Episode 126 - The Chintan Project

[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the leadership window podcast with Doctor Patrick Jinks. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Each week, through a social sector lens, Patrick interviews leaders and experts and puts us in touch with trends and tips for leading effectively. Patrick is a board certified executive coach. [00:00:19] Speaker A: A member of the Forbes Coaches Council. [00:00:21] Speaker B: A best selling author, award winning photographer. [00:00:24] Speaker A: And a professional speaker. [00:00:26] Speaker B: And now here's Doctor Patrick Jinks. Welcome, everyone, to episode one two 6126 of the leadership window. It has been an amazing journey on this podcast. We're having more fun just every week, and this week is no exception. This might be one of, if not the most unique episode that we have had in 126 episodes. I met our guests a few, well, I heard from them and learned about them a few months ago, and then about a month or so ago, we connected to talk about a potential show. And boy, I almost wish I had just gone ahead and recorded that pre conversation because that was rich all by itself. But we were more limited on time then. So I said, well, let's book a recording. My guests today are from the Chenten project, which we will allow them to tell us more about in a moment. But my guests are Amit and Kumar Ramlau. Doctor Kumar Ramlau. And Amit was born with autism spectrum disorder, among some other challenges, I believe. And one of the things that is really interesting to me is that Ammit's name, Amit Chenten in Sanskrit, means infinite thinking. And I will tell you, I think that might just be exactly the most fitting name for someone. Because among. You know, here's an interesting fact. He was reading by the age of three, and by the time he was about twelve, he'd already read over 14,000. That's not a typo or a misspeak. Over 14,000 nonfiction books. I won't read that many books in my entire life, and if I did, I probably wouldn't understand them. And I don't even want to know some of these books that we're talking about. But I can tell you, in talking with him and learning about him, I do think his thinking is just absolutely infinite. Today, they're helping leaders turn challenge into opportunity, or as they say it, help helping people turn baggage into fuel. And Ahmed insists that his thriving and his value creation in the world is not in spite of his challenges, but explicitly because of them. His father, Doctor Kumar Raml, is an investor, an entrepreneur, a physician, and a sought after consultant for business owners and family enterprises. In his physician role, Doctor Romlaw built from scratch a provincial service for a population of a million. And he's been the chair of the Royal College examination board. In his specialty, he served over 70,000 unique patients who he says have taught him how people think and behave when they're stressed. So this is really quite a partnership between father and son. Doctor Ramlau is Ammit's bonded partner in many ways. And so I will say no more because Ammit and Doctor Ramlau say it far, all far more eloquently. And they'll say it using a method that I can guarantee you most of you have never seen or heard. So let me stop my introduction there and welcome you. Doctor Ramlal Amit. I've been so looking forward to this. We finally made it happen. Welcome to the leadership window. [00:03:55] Speaker A: Thanks for having us on, Doctor Jinkx. Thank you very much for having us here. Doctor Jinkx. I am Kumar. And yeah, so Amit, as you heard, had autism spectrum disorder. And I know many of you are just here on audio, but for those on video, I'm showing a plastic card. It's a laminate, 50 cent piece of laminated plastic with the Alphabet on it and Amet types on that and he'll explain how that works. So for those of you on audio only, you would hear a tapping sound. That's Amit typing in a card. And then you'd hear my voice. He'll explain it. [00:04:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And let me, let me say quickly to the audience also, if you are listening on audio, the link to the YouTube version of this is on our podcast page. So if you want to switch over and watch the video version of it or watch it later or share it or whatever, you can do that as well. Go ahead, Amit. [00:04:54] Speaker A: Walk your drinks. As my dad said, I had autism, that still affects my independent speech. I type on this card and my dad reads what I am saying. I use it to help me speak much. Doctor Jinks, as you use glasses to help you see. Unless of course, it's a fashion statement. [00:05:39] Speaker B: No, mine's not a fashion statement. Unfortunately. [00:05:44] Speaker A: I have been a business advisor for at least 16 of my 22 years and I look forward to this conversation very much hoping we disagree some along the way to. [00:06:15] Speaker B: I don't know if I want to disagree with you, Amit. We'll see where that goes. But, yeah, the show's open to conversation and various perspectives, as it were. So, very much appreciate that. And, yeah, so again, if you're listening and you hear the sort of broken speech, the slow speech, that's when Doctor Ramlau is translating off the card for Amit. And sometimes Doctor Ramlau will have his own things