The Wicked Podcast

Perry Timms: The Energized Workplace

April 21, 2021 web@thewickedcompany.com Episode 42
The Wicked Podcast
Perry Timms: The Energized Workplace
Show Notes Transcript

We talk to Perry Timms about 'Peak Work' and treating the positive energy of your workforce as a value.

Author page: https://www.pthr.co.uk/
Book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Energized-Workplace-Designing-Organizations-Flourish/dp/1789661072

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'Inspired' by Kevin MacLeod
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Music: 'Inspired' by Kevin MacLeod Song: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3918-inspired License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Marcus Kirsch:

Welcome to the wicked podcast where we read the business books you don't have time for. I'm Marcus Kirsch. And I'm Troy Norcross. And we are your co hosts for the wicked podcast.

Troy Norcross:

All right, Marcus, can you tell anything different about maybe a haircut? Maybe like new new beard trim?

Marcus Kirsch:

Maybe you just set Oh, yeah, you look slicker than ever. 10 years younger.

Troy Norcross:

That's what I want to hear. And I'm really sorry, Marcus. I'm so sorry. That the lovely Alona brought you home a president of a cold?

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, I'm a little bit under the weather, but nearly back out of it. So when it's not COVID Thank God. So.

Troy Norcross:

Yeah, the thing is, for our listeners, you're willing to go the extra mile, and we're gonna keep recording even if you've got a gold, right?

Marcus Kirsch:

I yeah, I take on sitting here in my chair, as usual, just with a bit more. Vic Viper up smeared across my nose

Troy Norcross:

was better than what you whiskey in your hand. But that's another whole topic for another day of the show today.

Marcus Kirsch:

So on today's show, we have Perry Tim's and his book, The energised workplace. And it was really lovely discussion. I think he's a great guy, and the books really lovely. And what were your takeaways?

Troy Norcross:

You know, I'm a huge fan of the quote around Milton Friedman and get to maximise shareholder value. And it really kind of dawned on me during the discussions today, that employee energy is another resource. And if all we're trying to do is return value to shareholders, we're going to extract that employee energy and try to convert that into shareholder value. It's not a long term sustainable strategy. So to business leaders and to people, employees and leaders look, employee energy, it's not another resource to exploit. The other thing is, and it was great for him to say, and I'll let him tell the story during the interview that he and the publisher had to have words about it. But he included the Eastern philosophy about chakras, and the various chakras of energy centres within the body. And I think that's really, really great. So you know what I believe it does have, because if we know nothing else, we're always being told that meditation is a key part of overall wellness. And I really think that if you can focus and bring meditation and well being and the energy of the chakras together, you can we build a better workforce? And those were my two takeaways, what about you?

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, and I will approach it, as much as I agree with your takeaways approach it from a slightly more, we'll say, financial level, maybe not. But what I've seen a lot in my practice is, when you bring service design or design thinking to companies, you know, you don't pay attention to what you don't measure, you know, and if you've never measured it before, you're having a hard time selling it to into an organisation. And I think it's the same with this right? The aspects of your workforce and people and how to maintain that energy. And if you if you don't measure it, if you don't measure both positive and negative impact of your actions, you won't do anything about it. So my takeaway, essentially, is that he said, and I challenged him a bit on that with the question is, you know, do we need a particular person to bring that to the company, and it's like, well, you know, someone needs to own it. And you need to bring it in in terms of starting to figure out how to measure it. And the way you measure it is that you actually connect the pieces that are already happening that you can evidence to potentially a financial impact and that sometimes gets an organisation taking the first step towards it, not unlike what I saw with a sustainability client of mine, where we looked at energy savings in that, but beyond that monetary benefit, what that energy benefit, they did not register the extra value, which is the fact that the company was investing in sustainability in those positive mindset positively impacted their retention rate, attracting better talent, which you can calculate into into money saved or more value gathered or more value representing to the outside world. You can put numbers on this. And when you start doing that you realise you're doing actually more than you think with some things that aren't often measured in that way or aren't often measured at all. So try to measure more, and try to find the connections is my big takeaway in order to get to that into that space that is so valuable. So that's my takeaway there.

