Paul Carroll is the CEO and editor-in-chief of Insurance Thought Leadership. He is also the co-author of The New Killer Apps: How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups and Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years and the author of Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, a major best-seller published in 1993. Paul spent 17 years at the Wall Street Journal as an editor and reporter. The paper nominated him twice for Pulitzer Prizes. In 1996, he founded Context, a thought-leadership magazine on the strategic importance of information technology that was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.
In this episode, we look at Paul Carroll's research for Billion Dollar Lessons, key takeaways from the 750 most profound business failures of all times and how Paul learned as an award-winning journalist at The Wall Street Journal that not every tree grows to the sky.
You'll discover why there are no new business mistakes, just new people to make them. Paul shares the seven strategies that are most commonly associated with failure, including staying the misguided course.
Paul says, "once an idea gets put on the table, people want to confirm it." You'll see why it is so important to play devil's advocate, if you aim to overcome dangerous assumptions about things like the economy, your target audience, market timing and technological disruption.
Paul and I discuss why most people don't understand the role of luck in business. When we succeed, we assume it's because we're super-smart people and when we fail, we point to all the specific things that caused the unfavorable result. Paul talks about the difference between Michal Dell, Bill Gates and how timing and pivoting are critical, especially if you arrive late to the game in a specific market trend.
"While you never know exactly what the payback is going to be from your decisions, I think if you can somehow stay as flexible and be as intellectually honest as Bill Gates was, then you're going to be in a position where you can pivot from whatever you're doing now to whatever's going to be even more successful in the future."
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Dustin Burleson:
Hi. It's Dustin. We're here for this month's Burleson Box. This month, we're interviewing Paul Carroll, who wrote and edited for The Wall Street Journal for 17 years. He also wrote Billion Dollar Lessons, the topic of our conversation today. It's a New York Times bestseller, as is his book Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, a major bestseller published in 1993. He's been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Magazine Award for Excellence. Today, Paul's the CEO and editor-in-chief of Insurance Thought Leadership. He's also the co-author of today's book, Billion Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn From The Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years. Let's dig into the interview now, this month on The Burleson Box.
Dustin Burleson:
Paul, thanks for being here today.
Paul Carroll:
You bet. Pleasure to be here.
Dustin Burleson:
When I got your book, Billion Dollar Lessons, I read it years ago. I saw notes in the margins from almost eight years ago when I went back through, and it's just as relevant today as it was when I first read it. I'm impressed because so many books, they go an inch deep and a foot wide, and yours goes a mile wide and a mile deep. You look at over 2,500 failures and publicly-traded companies and then you dissect it out, the 750 most profound. Then, you spent a year just looking at the data. So, I joked with you. I said this book costs 15 bucks on Amazon, but you could easily charge $15,000 for the book, so...
Paul Carroll:
I'll... I'll take it.
Dustin Burleson:
Yes. Mail the checks to...
Paul Carroll:
Yeah, exactly.
Dustin Burleson:
Tell us about the inspiration for the book and all the hours you put into creating it.
Paul Carroll:
Sure. So, it partly came out of my experience at The Wall Street Journal. I started covering IBM back in 1986 when it was the darling of the world. In fact, shortly before I showed up, the Journal had done a special section on how great IBM was, and by the time I stopped covering the company in 1993, there were discussions about how the company might even have to file for bankruptcy because things had gone south so quickly. So then, I wrote the book, wound up in Mexico as the bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal. Mexico, when I went down there, was the darling of the developing world. Within about a year and a half, it had devalued its currency. Its economy crashed. South American economy crashed. The worry was that the U.S. economy was going to crash, and actually, the U.S. bailed out Mexico as a result.
Paul Carroll:
So, I became acutely aware that not every tree grows to the sky and began understanding at a very deep level, because I watched it day in and day out, how failure can happen to anybody. So then, I went off and became a partner at this consulting firm and did some things, and at one point as I was reading business literature, I realized that Jim Collins had done a great job of looking at success stories, distilling the essence and saying, "Here's how to be like those guys." But nobody had ever done a systematic look at failure and said, "Here's how not to be like those guys."
