Dashboard: The Case Against Pay for Performance

Welcome to another 21 Hats dashboard. I'm here with Kelly Allen, who is a management consultant who is a proponent of W. Edwards Demming and who's been on this podcast before. Welcome back, Kelly. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> It's great to have you here, Kelly. What I think what most people know about Deming, if like me, they only know a little, is that he went to Japan after World War II and revolutionized Japanese industry. I also know that in a very broad sense he was uh especially big on making datadriven decisions and trying to build better relationships between employees and employers. Um how'd I do? Is that a fair quick thumbnail summary? >> Uh yeah. I think you probably know more than most. >> That's scary. Well, it's because uh a lot of people know about Deming uh because they'll they study him in in school, in college especially, but they may find Deming uh what we often hear is, "Well, he was uh we read about him or we talked about him in a logistics class or in a statistics class or in a production class uh or an operational structural class or, you know, various kinds of classes. uh because he did touch all of those areas and others probably best known as uh a focus on quality and that was in part of that Japanese miracle after the second world war where he uh told them that if they would follow his uh suggestions that within 5 years the world would be screaming for protection from the high quality of their of their products. uh and that was certainly came to the four in the 1970s with uh various automobile and electronics, TVs and imports etc. to the US and then that prompted in uh 1980 in BC to do a documentary called if Japan can Why can't we? And the discovery was that this guy Debbie Edwards Deming who was 80 years old in 1980 was uh a key player in this transformation to thinking differently about how organizations are structured. Not just how products are made or services delivered but how the organizational structure that system uh changes everything about what you said in terms of relationships but also in terms of the Deming magic which is I'm over oversimplifying this but as quality goes up costs go down. Joy in work goes up, productivity goes up, customer satisfaction goes up, rework goes down, employee turnover goes down. That's the magic that things get better as your costs go down. And that took a long time for our western heads to get wrapped around that. Even though, you know, he's from the states, uh, he saw things differently. He had he he was able to look through layers and layers and layers of structure and interactions. uh as to how things actually really work and how they can be worked better. So I'd love to pick out one particular aspect uh to focus on here since we can't cover the whole waterfront obviously um and and that's pay for performance which is something that I think just makes so much implicit gut level sense to to business owners and yet Deming argued correct me if I'm wrong that pay for performance systems are basically flawed. um that they do not produce the results that they are intended to produce. Can you give us a quick sense of what do most managers misunderstand about incentives? Why did Deming not believe in pay for performance systems? >> Those things are interconnected. Uh and it comes down to this. Uh Deming's measuring stick was what is the most effective thing we can do with the least number of bad negative un you know negative unintended consequences. So there's no perfect world right and uh so we have to we have to make decisions as business owners about how we're going to run our business. What is this system that we're going to create? And what we know is that incentives uh work, right? They get you that superficial thing that you're after, but they hide a lot of the negative unintended consequences. So that's the uh downside of that that kind of thinking because those negative unintended consequences are often not seen. So if I am rewarding a person because they uh get let's say they process the most number of claims or they write the most number of lines of code or they can make x number of widgets faster than anybody else you know whatever it happens to be and then the belief is well they deserve more because they're working harder or they're working smarter etc. But what might be the negative unintended consequences of that? And this is what we see uh in every case. And uh I'll give you an example in just a moment, but I I I wanted to let your uh listeners know that uh the Deming Institute and I would be happy to make this happen for them. >> You're on the board there, right? >> I am on the board. I'm on the board of trustees there. Uh the institute is a nonprofit that uh you know it's got to cover its costs but it's it's to carry on Deming's thinking and legacy. So, we want to reach as many people as possible, and they have this incredible video library of award-winning videos, uh, beautifully made, very effective, but there are dozens and dozens of little, you know, five minute case studies and all kinds of things that explain Deming's philosophy and a bunch of the tools, etc. So, if any of your listeners would like to have like a a free 30-day access to that, uh, I'd love them to reach out to