Troy Norcross:

what gets measured, gets managed. And I'm measuring that it's four minutes and 55 seconds in the intro. And that means we're almost at the limits of what should we do Marcus,

Marcus Kirsch:

you should go to the interview. Hello, everyone, today, we're here with Perry term's. Hello, Perry. Welcome to the show.

Perry Timms:

Hello, there. Great to be.

Marcus Kirsch:

So as usual, we start from the top. So in order to get a bit of context, please tell our listeners, who you are and why you wrote the book.

Perry Timms:

Fantastic. Thank you. Yes. So I'm an independent practitioner that you could say operates in HR. But I like to think it's a lot more than that. the kind of work that the team and I do is largely around helping people create their best selves at work. And by virtue of that we help with the performance of organisations, and they've got a sustainable method of keeping on top of all the challenges, I guess, that we both expected and didn't expect, in the last few years and months and years. And yet, we're global. We've got clients in all sectors, and we adopt, I suppose an approach that looks at human centred design, and try and develop organisations, I guess, so that they are prepared for the future, but they're performing well now. And the reason for writing the book. So I've had a fascination with energy for a while, and it's in my job title, Chief energy officer. Possibly, because I've developed a sense of enthusiasm for what I do. I worked in the civil service in the UK, and the court wasn't always the happiest place to be because we were dealing with things like bankruptcies and repossessions. And yet, I saw the role there as helping create safe and protected ways for people to seek justice, so I could see the good in it. And I would go on training courses with my colleagues, and they would all be moaning about boring or workloads or whatever. And I'd be sitting there thinking I'm the only one who really enjoys this. Anyway, so that's kind of stuck with me throughout my career. And then as I guess, as I got into the realms of being a freelancer, and the ups and downs of that world, I still found myself loving it, even though there were times when I'm thinking, where's my next invoice coming in, right? And so I'm thinking, how have I got so much energy for my work here, I see so many people in a state of zombification, literally trembling through life, and only coming alive after work. And I thought, there's something wrong, I did some research, I went to speak to some companies, I got this sense that it's poor design that has created this kind of, I suppose you'd say sort of burden that people have for work. And I thought, well, if we've designed it that badly, we can undesigned it or redesign it, so that it becomes a flourishing experience. And that was the essence really for the whole book.

Troy Norcross:

Interesting. So you reference energy in so many different ways throughout the book, and I find it really interesting that you kind of pull energy as as a thing. And one of the things that we talked about this, and I talked about a lot on the show is the Milton Friedman notion that the only reason for capitalism is to maximise shareholder value, allegedly within the rules. And over a period of the last, you know, 40 or 50 years since the late 70s. We've found that capitalism continues to go to its natural extremes, and pillage and plunder natural resources and society and goodwill, etc, etc, etc. And it came to me and I was talking about it with with Marcus, just before you came on onto the show. Really, employee energy is another resource that is being pillaged and plummeted, you know, by capitalism, in its attempt to deliver shareholder value. And it does create the situation where people are drained. How, as organisations, can leaders and or CEOs or even boards of directors, move the needle away from pure what I call shareholder capitalism to more of a balance to stakeholder capitalism, that includes the employee and put some energy back in instead of just taking energy out.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah.

Perry Timms:

Yeah, I mean, it's a terrific question. Thank you. I think the thing I'll say about it is there is a dawning movement and a realisation that you use the word balance and it absolutely has to be about balance. So the Business Roundtable declaration in 2019, really enamoured me because Because it stated explicitly that it wasn't just shareholder value, it was quite literally trying to detach from Friedman's declaration. And so I think that's come through a number of different lenses, I suppose. So I'm really fascinated by the B Corp movement that is continuing to grow across the world. And they will absolutely advocate that this is a whole system's there. I'm also interested in economic theories, whether it's Thomas Piketty, or whether it's actually the donor economics theory of Kate Ray worth, who talks about the overshoot of the earth and just staggeringly bad, non regenerative processes. So I guess I'm drawn to companies who stand in that space. And we all know some of the big names of this, like Patagonia as an example, who genuinely emit a sense that you can be successful in a capitalist system, but that you don't have to be only extractive and reductive about what you do with the resources that you have. So they very firmly stand behind their proposition, you know, Yvon Chouinard says, Let My People surf right. So. So he's pretty much saying we can look at people as not just depletable resources as a but as a duty of care, to look after them so that they regenerate, because actually, we'll get more value from so I'm really seeing a shift. I was inspired a little bit by an Oxford cyhi Business School professor, Colin Mayer wrote a book called prosperity. So I was drawn to it, I really wanted to understand what he meant by that term. And he said, we've got the lenses of value, quite distinctly sort of corrupted towards financial only when really there is there are five others, human, social, material, intellectual, and natural. And I can remember, in the UK, there was a council in the city of Sheffield, who put a financial value on their trees, because they recognise they're both sort of natural beauty but also oxygenation. You know, they literally, were saying, We've got to put a value on our tree. So if we cut one down, that means we've got to think about the depletion of breathable air in this city. And I'm liking that kind of narrative. So I think it's it's still a lot of an outlier sort of principle, but I think it's becoming more mainstream.

Troy Norcross:

I, before Marcus comes in, I can tell he wants to jump in quickly. I think it's really great that they're starting to actually put numbers on those things. Because, you know, with the best will in the world, towards accountants and CFOs, and FDS. If they can't put a number in a spreadsheet, they don't have any way to communicate up or down. So finding that that tangible numeric equivalent is really, really important. Yeah,

Unknown:

yeah, totally. Right.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, and I think I think, to to to start with the numbers, but then maybe drive this further. So my question is, is 10, exactly. If it's not to financial anymore? If it's not the CFO anymore? Who holds all that in his box of gold? Is it is it? Who wouldn't? Who would be sort of 10 the first person to start doing this? And there's obviously, you know, I take your title. And there's other titles that have tried to be created to, you know, Chief people, officer and whatnot? Is it then those people who have to sort of start with it? Or do you think it makes more sense to get these things differently onto the board and actually, instead introduce something you know what, our one page report of the month will include a number or a colour or anything to visualise that value? So what what's what's what what's what have you seen what people actually done? Because, you know, I've been in a lot of different positions where it was about innovation and other aspects. And you given the label and you put in there amongst 400 other people, and no one really listens. In the end, what's your what's your observations?

Perry Timms:

So my observation is that it isn't rich enough, in the way you're describing? I'd love to see. I mean, I think just to answer your point about ownership, I think you're absolutely right, that what we've got to create is people who stand in the space of this is my function, and this is the value I create. And it won't always equate to a financial value. However, we can connect it to financial value, but there is more at play. And I think we've got to get better having those conversations so that we can truly balanced scorecard. I'll give you one example. Actually, there is a toy manufacturer in the US called Mattel. And what they've managed to secure is that each operational leader so whether it's a vice president or president of a function has a number of different success criteria in their business plan. But their primary first second or third goals that they have to report on are all about people, their own people, their supply chain, and I guess the community, then they have financial returns product investment in r&d. And I really love that because that's a commitment to saying right? No matter what the First goals we're going to talk about are huge goals. That might sound just like a reordering of the priorities. But I think it's simple. I think it says Mattel as a company is recognising that without people to both purchase the product, build the product, sell the products, and advocate the products. It's not worth it.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, and I go on Marcus Sacco, just a quick wrap up for that one, because, and I just did an exercise on that for a client of mine and a deal on sustainability. For there was interesting to see when we did some research that actually what they're doing is not just and sorry, it upon, you know, saving energy in terms of literally, you know, carbon emissions and saving energy. But actually, people who want to work for a company or has a clear sustainability plan and efforts, they're more likely to, to to hire the right people, or better people, because people want to go there, because they're better companies. So what we've managed to do there actually is translate some of that into some of that will impact your retention rate. And your retention rate, there's a number behind it, that will cost you a few 1000 a year, we can actually bring that down by just doing this stuff. And it's it's it's it's exactly as you said, it's about start tying these things up and evidencing that there is a correlation Actually, that's brilliant.

Unknown:

Sorry, trying to get to here.

