Books, Reputation, and Networking with Rita McGrath

If you are going to approach somebody with a high profile for help or advice or whatever to network with them, right? It should be a two way street and you should do your homework. But I can't tell you the number of times that I have people say, "Oh, I'd love to get together for coffee and pick your brain." And I'm like, "I know, my assistant just got a rubric, but she goes through to pick my brain about what." For what reason? What have you read of mine? Like, prepare yourself. So if somebody comes to me and says, "Rida, I read your article, you know, I read your thoughts far for your Tuesday news on what happened to Zillow and I really want to date more deeply, I'll share how it was fun today." That's a two way conversation. It's not just, "I want to soak up your time for my personal benefit and without any." In a world of career uncertainty, there is one variable you have total control over, yourself. Welcome to Forever Employable Stories, where expert digital transformation consultant and successful entrepreneur Jeff Gautel will share conversations with unique and inspiring individuals who have taken charge of their professional lives, leverage their expertise, built an audience, and future-proofed their careers. So you can learn how to do the same. Here's your host, Jeff Gautel. There are handful of folks who have had a profound impact on my professional career. On this episode of Forever Employable Stories, I got to talk to one of them. Dr. Rita McGraph is a veteran business school professor, a well-known author, speaker, and thought leader on business management, change management, and innovation. Now, in this episode, we don't actually talk about those things specifically, but what we do discuss is how to take the things that have made you successful under chosen career and turn them into a platform that continues to generate opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, regardless of whether you work as a professional or as an academic or anywhere in between those two worlds. Take a listen to this practical and super helpful episode. Hey folks, welcome to another episode of Forever Employable Stories. This episode's guest is none other than business school professor, author, innovator, and strategies, Dr. Rita McGraph. I've been a fan of Dr. McGraph for a long time, considering her work and using it to inform my own work in design strategy and this transformation and organizational agility. It turns out, beyond the success and the influence that she's had in that world, is that her career is a model example of becoming forever employable. And so I want to get into that conversation today. And so, Rita, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm super thrilled that you're here. For the folks who don't know you, we always start with a little bit of background about each guest. Tell the folks a little bit about yourself so they get a sense of your history. Sure, so I'm a long-time professor at Columbia Business School. I've written five books. I do speaking and writing and some social media. And my work is really at the intersection of strategy and innovation. Amazing. So academia, it's interesting that when folks think about becoming professionals, some folks do go down this particular path. The issue is academia is a career path. Typically speaking, what's a typical career path in academia? What does that look like? Well, different kinds of academia will have different career paths. So I'll comment on what the Business School typical path is. So you spend four to five years doing your PhD, which consists of two years, typically of course work, and then another two to three years doing a dissertation, which is a fairly extensive research project that you conduct under the supervision of your dissertation advisor. Then you go on the market and some people go on the market before finishing their dissertation, some people finish them and then go. You can give you a bunch of schools and some school takes a shine to you who you accept their offer. Then you go to work there and you start teaching. And if you haven't finished your dissertation, you finish it then. But if you have finished your dissertation, then you start writing papers because it's published for a parish. And typically at a three year mark, you'll have a review of your performance and you will get good news or not. And then at about seven years, depending on the school, to be a little longer for some, you get evaluated for ten years. And if you get ten years, you basically get a job for life. And if you don't get ten years, then you're asked to go somewhere else. And as you can imagine, this is a fairly fraught process. It's a bit like making part of a big law firm or something like that. But that machine said there are all kinds of ways to have a career in academia. And while there are people who go through that very formal process, there are a lot that don't. Super interesting. In fact, my brother for a long time was teaching a class as an adjunct and at Columbia in urban planning for a long time. And he was really enjoying that sort of as a side part to his day job. He mentioned something really quickly in that last conversation. In that last answer that I thought was interesting. I want to double down really quick. Get a sense of what it is. I'm not sure that the folks listening know because everyone said, "Publish or perish." What does that mean? Well, the rules in academia are that what's considered high quality academic research is something that other people cite a lot. If you publish a paper, other