116: Achieving More with Less Resources with Scott Sonenshein

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Scott Sonenshein
Thanks for having me here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really got a kick out of seeing how you have some innovative research approaches, and I’m thinking if you’re studying human and organizational behavior – well, we’re funny creatures – you’ve probably had some fun moments along the way with your research.  Could I put you on the spot and ask you to share a funny story that popped up during the course of observing us?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, I do have quite my fair share of stories – everything from the person who shows up to an interview with clothes that are completely torn and ripped and full of holes.  And I’m looking at him and it’s kind of one of those things where you’ve got to be sensitive and you don’t want to ask insensitive questions, but I just have this look on my face ’cause I’ve never seen anyone show up to an interview like this.  And he of course goes into the narrative that he doesn’t buy any new clothes and he never has for years and years and this was from the dumpster.
And for someone who studies resourcefulness, this kind of extreme frugality is something that’s not too remote for me, but to kind of see it first-hand and be sitting in this room with this person whose dress you probably wouldn’t really want to see out in public, really kind of hit me in the face.
But I’ll tell you, I think probably one of my favorite moments is really that time when I put together lots of my research to come up with the idea of Stretch.  And I was working in a chain of women’s fashion boutiques as part of my research to study how organizations stay creative with their resources as they go from a small family-run business to a larger organization.  And I don’t really spend that much time, Pete, hanging out in women’s fashion boutiques, so this was a bit of a different experience for me.
Anyway, I was opening boxes and displaying things and I got to do all kinds of things I’ve never done – from dressing a mannequin and pairing it with jewelry and all that kind of stuff.  But I pulled out one of these boxes to merchandise, and it this thing – I had no idea what it was – I thought it was a toy and then I thought it was a stress reliever, and it turned out there is this thing called “multiple jewelry”, and it’s jewelry that you can turn into lots of different things.
And of course I was the only guy there; all of the other women there are looking at me playing with this thing, fascinated – I’ve never seen this thing before and I’m getting quite a chuckle out of that.  But it’s interesting, ’cause that became a metaphor for what I was studying in Stretch, which is this piece of multiple jewelry you can turn into all these different types of things.  What if we look at all of our resources as being as flexible as this piece of jewelry?  How does that change the way that we work and that we live?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun, that’s like a Beautiful Mind genius moment of inspiration.  Cool.  So then tell us – you lay out much of these thoughts in your new book Stretch.  What’s the basic story of what this book’s all about?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, Stretch is really about how do you take the resources that you have and do more with them.  You want to learn about how do you make the most out of your time, your money, your connections and your knowledge to get both better results, but also just as importantly to feel better.  I mean how many times do you hear people at work say, “If I only had this resource…  If I had a bigger team, a larger budget, more experience, I could do more.”  And Stretch is really meant to debunk that myth – it’s what I call the “Myth of More”.  And what we’re trying to do in the book is teach people that they have everything that they already need to succeed in business and in life.  It’s just about how do you approach what you already have and make the most out of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is a fun turn of a phrase – the “Myth of More”.  Okay.  So then, you also have the phrase the “Power of Less” as a contrast.  And so, what does that mean?  “Less” doesn’t sound powerful on the surface level intuitively?  What’s that about?

Scott Sonenshein
Right.  “Less” is something that people usually want to avoid, because we do this mentality that I call “chasing”, which is the belief that the more resources that we have, the more that we can do.  And what the “Power of Less” is teaching us is, often we can get more when we start from a foundation of less.  And it’s about how the constraints unlock our creativity and help us approach problems in very different ways.  It’s about focusing on goals that we care most about.
One of the problems that I see with chasing in this sense that you need more to do more is that chasing then displaces your other goals.  It all becomes about, “How do we get more resources, how do I find ways of making sure I get more money, or finding more time, or expanding my budget?”  But the question at the end of the day you need to be asking yourself is, “Is that really what my goal is?  Is my goal to simply get these resources, or is my goal to actually do more?”  And I’d say for most of us, our goals are actually to do more or to meet specific objectives that we have.  And getting a resource is a means to an end; it’s not the end itself.  But when we get caught up in chasing, getting more becomes the ultimate end.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood.  So you are sort of freed from that tyranny or slavery of kind of being addicted to or chasing the “more”.  So that’s helpful, as well as constraints are sparking creativity.  And I’ll tell you – that just has really been resonating with me lately, in terms of thinking, “Oh my gosh, I don’t have time to finish all this stuff.”
And then I come up with some sort of scheme or idea, like I’ll get someone to make some software, or I’ll get some help from these people in this way.  And then once that’s in place, it’s just like, “Well shucks, how come I don’t do this all the time?  I’ll just keep doing that.”  And then sure enough, I’ve grown.  I’ve been more kind of capable or developed as a result of having had that “less” for a period of time, even though in the moment I sure hated it, but afterwards I’m reaping the benefits of the systems, habits, software, people, help that I’ve installed.

