Susan: I’m really glad you’re here. Joe, you use storytelling and particularly you have a very personal storytelling, to help, well I would assume to help others identify and shift problems within their businesses. Is that true?
Joe: Yeah I think that one of the things that I learned, living on the streets and going through transformation and working with a number of different companies is that it’s really those human road blocks that create disengagement in the workplace. When I work with an organization, whether I’m doing a keynote or I’m doing a training session, it’s really about possibility mindset. Possibility and seeing more in yourself, but also possibility in seeing more in your people and your brand and when you tap into that possibility and that’s just the idea that anything is possible, then you create a space for creating that shift whether it’s a culture shift in an organization or it’s a mind shift in the way a company does business. That’s what I like to do is I like to facilitate the initial ideas or the genesis of transformation if you will.
Susan: Why storytelling? What does it do that nothing else can?
Joe: I think that it connects left and right brain. I think that when you get into using a metaphor over in your right brain and then you slide over to your left brain and do some statistics, you’ve got a higher retention and you’ve got a greater chance of shifting the consciousness. What I have found is that a story like mine resonates people. It’s the story of perseverance, of determination, of overcoming great odds and it’s not my story that resonates. That’s actually a misnomer. Someone in their first few years as a speaker might see it that way, but really what it is is each of us individually identifying with the struggle. That connects us. That is one of the things that universally connects us. Every single one of us goes through adversity, challenges and change through our lives. We’re walking down the road of life and life life’s us and it’s in that moment that we ultimately determine that there’s more in us than we thought we had.
When you tell the story, because I’ve shared this with hundreds of thousands of people. Different people hear different things and that’s proof that what’s happening is they’re seeing it in their context, but then what you’re able to do is you’re able to take that story which connects us universally and then drive a couple of key pieces of ideas. It’s those ideas that have the teeth that can create that change in an organization or in a leader. I just spoke to the credit union managers association in Manitoba. The context for telling my story and the story’s really simple. In 1989, I was pushing a shopping cart around the downtown east side. Ten years later I was on the cover of leading Canadian business magazines as an entrepreneur. What does that have to do with credit union managers? Everything and nothing.
What is has to do with is as leaders, they’re looking to engage their employees. They’re looking to create their legacy in leadership and mentorship by extracting the most out of their people and the most out of their branch. The first thing that they have to see is one, that it’s possible. My story does that. The second thing my story does is connects them to the idea that we all impact other people in the form of mentorship and the form of leadership. It’s really about storytelling, but I would say the key piece that makes it powerful is contextualizing it for the different audiences that you speak to.
When it comes to storytelling, storytelling has been around far longer than any of the modern technologies that we have today to tell stories. I’m talking about modern technology. I’m talking about print. I’m talking about television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, all of these different mediums that we use to communicate and they simply weren’t present as little as maybe a few hundred years ago.
Prior to that, going back in the history of mankind, in every culture, there were those soothsayers. Those people that delivered the story and in the story is the ethics, is the way that we ought to live are the moral messages is the inspiration, is the teaching, whether we’re storytelling to children or we’re storytelling to corporate leadership. The story and the metaphor is incredible powerful.
I’ve had people come up to me 15 years after seeing speak at a mini conference and say, you know? I just loved your story and I would say what is it that you remember and almost every single time Susan, they say that story you told about the booth or that story about this or that story about that. It’s the stories they remember and it’s in the story that there’s something very powerful and that is to shift emotion.
Susan: You’ve said so many wonderful rich things in there and I want to highlight a few of them because I think they’re absolutely bang on and one of them is that it’s really not about you or your story but it is always about the audience and finding those points of connection for the audience and it’s about the specificity. You can tell a very general story and you’ll get a very general result and oh, that’s interesting, but it’s those moments of specificity where you bring somebody into the context of something that may seem unrelated but they will find their tooth there.
Joe: Absolutely. Honestly, as a professional speaker was the greatest. I began bringing value to clients when I learned that, that one, it’s not about me. It’s about the message and the message has to be properly contextualized for people to get it. At the end of the day, if you’re able to do that effectively, then you’re speaking into the heart, minds and soul of the audience member you have. I just did an event in Halifax where I was the key not speaker for the Brunswick Street Mission. This is an organization that serves the homeless community in both Halifax and Dartmouth. They’re a great organization. Really lean and mean. They’re doing some really great work and they brought me out to tell my story.
