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Transcript

0:05
We are excited to have you with us today on the LeaderGov Podcast. My name is Bill Stark and I'm one of the cofounders of LeaderGov along with Tim Fenbert. And we simply love investing in leaders in local government, we have a deep passion for helping city and county leaders come to better understand who they are and how to best lead other people. We got a lot of stuff on our plates to do in local government to serve the community. But we need to do it through people and with people. And so the better we can get at that, the better we're going to be at helping our local communities. And one big issue is how do we seize upon opportunities, opportunities that are in a strategic plan somewhere on a bookshelf? And how do we seize opportunities when they sort of just bubble up and come in front of us unexpectedly. And so that's kind of our topic today, this topic of what we call opportunity leadership, and that's actually a name taken from our guests, book opportunity leadership. And so I do welcome you Dr. Roger, parent, president of Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi. How are you sir? Thanks, Bill. I'm not doing great. I'm really honored to be with you. Because I think what you're doing is so strategic. I just appreciate people who serve us all through their government work, and whether that be local, city, state, national, whatever it is, and we're a big fan of it and believe and so what a treat to get to be with you and thankful for what you do. Well, thank you. Yes. We're looking forward to chatting with you today about about your book on this topic of seizing on sort of unexpected opportunities. I want to share with our audience a little bit of your biography. You are the president of Belhaven college there in Jackson, Mississippi, my home state. And actually you are, if not the most experienced one of the most experienced college presidents and America.

2:09
We know that you earned your PhD from University of Maryland in higher ed administration. And you're actually a third generation college president that's interesting, and was one of America's Youngest college presidents first elected at age 34. So you've been at it for a little while. I know that you've served on a lot of different boards, including the chair of the 2004 world for evangelism, hosted by the Lucene committee for world evangelism. And you're also author of the long view lasting strategies for rising leaders. Sounds like a great book and opportunity, leadership, stop planning and start leading. That's the book we're going to talk about today. Your wife also has a PhD in English. And as a professor there Belhaven, that is pretty cool. So again, welcome at you. Thank you. Yeah. Well, I really want to dig into this topic, what a wonderful

3:07
concept topic to talk about for leaders.

3:11
You know, Dr. Parrott, we've got an entry level leaders in this on this podcast series, a supervisory level folks, in all sorts of departments and local governments, cities and counties, we've got managers, directors, city and county administrators. And we know that sometimes government can be seen as a kind of slow moving ship, you know, and just everything's the same forever. That's really sort of true, sort of not true, a lot of things come at us from nowhere. And we get these opportunities. And so we want to talk about this whole topic of leveraging the unexpected, and of course, in any any person's world with unexpected opportunities, unexpected activities, fear and risk come into play. We'd love to hear your thoughts on that. But we want to explore this topic and really help people listening today, to embrace opportunities to embrace the unexpected and not be so hit down in our strategic plan, that we can't see something beautiful, sitting right in front of us. So anyway, I'll just jump in here. You know, in your book, you talk about not being hyper focused on a strategic plan. Now we actually at our company, we help people develop strategic plans, I hope your book that and put us out of business. But

4:32
we do know that too much of a good thing can turn into a bad thing. So could you just elaborate on this whole idea of what it means to leverage the unexpected? Yeah, yeah. It's how I have lived in my leadership. last 20 years, I was a traditional long range planning and I was I will separate out the outset the difference between what I call long range planning or destination planning, and what might be called operational planning.

