Millenials and Consulting Storytellers: Lessons from Influential Thinkers

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Foreign.

Speaker B: 00:00:15

Welcome back, Luminaries. We're so glad you're with us and glad you're enjoying our journey through the generations. And welcome back, Bruce.

Speaker A: 00:00:24

Oh, yes, mustn't forget Bruce.

Now, Mike, in our main episode, we've just been talking to our colleague Mafe Escobar as our representative of the Millennial generation, and she was talking to us about the ideas that had inspired and motivated her in her career in consulting.

So in this Luminaries episode, we're going to dig into the books and speakers that we talked about with Moffat and see what we can learn from them and what are our takeaways, even if we happen not to. To be 100% millennial.

Speaker B: 00:00:55

Right, right, exactly.

We're not going to go deeply again into Covey's Seven Habits, which, as you'll recall from that episode, she mentioned and was influential in her early career. So, yes, it endures. But we might talk about Covey as an example of how influencers and authors have evolved.

However, we will talk about Ian, some specific books that she did mention.

Speaker A: 00:01:20

We're going to start out by looking at Simon Sinek and his work, and in particular his great book. Start with why.

Speaker B: 00:01:27

We're going to talk about Brene Brown and her TED Talk, the Power of Vulnerability. There's certainly a lot of books out there, but maybe a little indication about something else that's different about this generation.

That TED Talk is the thing that was referenced.

Speaker A: 00:01:44

Indeed. And then we're going to talk about a book, last of all, Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.

And Mike, it's going to be really fun to dig into these three authors and the different way that they generated their insights and brought them to everybody's attention in the world. So there was going to be some important generational changes to notice, and I'm really looking forward to it. Let's get into it.

Speaker B: 00:02:13

So we're going to start with why. And that just seems to. To introduce itself nicely by Simon Sinek.

And I remember this as a great example in my life of the difference of what's influencing different generations of consultants. I was teaching a group of consultants somewhere in the world. I'm pretty sure it was not in the United States at the time.

And somebody who'd been through a couple of my trainings came up and said, mike, boy, have you read or. I think actually they said, have you listened to Simon Sinek? And I said, actually, I haven't. Tell me more.

And they were saying, well, I think you'll resonate, because a lot of the kinds of things you've been telling us sort of philosophically, I think you're going to find that he is on a lot of that same stuff. And I thought to myself, Ian, I have to admit my brain is kind of full.

I've got all this stuff that I take with me, and it served me well and everything.

And I wasn't at the time, I was so busy working and doing work, I wasn't sharpening the saw with new stuff, I was sharpening the saw with other stuff. And that was one that really caught my attention.

And it was also, as we'll talk about, very different, I think, than some of the other stuff that we've even talked about in our first two generational things. So Simon Sinek start with why. If you go back to his original, his was also a TED Talk originally, and I think he was in Houston or somewhere.

And one of the things I love is there are no slides. There's a post it chart. And he draws with a marker, draws three circles. And basically that is the essence of his entire talk.

And he adds some stuff to that.

He tells great stories around it, but he makes a very powerful point, not only in terms of the logic, but of the story that he tells and the telling of it and the way I reacted to it kind of made his point for him. So let's get into it here. Not a lot to talk about. We don't have a list of 27 things. We don't have 13 ways to do this.

We haven't looked at 345 companies and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. What we have is Simon Sinek saying, here's something new. It's absolutely factual and it might be the simplest idea in the world.

And he draws these three circles in the middle why, around that how, and on the outside, circle what?

And he's arguing that the reason that businesses succeed, the reason that ideas and great concepts and changes come about, are that people that do them start in the middle, start inside out with why, rather than what we all do. We all tend to be kind of tangible, logical reasoning language. You know, start with what, get to how, and a lot of times don't even talk about why.

And he gives great examples. He gives great examples of Apple, of TiVo, one that didn't start with Y and that had fabulous.

And then the Wright brothers and people like that, that he does a great job of setting this up so that it sounds empirical, but it also resonates. And he talks a little bit about our brain structure.

Speaker A: 00:05:53

Mike this was really interesting to me because quite a lot of the fundamentals begin with motivation and begin with a rationale, inherits itself from some thinking from a long, long time ago. But this idea that it's connected to biology was really interesting.

And it's a good example of the kind of proof point that makes the millennial generation pop up, makes me as well pop up, pay attention. So what was the story with the biology there?

Speaker B: 00:06:18

Well, basically, that our neocortex, the outside of the brain, the latest developing part of the brain, that's a lot about what and how.