The context is, I’ve got 550 people in the room who are community stakeholders and this is a fundraising breakfast. In this particular environment, what I did was I shared my story, but then at the end I was able to say thank you to this group, so the context was the money that you guys are investing in Brunswick street mission impacts individual lives and I’m one of those lives that was impacted because of the heart of charity that’s in this room today. By doing that, you cleanly knock it out of the park because this is a group of people who have taken time out of their morning to come and buy a 100 dollar breakfast to support this organization. Contextually, they see that it’s worth investing in transformation and they get inspired by that.
I think the other thing that I look for, me personally when I’m storytelling is to inspire people and what I know is that people forget what you say, forget what you do but they never forget how you make them feel. Whether in my role as a father, in my role as a community leader, in my role as a husband, in my role as a speaker, I’m looking for those opportunities to share a story with someone to inspire them because it’s a bit of a misnomer to say I’m a motivational speaker.
Motivation comes after action. You don’t leave something motivated. You leave an event inspired and that inspiration one would hope then translates into action. I’m going to tackle that weight loss goal of mine. I’m going to write that book. I’m going to leave this crappy job and go follow my dream. I’m going to get out of this relationship that hasn’t worked for five years. Whatever it is, whatever you feel inspired by to change as a result of that storytelling.
When you actually get into the repetitive action, that’s when you become motivated. You don’t get motivation until you do something. You take inspiration, it fires you up, you do something, it has a positive changing result. You get some good feelings out of that and now you are motivated to continue.
Susan: You keep saying so many wonderful things. One thing I wanted to pick up on is as a storyteller or as a brand storyteller, whatever your storytelling role is, it takes patience and trust and that’s a very hard thing to convey sometimes to communicators because they feel it’s their job to get certain bits of information about the company out. They’ll push these things out and they want to give the conclusions to the audience immediately. You see in young speakers as well, but you definitely see it in communications professionals. And the problem that they have is when you take the audience out of the thought equation, they lose their engagement, so instead of telling them it’s four, and this is a Pixar thing as well, you have to give them the problem of what’s two plus two and let them conclude that it’s four, as opposed to it’s four. It’s having that patience too and the trust that they will do the work and that they will want to do the work as opposed to you doing it for them.
Joe: I think that you’re right. One of the things that we’ve noticed with technology and Gen X and Gen Y is a higher level of skepticism when it comes to messaging, whether it’s a corporate messaging or just anything. There used to be a time when you had a microphone and you said something into that microphone, it was considered as gospel and nobody would fact check you. Today people are fact checking you on their smartphones in the audience and then challenging you in a Twitter conversation. It’s just a really brave new world out there. I think it’s important for organizations to understand that it has to be authentic. It really has to be authentic and so the authenticity comes in the “show me”, not the “tell me.”
Susan: To that point, ten percent of people believe what a company tells them about it. They need to experience it in some way. They do not believe what you tell them anymore.
Joe: I agree with you 100 percent and that’s why smart organizations are rolling their sleeves up. One of the organizations I love dearly because they’re a sponsor, but they’re also someone who puts their money where their mouth is is Telus. It’s an organization who really lives and breathes this idea that we give where we live. It’s that message isn’t just something they’re saying to drive an idea across the country. From their CEO Darren all the way down through the organization, they really live and breathe that message and they want to have a positive impact in the country.
What they do is they do all kinds of great things and they’re out in the community saying this is who we are as an organization and we’re doing it. Their storytelling and their messaging is in their actions. That level of authenticity from their involvement in We Day to having their staff volunteer at a homeless shelter, people start to get that. I think that one of the things that I’ve seen is sometimes those CSR projects are done in the shadows and they really need to be broadcast more. Instead of saying you’re a great company, show the world you’re a great company and that’s where I get excited as a consultant speaker is when organizations do roll their sleeves up and go out and they do cool things.
Susan: Talk about the benefits of CSR, of corporate social responsibility, because I agree with you on the nature and in some ways you have to I think celebrate others in order to tell your own story or sometimes infinitely more effective telling your own story when you’re telling somebody else’s because again it goes back to that nobody really cares about what you say about your brand, it’s how they experience it and it’s how they live it and it’s how they hear about it through other people and certainly corporate social responsibility is a great way to do that and one of the things I want to talk about is your Push for Change.