Paul Carroll:
And in my experience, it certainly was clear that failure happens and that if you're going to look at a problem, you really look at... You need to look at both sides, not just the upside. So, that was the inspiration and initially, a partner of mine from Diamond, who'd done a very successful book called Unleashing the Killer App, which was kind of the bible of the internet days, and I thought we would just sort of do reflections. We'd been around for a while, so these would be sort of Paul and Chunka's excellent adventures and we'd tell people how to worry about failure. And we learned that Collins had upped the ante, so you had to do real research. So, we then settled in, got our friends at Diamond to give us these 20 people for almost two years, looked through all the data, supplemented with lots of interviews and so forth. And it was easily the hardest project I've ever been involved in, but is probably the work I've done that I'm proudest of.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. It's evident within the first few sentences and looking at the references. So many people will grab a book at the airport about business and it's a story or it's someone's opinion. But, I mean, this really is founded in research. I could not possibly imagine the countless hours that went into it. But thank you for doing it because it's extremely helpful to anyone who's read it.
Paul Carroll:
You bet. And it seems to actually have legs. I mean, it's continuing to sell even though it's been out for going on 10 years now. I don't know that we'll ever need to go back and update it because it turns out that business people follow a line that was quoted a lot at The Wall Street Journal. The line was that there are no new stories, just new reporters, and it seems that there are no new business mistakes, just new people to make them. So, the mistakes are really the same, even though it's been almost 10 years.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. We think things are different, with technology, certainly. They feel different. The pace is different. But humans have been making the same behavioral mistakes for millennia and your book really... It kind of capitulates a lot of what I see with small business, medium-sized business, even friends of mine that own larger businesses.
Paul Carroll:
Yep.
Dustin Burleson:
We get in a trap. One of those is what you describe, the error of staying the misguided course. And frankly, I think it's something that our profession as dentists and orthodontists has been guilty of for a long, long time. So, talk about the mistakes you see business leaders making when it comes to what you call staying the misguided course.
Paul Carroll:
Sure. So, as we went through the book, we identified different sorts of strategies that were most commonly associated with failure and there were seven of them, of which staying the misguided course was one. And I think they're probably a couple of reasons for it. But the way it shows up mostly is that people work really hard, they solve the problems as they're building a business and then they get sort of comfortable. They're making some money. They're happy. They have their routine down and so forth. And change is uncomfortable enough that people tend to want to believe that what they're doing is the sort of thing they're going to be able to continue to do. Fortunately, there now have been enough failure stories like Kodak, which thought that people really wanted to get their photographs in little yellow boxes and never quite understood that my kids were going to be very happy just taking pictures with their phones and send them around and posting them on websites and so forth, without ever getting anywhere near chemicals or film or paper.
Paul Carroll:
So, now there's some examples that people can point to, but it's still really hard. One of the things that struck me the most was the time back in the late nineties when I was in the office of the CEO of Sears and I was trying to tell him that maybe he ought to pay attention to this little thing called the internet and he was saying that, oh, they were fine. And he was just convinced that he didn't really need to do anything different because he really understood his customers. And that's just the kind of thing that shows up far too often. I think part of the reason is that, as I said, people get comfortable. They just don't like having to try to change.
Paul Carroll:
In some cases, I think people are actually making pretty calculated decisions. In the case of this Arthur Martinez, I think what he was really saying is that he was going to retire in a few years and Sears wasn't going to have to do anything within that timeframe, so why was he going to invest a bunch of money over the next few years and try to set things up super-well for a successor when it wasn't going to make any difference to him?
Paul Carroll:
So, yeah. There have to be ways to get outside the blinders that people set up for themselves and understand that just because something has worked well in the past does not... It doesn't mean it's not going to work in the future, but it certainly means that you have to be aware of the possibilities that things could change, perhaps even fairly drastically.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. In hindsight now, Sears obviously... Amazon is kind of an electronic version of what they were disrupting so long ago, where you could buy so many different things from one place. I don't know if you remember the mail-order houses. You could actually order a pre-fab house from Sears. And now, they've forgotten that they were disrupting or leading an insurgency against the way things used to be.
Paul Carroll:
Right. I actually knew a guy who lived in one of those houses. A guy, very senior guy. He was at McKinsey when I knew him. Started a very smart company. And he lives in a house that was bought for $500 by a professor at Stanford back in the early 1900s.
Dustin Burleson:
That's awesome.
