BIZ/DEV

Accessibility, Leadership & Lightsabers | Episode 35

May 26, 2022 Big Pixel Season 1 Episode 35
BIZ/DEV
Accessibility, Leadership & Lightsabers | Episode 35
Show Notes Transcript

In this episode, Gary and David continue the discussion from last week: what does it take to be a good leader? From there they bring up the new Obi Wan trailer, as well as the series Moon Knight. No, there are no spoilers.

Enjoy!

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Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel


The Podcast


David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.


In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.


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David:

Hi, everyone, welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, and I am joined as always by the illustrious Gary Voight. How's it going, man?

Unknown:

Last year, so I like that. illustrative is cool, too. But yeah. How's it gone?

David:

So good. All right. So, we are going to start out this fabulous episode, talking a little bit about what's kind of in the news, which is kind of what brought it to our attention. But we're talking about accessibility a little bit. We've been seeing a lot we started last week, you start talking about Google, right? And how they were doing the whole translation thing. And the the poor lady who grew up with a mom, who she didn't speak the language, and now she finally could speak to her mother for the first.

Unknown:

Yeah, it seems like the industry is kind of taking this direction of accessibility and going full force like Apple, there are new rumors out now that the next version of Apple's iOS is going to feature some really cool accessibility features, especially for their phone. One of the things that we're talking about was like, real time captioning for video. So if you're on like a FaceTime call with someone, and maybe you can hear them so well, you can see what they're saying on the screen in real time, like a closed captioning would work, you know, on a movie.

David:

And that's pretty amazing. If in the thing that we saw, they're talking about doing that on device, which means it's not going to the cloud, which means it's fast. That means it's stupid, fast. Now, is the accuracy going to be great? Probably about normal 85%

Unknown:

I'm sure the there's a whole bunch of machine learning that's gonna go into it and probably help it improve over time as well.

David:

What would that mean, generally speaking, maybe 85%, then that sounds great. But that means maybe even if you're at 9095, that means one out of every 20 words is wrong. And that's leads to really funny results. It's good enough, it's got Google Translate for voice, right? You know, it's not great, but it gets the job done.

Unknown:

I mean, this already kind of exists in closed captioning software that's out there just for, you know, like Netflix and Amazon, Disney plus, or whatever. A lot of them use, like a third party app, that's like, you'll see the little disclaimer, when you turn on closed captioning, closed captioning brought to you by whatever app it is. And you'll notice depending on how fast they're talking, or what they're saying, some of the words will get messed up a little bit.

David:

But well, we've got a transcription on all of our podcasts. Yeah, it does the same exact stuff. We're using a software and it's probably about 85 90% accurate, and some of it is hilarious. Especially when you don't say something perfectly clear, it turns into hippopotamus, and it's great.

Unknown:

There was one other feature that I wanted to mention on the the rumors for the new Apple, iOS and the Apple phone with the LIDAR detectors that they're going to kind of build in a proximity sensor for accessibility for like walkways, street crossings, closed doors, like entry points, stuff like that. So anybody who's kind of like visual or hearing impaired, or, you know, maybe someone who needs a little bit more guidance assistance, they'll have like proximity sensor. So if you're coming up, you're walking down the sidewalk, and you're coming up to an intersection, your phone can warn you. Yeah, that's pretty sick. The key

David:

and I've said this about environmental stuff, and accessibility is falling into the same trap, environmental stuff started becoming more and more successful when people started tackling problems that everyday people have, when I can save money by switching my light bulb out, and that light bulb now will last a billion years. And I don't have to worry about replacing it. People started buying them right before when it was just a feel good about saving the planet. Most people don't care, accessibility, and that's just human nature. It's unfortunate, but it's just how we are at a population. I think accessibility is kind of the same thing is you want to help everybody and the people who are truly disabled or blind or deaf or, or impaired in any other way you want to help them. But the masses want to help themselves because again, human nature. And what they're finding with all these new accessibility features is that they help regular everyday non impaired people almost as much. If you have slightly bad eyesight, a lot of these accessibility features really, really help.