Joe: It’s interesting, because, we’ll unpack and talk about the push change, but the opus work that I’m working on right now is called a change maker program. This is something that I’ve been playing with and working in different corners of for over ten years. It’s the idea that we as people and as organizations become incredibly laser focused when one, we’re living on purpose. The things that fire us up and the things that ultimately help us leave legacy. The second piece is, when we push through the road blocks and deal with the personal development stuff that we may not have known has set us back. And the third, connect purpose, push through road blocks and get into action and find projects that we’re passionate about that have community impact. This is when you start to see an organization really help because when is the last time your boss came up and said to you, “What are you really passionate about Joe?”
If we could create a program within this organization and I may say something like I’m really passionate about the environment or I really like music or I would really like to see something put together in our city that has to do with helping single moms or something. When you connect into these specific pieces, what you start to find is two things and it’s just absolute genius. Your brand begins to grow in the good will. You’re viewed as an organization who’s doing good things.
Two, you’re actually doing good things. You’re actually impacting the community and three, you’re now able to squeeze more out of the people around you because they’re fired up and living in purpose and with passion and these are people coming to work now going I love this company. We’re out there making a difference. That may be something as simple as a carwash or a bake sale or joining the local walk a thon or whatever is going on in that city. When they bind together and do things as a company, and bring people and engage them, that’s when the magic happens. That’s what we learn with the Push for Change.
Two years ago I worked for an organization called Aeroplan rewards program. Most Canadians would recognize that brand. They’re an extraordinary company with an extraordinary vision and they do tons in the community to give back. They’ve got a program where you can donate your air miles to a multitude of different charities. Anyways, they’re a very community minded company and they do tons to give back.
They had an event in Montreal, where they needed an impact motivational speaker to talk about what living on the street was like. I get the call and went and did this project and over the course of the next day and a half, we went through three core exercises. I shared my story of what it was like to be a kid on the streets. We made sandwiches which were distributed to youth in the streets in Montreal. Then they did something really cool. They actually pan handled in the subway system of Montreal. 35 teens hit the subway system and they came back with I believe it was over 12,000 dollars in change. It was absolutely phenomenal. I’m looking at these 350 people absolutely fired up, absolutely inspired, absolutely passionate about what they’re doing and they’re having this huge impact in the local community.
The next thing that we did was we slept outside on October 10th in front of the bell center parking lot in downtown Montreal. October’s not a really warm month in Montreal. The next day there was a transformation that had taken place with those people. The senior leadership commended me on the project, told me they couldn’t have got to that place without the impact of my talk. On the back end of that Susan, I was actually saying to myself I’ve given 100 keynote presentations. I’ve gone to all these different conferences, but that piece of work was probably the most impactful piece of work I’d ever done in my life because people were fully engaged.
I went home and said what can we do to leverage that idea and inspire millions of Canadians to get behind the cause that’s important to me which is helping youth at risk in Canada. My business partner at the time, Dr. Sean Richardson, he said, “You know, nobody’s ever pushed a shopping cart across Canada and shopping carts represent homelessness, the thing that we’re trying to avoid for youth at risk.” He said, “Joe why don’t you push a shopping cart across Canada?” He said that on a plane when we were flying into Calgary to do some consulting work and I remember feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Susan: You know it’s a good idea.
Joe: It was one of those aha moments. At the time I was 45 years old, not an elite athlete. I was 60 pounds overweight, but I’m a possibility mind set guy and I said, you know what Sean? We’re going to do it. Over the next several months, we began working on purpose. Remember the model purpose? Personal development and passion. We began checking out what was my purpose? What was my legacy going to be? I began looking at all of the things we were going to prevent from being able to achieve this goal. The money, the time to do it, the resources, physical. It’s a wide country. Here’s the thing. When you connect into passion, things that fire you up, things that get your feet hitting the floor on Monday morning, it’s amazing what you can learn about yourself.
We decided we were going to do this thing but we needed to do a trial project before we did the national walk across the country. It was decided that I would walk from Calgary to Vancouver with the shopping cart that we now had. It was a custom shopping cart made out of aluminum. It’s really cool. You can learn all about it at thepushforchange.com. Anyways, we started a walk from Calgary to Vancouver, a distance of 1,071 kilometers and in less than 56 days, I had pushed the shopping cart through the rocky mountains from Calgary to Revelstoke to Kelowna all the way into the downtown east side. We gained national media attention.