people read it, then they publish a paper and they cite you in their paper. And so if your papers aren't out there to be cited, then you're not going to have a very good citation cap. So that's one of the markers of success along the traditional academic lines. Got it. You reminded me. I spoke at a conference in Hamburg a few years ago and it was a bunch of folks. It was open repositories or something like that. And the speaker dinner was just basically people comparing their citation counts to each other. There was a whole lot of like, "What's your number? And what's your number?" And I didn't even know what number they were talking about. In terms of that, I had a number. Super surprised because there you go. A couple of published books and people cite your books. You didn't even know you had a number. I didn't know that. I didn't care. Super interesting. So folks in academia publish and it sounds like folks in academia read those publications. But your work has reached much more broadly than academic audiences. Why? What do you attribute that? Well, I deliberately write stuff that is appealing to non-economic audiences. So I think you have a start there. I mean, academic work and I have a lot of respect for it. I think having a PhD and knowing how to frame an argument and knowing how to draw a logical message from one point to the next. I think that's all invaluable training. But that much being said, people tend to be very hyper-specialized. And so it's got its own language, it's got its own reference points. And I'll never forget going to the library one of my first days in my PhD program and reading this article by John Child, which basically made the argument that management decisions matter. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm getting a PhD in management. If I didn't think they mattered, why would I be doing this? And what you don't realize when you first start is you're part of a conversation that began before you ever got there and will continue long after you've moved on. And so it's learning that history, learning where your particular piece of the puzzle plugs in, what came before what will come after. And writing for practitioners is not like that. Writing for practitioners is much more about here's a new idea. Here's an interesting thought. Here's something you should be paying attention to. Here's some mistakes to avoid. It's a different kind of merit. Although I think both of them can come from the same intellectual source. Even practitioners, right? Nobody's really inventing anything new. All of us are building on top of stuff that came before us. And probably within a different right now, that's a bit more often, I would guess. Certainly. So the stuff that you're writing, how's writing for practitioners than differ than writing for academia? Well, writing for academia in case in your acceptable prior knowledge box, basically. So if you're writing for say administrative science quarterly or a heavy of management review or something, the work you're going to be reading to reference is all published academic work. You won't be citing popular books or novels or something like that. And so you're really looking at a different universe of prior knowledge. Writing for practitioners, what you're looking at is, yes, what do we believe to be true about the world, but you're also looking at where is what we believe to be true, perhaps not serving you well, or where does it not apply in this condition, or how might you take an action to create an outcome that you want to create. So academic work is evaluated by how novel is it, it doesn't open up a new idea, does it contribute to theory? Practical work is exactly as it says, does it help me do something practically that I'm trying to team? We use that word, but I want to make sure that the folks listening really get that right. So, and if I'm wrong, it's just kind of oversimplification of it, or if I'm just wrong about this kind of generalization, please, please correct me. But generally speaking, when you're writing for practitioners, there's a desire there for there to be a very actionable takeaway. Like, here's one new thing, or a couple of things that you can do differently, is that correct? Got it. Yeah, and I think that's a super important thing. A lot of folks are right. Here are my thoughts, that's cool, but in the end, if we're trying to actually influence an audience and get folks to pay attention to us, helping them be more successful, sounds like, might be a good, a good next step. So let's talk about this. So you're writing for practitioners, and you're building a bigger sort of brand, a personal brand of a presence in the business world. How has that broader presence, that broader success impacted your career, and what kind of opportunities has it generated for you? Well, I think the opportunities differ by the stage of career that you were at. So in the early days, when I was just getting started, it would lead me to roles, for example, in executive education programs, or in corporate training programs which produce income they at a lecture, meet new people, they let you develop your new skills. And so early on that was really the work that was very attractive to me. Later on in the career, you started to get into higher level speaking engagements. You get to go to high level conferences, like the World Economic Forum, and you meet a different group of people, and it drives your career forward, and at a different level. So I think where you use that stuff really depends on what kind of connections you want to make. I totally get that right. And if you