Scott Sonenshein
Right.  And there’s research, Pete, that shows that when you have a lot of resources you tend to default to the conventional ways of using those resources.  So you have a lot of money – you’re going to go follow what the traditional path is for using that money to execute on your project.  When you have less, it frees you from those conventions.  So ironically, and this gets back to your question about the “Power of Less” is, it liberates you to actually do things very differently and often times better, because you’re not constrained by having to follow that traditional path; you don’t have a choice.
And what I’m trying to do in Stretch is to teach us that yes, you can be resourceful and you can stretch when you have less and you can harness that creativity and the power that comes from constraints, but you can also put yourself in the mindset, even if you have a lot and make more out of what you already have, if you embrace this idea that you can do things unconventionally.  And so the idea of stretching is about being resourceful when you don’t have a choice, but it’s also about being resourceful when you do have a choice and how are you going to approach what you already have in hand.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting.  So could you maybe just give us a slam dunk example that illustrates this?  It’s like, “Okay, we’re constrained, we can’t do things the traditional way”, and therefore a really cool innovative approach emerges.  Can we hear a story of that coming to life?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, so the thing that we like to think about is about both individuals and organizations.  So when I think of individuals, we tend to think that someone at work who has a lot of resources is going to always out-perform someone who doesn’t have a lot of resources.  But what the research shows is that there’s actually what we would call a “curvilinear relationship” between the amount of resources and innovation.
So in one study what we looked at is this notion that having too many resources is just as detrimental to innovation as having too few resources.  So the idea is to find that happy medium, because if you don’t have enough you certainly can experiment, but if you have too much that puts you in a very difficult position too.  So one of my favorite stories from the book has to deal with this idea of knowledge.  And again, we think that the more expertise or the more knowledge you have, the better off that you’ll be.
But I have this really interesting profile of this gentleman who was involved in trying to solve what was known as the “Netflix prize” – that was a prize that Netflix put out to help optimize its algorithm.  And this guy was competing with all of these so-called experts at major research institutions, major organizations, and this guy is working off of his old desktop computer in his study with his young daughter helping him with the math.
And he ended up not quite winning the prize, but he was in the leaderboard running up against these huge super teams.  And I think what it shows us is that when we have less knowledge, and especially different knowledge, we can apply that to problems in ways that really surpass what experts do.  There’s this notion that experts always solve problems better, but actually that’s not always quite the case.  And again, it goes back to this idea of how we’re using knowledge unconventionally.  When you have a different set of knowledge you’re able to step out of the traditional way that people approach problems and come up with new insights.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and you had a quiz on your website, which I took – it was kind of fun – and there was one question on it associated with, if you’re in a meeting and you want to solve a problem and get the best outcome, what’s the optimal approach?  And if I recall correctly, the optimal approach was, “Don’t ask the supreme experts first.”  What is the optimal approach?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, I think people would be surprised to learn it’s often to just pick names out of a hat when you’re trying to put together a team.  What happens is you tend to focus on just the experts, and they have a lot of knowledge, but the experts tend to have a high degree of overlap of knowledge.  So you’re not getting the diversity that’s important to have a highly functioning team.  So researches looked at this through mathematical simulations and other methods, but often times it’s literally just picking names out of a hat.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood.  I also think it’s interesting that, I would imagine there is an interpersonal dynamic at play that shows up there too, in the sense of, if we have folks who don’t all feel like they are the experts or need to be the experts and they just sort of say what’s on their mind, then that creates a bit of a liberation or permission for everyone to just bring what they’ve got to the table and diminish a lot of that self-censorship which I think is destructive to group creative processes.

