The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or two — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

So much is written about how important purpose is to a business especially now.  But what is purpose?  How do you become a purpose driven organization rather than just a company with a purpose statement?  Podcast alumni Katie Cronen and Sachi Pettit join Michael and Lee to talk about identifying scalable stories, getting your purpose in front of the right people, and the value of a master narrative. They use poignant examples from companies like Toyota, Airbnb, Google, and Hershey to help you find the symbols that bring your company’s story to life.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

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EPISODE 7 TRANSCRIPT:

Lee Carter:
They said what? Welcome to Hearsay, a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and Partners, where we provide our take on the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today and what you can learn from their experiences. Our Philosophy is, “It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.” That’s why we call this Hearsay. I am Lee Carter and I’m partner and president at Maslansky and Partners and author of a book called Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter. Very, very happy to be here today.

Michael Maslansky:
Hi, Lee. And I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of the firm that invented language strategy and the author of The Language of Trust: Selling Ideas in a World of Skeptics. Today, we’re going to talk about purpose, where in this moment between a pandemic, Black Lives Matter, and so much other change in our world, we’ve seen that companies’ values and culture and their core purpose has been tested more than ever before. What do we get involved in? How do we deal with the situations that we’re facing? We’ve seen some companies react really well. We’ve seen some companies not know what to do under these circumstances, and so today we’re going to talk about the difference between those companies and what makes some successful in this moment while others are really challenged. To do that, we have with us two of our colleagues who’ve been part of our team for a really long time and have a tremendous amount of experience in this space, in terms of helping clients define and execute against their purpose. We have Katie Cronen and Sachi Pettit, both again long-time members of the Maslansky and Partners team. Welcome, Katie and Sachi.

Katie Cronen:
Thank you, Michael. Good to be here.

Sachi Pettit:
Happy to be here.

Michael Maslansky:
All right, so we’re going to start just by trying to get an understanding of what we mean when we’re talking about purpose. We know that a lot of companies out there have a purpose, or they would say that they have a purpose, but Lee, why don’t you start us off? What’s the difference between a company whose purpose really helps them in this moment and others for whom it’s just wallpaper?

Lee Carter:
I think one of the things that we really need to wrestle with on this is when people say they have a purpose, what’s that look like in practice? I would argue that companies that have a purpose, that is a true North Star, a defining narrative, something that everyone in the organization, everyone that is part of the organization really understands what you stand for, who you serve, and what you’re all about. It’s not just a nice thing on the wall. It’s not just something that people have forgotten or a couple of executives really rally behind, but it is the reason you show up every day. It is how you show up every day. I think there’s a huge difference in that bigger-picture narrative that’s really clear and really compelling.

Michael Maslansky:
And how do you know the difference if you’re working at a company? How can you tell if it’s a real one or if it’s just something hanging on your wall?

Lee Carter:
Well, I would make the statement that if you have to go looking through a document or looking your Drive or your Box folders to try and find out what the purpose statement is, you’re probably doing it wrong. It should be something you just know. It should be something that’s repeatable. It should be something that everybody is part of and it shouldn’t be something that’s hard to find. It should be something that is really top-of-mind across the organization.

Michael Maslansky:
I’ve spoken to a lot of people about purpose over the years, and there are plenty of people, including myself for a time, who was skeptical about this idea of purpose say that that’s great. People say that they have a purpose. They talk about being a purpose-driven company, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t actually help performance and it doesn’t really drive your business forward. Or does it? The question is, is it a driver for performance? Are companies better off when they have a real purpose? Or is it just kind of a nice to having thing? Katie, convince me why it’s important for companies to have a clear purpose, that they get real benefits out of it?