Speaker A: 00:06:29

Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:06:30

And the core part of our brain, the part that's attached to emotions, the limbic, that's also the essence of decision making, is attached to why that middle part.

And I remember thinking in sales, we had often talked about, and still talk about the difference between logics and psychologics, that there is the all the good reasons and everything, but essentially you also have to include the psychologics of the people and the simple story. And I remember this simple story when I was learning sales, and I've told this simple story forever, that logic opens the mind.

And then I would always turn to the group I was working with and say, but what is emotion open? And emotion opens what opens. Opens the mind, opens the. And I would pull out my wallet and say, emotion opens the wallet.

And you won't make a sale unless you have both, but you have to have that. And I would always say if they've.

They studied people with brain injuries that can no longer kind of feel emotion and they cannot make decisions, even the simplest of decisions. So this one hit me, too.

And as you say, the whole idea that how much of what we're learning and doing now, even in our teaching and training and interacting with clients and change stuff, is inspired by what we've learned from neuroscience and the fact that this has some great science, has some great storytelling, which we'll talk about, too. The point that Cybertex is making here is saying people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

And he used some examples about a lot of, if you will, computer companies that tried to make phones or make, you know, music listening devices or make some of the things that Apple's been wildly successful with, and nobody had any interest in buying them from other companies. We don't even remember that they sold them Dell or Gateway or some of these.

Speaker A: 00:08:40

But.

Speaker B: 00:08:40

But that with Apple, who was really just a computer company, all of this stuff came. And it came because of their why. And it took me Back to I was at IBM once upon a time, as we talked about before.

And I remember, I think it was a Super bowl commercial of Apple.

And it has basically this iconic scene of somebody kind of running in and disrupting the status quo, meaning big blue in computing and everything else.

But it wasn't really about their products at all or what the benefits or all the kinds of stuff you'll go, you're going to spend this much money on a Super bowl commercial, what would you do? And it was the why, how we disrupt the status quo. So this why this limbic brain and then this idea that great leaders.

And he's talking about Martin Luther King is one of the examples. Inspire action by communicating purpose. Their why first. And he does so all of this I think really not.

It's not 280 pages worth of stuff, it's not 300 companies worth of data and all that stuff. But it has a lot that I think really has impacted Gen Y consultants, as Maffei told us, and a lot that we could take away today.

Speaker A: 00:10:07

Yeah, there's takeaways for us there, like you say, Mike, about framing and understanding problems, also about helping clients to drive change. Again, the fundamentals not very different from something that I guess somebody like John Cotter would have written 20 years before.

But it's very memorable and it's very direct and it's got that connection to the personal which I think is important, by the way, not only because consultants these days are millennials, but because our clients these days millennials and they want to hear the stories told in that kind of frame.

It's also an interesting thing if you're involved in recruiting or leading or coaching consultants, helping them understand their own why and their own motivation, I think is super rewarding. And it's something that's transformed over the generations as well. Now, Mike, you were talking about your first experience of Simon Sinek.

I think my first experience was actually somebody sharing with me a video of him talking about the differences in the generations and millennials and Gen Z.

So from, from my perspective, part of the reason that I'm talking about this with animation today is because of some videos that I saw from Simon Sinek, all of which were attention getting, not all of which I 100% agreed with, but I thought he was a really great thinker.

I think in the book as well, like you say, he does a really, really nice job, better actually than I had given him credit for at weaving together his insights. In terms of his intellectual training. He is a cultural anthropologist, not a Business school professor, he's an anthropologist.

He does a good job of weaving those kind of insights into something that gives plenty of how to for leaders for sure. And also like we said for consultants, it's not just a self help handbook. I think it goes deeper than that.

Now, Mike, it's going to be really interesting to tease out the differences between where Sinek got his insights and his fundamentals from and how he wraps the message up compared with somebody from one of those earlier generations like Jim Collins from Built to Last. But maybe we should get into that later. Meanwhile, I think it's time to turn to our second author on our second work.

Mike, we're going to talk about a very, very well known far outside consulting circles presenter and TED talker and author, but also by the way, very credible researcher. That's Brene Brown. Tell me about the first time you ever encountered Brene Brown.

Speaker B: 00:12:38

many people and In Houston in: 2010

And as you say, this is not somebody that you would see on at that time on anybody's business conference, even cynic. I remember one of his points was the power of why in hiring.

He would talk about if you want to hire people, don't just look at their resumes and their skills and whether you think they can do the job. Look at how they resonate to your why. Because if they come to work for you for the pay and the job, they just give you that.