Unknown:

And that I have a friend who is visually impaired who has to use these features in order to do his job. And without them he he'd be stuck. But yeah, I mean, the little things like taking a picture with your iPhone and then zooming in, pinch to Xoom real quick and then having if there's text you can have that read to you helps them every single day.

David:

That's huge, right? And it's huge, but it also helps everybody else too. And that's where I think accessibility in the last, I'd say five years is okay, like Xbox started making accessible controls. Now that was for truly people who like have one hand,

Unknown:

yeah, when the tech starts bleeding into a more like, I guess you can say, broader use case, or it makes it more convenient for everyday users who might not need the accessibility features to help them but you know, they can and they will help them make things a little bit faster and slicker for them. Yeah, it'll be adopted a lot quicker.

David:

And that's what you're seeing here. I mean, the real time captioning, yes, it is technically, for people who can't see very well. But I promise you, that will be darn handy in so many places. And so you're seeing this go. And I think it comes from a good mix of really wanting to help people and expanding the reach, right? It's a good mix. And I don't have a single problem with that. I like what is coming out of this, a lot of the color stuff like you can hide certain colors, you can go full black and white, you can go. Now everything is you know, these cameras are smart enough that they can read what they're seeing, which is super creepy in one side, but really neat on the other. And then at the same time what we were talking about last week, they can then say, oh, that's English, you are speaking German. I'm going to take what I'm reading, and I'm going to turn that sign that stop sign into German. So you know what it means. i It all starts happening. It's really amazing stuff.

Unknown:

This layered on with the more advancements in machine learning and stuff like that. It's it's getting really cool. little scary, but also really cool. Like you said, last week, they were approaching the Star Trek type technology a little bit more.

David:

We certainly are. Now the question that comes up from a business perspective is you're a startup, you've got a new website, you've got a new e commerce site, how much accessibility do you need to make for your company? And the answer is, it depends.

Unknown:

There's layers, there's definitely there are lots of

David:

layers to this. So we did years ago, we did a major colleges law, website. Big huge law school, very cool project to work on. They were very, very big and accessibility, everything. And some of that might have been legal stuff just because of what they did. But they gave us a big old book. And okay, these are the requirements. Yeah, like things like really strangely that you wouldn't think about like it when it comes to color blindness. It's not necessarily certain colors, everybody thinks, oh, red and green and neck as

Unknown:

the content that's it's the contrast to triple A and double A rating of a contrast ratio between

David:

and so we're building this website, and they're like, Okay, that orange, those two oranges, or that blue in that orange, or whatever, I'm making colors up, those are horrible colors to mention. But

Unknown:

but those two colors aren't designers talking about the color combinations.

David:

I'm a designer, you up

Unknown:

between the two of us. You're

David:

that's fair, that's fair, I'll give you props. I'm just saying they what was surprising to me is how many rounds we had to go through because we had to keep increasing the contrast between two colors that were sitting on top of each other. Yeah, that was new to me. And that takes a lot of work.

Unknown:

That approach from a design perspective as well. You have to kind of balance between what's going to look good for the actual brand and for you know, the site that you're making, versus what is going to be triple A or double A rated for the contrast. And a lot of that you don't think about it when you're designing because you're thinking these two colors look fine together. But you have to also realize that a lot of people that have color blindness or visual impairment, they do they set their screens to inverse. So it's kind of like a permanent dark mode or light mode, it'll switch to whatever is more contrast heavy for them. So while you're saying yeah, okay, this light pink, on top of this dark purple is enough contrast. But when they switched to inverse, those two might muddled together like just similar gray tone. So then they can't see it. But yeah, so many layers and things to consider for just some of the most basic parts of the design. Yeah, and

David:

that really gets hard like the the one that just absolutely kills a website is font size.

Unknown:

Yes, it has to be responsive and you have to make sure that you can be scaled in and out just by keyboard you can't mock it the

David:

whole zooming thing and because making images that will not break weird or you've got a big title that you want to show and you want it to break a certain way. You got to throw out the window because you don't know what the person is looking at. We have clients that the their company laptop that comes to them from their IT group that we're developing for by By default, everything has a 50% Zoom, which blows us up all the time, right? You got to think about this constantly, because everything's because the way the laptop is it doesn't look big and chunky. But if it was at 100%, it'd be too small. And so everything gets weird and wraps funny in ways that we don't expect. It happens all the time. You'd never know what the if you're targeting Joe Public, you never know, we had one client who had so many this tournament accessibility, but they kind of proved the same point. He had so many toolbars on his browser. Oh, that is actual vertical space on his browser.