Katie Cronen:
It’s absolutely critical to have a purpose and that there are real business benefits from it. I know that there are a number of articles that have come out from Harvard Business Review and others that are making that point, but more practically, a really strong purpose can help you determine where your business goes or what kind of issues you should decide to engage in. It should be able to be something that you can use as a filter to say, “You know what? Because this is our purpose and it’s really clearly defined, these are the issues where we will engage. These are the ones where we won’t engage.” Or, “These are the kinds of products we’ll get involved in versus the ones that don’t.” Airbnb has a pretty clear purpose that they do a good job of making public, and it’s to belong anywhere. You take their history and the kinds of things that they got involved in, last year when travel stopped, there were not as many people going everywhere and booking Airbnbs with the same kind of frequency and they had to take a step back and say, “All right, how do we keep our business afloat?” One of the things that they got involved in that I think was pretty successful were creating these virtual experiences because even if you’re not traveling or staying in somebody else’s home, sharing some kind of virtual experience is a way to feel like you belong. On the one hand, I think that was a great example of them knowing that even when they had to reinvent their business model a little bit, it gave them a sense of direction about what was going to be authentic to them and powerful for them versus what wasn’t worth getting involved in.

Michael Maslansky:
It’s a North Star. Having a clear purpose is a real rallying cry for employees at a time when we know that many more employees in general and certainly Millennials are really focused on working for organizations that are purpose-driven. When companies have a clear purpose, you give people a reason to work there that goes beyond the business that you’re in. I think one of the most important and probably undervalued elements of purpose today is that in so many of the categories, particularly categories that we work in, in finance, in healthcare, in energy, these are places where it’s difficult to really stand out from the crowd purely on product features. Right? To really have a competitive advantage of your product, so much of it becomes what you build around your product, what your product means to your audience. And purpose is a place where you can have a competitive advantage that really allows you to stand out when other things don’t work anymore. So I am a convert, but we also know that it’s really hard to do it right.

Lee Carter:
Yeah. I think this is where the rubber meets the road. We know now what it is and why it’s important. The question now is how do you do it? It should be easy, right? Because this is about your values. It’s about who you are, so it should be easy to express it. I think for some companies, it seems to come really naturally and other companies, it takes a lot of effort, at least from the outside perspective. I think the one thing that we’ve seen in all the purpose work that we’ve done is once you find it, it just feels right. Then every communication that you have from there becomes authentic, it becomes true. It’s real for you. It’s real for your employees. It’s real for your customers and it really drives value.

Michael Maslansky:
I think you’ve got really three buckets of companies out there in general. You’ve got companies that are born with purpose in their DNA, and they’re like the Ben & Jerry’s out there and the Patagonias and the companies that everything that they’ve built is built around that idea of purpose. You’ve got companies that come to purpose and really deeply ingrain it in their DNA and it comes naturally. And then you have a lot of the industries that are lower-involvement categories to begin with from a customer perspective and where purpose is not necessarily intuitive. So you talk about financial services. You talk about insurance. You talk about even energy, in some cases, tech. For them, the journey, the figuring out purpose is a harder one. It might not be immediately obvious, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there. I think we look at an insurance company and you think about, at their core, what they’re trying to do which is trying to protect people from harm. So what in there is meant to be the purpose for a company? How can you define it in a way that’s compelling for you that goes beyond the products that you sell, but really puts you on a mission to protect?  You could broaden out that definition of protection. If you’re in the healthcare space, a mission-driven industry for most people, despite the fact that it’s gotten a bad reputation in some cases. But we have many organizations that we work with that really deeply believe in their mission and it goes beyond their business. Kaiser Permanente is a great one where they are really focused on care and caring as something that’s broader than just health.