5:00
TG planning, best practices planning, continuous improvement planning, those are two different things. So what I'm not doing as a university is setting what those destinations are. For the future, we're letting those come through opportunities. So, you know, so we're there is no, if you go to our website, there is no plan like most universities have that say by 2030, we'll have so many students will have X number of new programs will have this will have that will have that we don't do that. Instead, we operate by what when opportunities come, we have a culture that's sensitive to them that's willing to capture them quickly, and to move when those moments come. And the reason we do that is because traditional long range destination planning doesn't work. And, and the easy softball illustration of that is, if you had a long range plan four years ago, you don't have one now, because nobody had COVID in their plan. Nobody but look at what we did during COVID. It was it was there's a whole lot of horrible stuff that came out of COVID. and government leaders worked with the worst of it. And the university, we had to tough challenges and my daughters are COVID long suffer. So I understand the ramifications. Negative COVID. The positive on the leadership side is Look how fast we were able to adjust. Look at the innovations we brought forward. Look at how we brought small groups together quickly to solve problems, and to move on it because we couldn't afford to wait, look at the ways we could provide leadership in a difficult time that wasn't in the plan. Now the challenge is now that COVID is is dissipating, and kind of out of our forefront, we're going back to the old ways, and we're going back to our plans, and we're stuck in or structure of a plan. And if it's not in the plan, we're not going to do it. And I know especially in government agencies, that's, that's tough and as difficult because people expect that. And you have a lot of pressure and a lot of eyes on that. But so I just I think as I've been thinking about this discussion with your audience today, how do we capture the best of cat of the idea of looking for opportunities and moving on those while not having to throw up the part that's probably gonna get us fired, if we try to throw it out. I don't have long range plan for my university. But if you try that for your city government, you're gonna get fired. Your city manager, I promise you it's gonna happen. But don't do that. But there are ways other ways to work with this concept that allows you to get some of the best. And the reason I wrote the book, opportunity leadership, stop planning and start getting results is because I see so many ways that planning, long range planning does not work. And let me just give you several of them real quickly. I think first of all, we're developing a plan for the future. And projecting destinations, we project targets we know we can hit, we want enough of a stretch. So it looks like we are under salary. And we're worthwhile. But we don't want it so much. We're gonna miss it. And, you know, so we were probably Oh, but dozen years or so into operating without a plan at Belhaven University. And I took to my board one day, a documented said five year plan, and began to go through that it really was 72 points. But let me just list a few for you. One was increasing enrollment by 43%. Second was build $21 million in new bellies. Third was raised $25 million worth of new gifts, start seven undergraduate programs of which one was nursing, and start eight graduate programs of which one was was a Master's of Public Administration. And so we had, I went through these these goals for five years. And of course, they knew we didn't have a long range plan. So as I got through it, they figured out what I was doing. That was not the plan for the coming five years. That was what we actually did the previous five years. Now the the kicker on that is, if five years previous I had taken that plan to the board, they would have cut everything at least in half, if not by two thirds. And that's what we do in planning. We we aim for goals we know we can hit because otherwise we feel like we're failure. Second thing we do is it homogenizes our strengths. If you're a city manager, you've got to deal with every department that comes under the city government. And if you put together a plan, everybody's got to have a seat at the table, and everybody's got to get a piece of the pie. And when you do that nothing of significance gets done because the places where you need it the most. You can't put the resources, the money, the energy in favoring that because the plan would get blown

10:00
out of the water if you do so planning keeps us from capitalizing on our strengths. Another one is planning long range planning focuses on deficiencies. Now we can all say well do a SWOT analysis. And yeah, Bri does, and I know how to do them too. But the challenge is, we go really quickly through the strengths and opportunities, we focus mostly on our deficiencies, and the weaknesses. And I've never seen a plan that predicts destination, that essentially is not a list of what we don't have. And, and instead, at my university, we focus on what God's already given us, God's given us, a great faculty, a great campus, broad reach, etc, etc, we focus on those strengths, and not on our deficiencies of God wants to fill in deficiencies, that will happen. You know, I think there's a lot of unrealistic expectations that comes with a planning document.

10:55
Everybody who's who've been part of, of government that you work with, is to have this experience, where you're going to build a new facility. And maybe it's a community center, maybe it's a city hall, whatever it may be, the artists does beautiful rendering, which they charge a lot of money for. And there is no building in the world that can look as good as that rendering. So when the actual building comes out, and is built, everybody's little bit disappointed. Well, I thought this looked a whole lot better in a picture. And I did, because that's what planning does, it creates this, this artificial expectation of what the thing can do. And we do that with people as well, I was told my campus, there's only one perfect per employee, and that's the one we've not yet hired. That is because when we did somebody's resume, we look at that we've got a need, we say, Wow, they really fit this, when they come this problem, this problem, this problem will be fixed, and it's all going to be better. And then they come in all they can do is disappoint us, nobody can live up that expectation. And so, you know, these are some of the issues of why I've moved away from planning. And again, I separate out that destination planning versus operational or Continuous Quality Improvement Planning. Yeah, well, I love that. In fact, I really liked your thought about leveraging strengths. And we kind of struggle with that. And have always scratched our head wondering how can we leverage more of our strengths, to take advantage of those opportunities? Oh, in SWOT. And I think we probably give that the short side of the equation when we think about our strengths as a city or county or or department. Well, so So let's say I buy into this idea that we don't need to obsess over the plan.