Troy Norcross:

So back to your point that you were starting to say, you know, people, Mattel and of course, being an American from Missouri, I know Mattel very well grew up with a lot of the television of toys, it's great to hear that those kinds of things happened. Use an expression in the book called peak work. So how does that kind of map into this kind of human kind of centred kind of employee focused and yet still getting people work? How do you how do you align those two?

Perry Timms:

Yeah, so I kind of stole the phrase a little bit where I heard about the whole, I guess, you take game of commerce and the production of money. So it was a speaker from Triodos Bank who talks about a concept, I think, of peak lending. And what he said is quite literally, that if we all paid our debts back, the whole economic system would collapse, because money only comes into existence when we go into debt. And I'd never been taught that before. So this term peak lending, I was like, wow, that's incredible. Like, there is no point in lending anymore. But actually, we still have to, because otherwise the thing will collapse. So So I took the peak concept into the working environment. And what I was seeing, so this is like my 30 plus years in the workspace, is that people were reporting 6080 plus hours per week, regularly in all sorts of areas, not just first year graduates at Goldman Sachs, which is so very apt at the moment. But people in health care people in emergency services, people in retail people doing two or three jobs, because they begin with deliver ruined, whatever, whatever. And I'm like how on earth have we got to that situation because some research will tell you that labour saving devices have probably given us about 50% of our former out of work time back, but we filled it with work now. I love what I do. And I don't really put a clock on it. But there are lots of people who are doing it because they have to not because they want to. And I got the sense that we've got no more left to give. We've hit Pete work, we can't expect people to work 120 hours a week, even Goldman Sachs have now reneged on their previous 100 hour mantra. So I'm just thinking, we've got to redress the balance. And in a TEDx talk, I talked about unplugging from the matrix, because that's absolutely what it felt like we are just being depleted, and there's no more left. So we've got to unplug. Now, that could cause the whole thing to collapse. But I think we've got an opportunity to redesign so that we think differently about the energy we have how we use it, so that we don't work more but we just work cleverer, more in harmony with our mind, spirit and actual sort of intellect.

Marcus Kirsch:

You You have a bit of you have a section in there where you're looking at your into the crystal ball of 2050. And so very interesting. So can you tell us a little bit more about pro topia, in contrast to what we hear in the media today in the very full forms of dystopia and the books of tonight and seven, these utopian those kind of things? Can you elaborate, please on that?

Perry Timms:

Yeah. Thanks, Marcus. Yeah, I guess being a very optimistic dreaming type, I would normally veer towards utopia, I would think, yeah, we can solve this. Even at the beginning of the pandemic. I was thinking, actually, this is going to be incredibly useful for us to decouple from orthodox ways of working and rewire the way that it works. And I still think that even though I see reports of companies, urging their people back into the office and government saying, Oh, well, it'll all go back to how it was. So I guess we constantly get bombarded with a sort of semi dystopian sense that actually we're self destructive and nothing will ever change. Yeah, I do see some phenomenal advancements with social movements and with collective energy and with people rallying behind calls that I'm thinking, the fight isn't over yet the fight probably hasn't even gone. And I discovered the pro topia concept when I read a book about the inevitable in technology from Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired Magazine, and I've never seen the phrase before, but I loved it because I think it captured what I sense is a more pragmatic, realistic and possibly ability led version of the future, rather than a dreamy ideology that actually we're all just get disappointed about if it doesn't arrive Pretty soon, or the constant drudge of dystopia where people are like, Oh, it's never gonna get better. Well, that will be a self fulfilling prophecy. So So pro topia says, incrementally, we can see change, we have to adopt a mindset, which is, is what I'm doing better cleverer, more impactful create more value than yesterday, because if not, it's down to me potentially, to deal with the circumstances, I find myself in and just create almost like a series of micro futures, smaller, achievable, attainable goals. What I was really drawn to it for was because I see the benefit in how software production has shifted. Since the advent of the Agile Manifesto. I used to work in software, not as a programmer, but as a user. And I saw how carelessly bureaucratic and slow and cumbersome and unfulfilling technology development was before agile. Now I see it as this thriving, iterative, constantly improving way of operating. And I guess I just adopted the same approach for the operating system of work that we just need to think about incremental, gradual, gradual, progressive change, rather than huge steps that we always seem to think are going to happen so that we notice it. There's a futurist called Tom cheese, right, and he's got a really nice definition for this. He says, we have a series of low frequency changes, and then the occasional high frequency change. And I think we've seen a high frequency change with remote and homework in in COVID. But we've already seen lots of low frequency changes where internet accessibility and portable technology and so on have given us the chance to work like this. So I think pro topia is low frequency change.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, it's really fascinating, because you can see that in so many other areas, and I'll always wonder if that agile approach in parts came from designers, well, maybe less. But in design, we've done this a lot with prototyping and you know, in product design, goes back to the 60s. So that's been existing a lot of we just try lots of different small variations, and see what works back borderline, doing evolutionary kind of design in a way. And agile does this too. And it's also not quite surprising, because when you look at code and object oriented thing, it's been optimising and working in safe smaller buckets of code has become a standard long before agile was a thing. So and I find it really interesting that this is now applying everywhere else, because things are becoming so complex and becoming wicked problems with high uncertainty levels that you can take bigger risks anymore, you have to take tonnes of small risks. So I'm always fascinated to see how these things are connecting. And that is something everyone can pick up and is quite valuable. So it's a really interesting concept. Yeah.

