I think it's obvious. A lot of people have said it before I but none the less. I think it deserves being said in every setting I don't think you could easily disagree with the fact that we really are by sheer accident relative to you and I as individuals going through the biggest change in a couple of hundred years. And and to me that number is important. It's it's in a weekend maybe sort of cope with the idea of the most change in 25 years or since we're the end of World War II or in 50 years or since grandpappy's time or what have you but this isn't like that. This is the real thing. This is a big one.I have spent some fair share of my summer this year. In fact re-reading my Charles Dickens. And the reason I did was I wanted to get some kind of an emotional feel for what it was like to go through the sort of traumatic James that we're going through now, and of course Dickens was writing in the 1840s in the 1850s when people were coming in off of the farms and into the urban sectors and the technology change was significant the social change Associated therewith was literally quite phenomenal and indeed we were talking then has undoubtedly we are and will continue to be talkin now about change that really does deserve the term revolutionary. I think it was maybe nine or 10 months ago something like that. I attended the seminar in Silicon Valley and which Alvin Toffler the futurist was the keynote speaker, Mr. Toffler being that particularly nasty type of futuristic who has a habit of getting thing.right in toddler went through his little Litany of 10 changes that are changing the world or what have you and then he concluded with an offhand remark that I don't think was really part of his scripted comments and he said, you know, when you look at this list all together, what we're talkin about is the reinvention of Civilization now that is pretty heady language indeed. Maybe it's an exaggeration. I don't think it's silly. I don't think it's silly. I think it is is I say that big a deal in fact my last book Liberation management took some 763 pages to get out of my system as One reviewer said if you don't like the book, it makes a hell of a doorstop. As a as a confirmed capitalist I said I don't care whether you read it or use it as a doorstop the Royal. These are the same to me. But in fact, I can summarize those 763 words in 763 pages in 6 words and those six words are crazy times call for crazy organizations the title and fact that I have chosen for my next book, which is about to hit the streets crazy. Crazy. Organizations is nobody in this room where the travel services financial services software Hardware mining you name it. Nobody in this room. I should think would disagree with the fact that these are crazy times. I'll quit And yet in fact, the thing that has come to obsess me is quite frankly large and often middle-sized or small are organizations are too boring by half. If you buy the crazy times, do you not as a matter of logic have to buy the fact that the response has got to be relatively speaking at least crazy Enterprise. Will this next book of mine is structured around what I call the nine beyond the first one. I called Beyond change and toward the abandonment of everything. What are the big things we've learned in the 1980s? We still haven't gotten anywhere nearly where we need to be as we've learned about the Japanese word Kaizen or continuous Improvement that I even found it an English language dictionary recently Kaiser and it's important we don't do it. Well enough as I just said and yet Kaizen is arguably not enough as in not anywhere nearly enough the sometimes loved and sometimes hated anaki Lopez formerly General Motors today Volkswagen gave a speech to European automakers last fall in which he said kizan is yesterday's text. Today's is Quantum Leap change of four or five or six percent of a year will not do changes of 40 or 50% or called for and once again, I think he is right on the money. Peter Drucker this not wave his arms the way that I am occasionally given to do Peter Drucker is anything but an extremist and yet writing in the Harvard Business review about a year ago. Mr. Drucker set at one point. Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does. Now that ladies and gentlemen is not an equivocal statement. Mr. Drucker did not say the average organization should be prepared to change significantly in the face of turbulent times. He said every Everything abandon and quite frankly when I give long seminars these days. I say look don't bother to take notes just pull out one piece of paper and on that piece of paper write down not even the whole sentence with Professor rockers just write down every Everything abandoned put it underneath the glass top of your desk. If you have one and refer to it every 15 minutes for the rest of your life. It is that big a deal I do not think such things are overstatement or what what kind of a world is it take our local friends at 3 a.m. Speaking to the economist a year or two ago. The recently retired Chief strategic planner George haigh from 3M commented. We are trying to sell more and more intellect less and less materials. I have taken that one sentence