12:49
You know, it does have some some

12:54
limiting attributes to it, for sure. I think you've hit on some good points. So let's say we buy into that, how do we then get our leadership, our city council, county commission or our staff? How do we get best positioned to take advantage of opportunities? What do we how do we how do we prepare to receive opportunities when they when they come in the front door? Yeah, well, I think is a critical question. And you don't do it by going in full force with a with a no planning objective, if you go in and announce, there's not gonna be a plan for 2030.

13:31
Again, you're probably gonna get fired. So don't do that. Here's the way to do it. You know, and that's another interesting thing about planning, if you notice, every plan is around some round number. And we're either going to grow by 10,000, or 100,000, or a million or, and it's always 2030. I wonder why nobody has a plan for 2031 Less, it's your anniversary year, you don't have to plan for 2031.

13:54
But here's how you do it. You do it by looking back. And you do it by lifting up opportunities. So yeah, your city

14:06
council is not going to let you get rid of planning. But when you're reporting on the planning, you can say, here's the report on the plan for this quarter. But we had these four opportunities come now these are not in the plan. I want you to tell you, these are things we could not have planned for. But let me highlight them for you. And when you start to do that, they start realizing that the opportunities are where the good stuff comes. And the plan is where the adult stuff is. And it really you have to build that culture. I work with a with a

14:42
private school whose headmaster loves this idea of getting rid of planning but the board just will not do it. So at every time they report on the plan, they have a list. Here's the report on the plan outcomes, and here's the opportunities and they publish it. Here's the opportunities

15:00
We did not expect, when you do that enough time, all of a sudden, the part of the report that your city council's gonna start looking forward to is the opportunities, not the plan. And, you know, they want to know the chips running well, and I get that. And I understand that I want to make sure my city is running. Well, we're got a little problem here in Jackson, Mississippi right now. So it's a tough place to run. But

15:24
you know, when they see a pattern of opportunities, and they see that the good things come by opportunities, then they will respond. So you know it but it's it's a it's a process is not an overnight change, and is building a culture of expectation that opportunities are going to bring good things. Yeah, well, it what struck me and that idea is to enable and encourage employees to look for opportunities and and grab them, when they show up, it certainly energizes people, I would think it creates kind of this creative element where we're always looking for something new and fresh. And we're open to new ideas. And for organizations that are not prone to risk or have been, you know, in the past have a culture of very low risk, I can see where this is probably going to take a while to begin to open up to these things, it will. But as a leader, your biggest impact is going to be on your employees first. Because if you will highlight how they responded to an opportunity. We had somebody come in, they were getting their driver's license, whatever. And we discovered this and tell the story, celebrate it, find places to celebrate, when people is more than going above and beyond the the task. I mean, we all do that. And I'm not a huge fan of employee of the month, that's a different topic. But I think when we celebrate people who capture opportunities that others start looking for them, and there will be first adapters who will be comfortable with this. And they'll go and there'll be people especially maybe who've been in government for a long time, kind of like higher education, who will go kicking and screaming, because they want to Heather bland. And that's how they've always done it. And so you know, you but just as a leader, you don't have to start by convincing the city council, you start just with your own employees, maybe you're just running an office with four people start with them, encourage them in, by celebrating when you see it here. Here's the challenge. If you start, I do this with people who are starting with opportunity, leadership, spin one week, and just write down all the opportunities that you didn't expect to come. You don't have to act on them. But the people you didn't expect to run into the places of service, the ideas that might have come, the whatever it might be, you will be amazed at how many are there, the reason we don't see them is we're so dead focused on that plan, we can't get our eyes off of it enough to see the opportunity. So if you practice it a little bit, you'll be amazed, I don't care how bureaucratic and rigid your structure is, I mean, help us I'm in higher education. And we can do this, the government can do this, too. So

18:16
yeah, get off the eyes, focus on the plan, and really start to look for the opportunities. That's when they're going to come. And I think in the arena of the people in this audience, they're probably mostly going to come through people more than projects, especially at the beginning.