think about it, sort of as a progression over time, how do you make the leap sort of from one league to the next league to the next league? How does that happen? What's the thing that triggers a transition from one level to the next level? - I think it's accumulated, a accumulated respect that people have for your work, right? So, and also people get older, right? So all the people I was teaching in the MBA program when they were in their 30s, 28 years ago, are now 28 years older. - Right. - They've now ascended two positions of higher authority. So sometimes you get a referral that way, because they knew you went, absent that kind of relationship, it tends to be referrals, or tends to be what the sociologist calls social proof. So if you're showing up where other influential, important people are showing up, and they seem to know you, and they seem to talk to you, and you get welcomed into the circle. So a lot of it has to do with how you construct your networks. - It's really, really interesting, right? This idea that if you can, like, well, I'm gonna kind of read you, you said, if you keep showing up, hey, everywhere I go, there's this person, the same person, every time I look for something in this field, there's this person's name again, right? At some point, some levels of credibility, like it's associated with that, and then that increases the types of opportunities, and hopefully the level of opportunities that had your way. It's really interesting, I've watched folks, I've been doing this, and attempting to do that very same thing for many years now, and I've watched folks actually do it much more quickly than me. I feel like I've been doing this for about 15 years. I've seen folks really come kind of seemingly out of nowhere, and within five years, and then, but it's that persistence, and it's that showing up in this conversation, and in these consistent networks, over everywhere I went, there was this individual, every time, every time, every time this person was there, and all of a sudden, they're on the same stages, and conferences and events, and so forth. It's really interesting about that consistency, and that presence, and the credibility that comes with that. Speaking of credibility, one of the things that I've found in my career is that, amazingly, in 2022, still drives credibility is books. You wouldn't expect it. I've got two teenage daughters, and you're just kind of watching kind of flip through their phones, but their phones all day long, and they read, they were the smart guy I wanted college, and then one in high school, but they read, but the gravitas of having written a book is still a thing, and you've published five books at this point. Having done a few myself, I know that it's hard work. Why? Why keep publishing books? Why keep writing books? - Well, as you said, having a book is increasingly a table-stake issue, and I joke with my sort of my colleagues, all of them write books, and we're kind of a peak book, the moment. It's like, there's not a week to go, it's by where I don't get asked to read one blurb, but I'm gonna talk about one, you know, because everybody's not real, having a book gives you that credibility in the eyes of people who might hire you for consulting or speaking, or teaching, or whatever, if you don't have a book today, that's sort of seen as well. It's a negative. I mean, I don't think having a book is the kind of positive it used to be. I mean, it used to be in the days before digital everything. The fact that a publisher would take a risk on publishing a book. If you go back into history, and I published my first book, which was the year 2000, we were beginning to have the internet then, but it wasn't really out there yet. I mean, there's a big risk for a publisher, and they would read your manuscript very carefully, and you'd deal with a lot of rejection. And so if you made it through to that conflict, the reader was convinced that at least you were a credible person. And that, to some extent, is much less the case today. I think it's much easier to get books published even better at being a book publisher. So that's one kind of issue that I think. In terms of why I write books, there's that, you know, there's the credibility, and you talk about being consistent, and I think that's true throughout your career, too. This is very easy to peak. You know, when you have this one great book that everybody read, and then five years later, it's, oh, you know, I mean, I know people who are still coasting on a book that wrote 15 years of college. People notice, right? They're like, what's new? Nothing's new. Well, a friend of my music musician said, it's fantastic. You have your entire life to write your first album, and you have two years to come up with your next one. (laughing) It's a bit like that with the book business. So there's that notion of sustainability. I think for me, there are some other reasons why a book is valuable. A book length project requires consistent attention. It requires integrated themes. It requires you to stick with it for a good long time. So you really iron out your thinking. You're also working with a editor. And so unlike whatever verbal you might put out on social media or whatever, there's somebody who's actually reading your stuff and saying, wait a minute, this idea doesn't work. That thing doesn't hang together. This needs to be retitled. I think you've got the structure around. So it's your working in partnership with somebody who's going to develop your thinking. I find books are a way that I learn. So I tend to write books that are triggered by a phenomena