Unknown:

30% of his screen. Yeah, he's not even used for me, he

David:

was the client. And he was like, I can't see this. So we had to build, like, his key pieces for his Admin Portal had to be no more than 500 pixels tall, because that's literally all he could see. Come on, man. So accessibility is one of those things, if you're a startup, unless you are targeting an accessible market, like that's a thing. I wouldn't worry about it too much initially. It's not that you don't care, but it's expensive. And to do these layers upon layers, your design group, your design bill will double easily, because they now have to pay attention to 100 more variables.

Unknown:

There are some small things that you should consider from an SEO standpoint, like just all text for images and stuff like that.

David:

Yeah, I mean, you could there's there's considered layers

Unknown:

and zooming. Yeah. How far

David:

in do you want to go up the ladder of of layers, as it were, if I'm mixing all my metaphors here, the this can get really crazy. If you're building a government site, the amount of money they're spending on accessibility is very, very high. Because it has to be because all types of people, and they're the government. But if you're building a new Shopify site, pick and choose and then embrace more and more as you become more successful, there's nothing wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't mean you you hate disabled people. I mean, that's not what you're saying. It can feel like that. But that's not the point. You've got it, you can't save the world without money gets

Unknown:

hours, and hours and hours that it has to be added into those projects. Thanks. Yeah,

David:

it's expensive. It reminds me when we have a lot of startups over the years, we've had a lot of special very, very young people like fresh out of college, they want to save the world. And I love that, that's great. Go with that. But they're like they, I want to give away my product. Do you do not exist, if you make no money, there is no business and then you're a charity. And if you want to be a charity, great,

Unknown:

get some donations, but get some fun,

David:

you've got to you got to make a product first that you can sell and make money, then save the world. I'm all for saving the world. I'm all for jumping in and being an activist on a cause that you love. And accessibility falls in that same boat is what I'm saying is I'm not saying you should you hate blind people, right? That's, that's horrible. And no one would do that. But you can't spend, do you have $10,000 to spend to make sure that a screen reader is perfect on your website, when you're just starting landrus? Probably not.

Unknown:

You can't, you can't take a giant amount of your budget and focus that onto something that's becoming more and more trendy as a topic accessibility. And everybody wants to be accessible. But just like you said, you gotta get off the ground first, get the basics done, and then build up from there.

David:

As I mentioned, last week, we started I've started trying to train myself to be a better leader. And as some of that I'm reading articles and books and stuff on leadership. And I thought it might be helpful to hear or to hear my struggles with it as much as anything else. Right. I am not good at this yet. And I'm learning and I'm growing and I'm trying to become better. And I'm so I'm coming from this as a student rather than than a teacher. And I see you're taking

Unknown:

us on your journey as well. I'm taking you on a better leader. Nice.

David:

So today's lesson and leadership. Again, we're I'm reading currently, the Harvard Business reviews, top articles on leadership top 10. And this one is eight qualities of an effective leader. Do you have any idea? Do you want to guess on what eight any of these qualities might be? Out of the eight? See what you can sell me?

Unknown:

Does that have anything to do with what we talked about last week? No, like, okay, so then it won't be personality traits or any kind? They're not personality traits? No. Okay. Effective leadership would say compromise. Is that in there for finding a way to compromise now? Okay.

David:

I'm not saying you're wrong. Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying this is what the article is saying.

Unknown:

Right. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah,

David:

not compromise.

Unknown:

Well, I I mean, the old adage of lead by example, but nope. Okay. Have really cool shoes.

David:

Perfect. Nailed it. That's it. Nailed it. That's exactly right. That was actually three of the eight.

