Rapid Response: A crisis leadership session with General Stanley McChrystal

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But it's a managed effort, it's not something that just happens. Leaders have to understand that what they're trying to do in an organization is to create this equivalent, the level of integration and collaboration that a war requires. The real courage in a leader is not in telling people what to do, The reality is that the economy's in this hiccup right now. And as soon as it starts to sort itself out, certain organizations are gonna sprint ahead because they've been figuring it out, they've been going to school on this.

That's Stanley McCrystal. The retired US general who led counterterrorism efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan for more than seven years. He now provides leadership advice to executives across industries. Stan's advice in this moment. is about both calming down

And speeding up. It's about discipline. As well as intuition. When stakes are high, he explains. You have to be more intentional than ever.

About every step you take. If you have twenty priorities, he says. You don't have any priorities. And if you think you figured out this crisis. You're wrong.

This is Bob Safian, your host for Masters of Scale Rapid Response. McChristal's deep study of the history of crisis and his own personal experience have given him a foundation that we can all benefit from. Whether you're at the helm of a major corporation or a nascent startup. Or simply doing Your share of the task, as he puts it.

I'm Bob Safe, and I'm here with General Stanley McChrystal, retired US Army General and former head of Joint Special Operations Command, Jay Sock. In the mid two thousands, he oversaw counterterrorism operations in Iraq and then operations in Afghanistan. He is also the author of several best selling books, My Share of the Task, a Memoir, as well as Team of teams and leaders Stan is now a partner at the McChrystal Group, which provides leadership and crisis advising to organizations

In Virginia. As I ask my questions from my home in New York. Stan, thanks for joining us. It's an honor, Bob. Thanks. You've operated in some of the most ambiguous and dangerous environments imaginable in wartime against an enemy determined to destroy you. Uh many of us are eager to attack that experience right now.

Because we feel under assault on a certain wartime footing. I want to start by asking you about this coronavirus and when you personally realized that this was going to evolve into something ambiguous and dangerous for so many people and organizations. How did that come to you that realization.

I was interested when I started to see the reporting in early January. I was actually in the hospital. And uh Hawaii. So I had a lot of time to watch TV and I got to watch the initial reporting of this. And it was pretty obvious from the beginning of this thing, as it grew in China, that there was something that was Dangerous feeling about it.

And although there were attempts to dismiss it early. I'd say probably the end of January, it really started to bother me because You start to have the idea that we don't have our arms around this. So leadership in crisis is a common phrase right now. And I know you've said that that isn't necessarily meaningful that leadership

His leadership. Can you explain what you mean by that? We try to differentiate the two because we tend to think that on a daily basis leadership feels a bit like management. You just sort of move things along. You do positive leader things, which we all No, we should do. And then in a crisis, we suddenly look for a strong visionary. committed woman or man to sort of stand up and say, Okay, everybody

Go west. And the wagon train goes west or circle the wagons or w whatever's appropriate at the time. What I would argue is Organizations need that in the moment. But what organizations really need is to prepare themselves in the normal moments.

so that they have a level of adaptability. The popular word now is resilience, and it's an appropriate word. So that the organization can respond to crisis. Crises are inevitable. You know, everybody says if I do good analysis I can dodge crises. That's absolutely wrong. crises are gonna come of every kind and they're gonna hit you.

And the reality is The difference is what organizations are able to respond to them effectively. And so building that capacity is the kind of leader That's needed on a normal basis.

And then in the moment of crisis to help shape that to help focus people's minds. Businesses like using military metaphors. And and one of them is, Oh, sometimes you need a peacetime leader and sometimes you need a wartime leader. And I'm curious when you look at businesses, what that differentiation is or Is that not necessarily the way to be Thinking about it.

Yeah, that's really a great point to bring up,'cause there are probably different levels on this. The first obvious one is we say we go to a wartime setting, then suddenly It's all hands on deck. Everybody works twenty four seven. We use every resource we can to focus on something and we do it until we have And so that's the thing. Kind of one.

Faster than that. So the second part of the leadership is what kind of leader can bring every aspect of an organization Into focus. Give them clarity on what the situation is, give them clarity on what the strategy is. That's gonna be prosecuted.

maintain their focus on that and maintain using all the parts of the team. And the team is often wider than the people just in that organization. It can be in a business sense, it can be your suppliers, it can be your customers, it can be different partners. So you're talking about a wider community, all of whom have to be Brought into the conversation, they have to be focused, they have to be inspired.

