Herb Koplowitz_Strategy Driven Innovation_Accountability not Culture

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Speaker B Network Voice America Business welcome to the new management Network with your hosts Don and Bonie Folk. This program will help you get the competitive upper hand in your organization. Now here are your hosts Don and Bonnie folk.

Speaker C Hello, my name is Don Folk and I'm a management consultant in Toronto. I'm here with my professional and life partner, Bonnie Folk.

Speaker D Hi, I'm Bonnie. Welcome to the show. Our guest today is Herb Kopowitz who is a member of the new Management Network and president of Terra Burma Management Consulting in Toronto. We will be in conversation with Herb discussing strategy driven innovation and why it's about accountability, not culture. Herb was born in the Bronx, New York. He holds a ba in mathematics and philosophy from Cornell University, a phd in psychology from the University of Massachusetts and is registered as an organizational psychologist in Ontario. He is trained in requisite organization and in marketing research. Our show today will be a conversation in four segments. First, we'll be asking Herb about innovation in an organization and how it relates to strategy. Second, we'll find out about culture and how the current emphasis on creating an innovative culture may be misplaced. And third, we'll talk about accountability and how it tries strategy and innovation together and many other things as well. And fourthly, we will get Herb to describe a four point program for a CEO to get innovation focused in his or her organization. John will be leading off with her.

Speaker C Herb, it's great to have you back on show. You did this very good program earlier this fall 2008 on accountability, and we're back here with a different topic but related. Herb, let me start you off by asking you, what is innovation?

Speaker A Well, Don, thanks for having me on the show. Bonnie, appreciate the introduction. And when you read articles on innovation, it's a concept every author has their own definition of. But it always comes down to in one way or another, doing something new or doing something in a new way. And people will talk about, well, it's not really innovation unless it's big and they have their own concept of what big is. But when I read the articles I read on innovation, it all has to do with doing something new. But I think we need to recognize that what's new is different at every level of the organization. Some of the other presenters in this program have referred to the concept of stratum, the managerial level that a role or a task or a person might be at stratum five, where you're working at least part of the time on where perhaps your business unit will be in five to ten years. And will have, appropriately, four levels of management below you. Innovation is coming up with a new underlying concept. It's something, I recall an article years back of a railroad president who sort of woke up one morning and said, you know, we're not in the railroad business. We're in the transportation business. And with that change of concept, focused not only on moving goods within the railroad, but also to and from the rail line. So the big stuff happens higher up in the organization, people more capable at stratum three, where you'd be working one to two years out on where your function is and would have two layers below you, you'd be coming up with a new serial process to get work done. But even at Stratum one, in the front line, you've got a task in front of you. You're a bank teller, let's say. And there's a certain level of service you're supposed to provide with a certain level of friendliness. At the same time, you have to keep the line moving. Every customer in front of you is a new situation, and you're doing on the spot innovation. I just mentioned that because I think we tend not to pay attention, not to recognize that innovation happens every day at every level, in every organization. So, quick answer to your question, Don. Innovation is just doing something new or doing something in a new.

Speaker C So today, the dominant view of innovation in organizations, Herb, how would you describe that?

Speaker A Well, certainly when I read anything in the advice columns in the business section of the newspaper, and even much more solid organizations, conferences I've been to, I'm going to simplify a bit, Don, but really, it comes down to say, you know, let's look at the most successful organizations, something like Toyota. What makes them successful? Well, gee, they're always coming up with something new, like the Prius. They're the first car company to sell a hybrid vehicle, and they say, so innovation must be what you need to do to be successful. Well, how do you get innovation? Well, let's look at all those innovation. Those companies that are innovative, they have innovation cultures, by which we mean the people value doing things new. They believe that it's possible to improve products and processes. And if you listen in, you do not hear people say, for example, you don't hear people kill a new idea, saying, we've never done it this way. Rather, you hear people talk about doing things in a new way. So the dominant view seems to be, you've got to build an innovation culture. Then your people will be innovative, and you'll have innovation, and you'll be successful.

Speaker C That seems to be what I read, too, herp, but I gather you've got a little different slant on it. What's your.