or a request or something that people are asking for. So my recent book, which was seen around corners, was prompted by revisiting this theme that came from Andy Grove back in the '90s of only the paranoid survive. And I got really intrigued at this notion of strategic inflection points. And a lot of people said, ah, I'd love to learn more about that. And that really fell into place. And what caused that book to go less fascinating and the friends sent me an article. And it was called, what if you changed the world and nobody noticed? And what the article was about was about how long it takes. For these huge changes that changed everything about our lives. In the case, this article that we're talking about, man's life, the Wright brothers flying around, Kitty Hawk. People were literally on the ground looking at the Wright brothers flying around. And they said, oh, it's a hoax, it's a magic trick. It's a-- because it was so far away from what people believed was possible. And so it took forever. It took four years before the possibility of man's life if you're clear. And that to me was this strategic opportunity in the last book, which is if you can see them in that long, long, long period of buildup, then you can be positioned when the tipping point finally comes. So I think it's having a partnership, having that sustained focus, and then really getting something out into the world, which gives you something to talk to people about. If it's new, it gives you something new. So for example, take the speaking circuit. People don't want to keep hiring. Same people talking about the same topic. So if you have just the same topic, there's an upper limit to how much you're going to get invited back. Friend of mine told me this story about a friend of his who went to film school. And first day of film school, film school 101, film making 101, whatever that class is, one big amphitheater class, there's 800 students. Professor gets up in front of the students, and he says, do you want to make a film, or do you want to have made a film, which is a fascinating question. And you can absolutely apply to writing books. I mean, do you want to write a book, which is what you were actually doing, right? You're doing the research. You're meeting a need, you're responding to inbound demands in the marketplace. And I think there's a lot of folks out there who want to have written a book, to kind of have that as a thing to hold. So I wrote a book. And I think there's a fundamental difference probably in the quality, obviously, if you want to actually write it. But it's real work. And I think a lot of folks who want to have written a book to be don't finish the project itself. And along those lines, you mentioned sort of a bit about the book writing and the publishing process back then. And today, is there a difference, do you think, in the value or the perception of the value of the book that you're writing, if it comes out on a proper publisher versus a self-publishing? Do you think there's a difference there? So absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, anybody can self-publish a book now. Some people have recommendations that are big enough that it doesn't matter. So he takes it like someone, except God, you know, he can self-publish. But he's got 3.4 million followers. And the margins he's going to get on the book he self-publish is going to be a lot more attractive than the margins who're going to get on a book he publish with a regular house. So somebody like that can get away with it. But don't forget how many books he's written before that God and Mary is. I think a couple of things on that. Again, we're talking about reputational effects. So the book is a signal. And if you publish the book yourself and people don't know who you are, the assumption they're going to make is you approach publishers and gutter them. So as a last resort, you self-publish. Just to get it out into the world. Now that much being said, 50 shades of grace started out as a self-published book. I mean, you can find your audience. So it kind of depends on what you're looking for. But I'm assuming the kind of people you're talking about are the people that want to give speeches and invited to manage your meeting and stuff like that. And in that case, I think it really does help to have a reputable publisher. Now, a couple of things that people may not be aware of. Do not accept your publisher to do anything for you in terms of marketing or getting the word out or anything. So if you're thinking about the time budget of your life, you're allocating to this book. 50% of the time writing the book, the other 50% of the time promoting the book. And you're going to have to do it yourself. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But publishers love to solicit books. They love to edit books. They love to print books, but to sell books might goodness. Surely you just-- So you need to have in place before you even have a publication date. You need to have your marketing message or branding. Who's going to help you with this? How are you going to launch the thing? It's all been pretty decoded by now. We did one of the other reasons, I think, so much of this book space is so crowded. It's because people have figured out the recipe now. But if you don't do that, you're just going to get lost and it's the crush. It's really good advice. And that was one of the more-- painful lessons I learned twice with both the publishers that I published with, which I just couldn't understand. I was like, "Don't know you guys want to sell these books?" Right? We spent so much blood sweat