If they come because their why and your why resonate, they give you blood, sweat and tears. So it was people, this people, people connection. Well, Binae Brown is all about people.

She's a social worker and a social worker researcher and her research. I mean she is absolutely an academic. She is absolutely a researcher.

Speaker A: 00:13:43

Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:13:44

But researching in those very soft spaces of people and people's interactions.

For any of you who have had a lot of interactions with social workers, you know that those are not necessarily interactions where everybody's doing great. Yeah, it's pretty tough stuff. We did a lot of work with social workers in adopting our last two kids.

I've done work with social workers in my own therapy and marital therapy. These are sometimes the broken places of our lives and great sources of help. So, you know, not bad.

This power of vulnerability I wasn't really sure about. You know, vulnerability is a big word. What does that mean?

And I can't remember how I stumbled upon I think this TED Talk, but I really was blown away by it.

Speaker A: 00:14:37

Yeah.

Speaker B: 00:14:37

The thing that I Think I loved most when I first saw it was that she completely models what she's talking about in being very open about the process by which she got there. Talking about how she is very much a bottled up. I think she started with a quote about.

And I remember debating this in university and in my grad studies work, if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. And so as somebody who's always been on some of the softer things too, going, how do we measure this? How do we do this?

Because I think it's really important. And. But she was. And as a social worker, her idea was not just kind of that warm and fuzzy thing.

It was, I want to study this to understand it, to like knock it on its head and get it out of the way. I want to have certainty, I want to have control. And so this study came out of a study about human connection, because connection, vitally important.

Even some of the longest longitudinal research that we're looking back on now, the power of connection, so important. But she was well ahead of some of that and her findings.

When she talked about connection and she talked about worthiness as having it, when she would ask about these, what she would get is a lot of stories about the lack of connection, the lack of worthiness. And that what was underlying that was shame and fear, this unworthiness because you feel unworthy, you don't develop a sense of.

Or a feeling of belonging that she did find some people with a strong sense of love and belonging. And the big differentiator between these groups of people is that the people who had that believed they were worthy of. Of love and belonging.

They had the courage to be imperfect. And they valued connection not just for connection.

They valued the connection that emerged from authenticity rather than from trying to be someone they weren't. And the thing I think was rolling through my head was that great advice. It says, fake it till you make it. Yeah, you keep going.

I thought, man, how long as a boomer, how long, you know, have I heard that stuff?

Speaker A: 00:16:57

So not very many episodes. We were talking about authors in whose books the words love and connectedness would never, ever have appeared in a million years.

s. By the way, like, this was: 2000

Speaker B: 00:17:23

Yeah,: 2010

Speaker A: 00:17:24

onsulting. Especially now, in: 2025

Speaker B: 00:17:33

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, it's interesting because these people embrace vulnerability.

They don't describe it as comfortable or excruciating, even though you can hear about it both ways. They think of it as being necessary.

And so these are the kind of people who are willing to say, I love you first, to invest in relationships that might not work out, or to try something where there are no guarantees here and doing this.

One of the things that really attracted me to this was her talking about how this led to a breakdown, kind of an emotional and mental and if you spiritual breakdown in her life that she was trying to measure and control and realizing that a lot of this was about letting that go.

And it opened her, perhaps in some ways, for the first time in her own life, at a very precarious time in her life, to some of her own vulnerabilities. And so this is really tough stuff for people who want control and certainty. And, of course, I don't know many consultants who feel that way.

Maybe just all of us, right? Yes. So, you know what we said originally about this balance of ambiguity and certainty and stuff. It's saying this is a big issue for consultants.

I mean, how many times have we used imposter syndrome? So when people who are uncomfortable with this, the strategy is to numb it, push through, numb it.

But she discovered as part of the research, when you're numbing that, you're numbing yourself emotionally. So you're also numbing joy and gratitude and happiness.

And rather than numbing ourselves, he's saying we need to practice gratitude and joy, even in moments of fear, and believe that we are enough.

So I think this really has strong resonance for mafe, as we heard, and can have really strong resonance for consultants in general, not just ones of one generation.

Speaker A: 00:19:45

Yeah, absolutely.

Helping organizations and teams to feel psychologically safe, helping leaders to be authentic, helping people navigate through uncertainty with resilience. How many times have we talked about resilience in the last couple of years? If you think we've gone a long way from Peter Drucker, then yes, we have.