Unknown:

What are the other seven? Their wardrobe? hit three of them. Okay, you get

David:

through it? Well, it starts with the shoes, and then it's socks, and then it's watches. Those are three of the eight effective things that a leader does? No, that is not true. None of that,

Unknown:

obviously, I don't know any of them. So

David:

that's fine. No, I wanted to see how obvious they were. Because they're not they weren't, they weren't obvious to me. And that's where I was going with that they weren't, I would think personality traits. And the key part of this article was like, you know, that whoever's writing this, I don't have the actual author in front of me. But it's in that book. He was like, I have met the most charismatic leaders. I have met the jerky as leaders. I have met, you know, Mother Teresa type leaders, I've met, you know, military general type leaders who bark orders and yell and scream. And they all have a level of effectiveness. And here's what that all these types. So it's not personnel.

Unknown:

Okay, so he's categorizing the effectiveness in different versions of leadership. So step

David:

one, they ask, what needs to be done. And what's the important part of this, which is what struck me because I'm a normal egotistical person. It's not what I want to do. It's what needs to be done. That makes sense. He used Harry Truman a lot. As an example, when Harry Truman came in, he wanted to do a bunch of domestic stuff, and finish up stuff that FDR did, and, and move forward on on all of that. But when he came to power and became president, the foreign policy of the world, we had just finished up World War Two, everything was really, really rough. And so he had to spend a big part of his term, focusing on foreign stuff, if we're getting in touch any domestic stuff, because he realized this is what needs to be done. So I thought that was really good. Number two, what is right for the enterprise? Now those kind of related, but it's what is what is what the enterprise needs not me as a person, not me, as a leader, not Joe, as the director of XY and Z. It's not about personal, it's as the enterprise and enterprise can be a startup enterprise could be literally, you know, GM, it, that's what I thought that was neat. They call it enterprise, because it can be any size of company. But what is right, so it's kind of taking that next step, they're going to focus on what is right for the enterprise. The next is they all develop action plans. And that was really interesting. So they all focus on an action plan. So that a company for the company, right, it's not, they're not just winging it, which is what I am notorious for. I absolutely wing so much. But these guys are coming in planning, they all plan. And they're

Unknown:

probably planning years ahead, or at least a year ahead, not quarterly as the quarter is about to start, but a quarterly for 2023. One effective

David:

leader slings when he saw our Yeah, and then bring it down. Because there was a there was a quote, and I don't know who said it, but they said, human beings grossly overestimate what they can get done in a year. But they grossly underestimate what they can do in a decade. That's really powerful when you start digging into that. And that's really what separates a leader from a normal person is I'm going to cast my net five years out, generally, most of the people I've spoken to they talk about five year make a five year plan, where do you want to be in five years, because if you don't do that, you're going to be stuck in the minutiae, and you're not going to get nearly as far as you can. So you'll pick a revenue number picks up and you'll see a lot of startup guides that talk about that what your five year plan. And of course, it's fake, but it's a goal. It's not it's not concrete, it's a goal. And then you back it up with just three years, then, in order to get to where you want to be in five years, where do you have to be in three years? In order to get to where you want to be in three years? Where do you want to be in one year? Yeah,

Unknown:

and that's just not easy to do that it is really hard to do. That takes discipline and dedication, just because you ask someone? Well, in my experience, he asked anybody, including me, where do you see yourself? You know, three years? Where do you see yourself in five years? Or what do you plan on doing for the next day? And immediately you're like, I'm not thinking about that. That's too far.

David:

And that's, that's the I believe that's what separates a leader from a follower is no one should have that right off the tip of their tongue. That's just

Unknown:

not so it's something you have to learn to do and discipline yourself to do as well.

David:

Leaders go into dig down deep and go, gosh, where do I want my company to go? Because and I will say we did Did we be big pixel, we did a leadership conference, it was one of our I think the first one we ever did. Now, second, I did one a long time ago, and then promptly forgot about it.

Unknown:

But it didn't include me. So it wasn't as good.

David:

That's true. We did one a year ago. And for the first time, we cast a five year vision. And that was like, when we put that down on the whiteboard, we were like, seriously, like, what can we do that? I don't know? And then we backed up. I said, What is that going to look like in three years? How do we get there from there? Right? And that was really eye opening. So if you haven't done that, it's dude, awesome stuff. Okay. Next. They took responsibility for decisions. That's a big one. Now, that sounds so easy.