Paul Carroll:
So, yeah. I'm very aware of those.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. We all forget that a lot of this has been done before. And even the own companies forget what they started as. And you're right. The take home there for everyone listening is when we become comfortable, right? So, most companies are so outward-facing when they start, hyper-focused on the customer, as Jeff Bezos was and still continues to be with Amazon at this recording. And then they become inward-facing, where they get comfortable and complacent.
Paul Carroll:
One of the startling stats I found in Billion Dollar Lessons was that 80% of executives at a company thought that their customers valued them significantly more than the competition and only 8% of customers agreed.
Dustin Burleson:
See, those are uncomfortable truths that no one wants to admit.
Paul Carroll:
Yeah.
Dustin Burleson:
And no one really wants to surround themselves with smart people like you who ask good questions like, "Have you heard about this thing called the internet?" Right? Going back to Blockbuster and their opportunity to buy Netflix for next to nothing, and now looking what a false assumption it was that people would continue to drive to a store and rent DVDs because, quote, we know our customer and our customers want physical DVDs. They don't want to stream online. And how that rapidly deteriorated as an assumption. So...
Paul Carroll:
Exactly.
Dustin Burleson:
I mean, I'm sure you saw at IBM, where it's like, "We don't want to hear something that doesn't agree with our misguided course. We don't want to hear something that doesn't make the board or the CEO happy." Or in the instance, as you mentioned, with Sears, I don't want to think about something that's even past the time when I retire. A dangerous position to be in. So...
Paul Carroll:
Yep.
Dustin Burleson:
Again, great... Great lessons in the book. Something that struck me as incredibly profound in the book that no one things about, and you mentioned it in the intro, is that when we look about all the opportunities to grow or to acquire or to consolidate, everyone's quick to point all the upsides. No one's ever happy to talk about the downsides or what might go wrong. So, what are some of the things you see either small or either larger firms doing to avoid this pitfall of only looking at the upside?
Paul Carroll:
The biggest thing is what we call the devil's advocate. That's actually the reason that we started a consulting firm that we called The Devil's Advocate Group, because once an idea gets on the table, especially in big companies because so many people are trying to be nice to the king, the CEO. But even in small companies, once an idea gets on the table, people want to confirm it. And the way we put it in the book is that basically, you have to take a more scientific approach. So, sure, you come up with a theorem and then you're going to test it, but you separate the testing from the theorem, and what tends to happen in business is that people want to do it all at once. So, the first time an idea is out on the table, somebody says, "Do you think that's a good idea?" Well, maybe, maybe not. Let's look at the evidence.
Paul Carroll:
But you don't know enough at that point to make the decision, so what you need to do is find some way to have some person assigned the task of saying, "Okay. Maybe this is a good idea, but let's look at the assumptions. We're assuming the economy is going to do this. We're assuming the customers are going to do this. We're assuming competitors are going to do this. We're going to assume whatever." And these days, customers are actually changing quite a bit, even if they aren't, say, consuming dentistry any differently than they did before. Certainly with their phones, they want to be able to handle scheduling and records and all kinds of things differently because Jeff Bezos has spoiled them and competitors conceivably could be doing some other things as well because these days, distance doesn't matter quite as much as it did before, so maybe people can be expanding what they would think of as their traditional territories or whatever.
Paul Carroll:
But you need to have somebody who is articulating. Now, it could just be you doing this sort of at a different time. But if you have somebody who's knowledgeable, you could have that person come in and say, "Okay, just so you know, these are the things you're assuming. Let's evaluate those assumptions." And reasonably, often, when you do that, you find that some assumption is different than it was when you started out.
Paul Carroll:
Chunka and I just finished a big consulting project with a company involved in autonomous cars and they got very excited a couple of years ago when they did some studies assuming enormous profits because the cost of autonomous cars were going to be so low. Now, the costs look like they're going to be about five times what the initial assumption was, and the assumption was still running around at this very large, very successful company that the profits were going to be as big as people assumed at the beginning, even though, obviously, just doing the math, you would know that they weren't.
Paul Carroll:
So, the biggest thing I'd recommend would be to somehow introduce a devil's advocate into the process to make sure that you're as explicit as you can be about what has to go right for your plan to work.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. That's a common theme I see with offices, the doctors who... Some of our clients are running two and a half million dollar businesses. Some are running $20 million business. But their assumption that adding or consolidating or acquiring is going to end in these end results often is shockingly disproven. But also, right? They usually start by testing things that are probably almost guaranteed to work out anyway. So, a dentist who acquires another dentist... Unless you really screw that up, and expand market share.