But we've gone deep into what's important for people, what makes them successful and connected with themselves and their teams and their clients. I think this is great.

I also love the fact that lots of people just know Brene Brown for the very compelling, very personable, really great storytelling presence that she has in her TED talks and all of the other videos that you can see. Of her online. But she is, like you said, Mike, a really well respected researcher in her field.

Her starting point was different from the folks like Stephen Covey and Tom Peters. Her starting point wasn't how do we make people and organizations more successful.

Her starting point was how do we avoid the harms, the emotional and psychological harms that are caused by the fear of disconnection, caused by this fear of shame. And I think you've got to be willing to go in and explore that. And when you do that, I think her work is really valuable.

Speaker B: 00:20:56

Yeah, I mean, this whole idea, whether we're kids or consultants, millennials, boomers, any of us, the idea that, no, we're not perfect and oh my God, this idea about the need to be perfect for me, I know, has driven so much of my career and even not being perfect, to have that resilience of knowing that we are imperfect but worthy, which doesn't mean we stay there. It actually allows us to grow and to connect and to do more things together. So, you know, really nicely done, Brene Brown.

Thank you, Mafe, for bringing that back to my attention. Absolutely. Allowing me to go back there.

And she takes this and later applies it to leadership, applies it to a number of things, and it is like cynic, available in all kinds of forms. There's a Netflix special, there's an HBO film, there are TED Talks, there are books there. And she has two different podcasts over time.

So, yeah, lots there.

Speaker A: 00:22:00

Excellent. Well, Mike, I think it might be time to move on from the idea of vulnerability to the idea of some kind of perfection. Ah, let's see.

So, Mike, next up is an author that's been talked about almost as much as Sinek, probably even more than Sinek and Brene Brown and their contemporaries. That's Malcolm Gladwell, and we're going to talk about his book, Outliers.

You're looking at the front cover of a book that says Outliers, and it promises stories of elite sports people and musicians and great thinkers. What are you thinking it might be about as you look at the COVID.

Speaker B: 00:22:42

It's exactly that, Ian. I think as I remember it, it was almost like a pyramid and kind of this dust around it. And it was the story of success. Success.

It's like, yeah, now that's what we read on airplanes when we're headed off to do consulting.

Speaker A: 00:22:58

So probably not a coincidence that I bet that Brene Brown has more female readers and listeners than male readers and listeners. And I bet that Malcolm Gladwell probably has more male readers and listeners than Female.

That's a really crude generalization, but two different point of views. And I think you look at the COVID and it kind of appeals to somebody who was like you say, motivated by success and wants to read it on an airplane.

How different is it though, once you start to dig into it?

One of the great things about Malcolm Gladwell, because he's a great storyteller, is he sets up and then subverts your expectation of what you're going to hear about. He kicks off by talking about the mythology of the self made man or woman, which was pretty pervasive for our generation.

The idea that you too can be as successful as me as long as you work hard and pull yourself up by your bootlaces.

Except as Gladwell says, it doesn't actually work that way because a lot of times the person who's saying look at me, you can be successful like me actually didn't just rely on on their bootlaces. He's very fond of fact based but counterintuitive points. He loves the kind of aha gesture.

And he's done a really good job of reading and understanding mostly very, very well the work of not only economists, but social scientists and psychologists.

And he's presenting the ideas here not because he led the research like Jim Collins did back in the day, but because he knows that he can put it into context for us. So he's going to talk to us about what actually drives success and that it's more than just your own hard work.

By the way, before we get into more of this book, Mike, one of my first occasions of encountering a Gladwell thing, somebody loaned me his book what the Dog Saw, which is a collection of essays.

The first chapter of the first essay was actually an essay originally published in the New Yorker about oral contraception and the hidden unintended consequences of widespread oral contraception in women. It's a really fascinating essay and he does a very good job of carefully reading and representing the science.

So Mike, as we kind of scotch the myth that you too can be a self made man, we do find out that sweat and application has something to do with it because he then raises this idea of the 10,000 hour rule and he says that people who are truly masters, and that's one of the definitions of being an outlier, is having true mastery of a skill that's in, in demand or is rare or hard to get. And he says people who are truly masters and are seen as masters have done it and practiced it with intention and application for 10,000 hours.

And he talks about how that connects to elite sports and all kinds of other occupations where you need really distinctive skills.

Now, for me, that resonates as someone who has played musical instruments all my life and actually as someone who really learned the proper value of repeated practice. Only as an adult. I really, really like this thing about the 10,000 hours.