in fact and made it the centerpiece of the book that I have just finished writing. I went down a couple of years ago to 3M Austin, Texas operation and was speaking to the head of marketing down there and he said Tom luck the sales people don't carry around sample kits anymore. What they carry is laptop computers in the question is is our process for creating new and innovative solutions for the customer more Swift more Innovative than that of our competitors. Yes a connector or whatever. It is a lumpy object changes hands in the end. But what we are selling is not the lump what we are selling is the intellect. Well, I like the pair that statement with one other and one other that I almost have to hold onto the podium. When I order it. It's a statement that I came across. I think it was maybe eighteen months ago in the New York Times and to be very honest with you and more personal than I wish to be in a way when I read this statement the hair stood up on the back of my neck a little bit. I've used it in a hundred 50 settings in about 25 countries in the last 18 months and every time I every time I hear myself say the thing they are still stand up on the back of my neck. It was an article about the Microsoft Corporation. The Microsoft Corporation as far as I'm concerned sort of signified technically though. That's a silly term to use the end of the Industrial Revolution back in January of 1992. When the then two billion dollar in Revenue Microsoft Corporation saw its total stock market value race past that of the then 123 Billion Dollar General Motors Corporation at any rate this analyst Fred Moody and taking a look at at Microsoft and his comment was his single simple sentence was Microsoft. Only Factory asset is the human imagination. What is a potent statement? The problem for the in me I would contend arrogantly is is there any one of us in this room who can genuinely say that she or he knows what it is to manage the human imagination. I contend that it is Light Years Beyond empowerment as we think of it today, and I don't know what it means except. I know you don't say manage the human imagination. I don't know what you do with the human imagination, but you create a garden in which it can flourish or something like that. But you sure don't use the models of organization that continue to hold on and until until these days. And so that is the that is the this this this this phenomenal ship in the world economy in the world of economy that you see it. I want the object company like 3M that you see in travel services that you see pretty much across-the-board. Will the second of my my Beyond's is what I call Beyond decentralisation this organizing to unleash imagination. The Economist in the middle of last year, the humbling of big firms has only begun and as much as we have seen Blood on the streets for the last 10 or 15 years my suspicion is that the economist got it just right. Look I'm impressed with how hard that you all in this room how hard people in similar rooms not only across the United States but throughout the world have worked the deal with change, but I don't think I don't think I don't think we are within spitting distance of being serious enough. The case that I used extensively may be the most extensively in my Liberation management book and then use it again with some different twists in my new book is the story of a heavy industrial engineering firm Olympia object form a b b a c of brown boveri headquartered in Zurich and frankly. The reason I choose them is because they are Olympia object firm Percy Barnett make the chief executive of brown boveri of ABB is serious. In 1980. He took over Asia of Sweden founded in hair to the corporate headquarters staff of 2000 which she subsequently reduce the 100 in the course of the next 100 days. An 87 or 88. I think it was emerged the Sia with Switzerland Brown boveri. NC inherited a corporate headquarters staff of 4,000 which with which he reduced during the next five or six months to 200. I use a fraction when I'm using 35. Mm slides as I often do in my fraction says 58 1/2 numerator over 60 denominator. 2000 people on the corporate headquarters staff of the Sea of 4,000 people on the headquarters staff at Brown Bavarian see a 30 billion dollar Enterprise at the day Mr. Barna Vic runs it out of a nondescript building near the railroad station in West Zurich with a corporate staff of a hundred professionals and 50 supporting clerical workers. That is to say 150 of 6,000 Central staffers in Middle managers are left then my fraction 58 1/2 out of every 60 of the senior professionals were seem to be excess baggage at least in terms of the Corporate Center itself. Now that is called getting serious about slimming down. He's not alone. Hewlett-Packard now is earning an enormous amount of its earnings in a 20 billion dollar company from its printer business out in Colorado in the inkjet printer business Hewlett-Packard employs 9000 people. What kind of a staff does it take to run a 9000 person Enterprise answer for? The chief executive officer of the head of R&D in a couple of administrative assistants. 