Chris Leone:

Yeah, actually we've heard a couple things. They're like how's it going? I think it's really cool you're doing it, and then can Chris come and talk to our CEO so we can do it too.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, I bet. So then let's say we do have major efficiencies. Ai helps us, whatever helps us At some point. We went from a six-day work week to a five-day work week. Do you envision, at some point in the future, going from a five-day work week to a four-day work week, having this be just a normal thing that everybody does?

Chris Leone:

It's interesting. I heard a lot of people say, even people who are opposed to it oh, I think we'll get there eventually. I think that's interesting. I don't think everybody wants to work four days. Some people like to go to work and get out of the house and that's where they get their sense of purpose and meaning. That's why people still work on weekends or whatever. But overall I think there's been some legislation put together to try and do this nationally. It doesn't get anywhere, but I don't know. It's hard to say. I think more companies are going to try it.

Chris Leone:

What I get concerned about is those who don't take a strategic approach to it and don't really respect that this is about trying to do things better and more efficiently and instead they just cut time out. I think that can be dangerous to the longevity of any business. So unfortunately, I think the middle of the bell curve on this will be people who simply cut off time, aren't measuring it well. As it becomes more ubiquitous, it's not as much of a selling point. So you can't get better people just because you have that. We used to be able to recruit great people because we were remote. That was a competitive advantage and everyone's remote, and we don't have that advantage anymore. I've thought about it. I just don't know if you apply to everyone, if it will necessarily work. Honestly, I think it would be great.

Chris Leone:

One person on my shoulder says this would be great for people. People will be happier, they'll have more leisure time, they'll be able to live more fuller lives or live fuller lives. I think that's all great, but the other shoulder makes me a little worried that we are indulging too much in luxury and free time. Which.

Chris Leone:

Ray Dalio wrote a really interesting book about the rise and fall of nations and global superpowers and he said he studied all these countries that used to be global superpowers who are no longer, and one of the things you see on the back end of that curve of their power is that there's an excess indulgence in these countries and a lot of extra leisure time and that could lead to them falling back in terms of their status in the world. So those two things kind of battle in my brain sometimes. I do think with AI coming about, I don't see any reason why we can't become hyper-efficient in what we do in so many different ways that I do think a lot about. Will there be enough jobs out there for all the people? Or are we going to really consolidate the number of humans needed and then you have to get into, like UBI and all these other ideas to try and keep people float if things start to become really concentrated. So I can't really speculate, but not very well on that.

Sam Gerdt:

Well, on the one hand, if Ray Dalio said it, I'm inclined to listen, I find I find him incredibly wise, Probably one of my favorite business authors. I'm glad that you brought him up. But on the other hand I do feel like that. You know, if you were to compare it to the Industrial Revolution, there are far more jobs now than there were before the Industrial Revolution, and there are far more jobs now than there were before the Internet. So it seems like major innovation doesn't necessarily have a good track record of robbing us of jobs. It just creates new and different jobs.

Sam Gerdt:

But it is certainly true that we do have a significant increase in leisure time, and it does ring a little true for me. I think that the idea of a four-day work week where now you're all of a sudden almost you know, 50% of your time is working, 50% of your time is leisure, it does seem we're skewing in a direction where it's getting to the point where work almost takes a backseat, in the sense that the urgency to work, to live, to provide, doesn't seem quite so urgent. So I'll be curious to see you know what happens with that.

Chris Leone:

Well, and I think, especially the younger generations, millennials, generation Z they're prioritizing experiences and over material goods and a lot of especially when I'm interviewing younger folks, those are the things that they prioritize more. And you think about older generations and you say, well, who were they raised by? Well, they're raised by people who grew up during the Great Depression, right, they've got, you know, a very different perspective and they take a lot fewer things for granted. I'm not blaming the younger generation. I never blame the younger generations, because they're just working with what they got they were working with based on how they were parented in the world that they, you know, grew up in.