to say, and it will sound a little bit more fluid that way. So we'll try to remind you a couple times. [00:06:46] Speaker A: When my dad sounds like a robot, that is him reading what I am typing. When he sounds half human, that's him. [00:07:06] Speaker B: Speaking for himself, half human. Okay, got it. And that is helpful, actually, for our listeners because you, you. You have kind of developed. It is a little bit of a robotic sound, part of the tone of your voice along with the reading one word at a time. So I think if you hadn't said that, some people might think, oh, okay, this is like other things I've heard where, you know, they're. The technology speaks for them. But this is, um. This is all tactile technology, actually. And if I don't, if I'm correct, we won't dwell on this. But if I'm correct, this is a communication style the two of you invented. [00:07:42] Speaker A: Oh, no, no. A place that actually helped us, us being, in this case, my wife and I, to teach amit to read. They, the Institute for Achievement of human potential are the people who actually, they didn't even invent it. They got this from a mom in Australia who wanted to help her own child. And then they have subsequently taught it to so many people they called facilitated communication. And for. Also for the video people, it would be clear, but for the audio people, you might hear Amit saying some of the words as we go along. He has been working incredibly hard to build his intended speech. So what you're hearing is relatively new over the last couple of years. So. [00:08:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And every once in a while, you know, I've heard Amit actually just say things himself at the beginning of the show. I don't know if you caught it, but he said, you know, something like, thank you, Doctor Jinks. And that was from his voice, so he is able to speak. But I think that the. If I might have this wrong, too, but I think the idea is that the mind is really going faster than the mouth can sort of keep up with. And so this actually, if I remember right, is a mechanism just to help Amit slow down so that we can understand him. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to keep up. Is that right? [00:09:02] Speaker A: It's a gating mechanism, if you will. And I think so many us, especially, so many of us leaders, have gating mechanisms in our own ways and in the ways of our communication with our teams outside of us. And here's something else. Those gating mechanisms sometimes don't work so well even on the inside of us. Let me explain what? I mean, we sometimes allow our minds to run circles around us, and in that process, miss the key points, the key issues at hand sometimes entirely miss the priorities and therefore the impact and rewards that we want. [00:10:35] Speaker B: Fascinating. And my mind is racing right now on my communication and how, like, the speed of the brain. And, you know, you hear people say, well, I have it in my head, but I'm not sure how to quite get it out. You know, you hear that a lot, and it sounds like this kind of on steroids. I want to be clear, by the way, and also for our audience, at first, it sounded like you said it was a dating mechanism with a d. And so I was like, how is this a dating mechanism? This would be an interesting dating mechanism. But you saying gating with a g, as in pacing and cadence. [00:11:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Good. [00:11:15] Speaker B: So I caught it the third time, but with the first couple of times, you said, I thought dating, and I was about to say, say more about that. [00:11:24] Speaker A: It is a term borrowed from neuroscience. [00:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. It just took me. I'm slow. It took me a minute. Let me just have you describe for everyone. What is it you do? The Chenten project is a great name, and there's a lot to what you do. I think it's deeper in some ways than just your typical business consultants. So how do you describe, I think you say your human advisors, which is. I love that terminal. Describe what it is you do. What's different about your work for people? [00:12:00] Speaker A: So, context wise, Amit learned to read and then learned to use this card with us, started writing, and what, in retrospect, were white papers. People found out what he was writing, and then they started asking for them. Then we caught on and started. They started buying them out of these written pieces of work. That is how Ahmed says, I've been a business consultant for over 16 of my 22 years. So he started writing these things when he was four, five, definitely by six years old. And then people started hiring us as consultants to tell us more about what's in this, because we think this can help us solve problems. We became increasingly aware that there are only two kinds of people problems, much as we described just now. But let me make a it more explicit. There are inside problems within the leader themselves and outside problems where there are challenges dealing with others. Yeah. Does that make sense? [00:13:44] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, one of the books that I've recommended for years now is by an executive coach with corn fairy named Kevin Cashman. And his book is called leadership from the Inside out. And