Unknown:

Yeah, yeah. And it sounds easy, but anybody who because, you know, with the role of quote, unquote, leadership, comes the ego. So if they're more willing to blame, instead of accept responsibility for things, even if it's not their fault, but they'll just take it in and say like, well, if it was something that, you know, happened incorrectly or something that was done wrong by the company, then it's on me, that shows everybody below them that okay, we can we can rely on this guy to not just throw people under the buses are firing people if things don't go his way.

David:

I mean, that's, that's the thing is, I mean, it's not as though you know, if Joe Schmo drops the ball, and you're, you know, your marketing plan goes awry, because Joe just didn't do his job. Now, you're the CEO, ultimately, you hired Joe, ultimately, it's your responsibility sure to make sure that marketing plan happens. Now, does that mean Joe gets off scot free? Absolutely not. You privately take Joe and we have a service talking to and maybe he does get fired? I don't know. Maybe he doesn't maybe had a great reason. It doesn't matter. publicly. You are taking responsibility privately, you're getting things done. And I think it's really easy. A bad boss, usually citizen middle management, a bad boss, absolutely will blame

Unknown:

every fingerpointing is a problem in corporate America in middle management levels, for sure.

David:

But that's a big one. Next, they were focused on solutions, rather than problems. Awesome. That's a big one. To me, that one really kind of smacked me in the face. Because I will say running a business, it is so easy to get lost in the fires, there's always something smoldering, there's always something to fight. And sometimes you can't avoid it. If your biggest client is cranky, you as a CEO are not avoiding that. You're not delegating that your biggest client who sinks or swims, your company, oftentimes is cranky, you're getting involved, so you can't avoid them. But by focusing on solutions, and again, that comes back to vision, you're going to succeed more often than if you're just focused constantly on the day to day problem.

Unknown:

Yeah, I mean, I see that all the time, even with small things like instead of just fixing the small problem, and then hoping it doesn't happen again, like even if it's just a bug on a website or something like that, or a bug on an app. Instead of just satiating the client for the time being, fix the problem, and then take a little while a little time a little research and figure out what you can do differently in the future to avoid that problem. Talk to the client, even if they don't go for it, because it's a little bit more time and more money that they might have to spend upfront. At least they know you're thinking about that plan. So when they do have a little bit more time and money to spend, you can implement that. And they'll be grateful for it.

David:

While at the same time, my challenge would be if the reason X problem is happening is because you as a company dropped the ball, you might need to eat that you might need to do those fixes that you were just talking about in your head. On your own dime. Not they're done. Yeah, in order to save the client. Now, that's a judgment call every single time, right. Like I said before, we're talking about levels, we're talking about accessibility, all these things. There are levels to this. If this is a small client, and this is a small project, do you need to build this really robust solution? No, no, you don't. You fix the problem as it is now. And it should be good enough. If this is a multi year client that you need to it's worth the investment, that maybe you need to think about thinking about taking the long view, that's but we find ourselves in that boat

Unknown:

off. But the point of focusing on the solution rather than just fixing a problem and correct on

David:

not fixing the original the solution is keeping that client happy. Here are five things that was going to make that client happy for the next 10 years. That's money well spent. That's the solution. Okay, this one is way more than we can talk about in the next few minutes. This is a very deep mine. But the next one is effective leaders run productive meetings. That is a whole I'm an expert to take that and run with it and turn it into a online course.

Unknown:

Yeah, there are companies that actually just sell how to have effective meetings. Like,

David:

I would recommend anyone who's interested in this stuff, read this, this article, because of this alone, it they described five different types of four or five different types of meetings, and how to keep them laser focused. That's the key is laser focus. And as soon as you start veering off, you as the executive need to end it. That's the best. We have a client and I am in awe of him every time he's leading a meeting, because he comes in, does it literally bullet pointed out, this is what we're talking about today. This is what we're doing. Okay. And anytime we veer off course he is right there. steering us back on track, being respectful. He's like, I want to be respectful of everyone's done. As soon as that meeting goes awry, like in won't come back on the rails. He's out. He's out, I got better things to do. Now, he's not rude about it ever. But that's like there's There's horror stories of CEOs and stuff, who be like, the moment the meeting goes off, they literally just walk out the door. That's a little harsh. But but the idea is there. You're the executive, your time is precious. Every single person's time in that room is precious. It's not just you because you're the super, super person. Every single person in there costs money and time. So don't waste it. That's, we could dive into that. And I'm all for it. Because I'm not great at it. I will absolutely. I love a good tangent man. I love a good story. I mean, look at our podcast, right?