Sam Gerdt:

Right, it's not yeah they're different, but they're not. One's not necessarily.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, they're not genetically inferior because they prioritize this over the other thing. It's like, well, yeah, the other generations worked hard so that they could have, you know, live in this really safe, you know, well off country. All you know, all things considered, that's not their fault, but yeah, it's. It's a bit of a paradigm shift and I think we just have to acknowledge that we're lucky to be able to prioritize those things. It's, you know, hard work was valued, because hard work is what actually put got the hunger out of your belly, like it was a real legitimate survival, existential thing you were dealing with. So they prioritize that. But now it's like, well, we don't have to work, like we have means, we know where that next we're much more likely. I don't want to speak for everybody. There are a lot of people who have. We're going through really tough times in this country, but on average, the accessibility of calories today is much different than it was, you know, 100 years ago and, as a result, the kids who were raised by those generations have different perspectives on life.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, and that's where the technology discussion really shifts when we look forward to the future and all of these conversations that I'm having are really focused on this is we're looking ahead to a significant leap, and you've admitted I think in some of your posts too that you probably wouldn't be doing a pilot of a four-day work week if it weren't for tools like chat, gpt. So, howard, what is it about those tools that you see that has you excited to try something like this?

Chris Leone:

Yeah, I mean just to correct. I wouldn't say that we wouldn't be considering it, but it's a real help, you know it's a real foreign asset while we do it.

Sam Gerdt:

But going back to your question, though, you were asking Well, what is it about these AI tools that you're seeing? That is most motivating for you to try to do this to reduce efficiency so dramatically.

Chris Leone:

It will improve, efficient, reduce time.

Sam Gerdt:

Improve efficient, yeah, yeah.

Chris Leone:

It's. I continued, I started using chat GPT like I think, the week it came out late November of 22. And I was immediately wowed by it. And I was wowed by it yesterday trying to do something else and what I'm finding is that there are so many different layers to how it can help you and it's pretty multi-dimensional on how it can help you. And a lot of people most people have at least tried it and like, oh, it's great, it can write a paragraph explaining the movie Dumb and Dumber in the Tone of Shakespeare. That's funny, that's cool. And then they kind of move on, or at least that's their idea of what it can do. And yes, it can create content, but it can do so much more than that. And the things that I'm fascinated with right now are like, for example, I can have it write more complex Excel formulas and Google scripts than I could ever write. I was pretty good at Excel formulas, but I had it write something for me yesterday that was like several different lines, and that's when I discovered you can actually widen or deepen the formula bar. If you've got a really big formula, I'm like, oh man, this looks like a legitimate formula now. And I don't write script. I'm not a developer, yet it created this whole script for me.

Chris Leone:

So earlier in the podcast we were talking about these metrics that I have around turnaround times and number of tasks and urgency and everything like that. I was working within it and I was basically dictating the chat GBT. Here's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to take data from this spreadsheet in these cells, put it here so I can run it into a report. How do I do that? Because I'm having trouble with the formula and it's like well, instead of a formula, you actually need a script, and here's what that script will look like oh, how do I install the script? Oh, click here, go here and install it and then run it, and it should do this. And so it wasn't just saving me time in writing that script or in writing that formula. It was doing that. But now what I'm able to do is look at a report that shows in real time these KPIs, so I can then identify something's going on. So what does that do? It allows me to focus on the thing that matters and not go down a two or three month rabbit hole chasing some idea of what needs to get better, only to find out that it wasn't broken in the first place, because we have to guess a lot, based off of the information that we have, of what needs to be worked on or improved or whatever. So that's something I'm going to benefit from every day, and that was from something I did yesterday. So now my organization is smarter, it's faster, it's more focused than it was 24 hours ago, and that's just one thing.

Chris Leone:

So I think another great analogy I heard is people say this is like an iPhone moment. So if you look at what happened with the iPhone when it came out in 2009, I think, yeah, it changed how we communicate right, it changed how we access media, how we can communicate with each other. So it was revolutionary in and of itself, just for those reasons. But then take an app like Uber. Well, what did Uber do? It totally disrupted an entire industry, the taxi cab industry. When they invented the iPhone, they didn't say look at this cool phone and wait until you see what it does for the taxi industry. No one was thinking about that.