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, that’s right.  There is this interesting anecdote I reveal in the book that had to do with a doctor who was treating someone who came in for an ear infection.  And doctors, like myself, have absolutely terrible handwriting and the doctor had written a note to the nurse about how to treat the patient for this ear infection.  And the doctor had said something like, “Put medicine” and then abbreviated “R. Ear”.  And the nurse had interpreted that because the doctor’s the expert and you don’t question the doctor.  The doctor had actually left off the period and it was “Put medicine in the rear”.  And again, we sometimes don’t question experts and we assume that they have all of the knowledge, and obviously treating an ear infection that way is probably not going to be very effective.
Pete Mockaitis
Understood, yeah.  So, this is fun.  And so, I’d love to get your take on – and this may be something you agonized over when you were thinking about the book and the publisher – I think some people might say, “Oh yeah, it sounds like you’re just talking about sort of essentialism or the 80/20 principle.”  What would you say is distinct about what you’re exploring and putting forward here?

Scott Sonenshein
Well, I love the essentialism stuff that Greg McKeown does.  And the way I would see Stretch as different is, this is not really a book about simplifying your life; this is a book about actually doing more.  I think Greg’s advice would be to kind of focus and do less and do less of what you think is most important.  My approach is to focus on the resources you have and make more out of those resources.  So it’s about unlocking that creativity and that innovation that we often all have, but sometimes don’t feel comfortable or permissive to actually use.
I think another important part of this argument is how we get off of the chase, ’cause I think for both people and for organizations chasing is a really alluring concept when you think about it.  You think about our metaphors at work – “I want to climb up the corporate ladder”, “I want to hit a homerun and grow my business as fast as I can”.
And often times what the research shows is that’s not actually the best approach.  You can go back as… I spend time in Silicon Valley before I was a business school professor and we had the perfect example of the disasters of the chase there, where you have all of these startups trying to raise as much money as they could as fast as they could, hire as many people as fast as they could, get customers as fast as they could even if those customers were not profitable.  And many of those companies ended up going out of business.
Now an interesting fact of course is that actually about half of them survived, but those that survived tended to be this slower growth type model, where they weren’t trying to chase after more venture capital; they kind of expanded in more responsible ways.  The same thing goes for our careers is, you try and climb as as fast as you can and a lot of people end up burning out.  So the question I want to people to really think about is, at the end of the day what is it that they’re trying to accomplish?
And with chasing so prevalent I think in our society, that’s really hard to do because you look at your neighbor and you might look at his or her office and say, “Oh, it’s a little bigger.  I should move up too.”  Or, “They have a bigger team, or a bigger budget.”  Or, “My neighbor has a bigger house.”  And this idea of social comparison really can become toxic over time, and stretching is really meant to be not just an antidote, but a much better way of dealing with both how we work and how we live.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m curious to hear a little bit about the difference in the internal mental dialog there.  So chasing, you sort of laid out what that sounds like – “Ooh, he’s got that, I want that.  I want to go as far as fast as I can.”  And so then, what does the stretching sound like when you’re talking to yourself?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, there’s basically four aspects of the stretching mindset.  It starts with what I call “psychological ownership”, which is the sense that you actually own the resources around you, even if you don’t literally own them.  The way that we tend to think about ownership is as a set of property rights, but ownership is also an attitude.  So, how do you think about your resources at work?
And I spend a lot of time doing research in retail settings and, “How do you feel about your store and the products in there and the people that you work with?  Do you feel like you’re at liberty to do creative things with them?”  So ownership is a big part of that.  And ironically when you have less around you, you appreciate what you do own a lot more.
Second is this idea of constraints, and instead of running from constraints, not just work through them but work better because of constraints.  If you’re in a startup organization you get constraints right away, but the question is, what happens when you’re in a larger organization?  Can you get in that psychological headspace where you can embrace constraints or even seek out constraints?  Can you ever imagine someone talking to their boss and saying, “Give me one less person for this project” or, “Cut my budget by 10%”?
We shy way from that because we have a chasing mentality and that we judge both the worth of ourselves, the worth of other people, and the worth of our projects at work based on the amount of resources tied to them.  But let’s look at the alternative.  Let’s look at what we can do and what we can unlock if we not only not avoid constraints but we actually seek them out.
The third aspect of the mindset is frugality – people who are frugal not only are better stewards of their resources but they’re also much more likely to do unconventional things.  Now of course you can take this to an extreme, like we talked about with my opening example with the guy and the clothes, and I profile a couple of organizations in Stretch about organizations that are probably not frugal, but I would say cheap, and there’s a big distinction between the two.
Frugal people do things unconventionally and literally get a pleasure from using resources wisely.  The cheap on the other hand are psychologically pained from using resources and from spending money.  Now obviously you need to use resources to invest and to grow your business, so stretching is really about frugality, not about cheapness.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that.  This reminds me of a story that I must share, if I may.  I was in Lithuania – the motherland, I’m Lithuanian – with my aunt and uncle and more, and we were getting some beer at a crazy low price.  It was like 3 litai, which is like $1 for a good amount of beer.  And I was looking forward to paying for it, like, “Oh my goodness, what a bargain.  I’m excited to exchange these coins for that.”  And so then my uncle started to pay for it, and then my aunt Mary said, “Oh no, honey, let Pete pay for it.”  And he was just puzzled, like, “Let Pete pay for it?”  He married into the family, and we already understood – no, it is indeed a pleasure to use these resources and get such a benefit from it.  So that is very much resonating.