and tears just getting here and agreeing that this is the manuscript and these are the words. And then, like, yeah, that's great. Okay, we're moving on. What do you mean you're moving on? It's amazing. But I think part of it is the incentives in the publishing world, right? For most part, or not around the marketing side of things. And the other thing I find the publishers is they have this kind of, "All my children are beautiful, right?" Which is, "Well, if we do this for your books and all our other authors are going to expect, you know, blah, blah, blah." And so I think it's sometimes hard for them to take a stake. Now, I'm talking here about kind of business books, run-of-the-mill books. It'll sell, you know, 15,000 copies. I'm not talking about the latest thriller or the big authors that get multi-million dollar and answers because that's a pretty rare brief. Now, those books, they will go to a lot of extreme to market. And if you get a big name in the business world, sometimes the publisher will agree to take out a newspaper ad or launch a book. But by and large, what they're after is for you to do the marketing for it and look at the data collection. It's super interesting. And tell me if you're aware of this. If you've already got some kind of a reputation or following or a presence, the odds of you getting signed by one of those major publishers increases, would you say that that's correct? Oh, definitely. Yeah. It all works together. I think it's very synergistic. I do think people have a lot of misconcepts, so what a book will do for you. So yes, it signals that you've got an interesting idea that a publisher was willing to take a bit of a risk on. Yes, it says you've been able to stick with the project all the way through conclusion. But it's not going to turn you into an overnight recubest expert. It's not going to instantly hit the best cellar list. There's a lot of things a book is not going to do for you to. And I think it's also important to make sure that as a friend of mine, Dan Pink could just throw this fabulous book on regret. And one of the things he talks about is you're going to be living with that book for the rest of your life. You get known as, we have a friend who wrote a book. I'm not sure about that. And he's got that title following him around for the rest of his life. And he's cool with it. But you have to have that level of commitment. You're marrying this thing. Yeah. And the internet never forgets. So yeah, maybe 20, 30 years ago, if you were in the dud, people would forget it. But these days, you search a name, whatever you publish is there. There's also something else to think about. And I was asked to review a book published by a friend of mine. There were no women in it. No, women in it. If the only woman in it was an anonymous CEO called she. And I kind of wrote that this, you know, as a friend. This is really not good. This is not a good look for you. And I think you need to be a little bit sensitive to who you feature. Whose voices are coming through? Are you just relying on the same old case studies everybody's read 50 times? Or are you actually bringing something new for? Yeah, absolutely. On top of writing, you do public speaking. You do weekly writing. I subscribe to your weekly newsletter online, Dens, lots of other things that there as well. So the channels that you use to communicate with your audience, which, let's start with with channel. And if there's more, more than one, please elaborate. But which channel do you think has the most influence? Which one reaches the most folks? Or you feel like you make the best connection with your audience through? But each channel has its own peculiarity, right? So LinkedIn is very good if you want to get a conversation going. But full people will read the way in, they look at what you're doing, they'll know your work. So the people that are subscribers to my weekly newsletter are interested. And so that's a great channel for creating ongoing conversations. And it also provides legitimacy. And it also, many of them will happen to have events that are eventually they're organizing or whatever. So get to the short list. So LinkedIn, Twitter is more topical. Here's this cool thing went on this morning. Oh, did you see this article? That X? It's more like a quick shout out almost. I don't really use Facebook at all. It's not something I'm intrigued by. YouTube? Have a lot of stuff on YouTube. Mostly far side chats that I do, the people who are just fascinating. It's really interesting. And so I think that again, that reaches a different audience. And what's hard about it is there's no one that. So people will find you in multiple different places, which is why it is worth being in multiple different places. Now, I know people who, because they're just not interested in being public figures, they never go unleapeded. But they wouldn't look at Twitter. Or they don't even have a Twitter handle. And then that's fine. It just really depends on your goals. Yeah. I think there's a lot of comfort there too, right? Some folks are more comfortable writing. Some folks are more comfortable on videos. Some folks are more comfortable on audio. And so the good news is you can do any of that stuff and any combination of those things. But you're right. And the broad presence is super valuable. And speaking of, you've mentioned building the right network and having a presence in multiple places, one of the things that I've seen you do well is a series of collaborations with other well-known business thinkers. For example, I've seen you do some stuff with Alex Austro-Welder. And