Chris Leone:

But it was that secondary or tertiary effect of that type of technology being available to people and it just wiped out a whole industry and created a new one, so I think this technology is going to do things like that. The other thing that I'm so interested in and excited about it's not here yet, but I think all the technologies there it just has to be packaged this way is when we can have these company oracles and company co-pilots, where we can take these models, these large language models, license them and run them in an enclosed environment on our own company data, and it will know everything that we're willing to give it. It will train on all of our company data so it will know all the history of our customers. It'll read through all of our Slack messages over time that we want to give it access to all of our project management stuff, all of our employee handbook and process documents and all these things, and so you just could go up to and say who was our point of contact at this client three years ago, and it spits out the history around it. Oh, what were the campaigns doing then? Or how do I sign up for my 401k, and it would have all that information for you. Right like that.

Chris Leone:

But then to the next step, the co-pilot one. That's where, if these apps can be manipulated or managed by ChatGBT on your behalf. So you say, oh, I wanted to get back with Sam and we haven't connected in six months. Can you look on our calendars for two weeks from now and send an email and book a meeting with Sam and create the Zoom link? And it's one simple command and it's done.

Chris Leone:

That would normally be. I have to send you an email, get a response, I have to set up the counter, and this is minutes and maybe even hour spread out over days to kind of like dial this in on an hour but several minutes. And it's one command and it's all done. So I think companies that have their tech stack in line, meaning that they're using good tools or using good technology, that have APIs and are probably developing this for themselves, will be able to integrate this stuff as soon as it's available at the individual license level and then just be off to the races. And I'm really, really, really excited about that and I think the technology's there. It's just not packaged this way yet, so it's kind of like that last mile problem of getting it, but I think it'll happen in a matter of the next year or two.

Sam Gerdt:

It's really good to hear you say that. There's two pieces of advice that I give out in my capacity as an advisor to businesses who are using technology, and number one is make sure that you're collecting data good data, clean data, organized data. And number two is make sure that your tech stack has active development and good APIs, because this is you're right, it is coming, it is getting to that point and it's not going to be a perfectly packaged product that fits your business. There's going to be the need to plug in to it, and so if you're using spreadsheets instead of CRM, like HubSpot or one of these other ones, you're going to find it harder to plug in, whereas if you've got you know you have good Dev support, you know you have good API support you're going to find it much easier to get that Oracle.

Sam Gerdt:

And you're going to find it much easier to put all of this together. How are you encouraging, then, your other employees to use tools like ChatGPT?

Chris Leone:

Yeah, so this is one of the lessons I've had, because I was seeing the praises of this tool, like in December, and trying to get people to start incorporating it. Everyone was wowed by it at first, but the adoption of it was not automatic. So what we've had to do over several months is continue to promote it to, you know, create learning environments and events for people, because some people are kind of off to the races with it me, there's a couple other people in the company where we really nerd out on it and we're sharing the latest and, you know, thinking what we're doing and then others are just more set in their ways or just not intuitively thinking oh, maybe ChatGPT can do this for me, right?

Chris Leone:

So one of the things we've done several things, one, you know, especially in the early days we were having these regular like lunch and learns. So it's a voluntary thing, but just come in with your lunch on Zoom and if you have a cool ChatGPT example, put up your hand and you'll get five minutes to share it. Yeah, so people were starting to spread ideas around that way. So that was pretty cool. We have a dedicated Slack channel where people post news, links, ideas, lessons, things like that.

Chris Leone:

What I found as a leader is that, like I need to, in the beginning, I had to force myself to use it and, as interesting as it was to me, you know, some days you move on to the next thing, right, but I knew quickly that this thing had so much potential for us that I just forced myself to turn to it first for things, and I've Googled.

Chris Leone:

I've gotten to Google search so much less since then. But what I found is that when a forced habit becomes just a real habit, then you start to use it in ways that you couldn't have envisioned originally and you have it start to do some really interesting, innovative things for you, and then you can, of course, pick up those lessons and show others. So we get out of this mindset of it can write the next subject line for my email yes, it can, but it can do. It's like it can do so much more than that, right? So those are some of the things that we've tried. We also we follow traction, the traction model. So we have quarterly rocks and we had this like four day work week rock thing where it was like you have to find ways to cut back time in your week and like use AI and incorporate AI into what you're doing. So there's like this universal company Sprint we had, where people had to find ways to incorporate it, you know.