that was my first exposure to the idea of, you know, when we think about leadership, we typically think of all the external stuff, you know, our communication and our managing and our inspiring and all those things. But leadership is very much an inside out process. And we have to lead ourselves, we have to be self aware, we have to have the emotional intelligence, we have to know our purpose. So that resonates with me 100%. Amit. I think that makes total sense and a great way to paint that sort of, you know, it's external and internal when you're talking about people. [00:14:36] Speaker A: And so if we play this out now in our role, and I think Emmett will tell later on how he. And how and why business was where I. He focused. But as we went along helping business owners, it turns out we realized that businesses had challenges when the owners had troubles dealing with stress. And those challenges occurred at. It could happen at any time during the course, but it particularly was likely to happen at this startup phase and the exit phase, because there is a lot of variables at play at those two times. And so the owners tended to be stressed. And so something that might not be a challenge for them or the business at other times became a challenge at that point. There is a law in physics called Pascal's law, and it relates to a balloon bursting at its weakest point. That isn't quite how Pascal describes it, but it gets the point across. [00:15:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:15:59] Speaker A: And if our Yden businesses were a balloon, they break two at their weakest point. [00:16:11] Speaker B: Beautiful. We do in our coaching work, as I'm sure you've seen, a number of leadership inventory assessments, psychometrics and things like that. And some of them, including disc, the disc assessment, have a default disc. So it's disc. And some people are high D's and S's. And we won't go into the model, but there is a stressor version, what they call a stressor version of discs. So they'll show you two charts. They'll show you this is you normally, and this is your disk profile when you're under the most stress. And so you'll see people's, you know, D, for example, when they're normally maybe more distributive leaderships and collaborative in stress, or maybe even crisis, their D will start to show up more and they'll be more direct and more command and control and more assertive, or vice versa. So I think it would be really fascinating to learn more, Doctor Romlal, about your field of study in that and how people behave when they're under stress. And I think I'm right in saying, we don't always know we're under stress. We don't even realize that that's happening to us. So it's that self awareness, I think, that comes into play. Do you agree with that? [00:17:26] Speaker A: I think that would be accurate, that we sometimes miss the fact that our buckets are full, to use that analogy. And, and I have this model that I have frequently explained to patients where I draw them a bucket. And, and I say, in order for you to have any symptom at all, your bucket is full and then overflows. And let me tell you why. I would say if you didn't sleep well last night and you're hungry and you fought with your partner at home, you're more likely to snap at the person who cuts you off in the road. They nod, and it becomes a model through which we can analyze what their health challenges are and then have them start to learn that as they make room in their bucket, their ability to cope goes up. [00:18:17] Speaker B: Well, I think you should start using a balloon instead of a bucket. But no, I get both of those. And it's right, you know, and there's. There's times we kind of have to. We have to empty that bucket sometimes. It's like I always say, energy goes in two directions. I gain energy from my work because it's so fulfilling, it actually energizes me, but it also expends energy. And the beauty about energy versus time is that it's replenishable. Time isn't. You can't get it back. But energy, we can. We can replenish it, and we need to. And many leaders don't know how. They don't know that they need to at any given point. And I just. I just think you're spot on. I'm interested on this note now because we're talking about a couple different things. [00:19:01] Speaker A: Amit is a. I want to bring us back, if you will, Doctor jinks. [00:19:09] Speaker B: Sure. [00:19:09] Speaker A: So precisely how all of this is intimately related to what we promised our audience here today, how money and mission are and definitely ought to be married. [00:19:34] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. [00:19:36] Speaker A: And it has to do with expressly this balloon bursting, expressly to do with the bucket being full. Expressly to do with making room in the bucket. And you, Doctor Jinks, have already begun that discussion by saying that in some ways, your work is energizing to you. [00:20:21] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. [00:20:22] Speaker A: And in our experience, in our own lives and in working with thousands of leaders, if they listen to their energy meter, that would be a very insightful clue into what it is that is calling them forward. [00:21:00] Speaker B: So, listening to you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Go