Dustin Burleson:
What I think is fascinating are groups that will test assumptions real rapidly and starting with things that they don't know will work, right? So, I remember a case study with the people that ran the company Rent the Runway. So, we're going to start now. Instead of buying new fashion, women are... We're going to test this assumption that women might actually rent a fancy dress for a special occasion and then send it back so they always have the latest fashion in their closets. And I don't remember the gentleman's name that proposed the initial idea, but he said, "We're not even going to build the website. We're not even going to... We're not even going to test the assumption that we could sell stuff online, because we could probably do that. Let's test the assumption we can even get women to shift their mind to renting high fashion as opposed to owning."
Dustin Burleson:
And so, they found some influencers and just started literally direct mailing and direct outbound sales calls and saying, "What do you think of this idea?" And they found real quick they had a huge following and checked off the list an assumption, I think, that was a lot riskier, and didn't even build the website at first. I thought that was a fascinating approach and I'm confident they had a whole host of devil's advocates in that room.
Paul Carroll:
Right.
Dustin Burleson:
Pushing against the status quo. Yeah.
Paul Carroll:
And that's super smart and I'm happy to steal that as an example for other things that I do, because our mantra in The New Killer Apps is think big, start small, learn fast. And that's a perfect illustration of that because obviously these guys started with a big idea, but rather than spend a whole bunch of money on it, they just started testing the things that they could. So, they started really small, not spending money, learned super-fast and... I mean, my daughter, for a senior deal in college, just rented something. I don't know whether it was from that company. But it may very well be that they even ensnared me in this because they were very smart about how they approached the business.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah. There's a whole host of competitors that have popped up now because of their guts to test an assumption that was riskier than, "Well, I guess we'll acquire another thing that looks just like us." Right? So, I mean, Sears could easily be convinced to do things that look and sound and feel just like Sears, but testing the assumption like Bezos, selling everything to everyone online, totally different level of people in the room saying, "Well, have you thought about this? What if that doesn't work?"
Paul Carroll:
Yep.
Dustin Burleson:
So... One of the huge lessons from the book we're talking about today with Paul Carroll from Billion Dollar Lessons is this ability to think about not just upside, but to think in entirety and to think about the potential downsides as well. In the book, you talk about this confirmation bias, right? Or what we teach clients as the fallacy of success. In other words, because you succeeded somewhere as an entrepreneur at some point in your life, you probably had to prove someone wrong. Maybe it was a banker. Maybe it was a competitor. Maybe it was your mother-in-law. I don't know who you had to prove wrong. But because you succeeded, then, as an entrepreneur, you assume that you'll continue to be right in the future. So, share with the listeners of the program today what they can do now to strengthen the odds that they will continue to succeed in the future.
Paul Carroll:
This is a really interesting problem and the thinking actually seems to evolve some over the last 10 years or so, so I think there maybe are some exercises that people can do just to stretch their minds a little bit. I was recently involved in helping the top three strategy guys at McKinsey write a book called Strategy Beyond The Hockey Stick. It has an interesting little section in there. People could also look at the work of Daniel Kahneman and maybe some of these other behavioral economists because one of the things that people don't seem, just in their cores, to understand nearly as well as they should is the role of luck. So, when we succeed, we assume it's because we're super-smart people, and when we fail, we point to all the specific things. But we don't seem to understand that we also are often beneficiaries of good things when we succeed.
Paul Carroll:
So, some of the exercises people can do, for instance, is to try to see how good they are at actually predicting things, and you'll find pretty quickly that you aren't. These guys, for instance, had people try to remember how old Martin Luther King was when he was assassinated and would say, "All right. You can set as big a range as you want. Just make sure you have a 90% chance of being right." And something like 20% of the people who did this exercise were actually right, that he was something like 38 or 39 when he was killed. So, once you understand the role of luck, then I think you come at things with just a little healthier viewpoint.
Paul Carroll:
I was always amazed. When I was at The Wall Street Journal, I would have all kinds of people come through my office and I'd see the Michael Dells of the world who were obviously, at that point, already very successful. But then I'd see somebody else and I'd think, "Well, that guy's at least as smart as Dell is. Why isn't he as successful?" And it turns out that there are... Just are a whole bunch of things that have to come together for somebody to be a rip-roaring success the way Dell has been.