Chris Leone:

So we're just we're big evangelists for it, we talk about it so much, we share examples. We have other things that are a bit more structured, where people are a bit more forced to do it and then by going to the four day work week they're kind of forced to think about things differently and try things differently. And then of course they have all these resources at their disposal because we talk so much about it?

Sam Gerdt:

Are you encouraging the use of any other tools?

Chris Leone:

Yeah, like other AI tools.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, other AI tools.

Chris Leone:

Yeah. So what I found is so there's some pretty cool ones out there. Chatgbt, to me, is still the gold standard. For the most part, bard has updated information, although I find Bard can hallucinate more. Clawed is really good at content and sometimes can outdo ChatGbt on content.

Chris Leone:

There's a tool, piai, and that tool I think it's running through the GPT for API, but it's more conversational in nature, so it will ask you open-ended questions and then cause you to just think more about something. So if you're trying to open up the creative juices a little bit and you're stuck, it's a great tool to kind of get going there. Someone described it as like a ChatGbt therapist, because whatever you throw at it, it just comes back and it says oh so it sounds like you're saying this. That must be hard. Well, what about have you thought about this or what do you do about that? And it just gets the brain going.

Chris Leone:

So, yeah, there are other tools out there. I've personally played with mid-journey for Image Creation, dolly, and those are certainly fun. But since we're not a creative shop and since you are in some ways a bit limited there, you can't upload company logos at this point. You can't upload company logos and then create banner ads or whatever using it. All that stuff's coming. Photoshop is showing some really impressive things that it's coming out with, so I think those will get baked in at a very vertical level and our individual specialists will find ways to use them. But those are some of the three or four that we use. Chatgbt is certainly the lion's share of it.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, yeah, it's funny that you say that about being a therapist, piai, that's actually how I really started to learn. The most I think about ChatGbt is I knew I needed to force myself to use it to learn how it works, how it worked, to learn what it was and wasn't capable of, because a lot of people don't take the time to understand that it's not going to be very good at certain things and then they write it off. But what I started doing is anytime I had a task and wasn't motivated to do that task, I would just plug it into GPT and say hey.

Sam Gerdt:

I have this task. I don't know where to start, I'm not motivated, I don't have clarity on it, whatever. And just see what it came back with Yep and it would come back with action steps. And then you take it and you give it a prompt. That is an action step. You say, ok, what's it going to do with this? And I learned how to really have a craft prompts to get good outputs. But also I learned how to think about the LLM generally in terms of what it is and what it isn't, because we tend to humanize and anthropomorphize. We also tend to assume oh, it's AI, so it's good at math, certain things like that. But that's actually how I learned a lot about these LLMs is just by talking to them as if they were someone who could help.

Chris Leone:

And then I learned how they could actually be helpful.

Chris Leone:

And then you were quick on that point. For education, it's huge, right, I think, first of all, even kids every kid could have a private tutor that walks them through these things and gives them feedback for us training people in a company. If it had all that information, it could help train people. But it also makes me think of this creativity comment that a lot of people have, which is going to kill creativity. But I pushed back hard on that. I have never felt my creativity more challenged than I do now, because I'm no longer like if you go to a mid-journey and that thing is just blanking at you and it's like I will create whatever you can imagine, yeah, you're like I can't think of anything.

Sam Gerdt:

I don't know. Well, meanwhile you have that constant feed. If you're in Discord, playing with mid-journey you have that constant feed of other people's prompts, other people's stuff, and you're seeing this massive machine essentially just churn out Right, right yeah.

Chris Leone:

And it's like the creative process to actually get to a finished outcome requires several things. Right, like the initial idea and then the execution of that idea are kind of the two macro ones right, when you're not limited by your physical ability to create. It's like I have this idea for this beautiful scene, but I'm not good at oil painting, so it's going to look like crap. We don't have to worry about that, it's just tell me what you're envisioning and you're like oh, I'm envisioning this very specific scene that has this, this, this, as I saw it in a dream, and it's like I can't get it out of my head and I want to materialize it.