4 to 9000 I like that ratio a little high a little bit of fat left, but I'm sure they'll get it down. where to make them took the next step and he took this again I emphasized not Microsoft but heavy industrial Enterprise 200,000 strong and broke it down into 5,000 amazingly autonomous and independent profit and loss centers averaging 40 people each not a logic that this engineering frame Barnabas uses is impeccable as I see it. He said look every business in which we are competing as excess capacity. How do you compete in the face of excess capacity Quality Service Perpetual Innovation and being a lot closer to the customer than the next guy? And he said where do those attributes come from? They come from Passion from energy and from Obsession and then he turns to me in the interview and he said and Tom have you ever heard of a passionate obsessed energetic and Innovative unit of 3711 people. And of course the answer is no and that's as far as he goes with the logic and I think he's right on the money. The way I look at it is this. And this is a bit of a Mia culpa my 1994 scoreboard looking back on the 80s in the 90s reads this way Jack Welsh one Tom Peters. Mrwelshy General Electric if you remember during the 80s was known as Neutron Jack when Jack finished the visit the building was still standing with the people were all gone. Jack Welch in the 1990s sounds like Tom Peters in the 1980s. He talks about Liberation. He talks about all this Jolly stuff will see I didn't Jack got it, right and I got it wrong. If you look at Liberation management, you'll find a dramatic difference between that and my first three books first three books. I put the customer first. I thought about service first. I thought about quality first and I threw in the structural issues at the end for good measure. What I know now sincerely believe is that it is illegitimate to talk about superior quality constant Innovation closeness to the customer and excellent service in an 11-letter bureaucracy. And so in fact the fact that Jack spent six or seven years clearing off the Barnacles was the right way to go at which point it suddenly becomes legitimate to talk about this other stuff. Feisty 25 billion dollar Corporation is in my opinion an oxymoron. And yet I am as I have been for a long time a great admirer of the PepsiCo Corporation. I'll tell you when I figured out how much I admired them. It was when somebody tried to nail me at an event like this and maybe six or nine months ago. I talked about this this organization to unleash imagination and so on and I'm sure that many of you remember pepsico's Philippines Fiasco Little promotional campaign little computer glitch and a 3 digit winning number that was supposed to be repeated about three times was instead repeated a hundred thousand times this associated with a $30,000 price $30,000 being a lot of money in the Twin Cities in a lot of money in Manila. PepsiCo got in trouble part of the Prophet things that followed where were ugly and deed fire bombings of trucks and so on. I was getting a seminar. Somebody said well mister liberation. What do you say to the PepsiCo thing to which I said I am sorry for any of the property damage or human damage. But what I say is three hearty cheers for PepsiCo because the magic of that 25 billion dollar Enterprise is that it keeps the tethers lengthy enough and soft enough from the center so that people can do interesting things and therefore screw up an interesting and often fabulous ways. Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the guy in PepsiCo got promoted. Robert don't laugh because PepsiCo has a fabulous history of promoting people who do meth enormous botches. As long as they were fabulously interesting and that is a rare trade indeed. It's the reason why just this marks that in my opinion. It's the reason why just this March that Fortune Magazine titles. It's article on PepsiCo a cover article PepsiCo the 25 billion dollar University of growth in the magic of that institution in my experience for years is that you'll find this unusual thing. You'll find a half billion dollar Enterprise run by a 27 year old if that person is racing if they make mistakes mistakes are part of life, and that is unusual. So that's the second of the points the third of the Beyond points that I would mention is what I call Beyond empowerment literally turning every job into a business. Several months ago. I had a change of plans at the last minute and then about 5:30 in the morning for my Vermont farm where I live some of the year. I called the town that I was heading to to make a hotel reservation and I ran into one of those fabulous modern products of the information technology Revolution namely a lovely phone system that connected you to sort of mostly nothing and did it in a complicated fashion. After great deal of persistence though. I was able finally to get a hold of a living human being who was at the front desk in this hotel. And I said to him keeping my calm because I know that if you're calm good things will happen to you. I said to him I'd like to make a reservation. And he said I can't help you. And I said still calm why not and he responded calmly. I'm not a reservationist. My suggestion is that he is also not long