You have to build the teamwork all the time. Think of the greatest wartime leaders. The United States. Clearly. George Washington begins it and he he lost almost every battle, but he kept the army and he kept the Congress all on sides.

Abraham Lincoln. Together even though reverses on the battlefield, time and again said that the North might want to just give up. And then of course Franklin Roosevelt. pulled the nation out of the depression, but then worked this coalition to keep all the different elements moving forward in what he thought was a national effort.

So When I think of leaders now in the equivalent of wartime. It's not just the person who's the hardest person who's got the squareest jaw. You know, and stands up there and says bellicose things. It's the person who gets as many different parts.

on board as many pieces of the puzzle together so that it's a truly unified effort. As you describe that It sounds to me a little bit like well, wouldn't that be what every organization and every leader would be wanting to do all the time to have that kind of high level of integration and intentionality. You think. But what happens is integration and collaboration is not the natural state of things. You can have different parts of an organization and and as it gets bigger, it develops into HR finance, sales, research and development. And they develop their own physical spaces, they develop their own cultures, they often develop their own career paths up in that. And it's not that they don't like each other or don't wish each other well. It's just they by nature go off into their corners.

It just is it atomization of organizations. And so getting them all integrated on a constant basis is a little like holding magnets together, but not magnets attracting magnets and opposition.

It requires you to put pressure to holding them together. Another comparison might be A uh nuclear reaction. You know, you've gotta very carefully create a nuclear reaction to create nuclear power. Get it wrong, you get a meltdown or explosion or something terrible. Get it right and you produce this amazing amount of power.

But it's a managed effort, it's not something that just happens. And so I think leaders have to understand that what they're trying to do in an organization is to create this equivalent, the level of integration and collaboration that a war requires And it's sort of self-evident to most people, people sort of show up report for duty when they think there's a war on. But on a constant basis to create this.

without creating the frantic activity that exhausts people really quickly. 'Cause you can say, Everybody report to work Saturday morning, we're gonna work till we drop and that'll work for a week or two. You've got to create this steady marathon pace of energy of collaboration. And then when a crisis comes, the interesting thing about it, a crisis is just okay. We're operating the way we operate. And we're just gonna deal with this crisis. One of the things that was so unique about Joint Special Operations Command is when we change the command so fundamentally.

We basically went into a crisis mode and stayed there f in perpetuity. But we stayed there at a marathon pace so that we could Deal with whatever came up and it turned out to work really well. I mean it sounds like you know, right now organizations obviously they are in a crisis. They're dealing with some very difficult things. But you know, a crisis can be a terrible thing to waste too. And there are new muscles, new ways of operating that we can, I guess, all learn in this.

that can persist beyond this, right? Whether you're in a crisis or for whatever crisis comes. Yeah, I think that's very true. The hardest thing about changing an organization is overcoming the inertia. And the inertia is there for lots of reasons. If something is working pretty well, why would people change? And so you get used to it, you develop expertise, skills Just ways of doing stuff.

And so that inertia becomes very powerful. It's not evil, it's natural. When you got a crisis, you have an opportunity to overcome that inertia because the argument you can make is that the status quo isn't working. This is the burning platform idea. The one course of action on which we have data is the status quo we are failing, therefore Let's overcome the inertia.

A great saying came from a guy worked for me once it says you can't steer anything until it's moving. And so the key is to get it moving, and a crisis can often do that. Now the thing about Once you've got a crisis, you may not know where to go. You may not know what the right answer is. And this is where leaders sometimes feel.

very uncertain or insecure because they think that they ought to be the leader with all the answers. They ought to be able to see the future. They ought to be able to to write out this is exactly where the markets are going. This is what we need to be Six months from now, twelve months from now, six years from now. And the reality is nobody can do that. They can pretend to do that. But the reality is they can't do that. And so I think it's much more honest in today's world

to be h a little bit humble about it and say I don't know. All I know is what we're doing isn't going to be the right answer. in the future. So we're gonna have to change. So we are gonna have to figure our way out. We're gonna have to iterate to the right answer. There's so many things you said there I wanna dig into a little more. I I wanna ask you about

Your experience when you took over J Soc in Iraq. So You knew exactly what the strategy was when you were there. You were like, you know, I know exactly what to do, or were you In the same way Iterating your strategy. I mean they you come in as a new leader and everyone wants you to tell them what to do, right?