Speaker B: 00:26:02

Well, that's actually the way I got introduced to outliers. It was my wife Eddie was studying. We had actually moved to Florida so she could study with one of the top five at the time called Horse Whispers.

And he believes it's more about horse listening now than whispering to the horses. But this horse whisperer, and he had all of his top proteges read this.

And part of it was for the 10,000 hour rule to say, yeah, we're going to get a lot of great ideas, but here's the thing, you've got to get 10,000 hours in the, in this interaction with horses to really become a master at this is not going to be the eight rules of Peters and Waterman. That'll get you there.

Speaker A: 00:26:45

Interestingly, you're right. He also likes to talk about what did not get you here or what you might be surprised to learn did not get you here.

So he talks about how you are the product of your culture and your upbringing, like your parents might have instilled what he calls practical intelligence, which he describes as being a bit of a privilege, right? Knowing how the world works and how to get along and what, what to say and when to say it.

And he says that this is not all imparted to everybody equally. Like, we all get different doses of this.

So the culture that we're raised in and the gifts that our parents gave us in terms of practical intelligence has a big bearing on this. It's not only about us pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.

Bill Gates, he raises the example of Bill Gates is an outlier, not only because he was smart and skillful, but also because his particular skills that he cultivated and the culture that he was raised in, the entrepreneurial culture of the west coast of the United States, put him in the right place at the right time in Silicon Valley in the 80s and early 90s to develop Microsoft and Windows.

This doesn't say anything to denigrate the achievements of somebody like Bill Gates, but it says he had some measure of fortune as well as the mastery thing. So here's Gladwell again, kind of setting up and playing with our expectations a little bit.

So besides being an entertaining series of linked stories and linked vignettes and counterintuitive little kind of Easter egg moments. He does give us still some interesting takeaways. For us as business people and as consultants, there are some clear pointers for leaders.

We should not misinterpret one person's early success, or lack of it, as being a sign of their innate worth.

Speaker B: 00:28:26

We should.

Speaker A: 00:28:26

We should be good as leaders and as consultants at combining people into new teams to put them into new contexts, to instill new cultures and expectations into them, to give them chances to practice and to grow.

Because you might be surprised, and I can think of cases in my career, Mike, when some somebody whose progress was only kind of meh level put into a new context and given some new set of expectations absolutely blew the doors off. So I think that's a good reason for us to look at ourselves and our colleagues with fresh eyes and not to take things for granted.

Speaker B: 00:28:59

I think it's funny because we, I know, were not practicing this from this source at the time. We were putting together our global team with IBM and trying to figure out what this thing E business was going to become and how to roll it out.

But it was certainly the way our team was brought together. And a lot of it was that ability to take people who never would have made the cut.

We were motivated by stories like where they took the best of the best in the firm to say, we've got to make a generational leap in technology or we're gone, we're out of business. And they created this best of the best team.

And another group went and did college recruiting and presented the problem they faced as if it were a test for employment. And that was the group that came up with the answers, which the other group helped to implement that actually move that company forward.

So we were taking a little bit of this sort of advice to say, yeah, don't just look at everybody's track record. Bring people together, put them in groups like that. And so I think, you know, for Gladwell, a little bit of that certainly resonates with me.

Speaker A: 00:30:13

Amen.

Speaker B: 00:30:20

Well, Ian, I think it's fascinating to see how we've moved along the generations to learning mainly from business practitioners to a much more diverse pool of thought.

Speaker A: 00:30:33

Yeah, it's funny, I went back through the authors that we've talked about so far and said, who were they? Where did they come from? Stephen Covey was a business school professor all his life. Peters and Waterman were consultants mostly with McKinsey.

Collins was a little bit of both. Both a B school professor and a consultant. Sanjay was an Engineer the boomers and the Generation X's.

Mike, your generation and mine were influenced by and read books and consumed the thoughts of people who were practitioners and academics, what you might call business oriented academic thinkers, the folks who wrote in Harvard Business Review and those kind of thoughts. And that wellspring of intellectualization of business, for want of another word, is still there.

Like Harvard Business Review still does great business. We all still consume those ideas, but there's an extra layer on top.

First of all, I think the millennials have been influenced by people with interestingly diverse affiliations. Brene Brown, a social scientist, not the kind of person that you would have expected to influence business thinking.

Another example that we haven't talked about, which is Dan Kahneman, who's a behavioral economist.

The whole explosion of macroeconomics and behavioral economics has influen lots of what's been written and read in business in the last 10 to 15 years.