Speaker A Mean? It sounds, you know, it always sounds so simple when I say it out loud. But look, an organization has a vision. Every organization is, or people invest in it for a reason. There's something they want the organization to accomplish. Typically, it will be profit or profitability, or in a family business, it may be leaving a legacy or building a company that my children and grandchildren will have a place to work at. Whatever it is, there's some notion of success that the CEO of the organization has to be driving towards. And you get there by having a plan, which we call a strategy. A strategy is just a plan to reach that vision. Now, if you can reach that vision doing the same thing in the same old way, well, you've got no need for innovation. But if you're most organizations, most visions that I run across, and most strategies, if you pursue the strategy aggressively at all, it requires doing new things or doing things in a new way. And by aggressive pursuit, I mean managers direct their subordinates, support them, and hold them accountable to reach strategic targets at higher quantity or quality than was originally thought possible, or using less time or fewer resources than was thought to be necessary. So it's that aggressive pursuit of strategy that then requires you to do something new or do things in a new way. In other words, the driver here isn't innovation for its own sake. Doing something new is not in and of itself a good thing. What's a good thing is pursuing your strategy aggressively. This is a bit different from what I read in the papers because I never see any reference to strategy do things new. That seems to be what people say is going to get you success. And I just don't see it happening that way. And in terms of culture, well, culture is a homeostatic mechanism. It prevents change. It keeps things within a norm that you have. Now, culture is not a change agent. So, yes, if in your current culture, people are saying, oh, we've never done it that way, and that's a way to kill a new idea, well, then you need to change the culture. But as I'll say in a bit later, you don't do that by putting posters on the wall saying innovate. It's not by changing the culture that you bring about innovation. It's not that you say, think new, and people will suddenly produce new things or things in a new way. Rather, you've got a goal, you've got a vision that you're driving towards, and you're looking for the best ways to get to that.

Speaker C Well, you know, it's interesting, herb, this question of strategy. You'll recall about 18 months ago, we had a meeting of the new management network in Toronto, and Edwin Wang from Beijing was one of our new members and was talking to us about what was happening in the chinese economy at the time and this tremendous drive of the chinese companies following strategies to build, export to the western world, building on their ability to get things done and their relatively low labor rates, et cetera. And it seemed to me at the time that there were pretty clear strategies that the Chinese had. Well, a couple of weeks ago, we had Edwin Wang back on this program, and he was talking about what was going on in China now with all the turbulence and the drop in demand in the United States and so on, and it seems like the strategy of chinese companies is up in the air, and they've got to look at new markets. They got to look at their domestic market rather than their international market. Is it possible to have a strategy in turbulent times?

Speaker A Well, of course, the question comes up, and I forget if it was General Patton or Genghis Khan or whoever it was, but a famous warrior who said, no battle plan ever succeeds the first contact ever survives the first contact with the enemy. And we always need to hold our strategies and our visions a bit loosely and be aware that things we hadn't expected will turn up. But I can assure you those companies in China, certainly the ones that were successful, if they were taken aback by changes in the economy in the last few months, they now are coming up with new strategies of how to deal with the new times. And what I'm saying is to be conscious and deliberate about where you want to get to and how you want to go. Of course, that won't be perfect, but it's going to be a whole lot better than doing things randomly.

Speaker C Well, I suppose that's right. I mean, I can imagine that what's not happening in these chinese companies is that everybody's riding off in all directions.

Speaker A Yes, that's right. Nor does the CEO say to each of his or her immediate subordinates, cut your budget by 10%. What the CEO needs to do now is revision. The organization say, here's the growth that we're not going to be able to get to. Here are the profit margins that we won't be experiencing. Here are the service levels we're going to choose to continue even in the face of their relatively high cost. But the CEO revisions and then starts re budgeting from there on down rather than a non strategic well, we'll just cut 20% of costs and tell everyone to cut 20%.

Speaker C Herb, we've got a break for a minute or two here, but when we come back, let's pick up the speed.

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Speaker C It's Don folk and I'm here with Herb Koplowitz and we're talking about culture and innovation and accountability. And Herb, can you talk a little bit about culture and the idea of innovative culture?