But here’s what was cool. By telling that story to school kids, to community leaders, to mayors and to people along the side of the road, we got them inspired. Not by what we were saying and to people along the side of the road. We got them inspired not by what we were saying but by what we were doing and because it was a big enough aggressive goal, they supported it. We said, we want to be involved in this too.
All of that, what we learned is that one, people are inspired by what you do. Two, people want to help and get involved and if you lead with passion and inspiration, people will follow and they’ll join you on that. But three, what we’ve been learning from this experience is the model to teach other people how to make change with their programs. When we’re done with Push for Change, yes we’ll have made some money and we’ll have supported youth at risk in this country, but we’ll have a wire frame to show anybody that they can take their most passionate projects or life’s ambition and go out and make it happen. That will be the legacy and ultimately, that’s the change that we’re pushing for. Inside each and every one of us, there’s more in us than we can see. It’s unlocking that.
Susan: It is. It’s very much about unlocking that and in the business context, I think we’ve spent decades squashing our humanity and creating these silos and separating us from each other and we’ve really proven that doesn’t work and the amazing time that we live in now, we can all reach out to each other and I think we’re all starting to say, he that doesn’t work and it’s about engagement. That’s the magic piece that everybody’s looking for and really what we’re looking for a gain is to reconnect to our humanity. Even in business, we’re looking to reconnect that thing that connects us to each other and gives us purpose and that whole aspect of trying to turn people into robots has just been a disaster.
Joe: I absolutely agree and I’m optimistic. I’ve seen both. I remember being in Seattle listening to a keynote from a former, I don’t know if it’s president or vice president of Starbucks talking about how as we in North America continue to see erosion in social services, in budgets and different things that are being dropped by our government, it’s more and more important that corporate picks up the slack. What’s really cool is it’s this juxtaposition or oxymoron that as the organizations that give actually get more. That error of greed in the 1980’s, you remember the movie with Michael Douglas?
Susan: Yeah. Wall Street.
Joe: He said greed is a good thing. Maybe. I’m a die hard capitalist. I’m an entrepreneur from way back, so fly the flag for capitalism. I love it, but I think that if you’re going to look at that and you’re going to look at it pragmatically, we can only get more by giving what we have away. That’s the oxymoron, it’s like when we as organizations go out and attach ourselves to causes, it brings up the moral in an organization. People love working for that company. The community loves it and we’re going to need to do more and more of this as we hurl forward because we’re seeing holes within the social net and the fabric that used to be there aren’t there anymore. If it isn’t companies like the Westin Group or Tim Horton’s or Telus saying hey guys, there’s thousands of us. There’s tens of thousands of us in this organization. Who here put up their hands would like to do something cool that has an impact on the community? When they do that, it only serves to shore up their brand as a company that makes a difference. They get more out of their own companies and ultimately their bottom line stock price looks better.
Susan: I think lots of companies forget that their [inaudible 00:28:37] culture. In this day in age, every single employee is your PR department and they’re talking about you and what they’re saying either is they’re bringing out into the world what a wonderful experience it is working for you and how much you give to the community and how empowered they are to be a brand representative or they’re telling you how much they hate their job. You can invest in helping to grow that culture that is exciting and stimulating and working towards something or you don’t invest at your peril.
Joe: When we say at peril, the costs for non-engagement is staggering when we look at it in North America. We’re talking billions are lost when you consider everything from social claims to not being present at work to the maximization of sick days to conflict in the workplace, union grievances, all of these things have to do with culture and people. A recent statistic, I know I was on Ken Blanchard’s website and Ken’s someone I know in the US. He’s a famous author and real great stuff on leadership and the quote on there was, “less than 20 percent of people in the workplace today are playing into their strengths.” Less than 20 percent. That’s one in five people in the workplace are actually firing on all cylinders.
I think about how much more is in the tank if we begin to understand the human stuff, the behavioral science behind what’s going on and invest and I know that sometimes when I’ve worked with organizations, they may not see the value in investing in the soft skills but ultimately, it is that investment in soft skills and in people development that really determine whether you’re an upbeat culture or a beat up culture. I think you’re right, at their peril. Sometimes too what I’ve found is that sometimes it’s when a company is doing really, really well that people are stretched.