ahead, please. [00:21:04] Speaker A: Go ahead. [00:21:05] Speaker B: Listening to your energy meter is a skill that has to be learned. And, I mean, so many people don't know, that means, how do I listen to that? How do I pay attention to that? What are those techniques? And you don't necessarily have to get into them today, but I'm guessing that that's one of the things you help people do, is listen to their energy meters. [00:21:26] Speaker A: Well, one of the things that is most prevalent in our work with business owners is helping them to recognize that what the world says ought to be energizing versus. Versus energy draining is not necessarily what it is for the individual. [00:22:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:22:06] Speaker A: There is a lot of subordination to what we ought to be energized by. [00:22:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And so this might be a good time to pause and remind our listeners. So I'm seeing. I'm trying to look into the camera, so I'm making eye contact with our video viewers, and I'm catching, out of the corner of my eye, the screen down here when Amit is tapping on the card. And so I'm not always caught up with that. I'm. I'm slower. So, uh. But it's really interesting and just a reminder that the way that Ahmed is primarily communicating through this is through this card. So I just want to remind everybody. It's a little bit different to listen to, and it's fascinating to listen to. And what I'm noticing, Ahmed, is that it's actually incredibly effective because it slows me. You help slow me down in my thinking. Some people particularly like, really profound statements get made, and I go, well, that sounded really profound, but I have to back up. Say, say it again. But when you're speaking through this method, it forces the listener to slow down and catch things, too. I just think that's fascinating. It's actually valuable to the listener. But if I speak over you, it's because I'm not seeing the. I'm not looking expressly at the screen, but I think it's just amazing. So, yes, please jump in at any point in time on that. [00:23:34] Speaker A: So, in terms of the work we do now with business owners, it is mostly in the process of exiting their business or preparing to exit their business. And in that situation, there are clearly financial concerns. But for so many, the greater concern is letting their baby go. [00:24:18] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:24:19] Speaker A: Their greater concern is what is going to happen to their family, because there is a stat that I think it's, 87% of american businesses are reported to be family controlled. I think that's a lie. It's. 100% of american businesses are family controlled. Family being, however you decide it, and I dare say even the presidency of the United States has family control, too. [00:25:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. [00:25:25] Speaker A: And some presidents have been more explicit about that, and some not so. But you, as a close observer of humanity, can see those modifications in thought, modifications in action, because of family. [00:25:59] Speaker B: 100%, and you know it. One of the things I say often is that when people say work life balance, that's a. I have an issue with that term, because work is part of your life and your life in parentheses. Family is part of your work. It's, we're a human, so it's all. It's all in there together. It's not like, well, I work, and that's this compartment, and then I have a life that's this compartment. They go together, do they not? [00:26:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. We have been at the receiving end in our own businesses. We hired consultants, too, because, remember, the plumber doesn't fix their own leaky faucet. So we did hire consultants, and one particularly almost killed our business with a phrase. Check your personal problems at the door. [00:27:19] Speaker B: Wow. [00:27:21] Speaker A: And we had not cultivated that culture with our people and watched them leave physically and mentally. [00:27:40] Speaker B: Wow. [00:27:42] Speaker A: We got an opportunity to rebuild our business thereafter. But lesson well learnt. [00:27:57] Speaker B: Well, I bet. [00:27:58] Speaker A: I bet we have saved so many clients, so many businesses by having paid that tuition ourselves. [00:28:13] Speaker B: Wow. Wow. Well, what an investment in being able to do that. There's a. I mean, we're talking about this marriage. Your website uses the term human advisors. I mentioned that. But, Amit, you also described yourself as a business consultant, and I. So while they're connected, they're also kind of two different things. Right. So am I consulting on the strategy of the business and, you know, growing the business and thriving and transition and succession and all those things for the business versus I'm helping the leader. And in particular, with succession, there's both. I mean, I coach leaders who are in transition. Right now I'm coaching several. And you're absolutely right. There's a struggle with letting go, um, with what am I going to do that has the same level of purpose once I'm gone? So there's a. I'm concerned about the business, but I'm also concerned about what I'm going to do next. And so talk about which. Which of those