Speaker A Yeah, there is this myth out there that a company like Toyota that is so successful and comes up with new products that it must have started out trying to build an innovation culture, and a colleague of mine, Craig Flyn, who does process improvement and related work works closely with Toyota and actually works closely with Takashi Tanaka, who was the lead consultant in building the Prius. I asked Craig about this and he said, well, look, no, Toyota's driving force isn't to build an innovation culture. It has a strategy to deliver products that customers will buy and to make continuous improvement. And I said, so what do they think of innovation? And I just want to read you what he wrote back to me. He said, when I ask the Toyota guys about innovation, they're puzzled by the question. They want to know why it is considered something separate in the west. And I asked him, separate from what? He said, well, separate from work. What you do in work is not only produce, but you improve what you produce. And it doesn't start as a cultural issue, but it's a result of accountability coming out of their strategy. Their strategy is we do things better. And notice, not we do things new, but we do things better. And what does better mean? That's defined by your strategy. So Toyota certainly started out with the customer's needs and what the customer will want to buy. That's their strategy, and they do that better continuously. The result of that is an accountability for continuous improvement. And of course, the result of that is an innovation culture. But it didn't start with a culture. Culture is an aftereffect of that in some ways.

Speaker C Maybe the western literature has got the cart for the horse on this matter. Is that your basic thesis here?

Speaker A Well, I think there's several things wrong with the current view, and certainly that's one of them. We're confusing cause and effect. We assume that an innovation culture leads to innovation and innovation leads to success. When I look at it, it's that the successful companies do what's required to succeed, namely to aggressively pursue their strategy that leads to innovation. And when you systemically promote innovation, well, a byproduct of that is going to be an innovation culture, a culture where people value aggressive pursuit of strategy, believe that new things in new ways can help that pursuit habitually look at new things in new ways. That's very different from the dominant approach in our literature, which is sprinkle innovation dust across the company. And this notion that if you stimulate everyone to do something new and different, you'll get a result. And then you hear managers complain of people coming up with new products that don't fit our or new processes that don't fit our strategy. Well, this is the root cause of that. But I think there are a couple of other things that are problematic with the dominant view. The major one is that it ignores strategy. When you make doing something new the goal, you've lost focus on strategy as the driver of getting you to where you want to get to in the first place. I was at, a year and a half ago, I was at a conference at a major canadian university. Whole day spent on innovation, never heard anyone talk about strategy. The entire day. It was all about how do you break the culture? How do you form a new culture? How do you get people to think in new ways? So I think the ignoring of strategy happens at a tremendous cost to productivity. It leads to great waste. It keeps us from having the focus on strategy as a way of getting to the whole purpose of the organization that's required. I believe, Don, that one of the reasons there is this lack of focus on culture is because of a western, what's the word?

Speaker D Distaste.

Speaker A I'll put it that way. A western distaste for accountability. Even though we're paying someone a salary, and perhaps a very good salary, managers find it somehow distasteful to hold their subordinates to account. I believe that is why we have such a tremendous focus on culture in the management literature today. The hope of many managers, many executives is that if we have an innovation culture, then that culture will get people to be innovative. And I, as a manager, do not have to tell my subordinate, say, the head of product development, give me a line of clothing that will appear to the 65 year old goth market, whatever it is. If the strategy is saying we're going after the goth market or the 65 year old market, or now we've got a new strategy saying, hey, here's this new segment that's come up. You don't say, give me new products. You say, give me a line of products that will bring us to where our strategy requires us to be in our dominant markets, in the markets that we're pursuing. So I see those three issues there. Ignoring strategy, ignoring accountability, and confusing cause with effect. Those are the three major things I find holding back. How to put it? I think those are the three things that I find misplaced in the current dominant literature on innovation.

Speaker C We were talking before the last break, Herb, about the companies in China that have had to shift suddenly from manufacturing for export to the west to focusing on the needs of their domestic economy. And you were saying, well, let me put it this way. Can you pick up that theme and talk to us about how innovation would properly flow under those very rapidly changing circumstances?

Speaker A Well, yeah, first of all, you're raising a point I hadn't mentioned before, which is innovation of strategy itself. So someone at the top of the house is saying, whoops, the strategy that looked so good and worked for us for 510 years, suddenly there are changes in the market. It's not appropriate. We need to change our focus. And so there's a change in the strategy to, again, to still reach the vision of producing a certain level of profitability. But now that needs to trickle down throughout the economy, so trickle down through the organization. If the new strategy is we're producing for domestic consumption, not for the export market, the people or the person who's accountable for developing products is given a task very rapidly to say, not come up with new products, not innovate, but come up with products that are appropriate for this market. Come up with a new line of products that will get us into the asian market deeper, whether it's our own chinese market or neighboring countries. But you need to come up with a line of products that will be attractive within our new market. The person in charge of logistics doesn't come up just with something new, but rather to say, well, when we're shipping our products, we need better arrangements now than we've ever had before within China. Come up with some ways that we can ship our products economically within the chinese market and so on for every function. Of course, the result of this will be innovation, but it's not innovation for its own sake. It's not the notion that new in and of itself is better. It's what is going to help us more aggressively reach our strategic targets.