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, that’s a great story.  And then finally the fourth aspect of the mindset is, how do you take what other people see as invaluable and make it valuable?  It’s what I call “turning trash to treasure”.  And there is this example in Stretch; I talk about very simple things, but important things.  Like General Motors, for example, has this nice program where they take waste from their manufacturing process and they turn it into car parts.  Again, a lot of people would look at this and would see it as waste and worry about, what do we do with this?  But it’s about kind of finding these opportunities where you can see something that doesn’t look like it’s valuable at all and making it extremely valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent, thank you.  So I guess I’m wondering – given these principles, are there particular practices that enable you to sort of unlock them or tap into their power quickly?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, absolutely.  So the second half is really about how do you actually do this.  And the first is what I call “getting outside”, which is finding ways to experience the world differently.  So practically this could mean going to have lunch with someone who has your same job in a different industry; it could be about attending a conference that you usually wouldn’t attend; reading something differently.
The idea is that the more diverse experiences you have, I call it the “Multi …” – the more that you can make connections between what you know and different types of problems.  And what research shows is people who have expertise in an area struggle to solve complex problems in that area relative to people with less expertise in that area.  So if you can put yourself in positions to learn these new things by getting outside, that helps.
The second idea is to act without a script.  We like to plan and when we have a lot of resources we think we should plan and we plan out how to use those resources.  The problem of course, Pete, is the world around us is changing, and in fact right now I would say it’s changing at a faster clip than it has in many many years.  So you see organizations and even people coming up with detailed plans that by the time they’ve been finished drawing up those plans, the world has already changed again and they’re irrelevant.
So what stretchers are able to do is to get comfortable improvising and performing without a plan, and that could be as simple as you’re working on a project and usually have a project plan.  I like to say, try creating a backwards-looking plan, where instead of planning in advance, act first and then write up what you did later, and then go through these iterative cycles where you kind of read your backwards plan, you see what happened and then you make adjustments and you learn.  Those people that are able to process more real-time information and focus on the present, tend to perform better when there’s times of uncertainty and change, which I’d argue is right now.
Expectations are really important too, and how you can create what I call “positive prophecies”.  You can make people more valuable through the way that you have higher expectations of them.  There’s been a lot of research in this area in both education as well as in organizations that show when you expect positive things from people, they tend to deliver positive things.
The problem of course is, our instincts are often to think the worse in other people.  We might hear talk around the water cooler about the new office jerk who’s around, and lo and behold, when we meet this person we think he or she is actually a jerk because that’s what we expected.
It’s interesting enough – I know a lot of your listeners are trying to advance their careers – there’s been some research that looks at resumes, and what I call the “pre-impressions” that resumes make.  So recruiters for example will look at your resume and make a judgment over whether or not you’re skilled or not skilled, and then based off of that very quick glance of your resume, that will fundamentally change the way that they interview you.
So if you look good to them, they’re actually going to ask you less difficult questions during the interview and develop a better rapport with you.  And if they have any doubts about you, they’re going to end up asking harder questions and in fact making that a self-fulfilling prophecy that shows that their doubts were actually right.  So even before you walk in the room and shake a person’s hand on the job interview, a lot of what’s going to happen in that interview has already been determined.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so intriguing.  And on the expectations point, I’d love to hear in practice, what are some of the means by which you sort of convey and make use of those expectations?  ‘Cause I think merely thinking, “I expect this of this person”, probably is not sufficient to unlock that power.  Is that fair to say?  How is that communicated optimally?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, that’s right.  And in fact what the research shows is that if you don’t communicate those expectations effectively and the person on the other end doesn’t believe the expectations you’re setting for them, it just creates performance pressure and they perform worse.  So what you’re I think really asking is, how do you communicate credible expectations that really unlock this?
And there’s very subtle ways of doing it, so you can give someone an interesting project, for example, or a project that might be slightly beyond their skills.  And what you’re signaling to them is, “I’m expecting that you can actually do more than you’ve traditionally done.”  What people will do is they’ll kind of look around and see who has the more interesting assignments, and the people with the more interesting assignments tend to get the sense that there’s more positive expectations of them.  So I think how you behave is just as important as opposed to how you communicate when you’re managing people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great, thank you.