18:33
Yeah, I wanted to go back and touch on something you were just mentioning earlier. And when I was reading your book, I was particularly struck by the story of the football coach, and the fact that you had starting a football program, way tucked deep down inside the plan somewhere, maybe we'll do it in five or 10 years, then you ran into an old friend who was a football coach who had recently been let go by his school, I believe, and he was available to coach and that was an opportunity that just walked right up to you. And so you actually ended up moving forward with the program much faster than you normally would have. But But my question is, how do you how do we go to our leadership and how do we go to those employees who are a little skeptical? You know, who who like status quo, who takes them a while to come around to change and opportunity? You know, we've got to be convincing, right? We've got to somehow be inspiring, but seems like we're gonna have to do some some pretty good selling here to some folks that aren't used to these types of environments. We very much are, you know, I've got wrote a

19:44
document once a chapter for a book of how to lead for change and live to tell the story. Because when you're leading for change, you're very vulnerable people I am convinced people would rather live with the mediocrity. They know that

20:00
Rather than take the risk on the change of what they don't know, and so when change comes up is presented, people recoil, people are nervous.

20:11
People are scared of, well, that's one chaebol, then what are you going to do after that? Where's the other shoe gonna drop? The first reaction is how does this impact me personally. So you've got to deal with that. So let's say you're going to put in a new policy for the city. And and the first thing people in your office are going to say is how does that impact me personally, let's, let's take an example. You may say, an, our mayor may stand up and say, We're gonna build a brand new city, Hall's state of the art is going to be beautiful, it's gonna have all the great offices, everybody's gonna move, it's gonna be wonderful. First thing people think is, do I have to drive farther or shorter? Where am I going to park, where's my office going to be compared to other people's offices, where's the lunch room, where's the break room, how close to the restaurant, all these personal things have to be dealt with before they can catch the big vision. So don't gloss over that, as a leader, don't say those things don't matter, those things do matter. And if you'll address those things, and give them freedom to talk about those things, then they'll eventually get to the big picture. But yeah, change is hard. Because change usually requires more work, not less.

21:28
Change gets us out of our comfort, zone, change changes, relationships. Change also is kind of a trigger for a lot of times in the workplace, you can have tensions and pressures, and you kind of let learn to live with them and keep them quiet. Or when you change, those things kind of come bursting out again, and people get aggressive and those kinds of things. So I think the process of change is, is one of the most important things we do as leaders and and one of the key to me in leading for change is to to spend time with not just the visionaries who get it and love it. And boy, this was wonderful, tell you how great you are. Spend time with the people who are going to be the biggest critics. So you brought the football example of what we did with football. And yeah, I just finished the plan. And it was all done. I mean, literally an 18 month planning process of the blue ribbon committee, the whole works, had the plan all done ran into this guy. And on a on a spur of the moment, I said, How would you like to start a football program, and we did. And but what I did is I went to my critics first, not just the people who I knew would love it, but the people who I knew would be against, and I spent time with them, and I listened to them. And I don't have them, I don't have to agree with them. But they have to be heard. And what I find is you will always have the critics as a leader, you will always have critics. And what I find is their teeth tend to be a little less sharp before the decision than after the decision. So if you go ahead and announce something, they're gonna come after you and they bite really hard. If you go ahead of the decision, even though they may not agree with you, at least they feel like they got heard, they're gonna be more gentle about it, they're more likely to come along. So I go to the credit critics, then I build coalition around those who do agree with it, broadening that circle, some people, you know, I think one of the challenges we have as leaders, we think everybody makes decisions like we do. And some leaders can just decide in an instant, like I did with a football coach. Others need time. And there are people in every organization who can be quick and fast. And there are others who need time. There are people who look at it through a telescope, others look at it through a microscope, and others look at it through an endoscope, you know, we've all got our own tools of how we look at the world, and give them space to do that. And when they can do that, then they can begin to get comfortable enough with change, where it hits them personally, where they can see it from their perspective where they know they're hurt. It doesn't have mean they have to get consensus. If you wait for consensus, you're never gonna get anything done. And that's part of the problem with colleges and universities as part of the problem of government. We wait till everybody's in agreement is never going to happen. You finally get to get up lead. Yeah. Well, just to remind everybody, we're talking today with Dr. Roger parrot. He's the author of opportunity leadership, and really wanted to wanted to close this kind of a big question, but kind of close with this and has to do with these six talents of opportunity leaders. What are those? Could Can you explain what are those traits? What are those talents that opportunity leaders need to have that they need to hone if they're going to successfully leverage opportunities in the future? Yeah, I think they're critical that you know, I'm not