Chris Leone:

So it's really for me, it's stretched my creativity in a really positive way and I used to do a lot more creative things, like you know, art and music, before I was doing this job, and I feel like that again because I'm not limited by the kind of the technical limitations that I have on it. Those are certainly very important and we don't want to lose those as these tools come about. Those are still, I think, pretty important to the human experience, but this allows people to create anything that they want and we'll be able to do it with movies and music and everybody will have the tools, what there's. I think that's a one.

Sam Gerdt:

Well, and this is the. So those who say AI makes us better, richer, happier as a, as as a civilization, I think this is what they have in their minds. You have a, you have a tool AI broadly that is capable of removing the friction between having a good idea, having an imagination and executing on that idea. And what people are focusing on is, oh, but you know, it used to be that there were, you know, specific people, specific skills, specific talents necessary to accomplish these things, and those all represent jobs and you're going to take all that away. But what they're not seeing is everyone can go from thinking something to executing on it much easier. So the, the potential to generate value in the world just went to the moon.

Sam Gerdt:

It went through the roof and you start giving this to imaginative, creative people who lack certain skills and they're going to do really incredible, amazing things with it and I think it's very short-sighted to want to take that away because, you know, someone who has a very specific skill might have to adapt.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, how many Taylor Swift's are? Are there out there that that we don't know about because they would never, ever sing, they'd never let someone hear their voice, or they've got some physical disability or they don't have the ability to play it yet, but they've got the idea.

Sam Gerdt:

Or they lack self-confidence.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, all these things, yeah, all these things yeah yeah, it's like we want to know, let's, just what do you have in your head? Like, let's, let's empower you to show that to us and put it out there. So, yeah, I think there's there's so much good that's going to come out of it and it makes me excited for it.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, it seems to.

Sam Gerdt:

It seems to be driving us towards a more level playing field in terms of intelligence and ability, and the people who will most thrive with it are the ones who can kind of unlock that creativity.

Sam Gerdt:

I forget where it was, but I heard somebody recently I think it was on a podcast, talking about how you're we're getting to this point, to where, you know, someone with a low IQ will have access to an AI assistant that essentially raises their IQ, raises, raises their ability to a more average, a more average level, and someone with an average IQ has that same assistant and feels like they have something of a peer intelligence, wise, that they can throw work to and and and find assistance in accomplishing things. And then someone who is of higher intelligence than has has an assistant who is is more of, you know, a personal assistant, less of a peer, more of a subordinate. But but in all of that, the the the greatest benefit is to the one you know with that, the one with the low IQ who's being brought up a level and and and you to a lesser degree, the one who's more average, who's just finding that there's, you know, there's another one of me who can, who can take some of my, take some of my burdens off of me.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, and it's, it's, it's.

Chris Leone:

It reminds me of what I heard with as it relates to tutoring, and this was a TED talk by the person who runs Khan Academy.

Chris Leone:

It's a great watch where where they're talking about how they're incorporating these tools into their online tutoring program, and one of the charts that they set the whole discussion up with was that if you look at all the data we have on on the impact of tutoring with students, you find that, with a tutor, a below average student becomes an average, I think like an average student, or even slightly above average, and then an average becomes an exceptional one, and you'll be able to create these. Every kid will be able to have a tutor that can work with them, who can coach them, who understands where that child's challenges are and where their strengths are, and we'll be able to put the material in a form that the child can connect with. So that's where what you described is kind of working with the educated population of adults we have today. Once every child has this at their disposal, I think we'll be a much more educated society and a better performing one overall.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, I think what I like tying it back to, though, especially as it relates to you, with the effort that you make in your own company culture.

Sam Gerdt:

The kind of business that you've built is you have employees, I'm sure, who have individual challenges that they probably don't talk about. They have roadblocks to unlocking efficiency, roadblocks to unlocking better quality work, et cetera, and you give them an LLM or a tool set, an AI tool set that kind of solves for some of those challenges, maybe even diagnosis them to a certain degree, but solves for some of those challenges. I think there's incentive here right now for bosses, for employers, to say, okay, let's get our people recognizing that this is a reality and thinking in these terms how can these tools augment my workflows, augment my own habits in order to make me a more efficient and higher quality worker? And this is where I think, in terms of project management on an individual level, time management on an individual level. I was wondering if it was anything that you'd given thought to, because I know, for my own part, I've leveled up as a result of tools in the last six months.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, I think it's important to note that this isn't some silver bullet pancia. There's still gonna be variability in performance. I just think overall performance is gonna go up. There's still gonna be a bell curve. The bell curve may be a little tighter because you could take somebody on that far left of the bell curve in terms of performance and make them adequate, right. But to those who are already exceptional, I mean, just imagine what's gonna do for them, right? So I think it's kind of a rising tide thing, but there's still gonna be variability to it.

