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The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are
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solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not
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Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are
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condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helenan believes that certainly applies
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to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W
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four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and
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now your host, Kevin Helena.
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Thanks everybody for joining again today. I am Kevin Hallanan
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and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on
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W four cy dot com. We're streaming live on Talk
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four tv dot com. In addition, we're on Facebook, and
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that's live on Facebook at Winning Business Radio. And after
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the live show, you're going to see us on all
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those platforms where you get your favorite podcasts. YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple,
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et cetera, et cetera. The mission of Winning Business radio
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and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to
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offer insights and advice, to help people avoid the mistakes
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of others, to learn best practices, the how tos, the
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what to's, the what not tos, and to be challenged,
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and I believe, hopefully to be inspired by the successes
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of others. Those are consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and
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owners and entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But interestingly, every virtual
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excuse me, virtually every successful person I've ever talked to
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has had some form of failure in their lives and careers.
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So while we all have to get our knee skin
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once in a while, I say it every week. I'm
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driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's
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endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it.
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I've spent the better part of my career equipping businesses
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to grow from solopreneurs to small and medium sized companies
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all the way up to the fortune fifty. I've seen
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some of those companies win into varying degrees. I've seen
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some fail I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with
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some of the highest performing people around and with some
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who probably should have found other professions. In my own businesses,
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I've had lots of success, but some failures too, and
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I like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences.
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So yeah, you'll hear from me my opinions and insights,
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but more importantly, you're going to hear from experts, coaches, advisors, etc.
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And today is no exception. Timothy Sword's executive coach, certified
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mindfulness teacher, and principle of Mindful Leadership Executive Coaching.
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Here's his bio.
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Timothy recently transitioned his consultant practice to a new mindfulness
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meditation practice. As of twenty twenty four, Timothy is an
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executive coach and certified mindfulness teacher as principal of Hello
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Mindful Leadership Executive Coaching. He utilizes his decades of experience
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as a financial services executive CFO and management consultant with
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rigorous mindfulness training, including more than two thousand hours of
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meditation practice and study under world renowned teachers including Jack Cornfield,
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Sharon Salzburg, Joe cabot Zen, and Trudy Goodman. The end
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result is a bespoke, values driven approach that enables executives,
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business owners, and senior leaders to cultivate a self awareness,
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emotional resilience, and authenticity to lead with clarity and purpose.
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Working in person and virtually, Timothy has worked with clients
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in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as with
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executives in Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York, and Phoenix. Drawing
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on his experience as a senior executive with Fidelity Investments, PwC, AN, MUFG,
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Union Bank, and consultants to clients including Merck Lam Research
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in Cisco, he combines traditional corporate executive coaching methodologies with
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scientifically proven mindfulness practice. This highly effective approach helps clients
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navigate the complexities of leadership with greater clarity, confidence, and purpose.
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Beyond teaching mindfulness meditations and techniques, Timothy touts the science
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behind mindfulness and mindfulness practice and helping practitioners make lasting
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change both behaviorally in this and in the both behaviorally
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excuse me, and in the psychology of one's brain. That
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science is backed up and we'll hear about it by
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researchers at Harvard Medical School, Mass General Hospital, and numerous
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other institutions. Timothy holds a BS in Accounting from Boston College,
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a Harvard MBA, and a graduate certificate in Executive Coaching
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from William James University. Timothy, Welcome to Winning Business Radio.
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Thank you, Kevin. Great to be here.
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Yeah, it's good to have you. I appreciate it. I
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know that you're busy and appreciate you taking some time up.
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So a little bit of background. Where'd you grow up?
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I grew up on Long Island, about forty five minute
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Shane Rye from Manhattan, Okay.
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And what was it like to grow up there? Was
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it rural? Was it city?
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Was it suburb I'm definitely a suburban boy. It was
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definitely suburbia. It was fantastic growing up there. It was
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about a fifteen minute drive from the Atlantic Ocean. So
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swimming and surfing, which is kind of where my little
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logo is derived from. You can't stop the waves, but
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it can be enjoyed to surf them. And you know,
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if you know how to surf the emotions of your
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own mind. That's right. We'll get into that a little
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bit now. Growing up there was great. It was a
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very well resourced public school system. I went to so
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you know, I ran track, I played soccer. I played
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the French horn. You got all the uniforms.
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Nice, nice.
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I played trumpet and played. I played one year of football,
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but I played the trumpet. That was second grade. I
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think I still play all right. From there, though, you
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made your way to Boston to attend Boston College. What
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was behind that decision?
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Well, I had wanted to study accounting, study business. I
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had studied a little bit of it before going there.
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And I was the first one, at least on my
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father's side of family, which is the side of family
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and do the best. No one had been in business
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for generations. They were ministers and missionaries, maures and so forth.
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And when I started sing accounting, it was like this
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window into the business world. I had started working when
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I was twelve to start saving money for college, and wow,
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so I started running my own little business as a kid.
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But what was the business.
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Well, I had a paper route, I had a I
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worked at a beach club doing things like that. But
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I also wanted a liberal arts education. So that's how
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I got to Boston College.