tends to get more weight in your work? Do you find yourself doing as much of both the business side and the personal side, or is it all is. It come down to the person at the end. [00:29:31] Speaker A: The business doesn't survive and frequently will not even survive a transition if the leaders are not currently invested in the business. Some make a career out of turnarounds. We have not focused on that because often those are strategy heavy and come with a lot of operational, hands on work. We see our work through the advisor lens predominantly and bye that we mean helping them move. Add to words and vision what they would like to achieve. Now, sometimes that involves them getting clarity on what that vision is. Sometimes it involves them acknowledging that what they were after the program, they thought they were on the program, they were fighting themselves and others to be on Washington, not their program at all. Sometimes businesses are run by, oh, by grandpa's vision, not the current leaders. And you hear of things that can or can't happen for similar logical weighting as why the ham had to be cut off at the ends. [00:32:14] Speaker B: Wow. So what is a. And I wouldn't say typical, but what is an example of what an engagement with you looks and feels like? If, you know, if someone were to engage you and they're in this place of I'm getting ready to leave my business, hand it over to a family member or a new CEO, or I'm getting ready to leave my nonprofit organization, even. What does an engagement with you from a practical standpoint, include? What's that process look like? [00:32:43] Speaker A: Okay, so let me start by saying that in our minds, there is not nearly as much difference between for profit and what is increasingly called for purpose businesses. And here's why. Businesses want more customers, more money, more stickiness. And the leaders want, as Sean Kalagyi says, they want more money in less time, with more magic. Right? So the businesses want a set of things. The leaders want a set of things. And let's analyze what our nonprofit wants. More members with more money, with more engagement. Money is the same word across both, but replace members with customers and replace engagement with stickiness. Right. The customer lifetime value of a customer. Right. So you replace and you are left with the bone structure. Very, very similar. [00:34:53] Speaker B: I agree wholeheartedly. And on the money part, I feel like, I hope more nonprofits are realizing that nonprofit is a misnomer because you better make a profit. Right. You're not going to exist as an organization if you don't. Maybe a more accurate term in the sector is not for profit, like you say, for purpose, but money is critical. And, you know, for ages, our nonprofit sector has trained our communities to care about how little money they spend on things, which is wrong, because if you don't invest in the business, you can't deliver effectively on the mission. So the money, the salaries, the. The technology, the marketing, those are all part of the mission because they're the capacity it takes. And so there are, there are foundations and movements that have done a lot of work in the last, I would say, decade to try to help retrain the sector on that. But a more important question. So when I, when I was, when I used to lead nonprofit organizations, I would often get asked by a donor, what's your overhead? They want to know how much money we're spending. That's not going directly to someone who needs help. So anything that's a salary, a utility bill, a building, a brochure, a printer is what. What the donor. And again, the sector trained them to do this, and then we complain about it. But the. The donor wants to know how much is that? How much is overhead? And, you know, the. The conventional thinking, at least here in the states, was, you know, you need to be 1015, no more than 20% overhead. Like, you got to do this on bare bones and don't spend money on expensive things and make it all go to the client. And a better question for a donor is, if I invest in your organization, what's the return on that investment? Just like if I were investing in the stock market, what's the return? What is your organization going to do from an impact standpoint? And if I have not exorbitant but sufficient capacity, I can deliver more impact. So that money piece resonates. It's a part of both. And we're trying to help nonprofits understand money is not bad. It's critical. It helps you drive your mission. Yeah. [00:37:28] Speaker A: Agreed. And now to our engagement. So, right now, one client is the CEO of a tech company who thinks that her CTO is stealing not money, but energy. She thinks that he is not all in as she is, that he is working on side projects. They so paint this picture, right. These are clearly CTO is being accused of. You are stealing energy and not power off the wall, but power from their mind in terms of focus. CEO says, I'm all in. This isn't fair. We are 50 50. You got to be all in, or we got to change the money arrangement, get the urgency. They are in the midst of a capital raise. There is a rule in the marketplace. When there is blood in the water, the sharks come out. They need this fixed. And now. [00:39:18] Speaker B: So are you advising them together or are just one of them? [00:39:22] Speaker