Paul Carroll:
So, I would say if you can just somehow figure out a way to go through some of these exercises related to confirmation bias and attribution bias and so forth and so on, then you'll just have a much more realistic expectation and set yourself up better for success. That's a little bit of a rambling answer, but I hope something's in there for people.
Dustin Burleson:
No, it's spot on. We talk a lot with clients about the false assumption that the number of zeroes in a bank account equals a higher intelligence level, right? It's common in society. It's common even in people who own businesses. We see someone who's been massively successful and we never contribute luck, timing, market. There's things we can do in Oklahoma that don't work in New York City and vice versa when it comes to markets, and there's things in different cultures and different countries that work and don't work. But we assume because someone's a success that everything they've done has been right and been perfect and we don't attribute, like you said, anything to luck, and that's a dangerous place to be, both because you see... You see things that don't work and you then attribute that to yourself.
Dustin Burleson:
As a small business owner, you might think, "Well, gosh, that failed, so now I'm a failure." Or, "That doesn't work in my market, so it'll never work in my market." And we assume that we're stuck. And so, I think you're spot on.
Dustin Burleson:
Talk about the difference you see between some of these people. So, for example, when you met a young Michael Dell and watching how quickly that grew, and even now, today, some of the cool things he's been doing, versus someone who, as you mentioned, every bit as smart but for whatever reason didn't see that same level of success. Talk about some differences between what you might consider a good leader or a great leader and how they make decisions in their businesses.
Paul Carroll:
The leadership thing is a tricky one because, as the author of Cutting For Stone wrote, we live life forward and we interpret it backward. So, you only really know for sure that somebody is a great leader a fair while afterward, when you make sure things didn't blow up. Jack Welch was seen as the leader of all leaders and then GE basically blew up in the Great Recession because it turned out a lot of what he'd done was smoke and mirrors with a finance entity that couldn't withstand a major problem. His successor, Jeff Immelt, was lauded as just a great guy and now he's being trashed after being pushed out of GE at a much earlier age than people expected.
Paul Carroll:
So... And that's... That's a little tricky. But in my experience, the great leaders are the ones who can make a change. So, I would tell you Michael Dell was mostly lucky. I met him when he was about 22 years old. He, at that point, wanted to talk to The Wall Street Journal because he was trying very hard to get his computers into retail stores. And if he had done that, we never would have heard of him. He succeeded so well because he was the best of the guys who weren't in the stores, so when the internet came along, he didn't have to blow up any relationships with stores and he could go full on into the internet. He was an entrepreneurial guy who positioned himself well, took full advantage of his opportunity when he came along. But fundamentally, his strategy was lucky.
Paul Carroll:
I would say that somebody like Bill Gates is just brilliant, and the most courageous thing he did, I think, was to decide that he was staying the misguided course, to use the term we discussed, and was not paying enough attention to the internet. So he, once a year, would have what he called his Think Week where he would just disappear and try to revisit assumptions. He came back from one of these in, I don't know, '94 or '95, and decided that the company was late on the internet. So, he wrote a memo that basically said, "Okay. We're in danger of missing it. We're not going to miss it. We're going to do all kinds of stuff."
Paul Carroll:
So, it's... You never entirely know what the payback is going to be from your decisions, but I think if you can somehow stay as flexible and be as intellectually honest as Gates was, then you're going to be in a position where you can probably pivot from whatever you're doing now to whatever's going to be even more successful in the future.
Dustin Burleson:
Yeah, I'd agree. And Gates, one of the greatest thinkers of our time, possibly one of the greatest business leaders ever. I love to... He has a wonderful website where he reviews the books that he's been reading and he's doing, obviously, some amazing things with philanthropy, both him and Buffett. And I remember a story... I hope it's true. I'm going to repeat it from a book I think I read about Gates where... He's such a good thinker that in the time it took him to go from his car to his house, so from the car, walking through the garage and getting into the house... He didn't want to waste that time, so he had a map of Africa installed so that for the 30 seconds when he was turning his car off and walking to the house, he had something to think about, right? And probably profoundly impacted his decision to go and attempt to rid the world of malaria and to do the things he's doing overseas in philanthropy.