Unknown:

Yeah. And a lot of times a meeting can turn into kind of a social event as well. Yeah,

David:

but they shouldn't have a social event. And then have a meeting two different things. Okay, moving on. They thought we rather than I know, that sounds kind of feel feel good. But the concept there is it's not about you. Again, ego. It's about the company. It's about the value every single person. This comes back to like a servant leadership kind of concept. To me, at least, you the moment you think because you're the CEO that you're better or more important than the people who work underneath you. You have failed in my mind. That's just not how it works.

Unknown:

Yeah, no, that's, that's important to say.

David:

Okay, so I will, those are the eight qualities. And again, read this Harvard Business Review, top 10 articles of, of leadership. Here's some other notes that I took out of these eight, the first to give knowledge, the next four convert knowledge into action. And the last to ensure the whole organization were felt respond feels responsible and accountable. I love that. Okay. Effective executives focus on a single task. Some can do to, no one can do three or more. Now, if that doesn't hit you right in the face? I don't know what will.

Unknown:

Yeah, that is a strong, strong piece of advice for delegating things down or delegating delegating things to people who are probably better off doing it than you.

David:

As a small business owner, I will tell you, that is the hardest thing to do. It seems like an amazing task. Yep. This has been your baby, you grew this thing from its little egg. And and now it's got somewhere and you've got employees. And now you have to let go and let them do their job because you hired them to do a job. And if you're up in your business all the time, because you're taking every task on yourself, your business will flounder, I can tell you that from experience. And it's

Unknown:

not always an ego thing. It's not any more or less like you have to be effective with time management and task management. And a lot of times you just feel like if you're not the one responsible for it, something's gonna get missed. And it's not an ego thing. It's more of a fear thing.

David:

A lot of times it has to do if you're the leader, you're a special person. And I don't mean that in some cheesy superiority way. You have skills that most people don't leaders are rare. They just are if you are truly a leader, and you've started a business and you took that those steps and you did all those things, man, you are a special breed. And you are most likely very good at whatever it is you do. And it's very hard to let someone else do it. Because you might do it better. Even if you do it better. You are hurting your company. And I am speaking straight to myself here because I absolutely get all up in my project managers business all the time. And I apologize for it and I back off at least once a week because I just I just need it done. Right and I need it done right now. And you're busy doing something else that needs to be done but right now I'm going to get in your that is that is my right my thing and it's not because they've done anything wrong, it's just letting go. The more you can let go, the better off you will be. I'm telling you, it sounds so counterintuitive. Here's a quote that I absolutely love. Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds

Unknown:

into what deeds thinks and deeds. Okay.

David:

I love that. I think that's so knowledge for the sake of knowledge has no business in business. Oh, hey, that's pretty good.

Unknown:

That's weird. Yeah, I

David:

just made that up. Maybe it's horrible. I don't know. But it's already seen

Unknown:

the meme of you sitting next to the whiteboard like Michael Scott. With a quote.

David:

best compliment ever is that I can be compared to Michael Scott, the most ineffective manager ever.

Unknown:

Okay, no, but one of the most popular memes ever.

David:

That's true, man. Tell you what Steve Carell is rich, just because it means. Let's see here. Wrapping up here, I know, I don't want to take a lot of time here. A decision has not been made until people know the name of the person accountable for carrying it out the deadline, sign off on all the stakeholders. And who and everyone knows who needs to be informed of the decision. If that's super powerful when you dig down into it, because decisions, a lot of times that executive just says this is going to be done and walked out the door.

Unknown:

Okay, so yeah, to wrap that up, again, to kind of recap, a decision cannot be made until all those other parts correct, complete. Okay, that makes sense. That's

David:

not a decision until everyone who knows what they need to do knows they need to do it. They know when it will need to be done that's

Unknown:

accountable, who to track knows when we have to get done. And

David:

that decision should have a name on it. That's a big one, too. And I've heard that from a million places, not just as a decision needs a name on it. Because if it doesn't have a name on it, it's like you send an email to five people, and you never call one out every single person

Unknown:

until you hear back. Yeah.