25:00
asking leaders get rid of what they've learned from Harvard Business Review or their MBA, go with that, or their or their MPa, I know a lot of your listeners have an MPA, which is a great degree. So I'm not asking you to get rid of that, add this, in addition, and there are six of them there in the book. But they're you know, leading without a plan is the plan, there is no plan B. Now, that's a little hard in your context for your listeners to do in the way that I can do it. But you can learn about that maybe a little bit more. But the second one, I think, is really important for for this group of listeners that stay, I call what stay in your lane. And that means you we're all traveling along this highway, and we got our engine of whatever we're leading going. And we look over and there's another car that's going the same direction, almost the same speed, maybe a little faster, or whatever. And we tend to want to get in their lane, because what that looks like they're doing looks a lot like ours. But it's different. If we will really hone if you don't have a long range plan, you've got to really hone your mission. What's your calling? What's your responsibility? What's that mission? And so I come down to making those decisions could pick off and say, Well, how do you know which opportunity to follow because I get more opportunities than I could ever do? So how do you know which ones it comes down to mission gifting and capacity? Mission? I asked 12 or 15 really hard questions in the book about mission, gifting, what are you really good at? And everybody's not good at the same thing. So what is your organization, your office, your team? What are you good at. And then what's your capacity, there are times when you can take on more than times when you can't. And so we're always looking at staying in your lane by evaluating Michigan gifting and capacity. Third, third one that's really important to me is that making decisions that don't just solve the problem, I think this is where leaders get hung up a lot. We and it's pretty extensive how I write about this, but essentially what happens is, somebody comes in with a problem. And we want to get that problem out of the way. So we make a decision to solve that problem. But it created three more problems that are good come out of the woodwork after that. Or it didn't really solve their biggest problem, they don't only solve the symptom of their problem, we never got to the root of it. So I encourage leaders to to look more holistically at decisions so that we're not just solving the immediate problem in front of us. But we're solving the ones that are down the chessboard. And what I find is, the more of most effective leaders can look farther and farther down the chessboard, to see what the implication of that is. And I could give a Zane illustrations of that. But I face all the time, and everybody here does probably who's listening,

27:46
Jim, but I think that's a skill that's developed. Because usually when a problem comes, we just want to get rid of it, we just want to get it over here. Right. And, and and in doing so we create more problems. Another one that really is important to me, is practicing future focused evaluation. And I wrote a wrote a little history in the in at the start of this chapter in the book. That is I don't think it's been recorded anyplace out. But how US grant when he was leading the Union forces in Mississippi.

28:23
His father was somebody who was trying to take advantage of his position to make money. And he didn't get on well with his father and his father came with some Jewish merchants to try to do something where he his son could use his leverage in the army with the war to make money. And he kicked him out and he kicked them out. And then he put out a decree that essentially nobody in the territory could do business with Jewish leaders with Jewish business people. Well, when President Lincoln heard about this, he overruled his order. And he told him he was wrong, and very upfront about it. And then turned around very shortly after that, and gave him command of the forces in the east. Since that is what I call practicing future focused evaluation. We can evaluate people and we can beat them up, we can probably put tighter reins around them, we can make them feel bad, we can, you know, kind of keep them control, we don't accomplish much. If instead we'll help them solve a problem. We'll help them learn to grow from it. And then we'll give them more responsibly the best thing you can do for somebody who just made a mistake is give them more to do so they can prove they won't make a mistake and they want to do well. People want to do well. People don't want to do poorly. They want to do well. So when we practice future forward evaluation, we're investing in those people rather than just trying to beat them down, control them and beat them up with policies. And I do write in the book about I'm not a great fan of, of policies because we try to use policies to have control

30:00
Roll the fringe of the people we work with, when we just need to deal with them one on one, the policies need to be what's good for everybody, not just to make our job easier to control the fringe, so, so those are some of them. And then the last one of that group is one that's got some interesting reaction after the book came out. And that's emulating baseball players instead of football coaches. And in America, especially here in the south, you're in Atlanta. I'm in Jackson. I mean, this is a pretty football focused area of the world and seems like every place in the country is now but football is all about control. It's all about preciseness. It's about time constraints, it's about team perfect synchronization, it's about a predetermined plan. I mean, I asked my coach one day, I said, I said this game you're gonna play.