you and we'll make it happen for them so they can go in on their own and, uh, see small business owners talking about this very thing. >> Uh, somebody who's interested could just respond to their morning report newsletter or shoot me an email at lauren l o rn21.com. Thank you, Kelly. That's great. >> Oh, no. we'd love to have a couple hundred people come in and see them. Uh, all right. So, an example of that I started to talk about is the person who can process more, do more, write more code, do more widgets, answer more CSR, who can answer more phone calls or whatever is >> Let me stop you for just one second there, Kelly. It it seems to me that that's a fairly rudimentary version of pay for performance. And I'm imagining people listening to this and thinking, okay, I understand. I get the widgets. If you if you're just rewarding by widgets, there there are ways to gain the system. And you know, if you're if you're just focused on quantity, you're going to lose quality. Understood. What if it's more of a group uh or companywide uh metric that you look at like you know it could be based on margins, it could be based on profitability. Uh why wouldn't Demig favor or you favor something like that? >> Well, uh part of the issue with companywide is that's the sum total of every input, right? that makes sense in a profit sharing model. Uh a good profit sharing model, not one that's incentives, but based on this is a thank you for all of our work together. But once you start aggregating all everything together, you you struggle with trying to figure out how to make improvements in various places. The system is responsible. the system in which people work, all the inputs, all the training, all the policies, all the procedures, uh the way we do things around here, the tools, the equipment, whatever it happen, the interactions between people, all those things are inputs to an output. And we want to make sure that we're treating that system as the thing that we're really trying to improve. So if you look for for example if you go on to the Deming next and you look at the famous red bead experiment uh in which Deming demonstrates uh why it is that the system is in charge of 85 to 95% of the results and not individuals. When we try to fix individuals, we're spending 95 95% of our uh money on trying to fix the wrong problem. We need to be spending our money and our time on improving the system in which people work. When you talk about the system, are are you referring to just things within the four walls of a business that that an owner at least theoretically could could control or are you talking about things that nobody controls? Um you know the the price of oil, the outbreak of war, things that could affect a business. Uh no, those are those would be considered great question. Those would be considered special causes because they don't they're not common. they don't happen very often. They're special. So, uh uh if if you look at the organization uh as a sort of a systems flow diagram from you know whatever those you if you have some suppliers, right? And you've got you take that whatever it is is supplied to you, you add value to it in some way and you sell it on. So, some of those things you can influence, some of those things you can control. Uh so if you look at if you're if you're dependent on a bunch of suppliers, you want to make sure they are part of your system and you want to make sure that they are continually working on improving their system. So they're delivering more reliable uh and higher quality to quality to you because that means their costs are also going down. So you can continue to pay them a fair pay and they will continue to work with you because they are getting better and better at what they do and they can also sell other things to other customers. So that system you you have to define what the boundaries are. So with with pay for performance if you want a higher level uh view uh I think the uh an example of because we see this all the time. I'll just give you an example in in the insurance world. If you have an underwriter who is really fast and you got an underwriter who at the surface seems really slow, what we always find are the kinds of things like this. The really fast underwriter is handling the easiest policies, potential policies. That person off to the side is typically handling the ones that are much more complex to figure out. Now, this may be hard for you to believe, but many supervisors of those people don't know that. So they'll put an incentive plan in place to increase the throughput and or blame that person who's not doing as much work in their minds but who actually may be saving the company more money and making the company more money. So the rule of thumb is we have to look beyond the surface as to what the full um the richness of what it means to be good at something. >> You know I I think a lot of business owners feel just intuitively that they need incentives because they can't afford outsized salaries most likely. And if they don't tie pay to performance, what's going to motivate people? >> Yeah, that that's uh that's not uncommon at all. As you say, uh I would recommend that people for example see the Air Force One little 5minute uh case study on Deming Next on that very topic. So this happened