David:

There's five other people that say, well, someone's going to pick it up, right? And unless I say, Joe, I need you to do this. Oh, now it's on my plate, because it's got my name on it. That's a big one. All right, last one. Executives look at change as an opportunity and not a threat.

Unknown:

That goes back to the letting go, being willing to let go to grow.

David:

What the good things your your industry is changing. That doesn't mean your blockbuster right. Blockbuster could should have absolutely with the writing was on the wall and bright highlighted letters that digital is coming that blockbuster should have absolutely seen. And everyone said this, this is not a hot Take

Unknown:

this. Take that up a scale, printed newspapers,

David:

printed newspapers, they have so many of them have died because they didn't see the write on the wall. And then you have newspapers who are like I see the digital world, I'm going to embrace it, and they've done well relatively. And you look at those things. And they're not they don't have to be threats. They don't have to be scary. They could say, gosh, we could really do something great here.

Unknown:

How could we take this opportunity? Yeah, to help and benefit our business? Now? How do we improve? You know, how do we steer through this, you know, weird little period that we're going to try to avoid?

David:

And the last thing I'll say is effectiveness is a discipline. disciplines are things you practice. Effectiveness is as well, I think that's very cool. All right, I'm internalizing a lot of this, that's what's hard. It's a lot of it was when they hit you personally,

Unknown:

like, well, that's the only way to kind of take this kind of stuff. You can't I mean, other than just, you know, reading these eight tips to anybody else, without any of them affecting you personally, are you telling about telling us how they're affecting you personally. And like we said, before sharing your journey as you go through and try to become a better leader. That's what matters. It's not just giving someone else the eight tips, but telling them how they affect you.

David:

What's interesting, if it doesn't affect you, either you're already good at it. Or you don't believe it? Which is it? Right? If you just gloss over it? And it's like, oh, that does I don't do that. Okay, either. You don't believe that? That's a really good tip.

Unknown:

Yeah. Well, I already do that. Because I'm awesome. I'm

David:

awesome. And there are some things you are awesome at. That's why you're a leader. Right. That's, that's the thing. I don't want to dilute the fact that you are a rare breed. You are a startup founder, who are a business owner, you are an executive. There aren't a lot of people out there think of Apple. Apple has like 200,000 employees, and they have maybe 1000 executives of any middle management up. Maybe I'm making these numbers up, of course, but the vast majority of every company is worker bees. They're great. They're important. Are they they're necessary, and they should be valued and respected and all of that. But you are as a leader, you are a rare breed. And that doesn't mean you finished, right? It just means you've got different responsibilities, and you need to take those seriously. That's what I am trying to do. Because I didn't start this. That's what I keep saying this over and over again, I didn't start this business because I wanted to be a leader. I started this business out of pure hubris because I thought I was better than everybody else. And then when you keep moving forward down that track, and you do pretty well for yourself, you start leading people, and that's a totally different skill set. I mean, 100% different skill set, of which I was not prepared. So you got to you got to train those. You gotta you gotta, you gotta spend the time Have you seen the the Obi Wan, dark trailer, it's coming out in like a week or so I guess by the time this comes out, it might be just releasing.

Unknown:

Yes, I have seen the trailer, I've probably seen it about 35 times.

David:

Are you? Are you a big Star Wars? Not in general.

Unknown:

Here's the thing. I loved Star Wars when I was a kid. Sure. And then the second coming of it, you know, with the prequels or whatever. I was into him, not as into him, but I was into him. And then as things started getting put out on Disney plus when they started making, you know, or when they I should say, this would be like the third section of Star Wars for me with like, Rogue One and the awakening. And you know, I'm getting more and more into it, because I'm seeing how awesome it is for my kids to get into it. I'm not a huge Star Wars nerd at all. You know, I didn't. And I don't mean that in a bad way. But I didn't watch all the animated versions. I didn't play all the games and watch the Christmas side stories. That's just an ongoing joke. I saw that when I was a kid. But yeah, that's how old I am. But this new version, just because I've been so impressed with the Disney plus kind of a series that they've been doing except for mando Mandalorian was great. The Bobo one I had some issues with

David:

it was middling. Yes. Not bad, but not great.