A: No. Together. Yeah, we. We discussed that while we could work with one that that would be inadvisable. And so we were engaged and they are getting married again to use that language. And what it took was more the CEO seeing where she had been stealing energy in the same way. It's hard to pluck the mole out of your own eye, isn't it? [00:40:30] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:40:31] Speaker A: And that's what coach the bulk of the work. It took about three days. The bulk of the work was that. And was she livid to start with? Because she was the one who had made the initial connection with us. And this could have gone many different ways, but fixing the people problem here allows their capital raise to go on. So this isn't an exit circumstance, this isn't quite a startup. They have been going for a while and then, and then right now there is an exit scenario where. So this is a plumbing company two generations in and dad now wants to leave and kids don't want the business. You have seen this before. So dad decides that the preferable thing is to, in progressive degrees, hate the kids by threatening decreased inheritance to get them on board. [00:42:16] Speaker B: Wow. [00:42:18] Speaker A: And Ren Dot wasn't working, threatening to just quit because he and his wife had enough money to look after them till they died. None of that addressed the need on the current owner's part for legacy and for exactly as you've described, Doctor jinks, for purpose, that transcends and goes beyond the business. [00:43:16] Speaker B: So how then did you or are you helping this legacy owner navigate that and understand that this is his dream and his legacy, but if it's not theirs, you know, it's not their, it's not their purpose. How do you, how do you navigate that with him? [00:43:36] Speaker A: It might, it might seem very straightforward, but straight lines involve a lot, an infinite number of dots, Doctor jinks. [00:43:58] Speaker B: In other words, you don't have time to tell me that on this show. [00:44:02] Speaker A: So the way legacy was preserved was by way of a charitable trust. [00:44:13] Speaker B: Wow. [00:44:15] Speaker A: And their work is going to be for people injured in the trades. [00:44:28] Speaker B: Wow. What a great solution. [00:44:31] Speaker A: That still brings tears to our eyes as it does for me. [00:44:41] Speaker B: Thats incredible. Wow. [00:44:44] Speaker A: Plumbing company is going to now be in a sustainable way looking after people who got injured in the trades. Because in the US, in Canada, WCB workers compensation equivalent, that really is intended to get you back to work for the most part its intended to temporize while you get back to work. But this is empowering people to retrain, to get back onto the horse. [00:45:16] Speaker B: Wow. So let me ask one more question about the engagement and then we'll start to go into a couple of wrap up questions, because I know you all have another engagement. You mentioned that with the previous organization that you talked about, the tech company. It was a two or three day process. Are most of your engagements like in, out, it's. Is it a two, three day kind of thing or do you do work? That's. [00:45:38] Speaker A: The consulting arrangements are typically shorter. [00:45:43] Speaker B: Okay. [00:45:44] Speaker A: And the acquisition or exit work, which we did not address today, is typically longer. So. So that is so earlier this morning, we talked to somebody who advises tech companies and our work, it just so happened, the tour in tech. But tech companies at startup and our involvement with those companies is in an advisory role. So they are structured for exit as they start, because they will exit one way or another, you're going to exit your business. So they're structured for exit from the start. So that's one kind. I mean, we will be on, we're not on their boards, but we would be advisors to those companies for years. There is professional services firms that don't know how to structure themselves for sale. So there's an initial engagement and then there is ongoing. And rather than paying it all in cash, we have an equity stake in those companies. And then there's acquisition work, which sounds like it should only be the time of due diligence. Most people, when they buy businesses, they start the clock when the loi, the letter of intent, is accepted both ways, then end the clock at closing date. We know differently. It starts with first contact with the seller, or even before, and extends long after sale, where we bring to bear our human behavior skills and our partners bring to bear their m, and their merger and acquisition expertise and their marketing skills, etcetera. So we work with partners to do this and can bring to bear a lot more in the business. And those are businesses. Some of them we hold and some we would sell over time. So that's, that's a spectrum of work. That's most of our time right now. [00:48:12] Speaker B: That's good. I love that. And for some reason, what it made me think of is, you know, this continuum you've painted where this is not actually the starting point and this is not actually the end point that relates to a lot of our work. We say that about strategy. Our nonprofits want to say, hey, can you come help us with strategic planning? We're