Let me just ask you, give me a little bit of your background and what gave you the insights to write this book.

So I have been actively mentoring people for 25 plus years.

I've only ever worked for one company in my entire career that truly had a leadership development program.

And it drove the culture of the organization.

And the company was called Perot Systems.

It was started by Ross Perot himself.

It was the company he started after his non-compete, after he sold EDS back in the late 80s.

Correct, absolutely correct.

I want to get a sense of that right now.

Yeah.

One of the things I noticed over the years was when a manager quit, when they go to fill that manager, they typically look at the team, take the best technical resource, make them a manager, wish them good luck and they don't give them a roadmap to follow.

And every leadership book out there talks about theory and, you know, you need these seven habits or you need to do.

And then I got tired of hearing, well, you have to be a born leader to be a leader.

And I just say that that's cow dump.

You know, I don't buy it.

So let me, let me ask you like what, like given the fact that you don't, that you're not fifth generation leader and you're, you know, like, um, what, what made you come to like the ownership of like the domain in which you practice?

Can you walk us through your career journey and how it all started?

So this journey started, well, my leadership journey started in 1983 when I graduated college.

But in the last 25 years, I worked 25 years ago for a company that had a very strong leadership development program.

In my entire career, it was the only company that truly focused on developing the leaders of the future.

And part of that required us executives to mentor other people in the organization.

Well, I enjoyed that experience so much that I continued mentoring people for the next 25 years.

About two years ago, I started thinking about retirement and what would I do when I retire? One of the things that I know is I asked my mom.

Okay.

Let me just ask you, give me a little bit of your background and what gave you the insights to write this book.

So I have been actively mentoring people for 25 plus years.

I've only ever worked for one company in my entire career that truly had a leadership development program.

And it drove the culture of the organization.

And the company was called Perot Systems.

It was started by Ross Perot himself.

It was the company he started after his non-compete, after he sold EDS back in the late 80s.

Absolutely

Mm-hmm.

So stability is being the same person every single day.

At the same time, focus is also important so that people don't lose the sight of what we're trying to accomplish, and, uh, the best way I can explain that is a story about Jeff Bezos in the early days of Amazon.

Amazon started in his garage, and he was an online bookseller.

And as he grew, they eventually had a, a bigger office, and during those early days they had very...

They got, they got beat up heavily for having very, very poor customer service.

And so what Jeff did is he went to the head of the customer service department and said, "We have a problem, but I'm not gonna ask you to fix it." He said, "I'm moving my desk tomorrow down to the customer service department." Now, today he can't do that because Amazon's everywhere.

And so it's nice to say, you know, "You value me as a whole person in addition to what I'm providing to this organization."