Unknown:

Yeah. But this is kind of going back to what sparked that Star Wars like awesomeness for me. And just the fact that they're able to blend. I guess their prequel newness with Ewan McGregor playing Obi Wan as the young man. And then now he's in like, almost the perfect age to be in this series between young Obi Wan and old Obi Wan and like Luke as a kid like it's just that one little timeline that I'm super excited about. And he just said they

David:

haven't really right order. Yeah, it's kind of a new a new thing

Unknown:

is it's kind of like the birth of Darth Vader is kind of curious how big

David:

that will be. I know they're bringing back. What's his face? I'm missing. Christiansen. J James Donald Trump. No, no, no. Hayden Christiansen the last in the prequels Darth? Anakin. He's coming back as Darth Vader, which is the first time he's ever been Darth Vader except for like, a brief moment where he goes no. And he's really stupid looking. Anyway. I'm intrigued by that. I did I agree with you boba was met Mandalorian was amazing. And I think that they've got something really, really good here. I'm very excited about it.

Unknown:

I just the production quality of this content and stuff is just impressive, too. I just superb. I'm looking for I love these little chunks of like, here's six to eight episodes of something. When it's done, you're like, Man, I wish there was more. But then now just waiting for the next one. And you get so amped up for it. Like, sidenote, not Star Wars, but like the next season of Stranger Things amped on that

David:

too. i To me, I think it's really, when you have a 22 episode season old school TV style, you have a lot of fluff. Yeah. And the big arcs are the holiday, you

Unknown:

know, those are the this is not part of the main storyline, but it's going to be an in between.

David:

And those are interesting and neat. But I love the fact that now that we're not stuck to advertisers, and we're not stuck to, you know, having to fill a slot

Unknown:

for half a year ratings, ratings, ratings ratings, they

David:

can go and say we have a real tight story to tell. And that's all we're telling. And if that's five episodes, great if that's 10 episodes, great. Game of Thrones did that for the most part. And I think that's I think that's just a whole new era of television that I'm excited about. So I am I'm stoked about Obi Wan Oh, you McGregor is great, too. So that yeah, he's and it's the same thing is it really comes down to you now you're getting these aren't the sounds bad? These aren't TV actors. And I mean that with all the love in my heart, but there is a difference between in my mind, a TV actor and a movie actor. They have quality Be like, I don't think Moon Knight jumping ship here a second would have been it would have been super cheesy and hokey if Oscar Isaacs isn't as good as he is true. He is a great actor and he sold this really weird dude with a bad English accent. And you

Unknown:

don't eat boil anything but yeah, the hidden, like the complexity of his character was portrayed. Amazingly, by him.

David:

It's not it's not as though it's a secret that he has a split personality. That's like in the next first five minutes, but it's if it was not anyone else. There's lots of great actors out there. But if you would have pulled out like I was just watching the show. What is it? We'll have time on Amazon? The main lady Rosamund Pike, she was great. But almost every supporting actor in there looked like they just got out acting school, they were just not very good. Yeah,

Unknown:

no matter how good the story is, if it cannot be supported by decent actors carrying that vision is it's obvious to

David:

demonstrate is the difference between Wheel of Time series and it was entertaining. Don't get me wrong. It was fine. But the difference between that and Game of Thrones, when every single person is on the screen is just chewing up that scenery. And they're just given everything they've gotten you believe everything weird thing coming out of their mouth. Totally different thing. It's just night and day, man, night and day. All right, we will end it on that. Thank you guys so much for joining us. We are going to you're going to start seeing more of us and more places. We're going to be pushing out the show. We're already on YouTube. We're trying to get more episodes out. What we're going to start seeing being on more social media in the next few weeks months. So you know, tell your friends we should be on Instagram and even Tik Tok, which is a whole thing.

Unknown:

We might even be in video.

David:

We might even be in video you might see our fabulous faces. And so keep an eye out for that and we'll be in. We'll see you then. Alright, thank you guys much. See you