for the world of employment. Let me contrast that with something. We did a TV show a couple of years ago on an Old Line Manufacturing company 500-strong from Springfield, Massachusetts called tight Flex the neck hose hose for the Boeing aircraft Corporation hose for General Electric aircraft engines hose for the space shuttle and so on. They went through one of these miraculous revolutions under a guy by the name of John Simpson Simpson. They took layers out of the hierarchy. They took Central staffers and put them into six to 10% business units and so on along the way they cut the lead time for a Custom Engineered order from about 10 to 12 weeks down to two to five days, which is no small thing. And yet even that isn't enough when a Boeing for example is in a hurry and so Simpson created what he called the arditi or rapid deployment team or more specifically Tom strange and Joe Tilley to Frontline Teamster operatives. Tom and Joe they do in 3 hours on average what it used to take the company 12 weeks to do. And what are they do everything they are responsible for customer contact? They do almost all of the engineering of the order. It turns out that engineering is like all other guild CPAs Etc 98% of what passes for engineering and I have two degrees consist of nothing other than an effort to keep other people from being engineer's They make the holes. They take those to the loading dock. If it's a real crunch, they fly at the GE. They fly at the polling. They take it wherever it needs to be. And then I got thinking about these two guys. Who are these two guys Tom and Joe will they are couple of things in a couple of things that are very important. First of all, what they are is they sure as hell aren't reservationists. They are Tom and Joe ink a two-person entrepreneurial Enterprise within the 500 person company called titeflex, which itself happens to be embedded in a multibillion-pound conglomerate called the ti group of Britain. Secondly, I started thinking about my 7 years of working at McKinsey & Company. and when I went up a level of abstraction I said to myself and I think completely honestly I can discern no difference whatsoever between this pair of teamsters and a pair of McKinsey Consultants of which I was a part for a while. What are these guys doing? What they are doing is selling more intellect and less materials. They are selling the human imagination. They are selling curiosity. They are selling creativity. They're selling responsiveness. They are selling a turnkey job. And so the question I've been working on now for a couple of years and I have my answer. The question I've been working on is is it possible to turn every job in every corporation into a strange until a job because these people are not hose makers. They are a professional Service delivery firm. If you looked at the price of the hose, you know that it has very little to do with the price of the basic tough one power powder the DuPont sells Springfield. Where sells pipe Flex? And I think it's possible. That's why I call this whole business Beyond empowerment turning every person into a business. Okay strange until he Custom Engineered orders. In our new book, we feature a housekeeper. She's a housekeeper the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in San Francisco. Ritz-Carlton was that rare service firm when a burst of whatever it was the Commerce Department baldrige Award winners discovered that there was a service sector in the United States Ritz-Carlton is that rare service-sector firm that one baldrige award that are a lot of things at the Ritz-Carlton does well, but one of the things is that that woman who is a housekeeper without any approval from anybody can spend up to $2,000 on the spot to settle any problem with a customer has That is a level of spending Authority which most of you very senior people in this room. Don't Grant to your vice president. And that is the nature of this Beast. The fourth point on my list is what I call Beyond loyalty learning to think like an independent contractor and it's a little bit of a Twist on the one above you see the thing that concerns me about middle managers professional staffers and others. Is let's call it December 31st 1993. A third-year Deloitte & touche consultant looks back on calendar year 1993 assuming she is still gainfully employed. What can she say? She can specifically point the two or three projects that were begun and completed. She can enumerate qualitatively and probably quantitatively the benefits Associated therewith. She can provide references of living breathing human beings called customers who will testify to the fact that she was alive during the prior 12 months. She can tell you specifically what she has learned during the last 12 months. She can point directly to an expansion of her Rolodex ief contacts contacts inside and outside the company of importance and should she have wished to do so on December 31st, 1993. She can draft a resume that will be discernibly different than her resume would have been on December 31st 1992 in the question. I asked you is how many senior Professionals in human resources are purchasing or financing can do the same? And that to me is the test. We will survive as individuals will we will remain one of the 150 out of 6000 who survived at Barnabas operation at ABB. If and only if we can point the value we have added. An Apple computer there is a saying which I love the saying is your job security lies in your employability and to me that makes sense to me and I realize my view may be a minority view. That is a liberating statement. The 5th of my Beyond's is what I called Beyond disintegration what we've been talkin about so far to the notion of the corporation is Rolodex. The third most profitable company in Japan in 1992 was Nintendo. 