going to have a board retreat and our board's going to come together and we're going to start the process. And at the end of the day, we're going to have a strategic plan. And I always say, no, no, no. First of all, we're not even going to start at strategic planning. We have to start with your larger intentions and your vision. What is your intention? Then we can get into how will you achieve the attention? And when we do articulate that, we don't stop there either, because now it moves into, how do I turn this from strategy into tactile action that gets it off dead center and keeps it from being just a document. The other way that we say it is with donors. So to relate to our sector, our listeners in the nonprofit sector, we say that about donors, too. A relationship with a donor doesn't start when they write the check. It starts well before that. There's cultivation, there's relationship building, and it doesn't end when the check goes in the bank and the thank you letter is sent. You want a lifetime value of that donor, and there's relationship building beyond that. So I think that you just reminded me that that concept applies to a lot of things. And you're helping people see the continuums. Let's stretch those edges a little bit, because if we don't have, we're going to miss critical components of this. I know now we're on a little bit of a time constraint, but let me get to a couple of questions that I like to ask all my guests, and one is, and either or both of you can answer this. I'll leave it to you. I love to hear just brief stories of leaders in people's lives who have had profound influence on them. I'd like to know from you, who's a leader that comes to your mind immediately of someone who's had profound influence on you and your view of leadership and why. [00:50:18] Speaker A: Well, related to this episode, Mister Bill Barkman allowed my parents to bring me a to a business course when I was but three and a half years old. Their promise was that I, if I made so much as a boo, they would take me out. To not disrupt his class. I sat in his room playing with my hippos or pretending to play with my hippos. I heard every word he said, and more importantly, I understood all the words he meant but didn't say. I learned from Mister Bill Bartman that business is one of the levers to move the world. He's since died. His family wouldn't even communicate with us when we've reached out. We own none of his proprietary information. But I will say he has had a profound impact on my life and the owners and businesses we touch. [00:52:40] Speaker B: Boy, tremendous. There's, there's always somebody, you know, just that, just one little thing that, that, that they might not have even thought was a big thing, but transformational and foundational in who you are and what you're doing. Doctor Ramlal, does anyone come to your. [00:52:57] Speaker A: Mind, you know, the person that I think of as somebody who has also been influential in Ammit's life, but Doctor John Demartini. And he taught us that our perceptions run our lives and that things are not good or bad, things are not positive or negative, but as we make them so. And that has made a very significant impact on our lives and on the lives of the people that we have touched and. Yeah, so that's who it would be for me. [00:53:36] Speaker B: Wow. [00:53:37] Speaker A: Lots of books read, you know, both ways here. But sure, those are the humans. Some. One live and one not so live right now, who are still making a difference through us. [00:53:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Living in a way, still. Yeah. Through that spirit, that idea, that notion. It's beautiful. Ahmed, I'm going to wrap this show up with a final question for you. If you had an opportunity to spend 15 to 30 seconds with all the leaders of the world listening to you, and they wanted to know what your number one tenet of leadership is, the thing that all leaders should keep in mind, what would that be? [00:54:28] Speaker A: I wrote this when I was eight. It says, I, Amit Chintan Ramlal, dedicate my life to helping children of all ages find and follow their true calling. Soul day may lead the world. It is my earnest hope prayer that I can work on this mission over my lifetime and help those leaders recognize the universes that open as they follow their own true calling. [00:55:42] Speaker B: Doctor Ramlal Amit, this has been incredibly inspiring and you are incredibly generous people, because you're not just running a business, you truly are lifting the world. Everything you have said points to purpose. Everything you have said points to purpose and meaning and value creation. And I'm grateful for it. This is an episode I'm going to listen to a number of times and I just. I want to thank you both for coming on. I really do appreciate it. I want to tell everybody to go to chintan project.com. you will learn more. You will see how to engage the Tsinten project in your work. Maybe something has resonated with you personally in this, that you want to reach out to them, and I hope you do. There's a lot more inspiring information and resources on their. On their website. Connect with them on LinkedIn. They're both there. You'll find their connections on the website. And thank you for joining us and listening in as well. Lead on.