Speaker C Just to bring this back a little closer to home here in North America. Herb, we've got a contraction in our manufacturing industry, probably a very serious rationalization of the auto industry, particularly among the big three north american based companies. And we've got governments, at least in Canada and the United States, talking strongly about getting money into infrastructure that can pick up some of the emerging slack in the mean to imagine we've got an economy that smoothly and efficiently produces automobiles and the next day smoothly and efficiently produces light rail transit. Sounds like a lot of parts suppliers and a lot of fabricators and a lot of other organizations in the economy have got to be refocused strategically and refocused fast.

Speaker A Absolutely. So they need to make changes in their strategy again, not because innovation is in and of itself good, but because their current strategy is not viable. And what I'm suggesting isn't that the way to go is put posters up on your factory wall and say, think new. It's rather that each department in the organization, each function has to be given a new accountability, not for the sake of innovation itself, but for the sake of the new strategy. And that will trickle down each layer, holding the layer below it accountable for doing something to meet the new strategy, which will, of course, require doing something new. I hope I'm clear in this that I'm not against innovation. It's a necessity. I'm just saying it's not a goal in and of itself. It's a byproduct of aggressive pursuit of strategy.

Speaker C That seems very clear to me, Herb. And this recurrence of the notion of accountability and the difficulty north american managers seem to have with us is one that keeps popping up. Now we've got to go to a break here very shortly, but when we come back, I'd like to see if these issues are unique to innovation or whether they are also part of the problem elsewhere. Right, let's go to a break now.

Speaker A Cool.

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Speaker C Don folk, I'm here with Herb Koflowitz, and we're talking about innovation culture and mostly about accountability. And Herb, you're making a very clear case that the problem companies have is more about accountability than it is about innovation. Dust, among other things, are these issues unique to innovation?

Speaker A When I look at again what I read, typically not only in the advice columns in the local business paper, but even Harvard Business Review, I find these three issues over and over again ignoring strategy, ignoring accountability, and confusing effect with last I can't recall seeing an article, for example, saying, well, this problem persists only because managers do not hold subordinates accountable. The reference always is to what the culture encourages. So you'll see articles on the importance of developing a sales culture or a service culture. I have clients or prospects saying to me what I want is an accountability culture. And when they say that, I need to counter and say, wait a minute, when you say you want an accountability culture, do you ever plan within that to ever hold anyone accountable? Do you plan to hold your managers accountable for holding their subordinates accountable? Because to me, an accountability culture means everyone acts as though they were being held to account. But I don't know how you bring people into line with a new approach, a new strategy, whatever, without using accountability as the major driving force. Again, just as I said before, I'm certainly not against innovation. I think it's very important. And similarly, I think culture is important. But culture is, as I said, a homeostatic mechanism. It holds things together the way they are held together now. And you don't bring about change by bringing about a change in culture. When someone says, I want an innovation culture, what I'm inferring is they believe that the culture causes accountability. And they believe that there's some way to get to accountability other than by doing what's needed to have accountability. You don't get to a sales culture by encouraging people to sell. You get it by holding them accountable to sell and supporting them and directing them. These are the sales we want. Oh, you don't have the skills for that? Let's help you develop the skills so you support them? Oh, we don't have the it that supports that. Let's get the it that supports that. But whether it's a sales culture, a service culture, an accountability culture, strike out the word culture. You need to start out by doing whatever it is you need to get sales or service or accountability. So that's the primacy of culture and things. I can recall seeing articles touted as major research that say more successful companies make greater use of competencies. And the implication is that competencies are what lead to success, or use of competencies is what leads to success. And I looked at all the data in the article and it made sense to me that more successful companies have the money to throw at expensive competency programs. Don Bonnie, I'm not sure about what you learned in science in grade seven or eight, but when I went to high school, junior high school in Long Island, New York, the first thing we learned in general science was not to confuse correlation with cause. That the more successful companies have innovation or have innovation cultures. That more successful companies make use of competencies doesn't tell you which direction the causal arrow goes in. And I find us always assuming in our literature that the arrow goes in whatever way that the author wants to make the point. So confusing cause with effect. Putting culture in and ignoring accountability are dominant themes in the management literature.