I didn't have a clue, Bob. I took over joint special operations command the fall of two thousand three. I'd grown up in the organization. But when you become the commanding general, all eyes are on you and you feel a lot of pressure and you feel like you should be the person with the answers because you're in charge. I got there. The one thing I could tell when I first took over was

Iraq is about to get much worse. This war's gonna get much more difficult. Didn't have to be brilliant to see that. And then beyond that I didn't have a clue how we would deal with that. I had a sense that it was gonna take a much greater effort. But I didn't know.

So Rather than try to to deceive anyone in the command because most of them knew me from going up in the command. I wasn't gonna pretend I was smarter than I was. I sort of made the case to everybody. We know that this is gonna get much worse, therefore we know we're gonna have to perform differently.

We as a group are gonna have to figure out what that right answer is. So here's what we're gonna do. Our strategy is going to be to do what works. I can't tell you what works. you are gonna have to help figure out what works. Everything that we do, we're gonna try everything we can. Everything that works we'll do more of. Until it stops. Everything that doesn't work will stop.

So don't be afraid of trying stuff and have it not work because that's part of figuring out what what will and will not. You know, and and I felt very uncomfortable because I'd gone into command and That's a very tribal organization that the special operations world. And I was from one tribe. I was a rang. And so the other tribes look at you with a fair amount of skepticism. And so I first worried about my legitimacy and then I said, Well, and if I stand up and tell people I got no idea what we should do.

I'm not gonna get this huge vote of confidence. I think what happened was I think people One understood how confusing it was. And two Appreciated that I didn't try to BS him.

That didn't try to say okay, here's the deal. And they also like to be part of the solution. Because talented people in an organization want to have some say in in how things are done. And they were the people with the most expertise and the most experience, not me. You started doing an hour and a half daily meeting, and for seven and a half years.

You were running this meeting when you were running counterterrorism and then In Iraq and then Afghanistan. How do you avoid burnout? When you're On that kind of intense footing.

For that long. Like how do you turn from being a sprinter to a marathoner without slowing your pace? Yeah, that's a great question. I go on a personal level and I'll go on an organizational level as well. On a personal level What I found was I had to devote myself completely to it. So I took this command. It was supposed to be two years.

I stayed for five in J Shock and then I came back for ten months and I went back and took Afghanistan. I felt that during that period that command needed All of me. So I basically went and stayed deployed. And part of that was because to keep my own focus, and part of that was

To demonstrate to the command. that I was that committed. It was that important. I couldn't ask them to do things unless I was willing to do it. I'm blessed with a wife that Her calculus on this was I understand this. Do this until the task is done.

And then come home. I tried to set myself a complete focus, but then on a daily sort of cyclic basis. I knew certain things were critical to me. I knew I have to work out every day. If I don't I'm an ugly person and I'm not that good anyway, so it's better if I do.

I had to set aside about an hour and a half to work out every day. And that starts my day whenever it was. In Iraq that happened to be late morning,'cause we worked all night, went to bed right at dawn, and then I'd sleep until late morning and then work out. That sort of put me in the right Mindset. And I do operations and connect with people. I would Try to pace myself so that I got

A predictable amount of sleep. It was only about four hours a night. But in that environment that felt about right. And I tried to keep my focus. Even killed. And to be honest, I didn't do much back home. I had my son in college and my wife back. I email my wife once a day, but I didn't do any other distractions.

Because In my standpoint, that was very important for me to focus. Now for the command, this was even more important because Different from most forces, special operating forces are in the war all the time. No, so what they do is you have these elite forces and you rotate them by squadron.

And so they'll go over there for four months at a shot, then they'll come home, but they'll be back on alert back when they're in the United States. So they're really not unplugging from the war. What you had to do was try to set it up so that Everybody sprinted when they were in the area of operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. And then when they're back there, you try to set it so that the pace is slow enough so that they could meter that with their families and physically. On one hand it got hard, on the other hand

It was easy because it was simple. We fought the war, we worked out, we ate, and we slept. We didn't do anything else. There was no other. Foolishness involved. Now you can't do that in most jobs.