And as we've already pointed out, they took us in the direction much more of thoughts about individual behavior than they do about the whole corporation.

And then in the last 10 years, maybe 15 years, we've added in to the practitioners and the specialists, we've added in the thoughts of people whose main skill is integrating ideas into a story. Gladwell is a journalist, front center. He's not an anthropologist or a business studies Prof. Or a social scientist.

Simon Sinek is certainly trained at undergrad level as an anthropologist, but he's been a marketeer and an inspirational speaker much of his life as well. So there's interesting lessons for us there in the power of being able to integrate ideas and tell them in a story.

I'd like to share a bit of the audio from the beginning of Brene Brown's famous TED Talk and just hear how she frames it for us.

Speaker C: 00:32:45

An event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event and she called and she said, I'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer. And I thought, what's the struggle?

And she said, I saw you speak and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call your researcher, no one will come because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant. And I was like, okay. And she said, but the thing I liked about your talk is you're a storyteller.

So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller. And of course, the academic insecure part of me was like, you're going to call me a what? And she said, I'm going to call you a storyteller.

And I was like, oh, why not Magic Pixie? I was like, I don't. Let me think about this for a second. And so I tried to call deep on my courage and I thought, you know, I am a storyteller.

I'm a qualitative researcher. I collect stories. That's what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul, and maybe I'm just, just a storyteller.

So I said, you know what, why don't you just say I'm a researcher, storyteller. And she went, there's no such thing. So I'm a researcher, a storyteller, and I'm going to talk to you. Today we're talking about expanding perception.

And so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent.

Speaker A: 00:34:11

So Mike, I love this. The idea that stories are just data with a soul. Right? That sounds like something you or I might have said at some point.

Speaker B: 00:34:18

Well, absolutely. No question. And no question that data presented that way is much more memorable and persuasive, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill.

Speaker A: 00:34:30

Yeah, I think we've always needed our writers to be good at linking up ideas. Stephen Covey did a great job at that. So it's not like they are fundamentally opposite from each other.

But what we've seen is this skill of wrapping up a story and wrapping something up into context has become much more prominent in the way that people make their work relevant. Maybe that's partly because of the times that we're in and the way information has been shared.

Maybe there are fewer big new ideas coming out of pure analytical, observational research into business.

Maybe there's now such ready access to everything that was written before thanks to the Internet, that it's actually feasible in a manageable timescale to synthesize all these ideas in the way that Gladwell did. And that probably explains to some extent the popularity of authors like Sinek and Gladwell and their books.

I know, Mike, are passed around consulting practices these days just as much and with just as much enthusiasm as you and I passed around books by Peter Sanjay and Jim Collins.

Speaker B: 00:35:28

For sure. For sure. So we've talked about how this has changed. We've talked about data with a soul.

And you and I spend a lot of our day to day lives working with consultants knowing how to do that sort of thing here. What do you think? What's a takeaway from all this for you. For me, I'll just say.

I remember when Carville, the advisor to Bill Clinton in running for election as president, said it's the economy, stupid. Get off of that. It's the economy and for me it's the people, stupid.

For me, from my first meetup with State Employees Credit Union and saying it's about people and then we'll teach you business, throughout my career it's been about the people. And I really hadn't thought until we watched this progression that the business literature that was driving us really hadn't come back to that.

And so when I was re watching started with why, it was like, oh my gosh. I started with why. Thank you Credit Union. I kind of want to go back and tell them now.

Speaker A: 00:36:43

And in a way, we've come back to the beginning of the reason why we started this podcast, Consulting for Humans. Because it's the humanity that really counts.

My takeaway from all of this, apart from the fact that it's been fun once again to dig into the ideas and flex them a little bit, I think you could take any one of these works, especially if you are of the generation or the culture that says Brene Brown. Not from me or Malcolm Gladwell. Isn't that just kind of magazine storytelling? No, it's not.

Take a look at or read or watch on YouTube any of these bits of content and see if there's a storytelling idea that you can borrow for your next client presentation. Because putting factual information in context is 100% what we have to do as consultants.

Being good at giving data a soul, as Brene Brown said, give data a soul by making it into a story is 100% our job. These are some of the top practitioners in the context of information and literature.

These are some of the top practitioners of the art that we're all trying to practice in the world of professional services. So dig into it, enjoy it. Love your vulnerability. Meanwhile, we're going to be back next time for one more dip into the generations.

We're going to be looking at the ideas that inspire and inform Gen Z. Next time on the Luminaries podcast.