5.5 billion dollars in Revenue 1.3 billion dollars in profit from 892 employees That is 6 million bucks ahead and sales and a million-and-a-half in profits per employee, which is exactly three times higher than the Apple sales for employee, which is said to be the gold standard of a half million bucks an employee for sale in Silicon Valley. What is the magic of Nintendo? The magic is very simple Nintendo focus is on a few things which it does or tries to do phenomenally well and lets other people who do their bits of the action on their own the notion of the network Corporation the virtual Corporation the disembodied Corporation is here and it is a fabulously important idea. I have long been a fan of the MCI Corporation in the magic of the MCI Corporation now twelve or thirteen billion dollar strong in my opinion is that it was lucky enough never to manufacture anything never be allowed to manufacture anything in the early days. And so it's entire strategic approach. The wife is to find the best Partners to work with to take advantage of a fleeting Market opportunity the ability to create maintain manage and upon occasion sever alliances and relationships is the Strategic competence of MCI and one which I think is a worthy one indeed. Going beyond the disintegration to what I call Beyond re-engineering creating a corporate talk show is re-engineering important many of you were involved in that activity. Of course, it's important. We're going from vertical Farms. The horizontal firms in the idea of re-engineering essentially is to get the horizontal Enterprises linked up together and talking with each other. That's the last nice thing. You'll ever hear me say about re-engineering. I've got a very serious problem with it. I consider as an old engineer re-engineering to be what I call Neo taylorism. What I fear is that in many of these process RI organizations that are real orientations that were looking for what many companies are looking for is the same damn thing. They were looking for 30 years ago, which is the one best way of organizing remember that term that was used for quite a while that used to be the one best way of organizing this way the visualization or sbus or what-have-you. Now, it's the one best way of organizing that way which to me is absolutely antithetical to a world where the company needs in the PepsiCo sense to literally be able to reinvent itself virtually daily in pursuit of whatever the hell comes along. I'm in favor of horizontal ization. I'm in favor of getting your process. He's right, but it is nowhere near enough. What is the near enough? Well Mountain my Silicon Valley home about 15 miles 14 miles from Palo Alto where my office is is a Nifty little firm. Caldera phone as a 60% market share in the u.s. Of credit card authorization software and Hardware Associated therewith and also has significant share throughout the world and 26 million-dollar company with 1800 employees. It is described by its chief executive officer hatim. Tyabji as the blueberry pancake model of organization, very very flat and all blueberries are created equal. The verifone objective is very simple to distribute organizational resources as close to the customer as possible plus the creation of tight fast electronic information feedback loops a while back said Tom tell the people you talked to this tell him this about verifone guess what sports fans there really isn't a headquarters now. Yes, it is a publicly traded company publicly traded companies have to have a headquarters listed in there on your report and various other filing documents. Yes, Redwood City is the headquarters according to their annual report. There is no headquarters. The object himself walks 400,000 miles a year and travel and is on the road 80 to 90% of his time. The electronic network is the company for all practical purposes half of the verifone employees are spread out with their customers at any given moment. And in fact 35% of the company's employees are hooked into the electronic Network at any given time. Sharing information. Yes, you can share information at verifone literally 3 keystrokes will get virtually everyone including a new employee reported yesterday access the information complete information on bookings shipping shipments Prospect status. Everybody's travel schedule Personnel data to the extent that it's illegal to share it in a customized selection of technical matter, which is updated on a daily basis on top of that table G has registered / 1/4 of his employees as insiders with the SEC so that they can literally have