Katie Cronen:
Couple of years ago, we did a project for the Hershey Company and they came to us and said, “There are a lot of things we stand for. We’re absolutely a company full of really special employees who get out of bed every morning for a higher purpose than just to sell candy, sell snacks.” Of course, they’re very, very good at it and they love doing that too, but they wanted to nail their purpose statement. Up until then, they had what we were lovingly calling a purpose snow globe. A lot of core phrases that had been part of the company for years that got thrown around that they hadn’t quite rallied around a single purpose statement. One of the things that we found was we tested all kinds of different ways of articulating it, and we have things about their commitment to winning and innovation. And you test that internally and externally, and people just said, “That sounds just like a business strategy. It doesn’t have enough emotion to it.” If you think about the Hershey Company, immediately you are reminded of things that are more emotional. Then the other thing that we found is that there are a lot of things that they wanted to talk about or could talk about, but weren’t really heard as credible because it didn’t intuitively tie back to what you know the Hershey Company does really well, which is make candy and all of their other amazing brands. You guys are going to kill me, but there was a slide in our presentation that I was driving home that was saying in order for Hershey’s purpose statement to be credible, it had to be edible.

Michael Maslansky:

Wah, wah.

Katie: Cronen:

I know. Cue the eye rolls. I know. But you know what? I was trying to drive home a point, and it is absolutely true that in this instance, if you are a company that does food, your purpose has to tie back to something that feels immediately like you’re referencing potentially your brands and your products. So you take this. It has to be emotional, and in order to be credible, it has to be edible. And that purpose statement that they arrived at was to make more moments of goodness. It was really powerful for them because it allowed them to speak about the kinds of brands and the brand experience that they deliver, but also to go beyond that and talk about all the ways that they’re creating moments of goodness in people’s lives even just beyond their products.

Lee Carter:
You know, I love the idea of a snow globe, Katie. One of the things that I know you and I worked on a project once, and I think we actually stole this from Michael, who might’ve stolen it from George Bush Sr., which is oftentimes that-

Michael Maslansky:
It’s true. I did.

Lee Carter:
Yeah. Yup. Oftentimes in an organization, you have a thousand points of light. They’re dimly lit, but there’s a thousand good points of things that are happening. What a good master narrative does is it allows us to shine a spotlight. It gives all of those thousand points of lights one direction to focus on. What that does is that spotlight allows to tell a broader story. It becomes a platform. It becomes a thing that everything else can come from. Then you can bring it all to life. So I think the question people would have from here, so I’ve got my one idea, I’ve got the one spotlight or my area of focus. Now what? Michael, what do you tell them?

Michael Maslansky:
First, I have to say that the irony of that is that I think George Herbert Walker Bush was saying it as a positive. There were a thousand points of light. It was education related and we were saying that it’s the worst thing that could happen because it doesn’t generate any heat because there’s no clear focus anywhere. So when we have to think about how to bring a purpose to life, in many ways, you can test whether or not you’ve got a good purpose by the actions that you use to bring it to life. If you find that the purpose is so broad that you could do anything and attach it to that purpose, then you probably are not clear about what you stand for, but we hear a lot of clients and maybe some people listening who say, “All right. We’ve got a purpose, but it’s not generating any heat. We’re not bringing it to life. People are not taking it seriously. It’s not sticking.” In those cases, I think what we see is, or what we look for, what we try and help clients and companies do is figure out what are the symbols of that purpose. What are the clearest illustrations of your purpose so that, to Katie’s point, I can’t believe I’m going to repeat this about bringing it to life of something that’s edible. But it does have power because it feels right and there may be symbolic gestures that go along with it. Sachi, what do you think? How did you get that purpose to stick?