Scott Sonenshein
I was going to say, the last part of doing this is what I call “mixing it up”, which you’re making these unthinkable combinations – how do you combine things in different ways, and innovation obviously deals a lot with this.  Before there was an iPhone it was, how do you combine a camera and a phone and you get this great invention.  But we can also do that with concepts, like relationships – how do you combine competition and friendship, how do you combine creativity and routines?  So what resourceful people are doing is they’re looking at things that you often consider opposite of each other and finding ways to bring them into harmony.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I must know, ’cause I’ve been experiencing some creativity routine intersections recently – how do you do that?  What are some of the best practices you’ve seen unfold there?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah.  Well, I think it’s about recognizing that routines are not stable.  I think when you ask people to describe what a routine is, they’re going to come back with adjectives like “consistent”, “reliable”, “predictive”.  And I think when you approach your routine in that mindset, you’re signaling to people that that’s exactly what it is.
They have to do their best to follow the playbook, even though no one actually really can.  So I think part of this is to signal to people that routines are inherently flexible and that they have to be adapted and adjusted.  And the challenge of course is, how do you get people to adjust those in ways that are helpful to whatever your goals are as an organization?
And a lot of that has to deal with the culture that you have and whether or not you’re making sure that people feel that they psychologically own their resources and they want to be good stewards for those resources and they want to make good choices.  If you can’t develop that culture, routines tend to be much more command-and-control and there are control mechanisms, but in the world of stretching, we want to think of routines as really kind of templates for people to customize to be able to solve problems in ways that you sometimes really can’t anticipate as a supervisor.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood.  Okay, thank you.  So Scott, tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure we get to cover off before we talk about your favorite things?

Scott Sonenshein
No, I think those were great questions, Pete, so thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright then, let’s hit it – tell us, is there a favorite quote you have, something you find inspiring?

Scott Sonenshein
The quote that I really like, one that hits me from writing it in the book is this idea that we can reach extraordinary potential with what we already have.  And I really like this because we tend not to think of doing extraordinary things with what we already have.  We think that we need more to do more.  So I really want to convince people that you have everything already at your disposal to meet your goals and be on, and it’s really just about thinking about those in different ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you.  And is there a favorite study or piece of research?  I’m sure you’ve seen a lot, but something that truly resonates with you or you find extra fascinating?