I think partnerships and collaborations are a really great way to combine audiences, expose yourself to an audience that may not have seen you before and grow your network, popularity, opportunities, love, love, etc. How do partnerships like that come about? How might you cultivate them? How do you decide who you should partner with? If you get an inbound opportunity or do you seek them out, how do you go back down? You know, it happens a number of different ways. So I'll start with the people I seek out. So as an example, there was a book that came to my attention on its club, Doge of the Nation, and it's by clinical psychologists who studies addiction, basically, and you pre-practice it into this really interesting book. And I don't know it all, but I ran across the book and I thought, wow, interesting topic. And which would be open to doing say a fire sent check, because I think her message is very important, which is that the short-term lure of feeling better actually causes us more long-term harm than we realize. And I think that's an important message. So that's the one I would reach out to. For instrumental reasons, but more because I think the topic is interesting, I think she's interesting. And by definition, she's going to introduce me to a whole bunch of people I have never heard of because they're in the world of psychology and addiction. That's not what I typically do. So those are people I would reach out to. People that are in my circle and what you'll find is any circle of expertise will have people that you know. So somebody like Alex, many of them, I've worked in decades, you know, looked through one lens, you could be seen as competitors because we both do consulting in the innovation space. And we see it that way. We really see what he does quite different, what I do, what I'm trying to build is very different than what he does. So we really see it as growing the pie. And I think those are the most fruitful collaborations when you're not going at it with the sort of one I based all that behind you, but you're really able to say, hey, this could lead to many cool things that neither of us alone could address. So I think that's a fruitful way of doing it. There are partnerships where, you know, they go wrong. And sometimes they go wrong because people have different motivations, you know, people have different interests. Sometimes people are a little shark like, you know, I've been in a situation where I've made referrals to people and they just ran with it and like never, never kept me up to day, never kept me informed of what happened. And that's not in good faith, right? So I try to find people who share a common value system who are coming at it with a feeling of abundance who are generous with their time and effort, those kind of people. People who I feel are, and this is, I mean, I think this is actually what I'm going to actually be a useful piece of advice. But I can't tell you the number of times that people say, oh, I'd love to get together for coffee and pick your brain. And I'm like, I know my assistant just got a rubric, but she goes through to pick my brain about what? For what reason? So if somebody comes to me and says, Rita, I read your article, you know, I read your thoughts far for your Tuesday news on what happened to Zillow, and I really want to date more deeply, I'll share how it was fun today. That's a two way conversation. It's not just, I want to soak up your time for my personal benefit. And without any back and forth. Yeah, that's super valuable, right? And look, I don't think there's any reason why people should hesitate to reach out and ask. You never get to get anything if you don't ask for it, but. But do your homework. Be prepared. Show them. And know what you're talking about. So one thing that I've written, I mean, I'm not that hard to find, right? And look, and that's why we're here. That's what's by design. Why, you know, why we're having this conversation is because you're very explicitly made it easy for people to find you and what you're talking about. I want to just touch again on something that you said, because I wrote it down to my notes, and then you said it, which was, working from this position of abundance, this mindset, more so of abundance, rather than scarcity. It can really feel like we're all sort of hunting for the same work in any industry. It doesn't matter whether it's business management or design or product management or tech or whatever it is. But the reality, at least that I've seen and that have heard you reflect back, is that rising time lifts all boats. And if we can work together, even if we work in similar roles or adjacent roles, there's still opportunities for us to help each other without stabbing each other in the back others, taking an idea and running with it and never looking back. And so I think that's a really, really important point. So we've talked a lot about your outbound communications. We've talked about books. We've talked about LinkedIn. We've talked about newsletters and all these types of things. All this stuff requires tons of inspiration. You really, I mean, really, really, really, really, really, really important things. It's just a lot of folks set out to write a blog, a lot of folks set out to create a podcast, a lot of folks set out to do this kind of, to make YouTube videos or whatever it is. And they burn out. They don't necessarily burn out from the work. They burn out from the inability to generate ideas to create content around. So where do you find your ideas in your experience where should others look for inspiration for sharing