everything. And that's what he means by empowering employees. He calls it a culture of urgency the average manager gets between 100 and 200 email messages a day as one of their senior managers said the logic around here is simple, it's Tappan or die. All employees are accessible to all other employees via the Internet. He wouldn't even open a new office in Bangalore India until he could have a dedicated communication line that allowed the company to do its thing by the electronic Network. Female female is they call it that is paper is not allowed literally. They do not allow paper except those occasional harassing notes from customers into their organization and they are very very serious about that. How do they work? Well, I'll tell you how they got a major major account with a German banking Consortium, the Redwood City project team worked on the job time to go to bed the entire project and an ego free fashion turned over completely to the Taipei office. The Taipei office did its thing until the time came to go to bed. And then the Taipei office past the entire project over to the London office when London went to sleep back the project went to Redwood City, California and literally in the matter of hours. Verifone was able to do what would take its competitors weeks if not months to do they not only one the order but they embarrass the living bejesus out of their competition along the way what theology says and you can be the judge not I is he said yes, this organization is a little bit different. But if you're not playing the game by these rules 15 years from now, you probably won't be in the game regardless of what your game is. I suspect that might be a slightly extreme statement, but I think slightly by just about that much. How would you like it? If a competitor of yours switch the verifone blueberry pancake model of doing business. It's incredible. That's what I mean of going Beyond re-engineering to literally in organization. Literally reinvents itself as needed on a daily basis. That I like to go beyond what I've just said and what I call Beyond learning toward the creation of a curious Corporation. Sigmund Freud once said what a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child in the feeble mentality of the average adult. I'm just concerned. and I say this with with just as a personal observation, I've said it before I am concerned in 1994 with how tall the average organization is. In these decidedly non doll. * how do you create a curious Corporation? I'm not going to spend the time on it tonight. I thought about it a lot. I've got a list in my new book of about sixteen or Seventeen teen things to do and I'm not teasing and any sense. It's just a matter of time but the sorts of things that I've said or not very exciting. How do you create a furious Corporation arcuri's people, you know, not really very hard. Who do we hire? in the Twin Cities in Palo Alto We hire that young man, or young woman never missed a day of Nursery School. Never missed a day of elementary school never got award wrong on a spelling test at a 4.0 average in high school 4.0 average in University 4.0 average in graduate school while she or he put off the real world for yet another 3 years. Individuals who are absolutely positively perfect and have never approached doing anything even barely interesting in there 25 years of life. Who do I suggest we hire? I suggest we hire that young woman who started at MIT is an engineer in at the end of a year-and-a-half despite a very acceptable grade point average left on the run because she found MIT to be the most disgusting Lido institution ever created by adults. She took off around the world for 18 months. We don't know where the hell she went. She may have been working for Mother Theresa. She may have been knocking off 7-Elevens. What we do know is that at least at one point in this young woman's life. She thumbed their nose at The Establishment. She fought conventional wisdom if we hire and if we get lucky maybe she will do something interesting for us. And if you think I'm kidding look at your current issue of Forbes Magazine wonderful story on the Microsoft Corporation would suggest that one of its principal Criterion for hiring is to find people who have big screw-ups in their past as they say usually a big screw-up is associated with passionate commitment to an idea and I like people like that and I don't trust people that I'm screwed something up. Anyway, it's not exactly the normal approach the hiring in the average Corporation. Okay, let me tie or let me let me tie this then. To the customer issue and in my customer Beyond I call it Beyond total quality management and toward wow. In 1981 in the United States 2689 new grocery and Drug Store products were introduced to our shelves then years later in 1991 the number of grown from 2689 to 16143 or a new product every half hour all year long with you needed or not. Good on us. We shortened our product development Cycles were spitting them out an incredible rate. Right? What else does that statistics say yet? Why is it then when prior to the Christmas season last year? I think it was I talked to David glass the Chief Executive Officer