Speaker C Notice, Herb, that you make a point of competencies. And I know that Elliot Jacks was critical of competencies, particularly as they had to do with managerial skills, and that he had a clear set of skills that managers needed, and in order to get subordinates to focus on accountability and to get subordinates, once removed, focused on where they were trying to go with their careers and development, et cetera. That he was very specific about these managerial skills that were needed. And we had Dorothy Siminovich on the program not too long ago, and she was talking about coaching. But she also made the point that what's happening in the coaching movement these days is shifting toward teaching managers to coach properly inside with their own subordinates. And I wonder if you maybe just take a moment and talk about this idea of managerial competencies and the manager's role in making sure that subordinates develop and are focused on accountability.

Speaker A Well, I see the manager's work as comprising three parts. One is directing your subordinates and by which I mean telling them what you want them to accomplish. And I know that language sounds very harsh relative to the language in most current management literature, but the point they never see in the literature is, what do you think an employee is giving you in exchange for the salary. Right. So you're paying them in order that you get something from them. And I think it's the right to make use of their ability to do work. So I don't think there's anything offensive in telling a subordinate what to do, what to accomplish, as long as you do that respectfully. And that includes asking the subordinate for their best advice about it and having a good dialogue about it. So directing is part of it. Supporting them is another part. And by that, I mean look around to see what are the obstacles that are getting in the way of your subordinate doing what you're directing them to do. Coaching is a big part of that. Coaching in the sense of helping them develop new skills, helping them develop the knowledge that they need. And the third part, and this also is part of coaching for me, is holding them to account. And this seems to be the lost art in north american management. We find it somehow rude or inappropriate to say to a subordinate, look, I'm paying you a salary of so many thousands of dollars. I'm not getting that kind of work from you, and I need to do it, or I need to find someone who will do it, and I'll do everything I can to help you get to that place. But, yeah, I think that kind of coaching, both in the supportive sense and in the sense of having a hard conversation with a subordinate, is very much a lost art. And if there's a growing movement in that, Don, I'm really happy to hear that. And the other part that Jack's brought into the picture, of course, is, as you mentioned, the notion of the manager once removed. So we don't simply send managers to management training so that they learn how to be a better coach. The managers, too, need to be held accountable for doing that, because if the manager, once removed, holds the manager accountable for all kinds of things, but not for being a good manager, not for coaching, well, don't be surprised when the manager doesn't apply what they learned in the training session.

Speaker C We've got just a minute and a bit to go here before our break. What's your advice to the executive or business owner who wants a more innovative company or department?

Speaker A Well, I think it goes back to those four elements, Don. Namely, was it four elements? Get your vision, get your strategy, get a structure that will implement the strategy and hold people accountable to pursue the strategy aggressively. I think we can get into that longer after the break, but I think those are the key elements of it.

Speaker C Okay, well, then let's go to a break and when we come back, I'm going to ask you to summarize a four step formula. Herb for the CEO to ensure a truly innovative organization right?

Speaker D Okay.

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Speaker C Hi, it's Don folk and I'm here with Herb Kopowitz, and we're talking about innovation, culture, and accountability. And Herb, can you summarize a four step formula for a CEO to ensure a truly innovative company?

Speaker A Well, I guess I would start out by saying the first thing I'd say is examine why you want an innovative company, because I can understand why you'd want a successful company. But innovation in itself is not a strategy. Doing something new in and of itself is not a strategy, it's a strategic enabler. So to begin with, you need a vision and a strategy. And that would be point number one. Particularly more entrepreneurial companies where you may have an owner manager who really enjoys getting their hands dirty, but is brighter and more ambitious, has capabilities and needs that won't be used, won't be met. Working on their own, they start building a company, they often do not sit down and say, what am I driving at here? What am I building and what's my plan to get there? So for me, that's definitely step number one, is to say, let's be really clear on the vision, let's be really clear on the strategy. And the strategy should have particular time targeted goals within it. So you're saying, where are we going to get to in it in three years? In seven years? What does our product line have to be like in three years and seven years and so forth? For each of the functions, you need to have some time targeted strategic goals. So that's the first step, is where do I want to get to? How am I going to get there? And by when you've done that, you then need to design your structure. And the structure to me is the accountabilities and authorities, the roles and role relationships, and you need the head of each function to be capable of and accountable for reaching those strategic targets. An IT department that has an end state in mind that's three years out is very different from one that has an end state seven years out. It takes a more capable person to run an IT department that has a vision that's seven years out than one that's only three years out.