Dustin Burleson:
And that's... That kind of always on, not resting on your laurels, not staying the misguided course, always thinking what's next. And to see what Microsoft has done and continues to do, that's the type of thought required, right? To say, "Hey, we missed it, but now we're going to fix it. We're going to stay true to the core but also flexible enough that we can adapt." And I've said for years, if Walmart and Amazon and Sears could have done dentistry... They needed a license to do it in most states. But if they could have, every dentist would be working for them because of our insistence in usual circumstances or professions like dentistry, chiropractic, dermatology, cardiology, where we have this set path and the minute you admit that you're wrong, that's the most fearful thing for a doctor to do because they've been career students, and as career students, their biggest fear is the fear of failing.
Dustin Burleson:
And smart people like Bill Gates, smart people like you and the people you review in the book, can see past that. So, I totally agree. I think it's a great, great point.
Dustin Burleson:
I know we're getting close. We kind of have a limited amount of time and I appreciate you being here today. I'd love to let anyone listening find you or find out more about you. Where can they go or any closing comments you have for those listening today?
Paul Carroll:
Well, first, I appreciate the opportunity. I think what you're doing is great here and of course, any fan of Billion Dollar Lessons is a friend of mine. I'll tell you that that's a true story about Gates. I actually have not been in his garage, but I've spent enough time with him over the years and seen him do enough things similar to that and have heard that story from a number of people, so I'm quite sure it's true.
Dustin Burleson:
Cool.
Paul Carroll:
In terms of me, Chunka, the guy I've been writing a lot with over the last few years, and I are tentatively started on another book that we're calling Future Perfect. Basically, we're trying to look at the technology trends, which we follow a lot, and imagine what a best possible world would look like 20 years out if we apply technology trends. So, the title may change. It may never see the light of day. But people might keep an eye out in a year or so to see if Chunka and I do manage to write this book called Future Perfect.
Paul Carroll:
Beyond that, there's a site that I run called Insurance Thought. That's not necessarily a topic of great interest to you and your folks, but if people go there and sign up for the weekly newsletter, I do include a fair number of thoughts about innovation in general. Basically, I wound up involved in insurance because I've seen almost all other parts of the economy get turned upside down by digital technology, and insurance is a very important area that hasn't really been touched yet, so I've offered some thoughts on innovation there, and if people just sign up, they'll get a newsletter from me every Tuesday morning. That's about it.
Dustin Burleson:
One I highly recommend. I've taught clients for years that all of our best ideas have come from outside of our industry, right? If you get a bunch of orthodontists together, a bunch of dermatologists today, it's a lot of monkey see, monkey do. And when you get outside of that... And I will say that your site and your Facebook page and the newsletter are great in looking at an area that... And seeing how you talk to the people who are interested in that is smart to do, and I've learned way more hanging out with people in real estate or insurance or finance or even car sales than I've ever learned from hanging out with people that look and sound and talk just like I do, that like teeth.
Dustin Burleson:
So, Paul, it's an honor to have you today. We appreciate you being here. We'll keep an eye out for the book and if it changes, the title, we'll let everyone know. We'll make sure they're on the list. But if you're listening to this, you're receiving a copy of the Billion Dollar Lessons from Paul Carroll. It's one of my favorite books of all time in business and I agree, it has legs. It'll stand the test of time and you should get it and consume it and make notes and go back every year and review your notes. It's that good of a book. So, to that end, Paul, thank you for being here and thanks for writing the book. I appreciate it.
Paul Carroll:
Thank you. It was great talking to you.
Dustin Burleson:
All right. Have a great day. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll talk to you next time. Bye bye.
Dustin Burleson:
You've been listening to another episode of The Burleson Box, where we bring you and your team leaders into the conversation with today's best authors and business leaders. If you enjoyed today's program, please share us with a friend or colleague. Visit theburlesonbox.com, where you can sign up to receive my monthly reading list and action guides for each of the books and authors we interview. As a member of the program, we invite you to send The Burleson Box to your referring doctors and centers of influence. Call us at 1-800-891-7520 to discuss how The Burleson Box has worked for many successful organizations throughout the world, and be sure to listen each month for chances to win fun prizes and practice building resources for you and your team.
Dustin Burleson:
Until next time, remember the words of Mark Twain, who said, "A man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read." Go. Make it a great month and I'll see you right here next time in The Burleson Box.