of a modest little Bentonville, Arkansas based retailer. And he said to me Tom we're suffering is the new season arrives from an absolute Darth. I'm using his exact language and absolute dearth of new and exciting fashion-forward products. He said where's the equivalent of the early microwaves the early Walkman the early VCRs the kinds of products that sucked customers literally by the millions off of their couches and into my store. Yeah, we've gone from 2689 a year to 16143 year and every damn one of them looks like every other one. Maryann Keller, perhaps the leading Securities at analyst in the automobile industry wrote a recent book on General Motors Toyota and Volkswagen. God Bless America. General Motors came out Tops on the least worst list among the three biggest car companies. Keller's commentary was interesting. She said is the lean production machine at Toyota in good shape. You better believe it is is the Toyota quality stunning. You better believe it is they only got one small problem their products are boring. John sculley right before he left Apple computer said precisely the same thing. He said what is the personal computer industry offered us in the last 2 years Rocky 4 and Godfather 5 I'm worried. I'm tired. I'm upset in the last 12 months. I've been called in by office furniture makers have been called in by training companies. I've been called in by Engineering Services Company. I've been calling by computer company semiconductor companies packaged Goods companies and so on and every one of them is said the same thing to me Tom the consumers getting tighter with his mind and Distributors are pushing in the margins are going to hell in a handbasket. For which I have not one iota of sympathy. Because the fact of the matter is that most of those things are product of companies that are spitting out stuff at an incredible rate tqm to beat the band that just ain't very interesting. I'm loathe to admit in so public a setting the kind of thing that turns me on. But I was turned on I think it was I don't know what it was for 5 months ago. You probably remember the date. I don't you know, every year Fortune comes out with that ranking of most admired companies in the United States. I think it's maybe 10 years old now for the first 5 years and no brainer. IBM wins hands down makes sense that IBM imploded next 4 Years Mark wins hands down another no-brainer. And then this year's Fortune arrived. Oh God, did I love it? Who won do you remember who won this year rubber made a maker of plastic and rubber do dads? Don't tell me there are Commodities in this world under Stanley got Rubbermaid has become an innovation machine. They are Brant and I mean am I exaggerating when I say rubber dude. Just a little bows for god sakes? And yet they are profitable as hell they're growing is out because they've literally turned the world's most commodity of Commodities according to my silly way of looking things into an absolute 24 karat gold fabulously innovating Enterprise and that to me is the key my final be on my ninth Beyond is what I call Beyond change again and toward profession Perpetual Revolution. The consultant James Morse writing in the Harvard Business Review recently said this he said the only another one of those unequivocal words, the only sustainable competitive Advantage comes from out innovating the competition and executive at a seminar a mine in February of 1994 said this the issue is not simultaneous product development. Not even world-class Quality Inn on time delivery with a smile important hell, yes imperative. Hell yes, but enough know the issue is innovation Innovation defined as yeast be spirited disrespectful hustling ready fire aim Enterprises and I like that language. A couple of years ago 3 4 years ago right before he passed away. Actually. I had the privilege of interviewing the Chief Executive Officer of MCI the light bill McGowan. And McGowan said to me in our interview. He said Thomas was near the end. He said let me sum it up for you. He said in days gone by. The chump to Champ champ cycle used to be three generations. He said now it's about 5 years. writing a couple of months ago in the Harvard Business Review another consultant Rodger Mark Martin said to compete companies must learn to burn themselves down every few years and rebuild their strategies their roles and their practices or conclude with one other simpler statement is I told you I spend The third my timer so in Vermont in one of the nice little things that we have in Vermont from the little town of Waterbury Vermont as a company called Ben & Jerry's home made at the high end of the high-end ice cream Market. How do you stay at the high end of the high-end ice cream Market in a fiercely competitive environment will let me give you the answer that they give whenever a process of policy and procedure and especially a new product is being considered a Ben & Jerry's they asked one question that is at the very tippy top of their list in their formal product development manual. And that question is is it weird enough? And I think it is the appropriate question for these times which are clearly very very weird indeed. Thank you very much.