Perry Timms:

And you're a big fan of Buckminster Fuller's preeminence. And that's what he's been advocating for years. So

Troy Norcross:

yeah, so speaking of energy, and kind of out of characteristics, you talk about the various chakras, and you talk about Iki guy. And I think they're really, really amazing concepts to bring into a concept of discussion about the energised workplace, tell us your experience, and tell us how other people can bring these kind of Eastern methodologies and thinking into their work.

Perry Timms:

Yeah. So I will tell a story that the publisher originally rejected that, and I insisted that it go in, because I'm a very compliant author. But that was so fundamentally important for me. When they rejected it, they said, Look, this has no place in a business book. And I looked at their recent publications, and you've just pushed a whole book out about mindfulness. So I think you can get me a chapter. And they backed away. So that was, right, so so there is a story that I tell in the book, and I'll do a really short version of it here. I met a PhD student who just blew my mind when he told me about a device that could measure quantum energy and human beings, which I had no idea we have regular basis. Yes, yes. So it was from Soviet Russia. So pre glass loss and what it did, it was nodes that were pinned to the fingertips of athletes largely, and it would measure their quantum energy. So If somehow was able to capture that and report on it. Now, clearly, they wanted to know how to read the data. And they found that if they mapped it to the zones of chakra, that it could tell them where there was a likely injury going to occur via an anomaly in the readouts from this device. I mean, it just kind of looking at this guy go, really. And he then tells me two stories. One was an athlete, I think it was a javelin thrower, who was told not to practice because they looked like the report was reported in energy disturbance in their sort of lower left leg. And they kind of ignored it. And guess what happened, they tore the calf muscle. So I'm like, wow. And then this guy tells me that his wife was a dentist. And he had the machine from the original sort of Soviet use. And so he got a friend of his to just, you know, do a read out and put it to the chakras. And there was a kind of anomaly in the facial area. Anyway, it turns out that about three days later, this guy turned up at his wife's dental practice with an abscess. And he's like, oh, my goodness, me this thing worked. Now, I'm not a yoga practitioner. I know a little bit about this area. So I did consult with somebody who was a very, very highly qualified yoga practitioner. And she helped me craft the section about chakras. Because I just thought it needed to come in as a as a way of saying, you know, what, there are some things that we might dismiss, but dismiss at your peril. And this might be one of them. And so it started to unravel in my mind that that leaders particularly are in a position where they're often exhausted, they might feel a little bit like something's not quite right, but they steam on anyway. And then they're making decisions about multimillion dollar mergers and acquisitions after no sleep and really bad chakra energy. And then they wonder why it goes wrong. And I'm kind of thinking it isn't just about intellect, this thing, and it isn't even just about biological essence of energy. There's this false there's this thing. You know, there are sometimes leaders who, you know, have respect for their fellow leaders, but just don't get on. And what they probably have is a misaligned vibration in their chakras that they just don't know how to interpret and read. So there's really interesting things I think about human energy that we we haven't really been able to scientifically explain. But Reiki practitioners and yoga practitioners will tell you this stuff with absolutely, how they can sort of ply their trade, I just found out that it was about a $15 billion business year. I'm like, wow. So that's why it's there. Really, it's there, because it's something to think about.