to hap happened to be with a sales department, right? uh in which they were uh one one of the departments uh was struggling, one of the geographic regions, cities, areas was struggling and they were afraid they might have to shut it down and they had, you know, four or five other geographic regions in which they worked, but this particular one was somewhat problematic. >> Kelly, I Air Force One, you're not talking about the plane the president flies in, right? I know this is a commercial. Thank you. This is a commercial uh HVAC company. Nice play on words. Forcing the air through your system. Got it. >> Thank you. Yes. Uh so what they decided to do was to uh uh do a a little Deming based experiment uh of what if what if we take you off from uh commission sales, which is sort of the in some ways the ultimate pay for performance, right? and try try a different way of doing sales like we collaborate with one another. We share what we know uh with with one another. We may even work together to help write a proposal. These are you know for commercial jobs. Uh and this group went from being the worst in the entire company in terms of well they may not make it right. we may have to close this this operation down to within uh I think less than a year being second only in sales to headquarters which had been around for 50 years and had a huge installed base in the in the home territory. Uh so there's an example of thinking differently and how to collaborate rather than just looking at the numbers at the surface. So what they also did as a part of that because it was a a smaller organization uh and and they they couldn't uh pay people what a large company's going to pay people but they created an environment in which people were paid well enough. them and they could feed their families and pay their mortgage, etc., etc. And they included them in the in the profit sharing, so that people could then work together and figure out how to improve the sales process rather than just looking at those things as transactions. It's it's very dramatic. >> It sounds a little bit serendipitous. I mean, you're kind of relying on the employees themselves to come together and improve. >> No, no, sorry. Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. Uh, no, a system has to be led and a subsystem of sales has to be led. And how do you lead that system? You you get them to see a bunch of Deming Next videos. Uh, you have conversations about how to work together. you uh start to challenge some of the beliefs and assumptions about how sales are made and what they've always done and what they could try. You drive out the fear so they will try new things, not just use the same old mailing list, not just use the same old scripts, try new scripts, try new approaches, and to do that in an atmosphere where your next paycheck doesn't depend on you closing a deal now for whatever price you can get. Because in that environment with a salesperson on commission, the sales person has one customer, her or his boss. Can I lower the price? Can you take a can I get a discount on this? What else can I give them? Versus really being a salesperson to create a win for the company and for the prospect. So now there's more money being made. Customers tend to be longer term. a positive unintended consequence, right, of treating the customers with respect, not just as a transaction because I'm moving on to the next one and now it's over to the service department. Oh yeah, I sold them that and the boss signed off on it. So you guys got to make it work. Well, we don't have the parts to do that in the time frame we said we'd do it and right all these ripple effects so that I can get my spiff, my special bonus. I can just imagine an owner listening to this and thinking, okay, so I have two choices here. One is I can take a leap into the unknown and hope that trying different things. >> Don't do that. >> Trying different things is going to lead to something better. >> No. No. You know, we love entrepreneurs. I'm an entrepreneur. We work mostly with entrepreneurs. Uh I love the fact that they are very self-reliant. That we are very self-reliant. let's go do this. And they're willing to leap into the unknown, but I don't want you to leap into the unknown. I want you to get a little bit of schooling and some understanding and then to take, we say, boil a cup of water. Don't change your whole system. Air Force One did not change its old its its entire system for over two years because they needed to do it in a methodical way, but it was paying more than paying for itself to do that over time. And so and the the owner said to me, "All right, so this is working really great. How do I get other uh ge geographies sales offices to do this?" And my response was, you won't have to because there are no secrets. They're going to hear what's going on in this office that's doing these demning things and they're going to come to you and they're going to say, "When can we do this?" And that's exactly what happened. So, I don't want them to go off into the unknown or the it to to take that leap. There's the videos, there's seminars, there's books, you know, there's God help us consultants. So you you run, you walk before you run. I I get the idea uh that you don't take that big leap at once, but it's still it's