Susan: One of the things that you said really struck me, I think brand complacency is one of the biggest threats to business right now and brands I think tend to rot from the inside out and they don’t really notice until the external signs are there and then they’re running around putting Band-Aids on things. Quite often, even a company that might have gone through a major restructure and yet when they come out of it, the first thing they want to do is more of what they were doing before. I sometimes think how do you get a brand to hit their bottom? The same way that it takes a person to hit their bottom. How do you get that brand to hit their bottom and understand that doing the same thing is just going to result in disaster?
Joe: That’s a million dollar question. I think that what I go to is sometimes the brand maybe isn’t supposed to survive. I get asked all the time, how do you help somebody, whether it’s a brand or whether it’s somebody on the street, it’s the same thing. It’s like, well if they’re not going to help themselves and do the things that are necessary in order to make that, maybe it needs to suffer. Maybe it needs to hit rock bottom. I think sometimes a change in leadership is often the order of the day. It depends. If it’s just more of the same. The reality is that I don’t think there’s one thing. I think there’s a process and if the process is followed, then transformation can take place whether it’s a brand or a human being. I think the misnomer is looking for the one answer. If we do this or if we do that. I think there has to be a deep commitment and this is going to sound cliché but a deep commitment to wanting to change.
If there isn’t that deep commitment at a senior level, is it really going to shift and change? I’m skeptical. You often see people at a VP or a director level trying to implement change or strategy, but if it’s not brought in from the top down, will it change. I’m not too sure. I’ve worked with organizations where the senior leadership jumps in the deep end with you and the change is incredible and I’ve watched others where they’ll look at it from the sidelines and there’s change but regression to the mean can be measure by weeks. You know that going in as a consultant. You go okay. Maybe we call that job security. I don’t know. It’s lead me to now in my mid to late 40’s to want to work with organizations, you’re working with senior leaders who say we want and we’ll do whatever it takes to get from here to here. Ironically, Susan it’s the same thing with working investing time and people who are wanting to personally make a transformation in their life. I want to work with those individuals who are hungry for wanting to make that change and transformation. Hungry to do it and willing to go to whatever lengths.
I’ve been asked a million times by media like the papers and the TV what was it for you and I think the one driving thing was the passion. I wanted something different in my life so bad, I was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen. That’s something you can’t teach a brand. They’ve got to have that. If they don’t, it may just be resources after resources. It’s hard to say.
Susan: They have to be willing to embrace a radical honesty and transparency as well. I think whether it’s personal recovery or brand recovery, those two pieces are absolutely key.
Joe: Absolutely and to facilitate that takes someone with some special skills because someone can come in to arbitrate against your own thinking and get you to turn around and face yourself in the mirror. You get into all kinds of funny stuff around human behavior and egos and yeah, it’s a funny dance. I kind of like being the guy on the outside when you’re doing that work because it’s tough. At the same time too, if you’ve got your arm bent around your back to the point where you’re saying uncle, all right good. The problem with human beings is sometimes we’ve got to get beat up before we become teachable.
Adversity challenge and change whether it’s in a brand or a company is losing money or your own life feels like it’s going down the tubes, that is the catalyst of change. We don’t change when things are going well. It’s when things start to really suck that we say all right, what do we got to do to turn this around gang? That’s the great thing I love about human suffering and pain. What appears to be adversity.
I could look at my life and say that day and that week in my life is the worst thing that could have ever happened to me but just fast forward ten years and go that day and that day in my life was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because it was in that moment that I gained that tool that I’m able to share with youth at risk or in that moment, I was able to learn that key thing about being a professional sales person or a speaker or a consultant or a father. We don’t learn a whole lot with success. If we’re paying attention we can learn a snot load from failure. It’s in those challenges that we see time after time those great articles in Forbes of someone who faced peril managed to turn it around and turn it into the company’s greatest success because they had a vision for it.
Susan: That is almost where all great success comes from is standing on the brink of abject failure.
Joe: It’s our mistakes that makes us gurus. It absolutely is our mistake that makes us gurus and there isn’t a person out there walking that hasn’t been through some special life experience that couldn’t assist a human being with that. You just have to look for that genius because it’s there. Most times for us, it’s on the end of our noses.
I was just putting some program material together for the health and safety conference which I’m going to do a proposal for and I was thinking health and safety, what do they need? They need somebody to speak to some of the mental health issues in the workplace. Stuff on bullying, stuff on substance abuse and depression. These are topics that I can speak to in a real deep and profound and personal way and yet for many years now, I haven’t really saw that as my topic matter. The event planner for that conference said, “Could you cover this or could you cover that?” I thought, well yeah, all day long. That’s my backyard.