Troy Norcross:

So to move from Eastern philosophy and yoga practitioners and Reiki, how do we then move to the other extreme, which is the 20, kind of chemical letters associated with the Department of Energy towards the end of the book?

Perry Timms:

Yeah. So I'm really, really wanted people to have a sense that they could read this book and not just go Well, that was interesting, and shut the cover and not change their lives. Now, I discovered I guess, the whole sense of behavioural economics and nudge theory and incremental marginal gains. And I thought, there's something in this that we can do to help people nudge themselves towards a better understanding of their energies. So I interviewed as many people as I could about what things they could track in a journaling exercise at work that sparked their energy. And so some people came back with some reports and said, Look, I was a pretty flat, light day, and I had a really bad conversation. But then somebody sent me something that enabled me to do some research, and I suddenly came to life. And I was like, What was that all about there? And I was suddenly sparked because I was learning something new. And I forgot about my bad instance. And all of a sudden my energy change, and I got through, and I created a sort of breakthrough report. And I'm like, wow, this stuff's interesting. So all of that came back. And I started to kind of categorise it. I thought, How can I represent? I had no idea and I thought kept come up. Because these are almost chemical stimulus, roads, when we learn stuff, when we are complimented, when we are in a discovery phase, when we're taxed by a complex problems that we can intellectually sort of, because I've often wondered, why do people sit and do Sudoku puzzles on a train on a bus? I look at it and think what a pointless exercise but for them, it's a bit of mental gymnastics, and when they've done it, they get a sense of euphoria. So I guess it's all the things that help us shift our physical possession and our mental stimulus. That's why I came up with those things. Some people are stimulated because they go introspectively. And some people are stimulated because they're around other people. So there's a little bit of Jungian theory coming through here, but it wasn't just about that. So once I distilled them down, I wanted to give people some tips and this 20 minute themes just like we can surely find 20 just to work on one thing to help us be the agents of our own kind of energised nature even if the system around system struggle. So that was the thinking behind it. And a few people who have read the book and come back and said, I've started to journal and practice those things, and it has made a difference. So I think it's, it's, it's to be personalised and it's to be explored, but I think it gives people a little bit of something to do.

Marcus Kirsch:

Yeah, it's really like, I think if the last year has taught me anything, it's surely to listen to some of those aspects. More You know, I'm, I'm just on the edge of being a bit more introverted and extra smart as I'm running, you know, with this podcast and things, but the I found that even so I'm always quite comfortable by myself that actually suddenly things were draining more runabout, August last year, and I started with the same things that everything I had picked up running, so I would step out for an hour or something that really cleared my head. And I think now I'm doing this a bit more often in smaller pieces as well, where you just step out. Having worked in the creative sector, as well, and you know, having come up with ideas and problem solving more, you need that, right, you need a break, refocus, sometimes internalising things, reflecting things, and there's a lot of theory on exactly that having reflective moments in any shape or form, helps massively with learning helps massively was focus. And, you know, even on that level, there's definitely something there. So, so that as a little anecdote, I find it really, really, really, really interesting. Nice, but that also sounds like and brings me, I guess to our second last question, I guess, because of time, Troy will follow with the last one there is, it sounds, there's a lot that we have to start with ourselves in ourselves more than maybe trying to have something control from the top or collectively suddenly managed to get 100 people on board or something. So it's a bit in your book? And can you can you comment a bit on that sort of? Maybe starting with yourself? And what's your thoughts on that?