Speaker C You're on to, I think, a very interesting point here. Your and my colleague Julian Fairfield in Australia talks about competing strategically with functions, and that if you raise the level of a function as you've described, you're from a two to five year time horizon to a five to ten year time horizon, you've changed the strategic balance of your company. And so part of structure here is getting the functions at the right level. Am I hearing that.

Speaker A Mean? And Julian is brilliant at analyzing this, not just internally, but inferring from what competitors are doing at what strategy their IT department must be functioning, or the logistics department, and using that as competitive information. So the purpose of your structure must be to bring your to implement your strategy and you then need to staff roles with people capable of doing the work. A VP or director of it who could be very successful running an IT shop where she's working at, where that shop needs to be in three years, may not succeed in heading up one where she'd have to be working on where it'll be in seven years. So it's a very simple direction of your vision determines your strategy. Your strategy determines structure, and structure determines the staff you need. Particularly in entrepreneurial companies, it often goes in the reverse order. Gee, we were a little shorthanded. My next door neighbor is looking for a job. I guess I can hire him. I trust him. Now let's look around for something for him to do. So you start with a staff, and that builds the structure. You're building the role out of who the person is, and that ends up influencing your implicit strategy.

Speaker C And also with companies, often they have a set of people who take them to a certain level as a company. And then in order to go from a level four to a level five business, for example, you need to go to level four vice presidential people, and you may not, just, may just not have them in the current talent pool that you've got. And this, it seems to me, is one of those very difficult transitions for a company to pull the staff up to the level needed to execute a strategy at a higher level.

Speaker A Absolutely. And you'll often find that in an entrepreneurial organization, when the owner operator matures from stratum four into stratum five, let's say, and wants to do bigger things than they've ever been able to do before, and now finds they don't have the people to do them. When they were in high four, they didn't mind managing a director at low three, but now that they have matured into five, it becomes a huge gap between them and their directors. They've got to need to fill in the spaces. And the fourth aspect of this is to manage, actually manage your people. Direct them, by which I mean tell them what you want to accomplish in dialogue. Support them, give them the tools and the skills they need and hold them to account. You are paying them a salary, they owe you something in exchange for that. And what it is, is to apply their capability to the very tasks you want them working on. And one of the key tasks that Elliot certainly referred to in terms of managers was continuous improvement. And this, again, is what Toyota has done. It doesn't have an innovation department, it doesn't have an innovation program. I mean, this harkens back to a couple decades ago when we had quality circles and the next thing you'd find is quantity circles or something. But it's like, no, doing things better is part of your work. This is what the people at Toyota will tell you when you talk to them. They say that doing things better is part of what my job is. And again, the point is not doing something new. It's not that I've got to come up with a new idea. It's that our strategy says perhaps we need cars that are more serviceable than other cars.

Speaker C Come to the end of our time here. All right, sorry to say, and I've got to turn it over to Bonnie to bring the broadcast to a close.

Speaker A Very good.

Speaker D Thanks, Herb. I've enjoyed listening to your in depth exploration of strategy driven innovation and why it's about strategy and not culture. And thank you, Dawn. I look forward to seeing you and Herb at the next new management network meeting. We encourage you, the listener, to explore this subject further with Herb, and you can reach him by email at Herb at TFMC ca. That's Herb at t for time, f for future m mothercarrot CA or to reach Don and me, email us at folk at vanet ca. That's folk. F for Frank, O-W-K-E at Vanet, v for Victor, I-A-N-E-T ca or 1803 872165. That's 1803 872165. Next Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific or 02:00 p.m., eastern, Don and I will be in conversation about Roger Stewart of Cape Town, South Africa, exploring a project to foster rural development in that country. It should be an interesting exploration. We look forward to you joining us. Then. Goodbye.

Speaker B Thank you again for joining us as an important part of the new management net work. We hope you picked up some tips and plans to help you improve your management technique. Remember, for more information, visit newmanagementnetwork.com. Join us again next Tuesday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time 02:00 p.m. Eastern time for the new management network on the Voice America business.