a it even if it's a small leap, it's it's doing things very differently as opposed to what intuitively seems to make so much sense. If I offer big rewards for big sales, I'm I I get sales. And if I don't do that, I'm going to lose my best salespeople because they're used to being compensated on commission and they're going to go somewhere where they think they can make more money. >> Yeah, that that's a great one. There have been a lot of studies on this and in fact, very few salespeople leave as a result of that. Really, in fact, I think uh we have examples uh both small and large. Uh I think uh if memory serves, Air Force One lost one person who was probably going to be fired anyway because of some toxic behaviors or potentially toxic behaviors. Uh people uh don't like to be manipulated. There are there are a few folks who don't like being manipulated but who are really just uh they want to do their thing and they're really good at it and I understand that but to take that and to extrapolate that into an organization is is uh unwise. It's unwise and you want to educate them in the process. Again, it's not this command and control of we're going to change our sales model or we're going to say change our pay for performance model. We're going to change all that. No, that's command and control. It's going to them and saying, "Hey, there are some things here that have these kinds of benefits that would change your life in these ways, your work life in these ways. It's working at all these organizations. We could do a little experiment with this if you'd like and you can help us design it." That's the difference. It's about thinking differently. I want to if I may just one other thing in terms of we have to be very care we have to both trust our gut but also be very very careful of it because the research shows and also my own experience is that the power of the familiar the way we've always done things is the single most powerful human uh what emotion. Uh in fact there's research on this published by uh some scientists who who point out that the power of the familiar is more powerful than the urge to procreate or to survive. Which explains why battered spouses will go back to the batterer. Right? Let's not be let's not be battering ourselves. If we entrepreneurs what part of what makes them so great is their open mind, right? to try some new things, to learn about some new things. And that's and and engage other people in that. And the nice thing about Deming is that within like 30 to 60 days, you're already seeing your payback. It's already changing things dramatically. Which is why we we have clients for 30 years. Deming becomes a profit center for them. So if if most gains in performance come from the system and not from rewarding individuals for individual behavior, does that risk letting poor poor performers off the hook? >> Well, you have to h how do I know who to fire? >> Well, that no, right? That's that's uh still thinking though within that framework of pay for performance. So if you take that out of pay for performance uh thinking and you put it into what's our aim here? What's our aim? If our aim is to grow this organization over time. Now if you're if you're building it to flip Deming still has some roles there, but not as much as if you if you're building it to last or at least your lifetime. Hand it off to your children. uh do a sale at some point uh into the future, right? But if you're because the payback is so fast, right? The payback is so fast. the uh I I if what the research shows and what Deming has proven and we continue to prove year in and year out about 3% of the time 5% at the most are people who really do not belong in your organization. So if you have a 100 people, you can expect, you know, 3 to 5% of those people you may have to, you know, fire during the course of a year, but the rest of your turnover will stay really low, right? The turnover, what's the average turnover uh rate in this in this country? It's like 25% for smaller businesses. Not all of them. It just depends on the marketplace and what industry you're in and all those kinds of things. But the other thing that we find is that the people who are often seen to be the best performers have figured out figured out how to manipulate the system to get the numbers they need. Because there are only three ways ever invented to get better results, get better numbers. Manipulate this the numbers. Manipulate the system that provides the numbers. I'll pull this sale over into next month or I'll pull next month's sale over into this month so I get that extra 5%. Or the third way is to improve the system in which people work. Those are no one's ever invented anything beyond those two. So when we look at somebody who's a poor performer, the question is h did they get the training? I mean, every day we have conversations with with with clients who talk about I may have to let so and so go because well, so when we start to track it down, it's like, oh yeah, they didn't get that part of the training or we've just told them to do this job, right? And this job, if if we think of our system from end to end, it's like a chap chapters in a book. Your job is to work on chapter 8. Well, if I'm a new employee, I don't know what chapters 1 through 7 are. I don't know what's