Chris Leone:

I think it comes down to, first of all is the company culture really built to support these tools and encouraging these tools and investing in these tools, right? If they're not, they're not gonna be a benefit to get from it. And I still think it's gonna come down to the individual. Like, there's still choices that are gonna have to be made, because generally, those who want it, no matter how good they are, even if they're not that good those who want it tend to outperform those who don't want it, right? So there's still gonna be a level.

Chris Leone:

It's not gonna solve everything, but I think on average it will make people better, especially those who really lean into, especially those who have a growth mindset. They're gonna continue to find and explore ways to use this to their benefit and I think they're gonna take off. And I get excited for those people who are kind of average above average, who now become exceptional and they're playing in this window now where they're exceeding those who maybe, naturally, are stronger performance than they are but are not using these tools yet. So they'll kind of see their cell put themselves at a status that they didn't know that they'd be able to get to. I'm excited for them there. I think if you apply to everybody, you're gonna start to see the variability that we know today.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, well, it does seem like what you're saying, though, is the way for an organization to improve is to have its employees, its people, and make the conscious choice to improve.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, yeah, it's a tool. Again, at the end of the day, it's a tool.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah.

Chris Leone:

So, we gotta choose to use it. We gotta get good at using it. It's gotta be kind of a cultural and operational thing available to us. But yeah, it's not, like I said, it's not the silver bullet, but it's really powerful if we choose to embrace it.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, choose to embrace it and choose to do good with those increases Right yeah, exactly.

Chris Leone:

We're not just pocketing all the benefit, but we're saying, well, what kind of companies can we create now that we have this? Not every company needs to IPO. Not every company should be taking on venture or private equity. It's okay to grow 10, 15% a year and that's it. That's okay.

Chris Leone:

You can still make a lot of money and do really well. Let's not over glorify these giant organizations who are taking on all this debt in the name of growth, because they're walking a very tight line. It's just and I'm not saying that every business needs to be this kind of like leisure business, where you don't care what happens to it. I'm just saying that you can have a more manageable growth rate. You're focused, you do good work, you're intentional about what you do, you take care of your people and it all works out. It's like at some point, more is not better.

Chris Leone:

More is not always better, and I think we're waking up to that.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah well, you're not the first person I've talked to who has said that it's going to be all about the human connection. It's not going to be all about AI and compute, it's going to be about the human connection. Those are the people who are going to succeed.

Chris Leone:

Well, I've heard some of the people I was talking to earlier about this was saying it's going to really emphasize the human connection because that'll be the only thing left to do. Yeah, all this other, these tools will analyze the data. They'll be able to do the tasks. We're going to spend more time being humans to each other, or humans to the people in our circle or whatever, which is good, we could use a dose of that.

Sam Gerdt:

I think so. I think so. Chris, I really appreciate you talking to me. I'm going to let you go. It's been an amazing conversation. You said you're seven weeks in now and you're going to evaluate three months.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, we're evaluating as we go, but I think we'll have a better data set after three months to decide where we're going to go from here.

Sam Gerdt:

Well, I will. I'll keep track of it. I will connect with you then and just see how it's going, but in the meantime, I appreciate you talking to me. I think that what you're doing is really good for your company and for your people and I really respect your willingness to kind of disclose some of those behind the scenes things that you're doing in order to improve that culture. Talk about motives, talk about mindset.

Chris Leone:

Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate you having me on. I love talking about this stuff and I'll continue to post it and kind of tell the story as it's coming together. Because I know people are really interested in that and hopefully we can connect to sometime down the road.

Sam Gerdt:

Yeah, so if anybody out there is interested, just connect with Chris on LinkedIn. He seems pretty responsive, happy to talk about it and we'll see how it goes. We look forward to seeing it, thank you.