But there are times when you take incredible focus on the part of an organization. And at that time, I think one of the key things for a leader to do. is to offer real priorities And when I say priorities, someone says, Well, here's the priorities of what I want the organization to do. Here are the top twenty priorities. And I just start laughing. If you have twenty priorities, you don't have priorities. If you've got three

You've got Priorities. The real courage in a leader is not in telling people what to do, it's telling'em what it's okay not to do. 'Cause there's a whole bunch of other things that they kinda think they should do. And the leader has to sign up and say, if you don't do any of these I'm okay with that. As long as you do

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Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the rapid response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. prioritizing it these times becomes more and more essential and being intentional about every step that you're taking I can already sense in some of my conversations with executives, I don't know whether you feel this at all, but a sense that they've absorbed the first blow, the first shock of the crisis, right? And they've kind of settled into this new reality like they've figured it out.

And maybe the urgency and the speed that marked the first few weeks. is slowing down a little bit. And I'm curious, is that a trap? How do you instill Agility that's not

transient, but that is this sort of constant marathon approach. Bob, that's exactly what we're seeing. And we describe it as at the end of phase one. What happened is we had this approaching pandemic and the economic impacts. And then everybody had to work from home.

And revenue stopped for a lot of companies. And they did that. And there was a period of two, maybe three weeks. And then suddenly People were able to communicate from home. They could get their systems to work. And a lot of normal things that they were doing seemed to work. And so everybody kind of pats themselves on the back and go

This is not that hard. I got it. I think two things. One is in many cases, organizations aren't doing a lot of things that have to be done long term. They are doing sort of The basics right now, the bare minimums operating from home. They haven't yet been developing strategy. They haven't been doing longer term leader development. They haven't been doing things

that have to be done over the long haul. And They haven't dealt a lot with, in many cases, customers. They haven't tried sales over this. So I think that It is a trap. You start to say, Well, okay, we got this.

The reality is that the economy's in this hiccup right now. And as soon as it starts to sort itself out, certain organizations are gonna sprint ahead because they've been figuring it out. They've been going to school on this, they've been preparing for a changed market and they are gonna come out of the starting gates. Some are gonna try to go back to status quo anti. And they are gonna be absolutely crushed. Because they're gonna go back to a time that no longer exist.

Others are going to dog paddle in circles kind of where they are now, trying to figure out what works and they will be left at the starting gates. I think that organizations have got to understand now that there's a temptation to focus on the here and now. The crisis.

The crisis is true. But you still have to do all of the long term things, you still gotta push the organization forward for the future. And I think people have got to put senior leader eyeballs at and the focus of the organization on that kind of forward movement. It's almost like you see there's gonna be sort of three different groups, right? The folks who are really getting this are gonna be that much further ahead when we get to the other side. Some folks are just not gonna make the transition at all.

And others are gonna kinda become Secondary also rans because they didn't really adjust to the new reality. I think that's exactly right, because many things of the new reality are more subtle than we think. They're not just working from home and talking to people on your computer. They are doing many things about product development this way.

About building teams because we're still operating off muscle that was built up before. Many organizations went home and they're working from home, but they all know each other. They spent years together in offices. They built up relationships. They built trust. They built Things they do. Take this a year or two in the future or create an organization in this model.

You don't have any of that. Shared background. You don't have those relationships. suddenly there's a different dynamic that's got to be used. Same with dealing with customers, buyers, suppliers.

The longer we go from what was before, the more we've got to be adapting to what we think will be the new normal. You talk a lot about leading with compassion. And in this time there's a tension because You feel like oh, this is a do or die moment, right? If there's any time that I should go all in and work twenty four seven and Ask everything of my people now is it,'cause I there may not be a tomorrow for my business.

On the other hand, you want to take care of your team, you want to be compassionate, you understand that people are stressed out. How tolerant can or should you be? How do you find that line? I think leaders now it's a careful balance point because We send people home and we may go home to a pretty nice home office and we're pretty well situated.

But what if your employee goes home and you say, Well, they still got a job. They should be thankful for that. What if they got two or three kids whose schools have closed? They live in a small apartment, so the kids are underfoot. Their spouse has lost their job. A parent has Covid nineteen.

Suddenly it's a much more complicated environment for them. And working from home is not that easy. Now Work. is at home, so you're always at work.

So I think it first takes a fair amount of empathy that people are actually under more difficult working conditions than they were in an office or a plant or whatever. Directly uh

exposed to the danger of the Covid nineteen. So you start with that empathy. But empathy only gets you so far. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is being able to put yourself in the other person's position to understand it. Good leaders in the military have to understand how a private feels when they don't know what's going on, they're frightened, their feet hurt, they're carrying a heavy load. It's really hard.