coming to me and how I'm supposed to be assessing that. And I don't know chapters 9 through 15. I don't know what happens to it after this. So, there's no systems view for that new person, but I put them in there because I need to get to get that work done. Now, that's fine for a week, but when you start to find yourself, well, they're not really working out. Are they not working out? Right? I I I I think of uh Peter Schulty's uh who worked with us and worked with Dr. Deming as well is people would say to him uh well Peter we know we have a bunch of dead wood around here and Peter's line was hm uh did you hire dead wood because if you did that's a process related to hiring and onboarding or did you hire livewood and kill it? That's a that's a different problem. Which one are we working on here? Right? It's a different way of thinking. It's a different way of thinking. So, it's not just a tool. Deming's not saying just get rid of performance appraisals. Uh not just, you know, he he wants there to be a a view where you can go forward without stubbing your toe too much. We're all going to stub our toes. That's just every entrepreneur knows that, right? There's no there's no entrepreneur left uh for over a couple years who hasn't made some mistakes, right? So, that's just a part of being an entrepreneur, being a small business owner. You love to figure stuff out. If you don't, you're probably not going to make it. But if you love to figure stuff out, wow, that thinking differently from Deming, that learning is the only sustainable competitive advantage over over your competition, right? It is sustainable because you can learn faster than they can and it's hard to copy because in part they can't see what you're doing. So when Air Force One took when everybody in the entire company was then off commissions, uh it was like they just took off even more. the competitors can't figure it out because the competitors are still looking at it through the lens of command and control and these people are lazy and they're we've got to motivate them. And what Deming points out is remove the demotivators. Remove those demotivators of pitting us against one another so that one's a winner and one's a loser and someone's going to go away or pitting us against one another for kudos or for incentive rewards or those kinds of things. That's thinking differently. That is building that's futureproof the or future proofing the organization. >> I keep trying to think about this from the you know most granular level. Somebody trying to adjust and think differently and follow these principles. Let's go back for just a second to those two underwriters you told us about. One's doing the easy stuff quickly. The other's doing more complex stuff taking longer. Can you address how they should be compensated? Do you know from that example? >> Sure. Sure. And uh we have many similar examples and uh similar compensation examples. It's not about throughput. If someone is truly so this gets into the the statistical part just a little bit but every system has variation. Every process has variation in it. Every person every day at work has some variation. So if you look at it on a graph uh you know like a sine wave going across a graph uh just to give you a visual image you may have some people who are either know some things or have certain gifts that place them at a higher level of capability. And you may have some people who are below that graph of where most people fit. they so they're struggling, right? But in while you figure out what that person above and that person below are doing or not doing, everybody gets basically the same pay, right? They're doing the same job. Now, if over time that person who's really doing so much better, uh, if if I just incentivize that person, why would she be interested in helping you learn how to do your job better, Mr. Low performer or Mr. Mr. Average performer? There's no incentive for her to do that. Who loses? The whole company loses because she's walking away with the rewards and the incentives and the parking place and all that stuff. and she's also eating alone at lunch, right? So, a if the job is not challenging, she's going to leave and b if she's not liked, she's going to leave eventually, right? Depending on the economy, etc. So, we want to make sure if that person really is knows some things that we're she's wanting and willing to teach that that might be a promotion, that might be a different level of pay. She might be able to do her existing job and more as well. But if I'm on a pay for performance scheme, why would she do that? She's cleaning up because all her colleagues don't have a clue as to how she's doing it and she's not going to tell them. So for the lower performer, it's like, what are we missing? Is this person in the wrong job? Sometimes that's the case. We we just we didn't hire well. We didn't train well. The person's just really not up to the up to the training. Can't get it. So you you make a a humane severance and you move on. >> So what you just described the the notion of this employee feeling incentivized to improve the system, work with other employees, help the company as a whole as opposed to just counting their own metrics, their own dollars. That sounds a little bit like what I sometimes hear from