their expertise and experiences? That's a great question. Well, I read voraciously. So I read, most described it just about every business publication that there is. And I don't read them cover to cover every day, because I just wouldn't have the bandwidth to do that. But I will kind of go through them. And every so often, and quite often, an article will strike me as, wow, this is really interesting. So one event was last week, as we speak, I know this speaker recorded, but recently Facebook had this, disaster spurnings call where Mark Zuckerberg had to basically say our user population is not growing anymore. In fact, shrinking, we're projecting $10 billion of losses because of Apple's anti-tracking devices. And TikTok is growing very rapidly. Well, in my book, which went out in 2019, I said, Facebook stays, you know, that anybody with a business model, which is based on people being ignorant of the data that you are collecting about them, is eventually going to get into trouble. And I remember when I wrote that, my editor was shocked. Because at that time, Facebook looked as though it could do no rock. And it was growing by leaps and bounds. It was a Wall Street darling. It had successfully pivoted to mobile. I mean, it did accomplish all this amazing stuff. But when people would not give you that data if they knew what you were doing, that's such a big vulnerability. It just struck me as really interesting. So the blog I'm going to write to the article and publishing soon is about that exactly. And the analogy I make is to the food and drug administrations roll out of food safety regulations. And the big thing that the food manufacturers were resisting-- and this is going back to like 1906, 1910, 1920-- the big thing that they were resisting was allowing government inspection agents in their plans to make sure that they were actually doing what they said they would do. And there would be fines and things. Well, I think the analogy is going to happen to Facebook. I think we're going to see outside entities. And they're going to be required to give data and access to outside entities to make sure that Facebook's not doing something that's really illegal or immoral with the data that they're collecting. That's coming. And so that would be-- I would read something that kind of sparked my imagination or hear about something that sort of says, whoa, that's interesting. Another example would be, I ran a class, Jeff Colvin, who's a writer for Fortune. And he wrote this really searing article in the price of insulin. And that got me thinking about, well, it's 100-year-old drug. It certainly has to be all patent by now, like why the price is still high. And when you lift the lid on that situation, which we find is this really unholy alliance between manufacturers, pharmacy benefit, managers, list pricing of pharmaceuticals, and the way we pay for drugs in this country, which is completely unique to the way we pay for drugs anywhere else. And again, that was just such an interesting thing. I thought it deserved some thought. And it actually will happen with a lot of these pieces. They'll find their way into some learning modules that I'm building. So online accessible ways to access tools that I've developed over the years, which is another venture that I'm sort of getting to now. So they'll find a way to do those. Or they'll find a way to do books, they'll find a way to something. But it's almost-- you can almost think of it. Like Shell's stocked with sets of ideas that can be developed further as you think about them. That's amazing, right? So just keep your mind open, keep ingesting, everything that comes your way and looks for ways to be able to expand on the story, not just regurgitate the story, but actually look for those unique insights in there. So Jeff, one thing that might be helpful to your listeners is years ago, there was a Harvard professor who was interested in studying what he called the science of the interesting. And he actually wrote a paper called "That's Interesting." And what he found was that people find challenges to weekly held assumptions to be interesting. So if I were to open a sentence with, most of us think that X causes Y. But really, it's Q. Let's find it, right? We have just inherently interesting sentence. Now, you don't want to challenge strongly held assumptions, because that's when you get into polarization and name calling people, you violated the religious beliefs of people, but weekly held assumptions are fair game. And so that's always been something I've kept with me, which is like, what's the weekly held assumption you're challenging here? Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much for that. And thank you so much for sharing your story and your expertise with everybody here. Rita, thanks so much for being on forever and forever stories. I think this is going to be a fantastic episode. I'm thrilled that you were here. Thanks, Chad. It's a pleasure. Hey, it's Jeff. Thanks again for joining me for this episode of Forever Employable Stories. If you enjoyed the show and learned something new, tell a friend. The best way you can help us grow is to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform and send this episode to someone you think can benefit from it. As always, feel free to reach out and connect on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you. Do you know someone who has a great Forever Employable Story? Someone who has built a platform and an audience using their unique skills and experience? If so, I want to talk to them. Send me a note at [email protected] and let me know.