It’s amazing how you don’t see it. There it is. There’s your genius. Going to share with health and safety managers about bullying in the workplace or about addiction and substance abuse. They’re facing this every single day and they’re in the trenches, working with unions, working with employees that are battling and dealing with substance abuse. If we treat them like a human being through an EEAP program, there’s hope for that transformation. Anyways, I digress.
Susan: Digressions are fun. Any trends you see emerging in business? You get to see a lot of them from the outside. Anything that you think is remarkable coming along?
Joe: I’m really excited about the age of CSR right now. I’m excited about where it’s going. More and more organizations are putting back into the community and they’re doing so in a way that is getting people involved and creating relationships and strategic alliances within the community and more so than five years ago or ten years ago. Forget about 25 years ago. Tackling a myriad of different issues. It’s not just the things that are near and dear to my heart. There’s all kinds of really great projects around environmental change. Culturally, we’re seeing some different shifts and some different thinking around soft skills developments. I’m kind of a cockeyed optimist. I love when I see that kind of stuff. I think there’s a coming back to humanity and we’re seeing more and more of that at a corporate level.
Susan: I would totally agree. The one thing that I would urge and the embrace of CSR is I sometimes see big organizations, particularly and sometimes smaller organizations too embrace a program of CSR and yet the thing that they are embracing is not actually resonating throughout the whole of who they are. And so you’ll see an organization talking about this great work that they’re doing out in the community and yet that piece is missing in their fundamental business relationship with their customer.
It’s about not just getting out there and using it as a communication piece. It’s about learning from it and folding that knowledge back in to the fundamentals of how you treat your customers and your other stakeholders, your employees so that it’s not kind of a oh, we’re making up for all the bad we’re doing. It’s actually a moment of reflection and folding that back in. You’ll see big organizations go out with messaging that talks about how they do this and how they are this and yet in their business practice, not so much. What we’re hoping to see is a closer relationship where what they are learning there is folded back really deeply, authentically and honestly into the culture of who they are.
Joe: I agree with you. You can measure on a scale of one to ten and I would call it the authenticity scale. One of the things that I’m also really aware of is CSR as a concept is still in its infancy. There’s some organizations that are leading the way. There are others who are saying we need to be there too and CSR strategy is created and a bunch of action items are put on and they check the boxes and they go through the motions. I think as this evolves more and more, I think the leaders will teach all of us because it is still an emerging thing on how to do it with the authenticity. A few stubs of the toe I think will wake up those that are simply doing it to do it.
It’s kind of like I did really well in graphic design and website development in the late ’90s. It’s one of the places where I ran a little company and we did really well really quickly and what we learned was, a lot of people ran to the website and said, well we’ve got to have a website. What our strategy inside mind ware was to go and fix websites because everybody had run to it, but nobody knew what the hell they were doing. They just, we got to have this. What we said was our value proposition to a CEO or a company was like, “Okay well you’ve got a website that’s not working, would you like to do it right the second time?” Because everybody needed to be there, so they ran out and they got a presence, but they weren’t asking the right questions and I think that’s what you’re talking about. You really want to ask those right questions about what it is that we’re doing. Why it is that we’re doing this. Make sure that all those things do line up.
Susan: I think that’s exactly so and I also think it has to do with the listening. You can ask those internal questions and they’re critical but I also think that sometimes leadership will not come from the leaders. I think it will come from more of a ground swell up and I think that’s where the learning has to happen. I think we’re seeing the rise of the consumer and I think that’s a very good thing ultimately for business and for our society, because I think people have gotten into what can we say and get away with and they’ve learned to believe that. I think the fact that we have now so many wonderful consumer oriented groups, they’re saying hey, no big industry here. You really need to be thinking about what you no longer believe what you’re telling us. I think it’s a painful transition, but I think it’s ultimately going to be better for humanity, for the planet and for business.
Joe: I agree with you absolutely.
Susan: Joe Roberts, Skid Row CEO, you’ve just been an extraordinary guest. Thank you so much. I loved having you on talking about stories and just the infinite wisdom and perspective you’ve brought to all of this, it’s just been an absolute joy talking to you.
Joe: Thank you, Susan. It’s been a pleasure being on the show.