business owners who say something along the lines of, "If you want employees to act like owners and care about the overall success of the company, make them owners." Uh, and that's a common argument you hear in favor of employee ownership, which sounds like it's playing along similar lines of what you just described. Is is employee ownership something that Deming look favorably upon or or not? >> I would have to research that. Uh I don't know off the top of my head. >> Well, what what do you think in terms of what you've observed? >> Well, the f the first thing is I I would reccharacterize uh how you framed it. So, you you said that having that person uh take uh have a a different title, a new job, different pay, etc. Uh, I'm not sure that has anything to do one way or the other with ownership. It's trying to make sure that we're taking that person's knowledge and integrating that into our system so everybody gets better. And then if we have a profit sharing plan, then everybody benefits including that that person who uh used to walk away with all the rewards or many of the rewards whatever the case may be. Now in terms of ownership, we see a couple things with ESOPS for example. And so Deming said a system must be led. Uh it it can't just be left to its own devices. What we see uh too often is that the ESOP was a way for the owner to get equity out of the business, but the owner had not trained people to really lead the organization. So eventually, depending on how the deal is structured, the owner is not going to get paid because the organization is not going to go forward without that owner's knowledge which was not embedded in others in the business before the owner created the ESOP. in terms uh in general in terms of employee ownership, we also have to be careful because it's uh it it makes sense. It in so many ways I'm not against it. But what happens is if we don't educate people on say Deming's teachings about depreciation for the system, what you'll see happening is, well, I don't want to spend the money on that equipment. That's going to hurt my I'm going to I want to buy a boat, right? that's gonna hurt my my uh profit sharing or let's cut back a little bit on maintenance. We can make it run for a while because our profit sharing is going to go up. Uh or we now we'll make it work with the people we have e even though there are more accidents now because we don't have enough people. They're getting tired out. We're hustling too fast and we're not paying attention to safety or there are dozens of these kinds of things. So if I'm going to have employees as owners, we have to have some agreements about how we are doing things, what our aims are for this, why what we have been doing is making sense. We're open to new ideas, but it can't violate these basic core principles because when we do that, we get into trouble. So, if I hear you right, you believe that there are ways to do profit sharing um that work well. Um and I guess you're I mean I I've thought of private sharing as being a particular flavor of paper for performance. >> You don't seem to see it that way. >> No, absol absolutely not. Profit sharing should not be an incentive. It should be a thank you that we're all in this together by doing everything that we do. Spending the money on maintenance, training, uh tools, equipment, uh you know what, whatever the organization needs to improve, how we treat our customers, all of those things. the sum total at the end of the year the owner needs to be able to say this we've made this much money I need to set up uh set aside this much for the rainy day I need to set aside this much for future capex I need to right and what's left because my first responsibility is to jobs my first responsibility is to keep this company going and employ people once I have done that done my fidiciary and moral resp have have my moral responsibility. This is what's left over now. This is what we get to share as a thank you for everything that you've done all of you. And there are a couple models uh of profit sharing which we could we probably don't need to go into now, but if anybody's interested, I'm happy to speak with them about it. They can reach out to you. I I I got to ask you about one thing you just said, which is the your first responsibility being about jobs. I think a lot of owners would question that um I mean in in tough times you first responsibility is to try to keep the company alive. >> So you can have jobs as opposed >> doesn't mean you're going to have all the jobs, right? Well, and also so the owner who has invested probably substantially in in a business can, you know, keep that investment alive. Uh >> but exactly. No, no, but those things are not it uh uh counter to one another. >> Well, you may have to you may have to lay people off. I mean, >> you may indeed because you're saving 50 jobs is better than losing >> Okay. Okay. Okay. 60 or 70 or 80 jobs. >> It sounded to me like you might be saying the first responsibility is keeping all the jobs and that clearly is not what you're saying. Got it. >> No, >> I'm still a little bit unsure of what works with profit sharing in your mind and and and what doesn't. Um maybe you could just tell us what what what makes a good profit sharing plan. >> Yeah, I I'll give you an example. Uh if