Scott Sonenshein
There’s this great study by this guy at University of Chicago, Christopher Hsee, and he studied what he calls “mindless accumulation”, which I think is an important aspect of chasing.  And it’s this idea that we tend to just mindlessly accumulate resources, and he does it in a great context – he studies chocolate.
He looks at these people who literally have to do a little work to earn some chocolate and they’re listening to music, they’re in this kind of leisure setting and they’ve got to do a little work, press a button and their nice music gets interrupted with the sound of a saw cutting wood, but they earn chocolate.  And what he looks at is how much they earn in terms of their chocolate, versus how much they end up eating and enjoying.  They can’t take the chocolate with them; they have to eat it after the study.
And he finds that if you’re a low earner – so it takes you a lot of a lot of work and interrupting your leisure time to earn chocolate, or you’re a high earner – it doesn’t take that much work, everyone over-earns chocolate by substantial amounts and they end up accumulating a lot more chocolate than you’re physically able to eat.
And the message to the story I think is really good, because I think often many of us go through life trying to just accumulate things and we have no idea what we’re actually going to do with them.  And then at the end of the day we ended up doing work and doing things that we didn’t necessarily need to do, but we’ve got this whole cache of resources and we have no idea what to do with it.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fascinating, thank you.  And how about a favorite book?

Scott Sonenshein
Probably anything by Michael Lewis.  I love all of his work.  His first book, Liar’s Poker, was a great book.  But really his book on Silicon Valley, The New New Thing, is what talked me into going to Silicon Valley in the first place, so that probably had the biggest impact on me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun.  And how about a favorite tool, whether it’s a product or service or app or something that you find is helpful to be more awesome at your job?

Scott Sonenshein
I’m pretty much a minimalist when it comes to tools.  So I would say, think about this more as a framework and try spending a day without any of those tools and see what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you.  And how about a favorite habit, personal practice of yours that’s been helpful?

Scott Sonenshein
So I go for a walk every day.  I try and walk for at least an hour a day, and I’ve been doing this for quite some time.  But there’s actually now research that shows how walking just helps let your mind wander and come up with new ideas and unlock creativity, so I love my walking and now I feel even better about doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  And is there a particular nugget or a piece of your writing, teaching, speaking, sharing that really seems to resonate with people, that gets them nodding their heads and taking notes?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, I’d say when I tell people that not only when the boss says “No” to you, that that’s actually a good thing.  People usually say, “Well, it’s an indictment of me, it means I’m in bad standing or my project is not worth a lot”, but when I tell people, “You should actually be asking your boss to say ‘No’ to you more often”, that usually raises eyebrows.  And again, I think it’s because we have this mentality that we judge things based off of the amount of resources that are tied to them, as opposed to what we can actually do with what we have.  So I’d say, not only welcome the “No’s” when those inevitable “No’s” come, but sometimes ask for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  And what would you say is the best way for folks to contact you or learn more about what you’re up to?

Scott Sonenshein
They can go to my website – it’s www.scottsonenshein.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  And did you have a final call to action or challenge for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Scott Sonenshein
Yeah, I would try just experimenting with some of the ways of stretching, whether it’d be asking for the “No’s”, going to visit new places, spend time with different people or spend time in different environments, try a project without a plan – see how it goes.
I like to tell people to scramble up their routine, so instead of doing things the usual way – you run a meeting – try running a meeting from a different room, or you have your Monday meeting – try it on a Tuesday and see what new things might happen, how did the culture of the meeting change?  And then maybe taking a break.  I mean we tend to develop tunnel vision about how we see things.  So there’s a whole bunch of research on getting into this mindless headspace and finding distractions and how it helps us see new connection.  So you have that joke of when Windows first came out – I might be dating myself a little – people playing Solitaire on their computers, much to the scorn of the bosses.  So the question is, try and do something a little mindless for 5 minutes during the day and you might make connections that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent, thank you.  Well Scott, thanks so much for making the time to be here.  This was a lot of fun.  I hope that Stretch is a smashing success, and good luck to you!

Scott Sonenshein
Great.  Thank you very much, Pete for having me.