And the reason I wanted to come back to it is that I want to give a shout out to this great guy named Ed Jenkins, who was a British guy living in the UK. He was a franchise lead for one of our big pharma clients. He’s moved on to a different client at this point. And we did this pilot because this pharma was a new client for us, and we were hoping we could do more good there. And the pilot went great. The salespeople, they increased their numbers. The managers were having better relationships with their salespeople. Yada, yada, yada. I was like, oh, awesome. But I don’t always know why things work well. And I’m constantly curious because my faculty and I are constantly trying to improve our craft because this is a skill. This is part of the big mess. It’s not just about courage. And I think we need to get off courage a little bit. But I’ll come back to that. Because we made this whole canner thing too radical. It’s too macho for my taste. So I remember talking to Ed. It’s like, things went fabulously. Okay, we’ve got all the data.
Great. But why did it work? Because he was two levels up from the salespeople, I think. And he says, Well, Because what you taught me and us, whether it was the salespeople or us managing the salespeople, was to treat every conversation with each other as a collaborative search for the truth on behalf of making things better. And he said it was a huge change in his frame around these things because he always saw these conversations, whether he’s talking to a colleague, a customer, his own people. I I got to win the conversation, right? I got to get what I want out of the conversation, as opposed to, forget the consequences, man. Forget your goals. Your goal is to do as much good through this conversation as possible. And the way to do that is through an earnest pursuit of what’s true. And that means you got to express the truth of what you think, but not in order to convince people that you’re right, but as a piece of the puzzle, so with other people, you could figure out what’s true. And he’s like, it just that was… And honestly, Matt, before he said it that way, I couldn’t put words to it.
And so people ask me what candor is. I finally have a definition. And by the way, him saying that to me became like my North Star for the last two years. It’s like, oh, treating every conversation as a collaborative search for the truth in order to make things better. That’s it. I’m like, finally, after 30 years, I know what I’m doing. Took somebody that I was developing to teach me what I’m actually doing in this life.