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And the timing is probably doesn't worry as much, But
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when did you get your MBM.
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Why did you decide to go do that? Yeah?
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Gotcha. Yeah. So I I was at I graduate BC,
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I went into a national CPA firm. I was auditing
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banks mostly, and it just wasn't you know, that interesting
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to me?
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Yeah.
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So I was think going back to school for psychology actually,
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and some friends of mine heard about this and they said, well,
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you know, while you're playing a graduate school, maybe you
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could do our accounting and bookkeeping and so forth. And
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I was like, I like a degree of bust college
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and accounting. I don't about book keeping. But I talked
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to some of their mentors, their CPA and another guy
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who was the president of a pretty well established consulting firm,
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and the oh, you could really learn something. You know,
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business is kind of is doing well. So I went
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to work for this little startup and that was making
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transparent rainbows. That was their biggest job. And one thing
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led to the next. We grew really fast. We were
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actually became an ink fast. This growing up your company
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and I kind of grew into being the CEO and
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CFO in my twenties and we got to a certain
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point of growing this business. We had no idea what
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we were doing well. Organizationally, you know, product wise, we
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were great. Sales we were great, and so we hired
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a consultant and this guy helped us make so much
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change in a few months that I was really inspired
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by that, and that's what I want to do. So
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that's so I went to business school.
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I had a little similar experience in that I'd seen
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consultants at work and I'm thinking, well, these guys get
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paid pretty well. I know they work hard, they're really smart,
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but they you know, they're well respected, and very early on,
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you know, I thought I didn't think it would ever happen,
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but I thought, geez, I'd like to do that, and it,
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you know, eventually did.
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But I get you.
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I get you totally all right from the NBA experience.
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So I always like to ask, and I'll ask this
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a few times, what was your most important lesson learned
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from your MBA education?
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Well, it was an interesting education. So I've been in
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this tiny little business. Yeah, and uh, suddenly I was
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with you know, really like very high high performers and
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investment banking, which honestly, I didn't even know what that was.
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That's when you invest in a bank, right right.
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Exactly, And so you know that was a bit of
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a humbling experience, you know, being with high performers, a
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lot from IVY League, which wasn't really my background, you know,
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and uh so it was a great uh learning about
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like how big corporations work, honestly because hard bhiscal it's
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a big class, a class. Oh, it's just being there.
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It's like being a large.
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Corporation with a lot of other high performers. As you said,
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all right, so just a little bit of a walk
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through career just because I've got a couple of questions.
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PwC large consultancy. You sold and led delivery of organizational development,
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it says, talk a bit about what you took away
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from that experience. Again, PwC is like one of the
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you know, arguably top three call it what you want
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in consultancy, but really smart, really smart people, good performers.
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What would you say about that experience?
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Yeah, so I did a number of things there. I
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started in the strategy strategic planning group and the business
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process re engineering, so you know, helping companies become more efficient.
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Then of course you need to you know, it's part
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of implementing those things. You need to be able to
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understand organizational design and development, and I actually learned how
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to write it there.
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Oh interesting, interesting, Yeah.
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We actually hired a woman, Barbara Minto. I still remember.
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She was the first female professional employee at Mackenzy Wow.
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And she actually developed their writing and how to present,
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how to write for presentations. And it was a great,
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great learning actually, And because what we would do is
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strategy consults in particular, we'd go out for like three
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months and just do all this research. We would have
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so much data and then we would have to distill
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it down for presentation for the executives of the client.
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It's honestly, at first I didn't even know where to start.
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And imagine she taught this method of like what are
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your top seven messages? Right, and then I kind of
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learned to like trust my gut, like just write out
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like what you thought the executives needed to hear in
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seven bullets. And it actually cut through so much of
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like going through all the materials and thinking where do
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we start of them? So I just start at the
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simplest high level because you could always fill in the details, right,
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and we had tons of details. We had tons of data,
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tons of anecdotes, you know, tons of charts, but so
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it really helped me sort of trust my gut about, oh,
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I know what the story is. I've been immersing the
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data for three months. I don't need to try to
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share it all at once. There's a lot of sequence,
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and it was a great way to work with the
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team too, because you know, we'd all have different somewhere,
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different perspectives, and so we could get in a room
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and sort of debate what that storyline was. Then once
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that was agreed upon, then we could kind of delegate. Okay,
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you do you know the first part of the deck
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you did the ability of the underwork.
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Were those presentations led by an executive? Were they led
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by the team.
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So in the consulting world, it's kind of an interesting arrangement.
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It's it's a fairly merit it's mostly a meritocracy, so
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that pretty much while you're putting these materials together, any voice,
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no matter what level, is welcome to be heard. But
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then when you go to the client, you know, typically
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the senior partner leads off intro and then who's ever
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running the project they lead the presentation. Usually that's how
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it goes because you know the data, the partner knows
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the highlights.
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Right, let's see, do you want to touch on CSC
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index or palladium. I do want to get to fidelity,
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But do you want to touch on either of those
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maybe some key lessons?
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Yeah, sure. So while I was still it was actually
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the Cooper's side of PwC. Prior to Man, I had
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started in strategy, as I said Kevin, and you know,