you take the profit sharing and you divide it into a pie chart, you have two big pieces of the pie at about 45% each of the pie and then there's another 10% piece. That that 10% piece and it's somewhat changeable. Some companies do 20% and it's about it's about how long uh people have been with us. It's to say hey we appreciate your 5 years, 10 years, whatever it is. So there's a there's a piece of the profit sharing related to that tenure that that time with the organization. The other two pieces are the one is the all we are all in this together piece. I don't care if you sweep the floors or are the top whatever engineer, scientist, salesperson, CSR, uh driver, whatever it happens to be. We are all in this together. So everybody gets just for the math simply a h 100red bucks. That other 45% is what we talk about as market reality. We know that an engineer is going to make more than a janitor. So that's a percent. We just figure that on percent. So if if one again just to keep it simple if if someone's uh making a h 100,000 a year and someone else is making 20,000 a year in this piece of the pie the person making a h 100,000 a year would get five times as much from that piece of the pie because the marketplace says that person is worth five times as much in the marketplace. So we have to have the marketplace reality. But that top engineer, salesperson, whoever it is, right? Uh knows that without all the other people behind the scenes doesn't get to be as successful without all those other people. And that's why that other 45% piece is we are all in this together. we are all going to get the same amount whether it's $1,000 or $100 or whatever it happens to be in the formula and that's about as close to fair as we can get to my knowledge. >> So I think the distinction you're drawing and one that I think probably will take a lot of listeners by surprise is you're saying that in a well-designed profit sharing plan it's I think the word you use is it's a thank you. Um, >> it's not incentive to work harder. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but my impression is that most profit sharing plans are designed to incentivize and to try to get workers to give their best, hardest work to to the to the business. I I think that's that's another hurdle that someone would have to get over to uh approach this. Do do you think I'm right that I I do I do and in part because it looks profit sharing on its own is neither good nor bad. It fits within the context of a way we operate. So, if it fits in the context of a a more command and control operation, which I'm going to ring everything out of you that I can and try to motivate you, versus hm we're we're a transaction versus this is a collaborative operation. We support one another. We help one another. We learn from one another. We work together. We figure things out. and the whole organization moves uh forward with uh better products, better service, uh less turnover employee of employees etc etc. So if I'm seeing profit sharing, oh profit sharing, it's another way to motivate because my mind is about motivation versus uh I want to be able to have an environment in which I'm bringing out I'm getting rid of the demotivators that cause people to pull back their energy. So last question, somebody's listened to all this and you got them thinking and they're intrigued. Can you give a suggestion of a way that they can kind of take that first step that you described earlier? You don't want anybody to just leap into the the void? >> Yes. >> Is it possible to try this uh in a very small way and get a sense of whether it works? I would I would say you what you want to try in a small way is to see some videos on the Deming next by reaching out to you uh so they can get to the Deming Institute >> lauren21s.com and I will forward your email on >> great and the second thing is uh if you're a reader uh pick up the third edition of Deming's seinal book called the new economics and read the last chapter first. It's a new chapter. It's only in the third edition. Read that last chapter first. It's only about 40 pages. There are lots of examples in there. There's a little practicum as to uh many of the things we've been talking about today, plus some others. And you'll know from the in that, you know, those few minutes that you're going to spend reading it if this looks like it resonates, if it feels like it's going to resonate for you. If it doesn't, no harm, no foul, right? Uh but if it does, uh you can have a lot more fun and make a lot more money. That's what that's what it comes down to. Look at the title of the book, The New Economics. The new e the new way of thinking the fun in that making money. I'm sorry. >> I'm not hearing the fun of that. >> Of making more money and having more fun. >> Yes. The new economics, not so much. >> Oh, I see what you mean. >> Yeah, I get it. All right. Kelly Allen is a management consultant based in Columbus, Ohio. You can learn more about his practice at kellyallen.com. That's Kelly ke ly Allen A. Uh, Kelly, thanks so much for taking the time. >> Oh, it was fun. Thank you. I hope it was helpful. >> I really appreciate it. I took a little more of it than I promised, but uh I think it was worth it. Uh, thanks for hanging in there with me and thanks for listening everybody.