Perry Timms:

Yeah, I guess there's a few things in my mind. And I suppose one of them is the fact that we are in a very sort of individualistic era, I guess, and the technological sort of accesses, bizarrely sort of amplified that. I think, even though we've got social networks, where we're connected to 1000s, if not millions of people, isolation seems to be an increasingly powerful sort of force that people are having to battle, yet the agency to change as often they're, sometimes it's all about people being a bit lost in themselves. So the individual nature of the world has, has forced, I guess, some more introverted actions to an extreme, and therefore, people then struggle to help themselves, whereas before, they may have had other people stimulate spark and, and care for them. So yeah, so I think the individual thing is, is trying to play into that, but flip the energy. So it's not destructive. individualism, it's not isolating individualism is looking at yourself as an energy vessel. And I suppose you know, just talking to the the elements that you've brought into your life, Marcus, I'm the same when it comes to work. When I had a routine, where I had to commute and waste time travelling to things that I could have done virtually, I found myself having to snatch it at work at my at silhoutte cognitive peak, my cognitive peak is around about 6am, to about 9am. That's it, I am better in those three hours than probably any time of day. And I've seen some neuroscience research that says, actually, the brains only optimal for about two hours a day anyway, it's always then suboptimal after that, no matter what you do to try and regenerate it, you've got this peak bit. And then after that, it's just topping it up a little bit. So I thought, oh, wow, I get to now use those two optimal hours at what I know is my best to. So I've reduced the interference around me by circumstance. And I'm continuing to do that now. So that realisation in me is something I wanted others to know more about, know your patterns, know your flow, or your stimulus, know your low points. Be kind to yourself and accept that sometimes you might want to work, but you really your energy system is kind of going. It's dangerous. Don't do it. Just Just stop and do something different instead. And I've often had a deadline. So now I needed to complete that. And then the next morning, I'm up and the next morning, I've smashed it and I'm thinking I did like an hour's productive work versus five absolutely awful, terrible raggedy work. What am I best do it. So I think that's why the individual side of things is pretty important. So that we can break away from some of those cliches and conditions were told. You know that we can do long hours and six hours sleep we pretty much need it. We die. So it's those concepts.

Troy Norcross:

So the last thing I want to say is, is is a compliment to you. And it's a general state of the world to a lot of other people, I have referred to HR as human remains, for the majority of my professional career. The only position the only reason for human rains to exist, is to hire people, the day after they're hired to make it easy for them to be fired, and too easy to get rid of them. And everything else is just window dressing about training and welfare and perks and benefits. And the reason it's a compliment to you is you sound like someone who is actually in human resources, looking at the business of managing human capital, and really treating them like people and not a resource to be demolished. So I wish more HR people would read your book and listen, as are following some things. And I wish more business leaders would take on some of your ideas. It's been a real joy talking to you today.

Perry Timms:

That's That's so nice. And you don't know how much that means to me because I have struggled a little bit inside my profession where people have looked at me as a little bit of an outlier, and even said, You've never been an HR director, what would you know? And I've often thought about that, and it's kind of damaged me a little bit. But I've, I've equally come back with a retort when people have said, Why did you want to be an HR director? I said, Well, from what I've seen, we've got some good people there who are doing senior leader adult daycare, and I didn't want to do that. So I can actually equally come back at them with I think we've, you know, underwhelmed the world for too long, and we've played the wrong cards. And now's the chance to really go hang on what the world needs now. People who've come alive, we've got the gift of looking after their interests, and it's a crime really to not do that. So I'm backing what you're saying try and if I've got any part in pivoting that towards better then I'm really

Troy Norcross:

great. Thank you so much for being on the show today. And we wish you a great Easter holiday. You too, guys. Thanks

Perry Timms:

so much for the chance. Love talking with you. I can't wait share this podcast. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Barry.

Troy Norcross:

You've been listening to the wicked podcast with co host Marcus Kirsch and me Troy Norcross,

Marcus Kirsch:

please subscribe on podomatic iTunes or Spotify. You can find all relevant links in the show notes. Please tell us your thoughts in the comment section and let us know about any books for future episodes.

Troy Norcross:

You can also get in touch with us directly on Twitter on at wicked n beyond or at Troy underscore Norcross also learn more about the wicked company book and the wicked company project at wicked company calm