The leader still has to say this is what we have to do, this is the task in front of us. I can't make the hill any smaller. I can't make your pack any lighter. I can't make the enemy any less dangerous. All I can do is tell you that's what we have to deal with. So I think leaders do have to be tough enough now.

But a lot of that starts with being absolutely upfront with people. I think in small organizations now every small business is under pressure. You have to get in front of your people. We got in front of the people in my company and said, Here is the economic reality. Here are all the numbers. Exactly what it is. Here's what we have to do.

Everybody needs to understand that. And if that changes, we'll let you know. And so I think leaders have got to be brutally candid with their Team members. But not to the point of being unable to either make tough decisions or push people when we need to push hard.

You've used this phrase creating a shared consciousness among your troops, and you know, it's not something people expect to hear from a lifelong military man, that kind of phrase, but this idea of common purpose. you feel like is particularly valuable in getting teams to operate and getting organization to operate under any kind of crisis or any other condition. Absolutely. My father he was a soldier as well as his father had been. So we had a lot of old Barracks sayings. And one of my dad used to joke, he says, Put your brains in the foot locker, I'll do the thinking around here.

But that was the opposite of way my father really was, and the opposite of what works with soldiers. If you tell everybody What test to do? But don't paint them a picture of what you're trying to do, what the purpose is, what the intent of is, then it's really hard for one

to them to believe in their task because it may seem narrow and mundane. But also they can't adjust. So What we found is if you give people a contextual understanding of the situation

of what we're trying to do and what a good outcome would look like. And then they go forward to execute. In many cases, what you might have envisioned them doing for specific tasks may be very different from what was really needed. In Afghanistan we developed this rule because we knew that we came up with this brilliant strategy in Kabul and we sent it out to everybody. But when you get in the the hills and valleys of Afghanistan, the conditions are very different than we might have envisioned. And so we said when you get on the ground

If the order we issued you is wrong. Execute the order we should have issued you. And you're saying, Wow, that's requiring them to use their judgment. Well, that's right. 'Cause they got a lot of judgment.

But only if they understand the big picture, and so in today's world. I just think it's incredibly important to create this shared consciousness as an organization so people can all figure out what the right thing to do based on that understanding is. In one of the reports that you guys issued recently about Covid Toward the end, you have this box, this conclusion that I love that says this may seem obvious. And that's the point.

that operating in a crisis is about the basics. There's an honesty to that and also uh I don't know, surprised that it shouldn't be complicated? It feels complicated. No, it that's so true. It's it's funny. People they get in a crisis and they wanna open this special book with crisis instructions or a box of crisis tricks.

We used to say that you have these set of soldiers and you go to war and suddenly they're gonna get smarter, braver. more focused. No, they're gonna be the same people they were before. They may get a little more excited when things are way more dramatic. But the same with a crisis here, you've got to lead with the same things that motivate people on a normal basis. Integrity, candor, commitment, inspiration. And then the ability to make decisions.

You don't make better decisions in a crisis because it's a crisis. You still gotta think. Yeah, you still gotta go through those kind of processes, they may just be faster. It's another thing you said was that employing intuition in high stress environments becomes harder. Why is intuition important?

It's funny, there's a lot of talk about it. data and predictive ability and all of these things. And what we've learned about probability and data, is there are limits to it. You can get a lot of good information. You can tell what happened in the past. You can figure out the probability of something. but you can't figure out what's going to happen. You don't know what's going to happen on the next twin costs.

So intuition is really a product of experience. You've done something a number of times, or you've done similar things. You know your organization. You have a sense of of what is happening. Your judgment, as you can call it. becomes extraordinarily important. And

You've got to You've gotta respect that. And An organization will have an intuition as well, you know, sort of a wisdom of the crowd intuition. And if you're able to talk to people about it, They'll give you a sense. It's terrible to do an operation, have it go bad, and then afterwards you talk to everybody and they go, Yeah, we we kind of figured that that was gonna happen. And it becomes distracting otherwise. Is there a corporate equivalent of post traumatic stress? How do you plan or think about that sort of

Post traumatic. ongoing long term impact. A being in stress like this for a long period. I'm sure that there is the equivalent because stress is stress. And this is one of the things about leaders. I think first on a

work level. There's the stress of suddenly your revenue can stop. You know, and In all these businesses. And and that creates unbelievable stress, not just for the CEOs and owners, but people who have jobs or trying to do certain things.