30:47
How do you respond, he said, we call the first 20 plays for every girl in a locker room, it doesn't matter what they do, we know what we're gonna do. It's and football is about winning every game. Baseball on the other hand, the manager rewards anticipation. It's a reactionary game, it's about personal ingenuity. It's about flexibility. It's about an inner woven purposes, even though the gifts that's our difference, and you can lose 30% of baseball games and still go the World Series. But here's the kicker on it. And I'll stop with this one. The kicker in on it is when the pressures on you're watching a football game on TV, when the pressure is on, every time the camera goes to the coach. In a baseball game, when the pressure is on, the camera goes to the players and leaders, we need to turn the camera around, we don't need any more spotlight, turn the camera on the people who are playing the game who are doing the work with you put the focus on them. And when you do, everybody comes more successful. Huh, Wow, I love that. What a wonderful picture of this contrast of football and baseball. I've never heard that before. I really, really liked that. Thank you so much for, for sharing that. You know, a lot of our cities and counties and departments whether it's public works or public safety, police fire, they have book clubs. And they learned leadership techniques and concepts through book clubs. And I really want to encourage all of the folks listening today to go to Amazon and buy this book opportunity leadership by Dr. Roger parrot, and create a book club around it because it's really going to help, I think transform the way you actually run and operate your local government and your department. So I'm a big fan of the book. And it's really meant a lot to me in reading it myself. Last thing I wanted to ask you about was your new Master's of Public Administration program there at Belhaven. I understand it's an online program and very affordably priced. So here again, we've got hundreds of people listening to this podcast around the country, some of which are not credentialed who want to go back to school, perhaps, or want to be promoted within their city or county. And having an MPA would make all the difference and a lot of them do pursue MPa. So could you mind just taking a couple of minutes and sharing a little bit about the program and how it works and how people love to connect. We are very committed to to those who work in public service in government. And so we created this MPa, Master's of Public Administration here Belhaven University, it's 100%. Online. It's very engaging. We support it with a tremendous staff who will make it easier, easy for you. You know, chances are in some government agencies, they will pay a portion or you may get a raise when you get the degree done. Even if you don't, there is federal financial loans available for the degree. But the great thing is, we said we've got to do something to really help these folks after COVID, because we felt like the pressure was really on that whole world after COVID. And so we took that degree and it'd been like $16,000, and we kept the price to 9950 bucks, I think is the final price on it. We want to get it under $10,000. It's the least expensive degree in the country, as a Master's of Public Administration. This exact same degree we were offering for 16 grams, so we didn't get the quality. It's the same thing. But we just feel felt like this is a time we need to boost up these leaders and a master's degree gets them the promotion, it gets some new opportunities. It gets some advancement opportunities to change locations if you want to. And it's a great it's a wonderful degree that really is affordable and I'm prepared for your setting. You can do it whenever you want. So you can do it. It's not you don't have to come to class anytime online. The thing is 100% online we have students from

35:00
All over the country engaged in this program and we appreciate it so much bill that you mentioned it because we really would like to make it available to students and classes start every eight weeks. So you can start right away. You take one class at a time. It's very manageable. Maybe you got to stop out for because you got a big project. Come on. That's okay, take eight weeks off and then pick it up again. We'll work with you the teams terrific to make that happen.

35:26
Wow.

35:28
Do you Belhaven with one LBL ha ve and that

35:35
edu type in MPa, or Masters of Public Administration or typing a master's degrees, they'll show up and you'll you'll find the link to it.

35:44
Well, thank you for sharing that, you know what I know we both have a heart for helping others become their best best version of themselves what God intended for them to be. And so we do that through leadership development training, and you do it in more of the traditional educational realm. And so we want to help folks really get to that. And we were really supportive of the training you do and, and we share a heartbeat on that. I mean, we're a Christian institution, we're serious about our faith. And so people come to our program, you'll find biblical foundation built into this full curriculum, because that's important to us. That's how you're going to weather the storms of life. So you'll find that with us, but and you'll find the best marketplace ideas, but But Bill, we love what you're doing, we're big fans, and I think government leaders are really fortunate to have what you all provide.

36:43
Well, thank you so much. Thank you for being our guest on this podcast. And we loved I know everyone really is going to appreciate hearing what you had to say again, I would encourage you all to go by the book opportunity leadership, Dr. Roger, parrot, get it on Amazon, wherever books are sold and create a book club and really begin to grasp on to this idea of seeking opportunities, leverage opportunities, and taking advantage of of what comes your way. And so thank you again, Dr. Parent, we enjoyed speaking with you and for our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. Again, if you have ideas or suggestions on future topics for these podcasts, please let us know you can go to our website and get in contact with us. In the meantime, hope you have a great day. God bless and take care. Thank you, doctor. Thank you so much been terrific.