Then remember as we talked earlier, people's lives are more stressful now. There's so many aspects of it that They have to worry about the health part of it. The the small Inconveniences.

Kids not in school and that sort of thing. All of those things are cumulative. And so a person suddenly gets to the point where, wow, when you're working from home It's actually harder to vent that stress. You don't want people venting it on their spouse. You can be in a room, you really can't go out and do all the things you did.

I think you can start to look at the same walls over and over and that just starts to go through the roof. I think leaders have got to be very intentional about trying one to help people through it now. And also to Recognize it. We put a thing in our company where every day we do our call for the whole company, so everybody connects and we cover key things. But then I've asked everybody to call two other members of the company, not their big Close friends.

do a video call with two other members every day, different members. and just get an eyeball to eyeball connection so that people are getting their attitude checked. Plus when you're reaching out to someone else If you've got a really bad attitude, you suddenly feel like I'm doing something for someone else, and it actually improves you. You are a care giver, not just a care recipient, and so

I found over time that that can be really helpful. One bit of advice you've given of late that the camera is your new best friend. We all have to get used to these cameras, whether for zoom calls or or anything else, right? Yeah, and most of us hate the camera. You know, you give people the opportunity, they'll put the camera off, they'll say it's not work and I'm on my phone because my bandwidth is low. They will find every excuse not to be on camera for a couple of reasons. One, people feel uncomfortable being looked at. The second is it's exhausting.

When you're on camera, you are focus on that and you've got to be more expressive than you are typically because the camera, you've got to Try to create that human connection through digital means. You can't multitask, you can't be looking around doing other stuff because it's so obvious and disrespectful.

But there's no other way. To create it, you know, I joke with people, you know, what to do in push ups, eating ice cream and cutting your toenails have in common. All things I've done on conference calls. And You know, it's kinda gross, but

The reality is so has everybody. The beauty of the video is It creates a human touch. It can create some empathy and of course engagement. Well, I I appreciate your empathy and your time with us. I wanted to make sure is there anything that I didn't ask about, other things that you might want to mention that you think people should be most mindful of at these times.

Yeah, I think building teams is a key one. Looking at your organization and building teams connections because as everybody goes off, you're not sitting in conference rooms, cubicles, things like that, there will be a tendency to give people tasks and just assume their information will come in and come in as some great big Product outcome. I think you've got to intentionally create teams, intentionally create interaction with them. Cause them to have meetings. Virtually.

And put them on a disciplined operating rhythm to do that. Communication is much more important than ever because much of what you did in an office or in a plant or in a store was nonverbal. You know, people could look at you and you give them a thumbs up and say good job or touch'em on the shoulder. Or they could watch a peer or slightly more experienced person do their job and they would learn how to do their job that way. That's not happening right now.

And so that whole body of communication and Рієфорсмент із Гон. We've gotta replicate it. Digitally. And it gets back to what we talked about earlier about people are living off muscle built up before this.

And they may not know what they've lost as time passes if they don't think about it. Cause we've all kind of become lone wolves in a way. Right. We we think we're part of a team, but it's harder to feel like you're part of that team in this environment. Exactly. Do you have any uh other advice for folks who are particularly stressed right now? How they can manage or help their teams manage their stress as they work through this Strange time.

Yeah. I think it's it's discipline, and what I mean by discipline is The discipline to put some time for you. And fence it off. Put it on your calendar. Be very disciplined about when you work out or whatever's important to you, because if you don't do that, you're not able to segment work and home life like we used to. Put that in there very carefully and hold yourself to it.

Think about the relationships that matter a lot and maintain them. Spend time, whether it's video calls, whether it's email, whatever It does because If you don't do that

I think you just find yourself in a downward cycle, you know, a decaying orbit. You get a little sloppy or little lazy or a little everything, and that's not a good outcome. Well, I will try to be more intentional with you in mind. Stan, thank you again for sharing your thoughts and your time with us. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks everybody for listening. Thanks, Bob. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a Wait What original.

The show is recorded remotely using sanitized audio gear. It's hosted by me, Bob Safian, Masters of Scales editor at large. and Masters of Scale host Reed Hoffman. Our executive producers are June Cohen and Darren Triff. Our supervising producer is Jay Punjabi.

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