Sachi Pettit:
Yeah. It’s such a great question and something that clients ask all the time. I know one thing that we’ve talked a lot about as a team is this continuum we’re seeing as a trend, so on the one hand, you can be seen as opportunistic. On the other side, there’s what we call wallflowers: folks who are doing a lot of things, the little points of light, but none of it is breaking through. On the far end of the spectrum is where everyone wants to be: the companies who are truly making a difference. If you’re doing a lot of good things, supporting those causes, it works well for those employees, but you’re not going to get the credit that you want to be seen as that company that’s making a difference. You’re not really moving as far as you can and getting as much traction and as much credit with your purpose as you could be. I think that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity. But let me make this a little concrete with some examples because even when I say opportunistic, even if you’re a brand that has purpose built in, that doesn’t mean you can take any action without running it through the filter of “is this supporting our purpose?”  An example that comes to mind for me is Everlane. At the start of the pandemic in our Instagram feeds, Everlane is a clothing company that’s known for being very ethical. The first thing they did was to say, “We’re announcing a sale on our jeans because there’s a lot of firsts going on right now and this is the first time we’ve done it.” They got some backlash there because that was just not meeting folks where they are in terms of emotionally talking about firsts when everyone’s feeling anxiety around the pandemic. That was a bit too opportunistic and not actually using their brand platform, their purpose platform to meet folks with a grand symbol. On the other hand, you have Target, for example. We all know retail is hurting a lot right now and we would expect there to be, perhaps, some rollbacks and raises or just for wages to stay the same. Target did the opposite. This, I think, makes it a powerful symbol. They announced that they’re permanently raising minimum wage to $15. Not only that, for the employees, they’re offering free virtual health visits. For every employee, knowing that they are essential workers in the stores or helping with shipments and things like that, they gave them a one-time thank you payment of $200.  It’s that type of symbol of being a bit unexpected and a bit different than the other companies that we heard about who are just writing paychecks or maybe just saying thank you to employees. They actually were able to use their purpose around helping all families discover the joy of every day life to say, “That starts with our team. We can’t deliver on purpose of helping families discover joy unless we take care of our employees first,” so I think that’s a very powerful example.

Michael Maslansky:
So Katie, we’ve worked on projects together. It’s been painful for you, I know, but we’ve made it through. But sometimes it’s hard to find that symbol, that red thread that you can create to bring that purpose to life. What do you tell clients who have a harder time trying to figure out what they can do to create those symbols, to find the really clear ways to make purpose stick?

Katie Cronen:

I have bad memories of being in emotional response session after emotional response session asking consumers, “Hey, who’s a great company?” A few years ago, all you could hear were things like Tom’s because they have buy one, give one. It’s like, okay. Well, what if that’s not baked into your business model in that same way and you don’t have that automatic awesome symbol? In those instances, the first question that I ask of clients and that I ask of ourselves is how much are you doing and how much are you talking about that you’re doing? Because usually what we find is the instinct is to laundry list a bunch of different initiatives. “We’re so good because we’re giving to this and these support our troops and we have access to education initiatives and here is our sustainability plan.” Very often, I feel like companies become corporate wallflowers when they try to boil the ocean and they try to talk about everything without picking a couple of initiatives that they’re really proud of and that most intuitively line up to what they’re known for. Even from there, there are things that you can do with some core initiatives that you have and how you talk about them in a way that gets people to remember them. So you think about companies and financial services, somebody talking about how much they give away every year. You can have somebody who says, “We donated last year X billion dollars in these cities.” And it’s amazing because it’s big, big number, but the truth of the matter is nobody remembers the number. They actually start to ask, “Well, is that a lot or is that a little?” Sometimes they start doing the math and the math doesn’t always wind up in the company’s favor. But even something as simple as, let’s say you shift that from not just talking about how much you spend, but to shift it to for whom. Who does that actually benefit at the end of the day?  Something as simple as moving away from saying, “Last year we spent X billion dollars financing small business owners,” you could shift that and say, “We have lines of products focused on small businesses that may not normally receive funding with loan amounts as low as $10,000.” If that’s your symbol or if those couple of initiatives are your symbols and they line up to a bigger story that you’re telling about caring about the small businesses that are the lifeblood of this economy, suddenly we have a different conversation going.

Michael Maslansky:
Lee, I want to ask you a little bit. We’re talking about purpose and actions that people can take, but we’re not as much in the actions business as we are in the language strategy business. So why are we giving advice about actions instead of telling them what to say about the actions that they’re already taking?

Lee Carter:
I think how you frame up actions can often be as important as the actions themselves.  Katie talks about our idea of laundry listing and wanting to talk about all of the good things that we can do. I can remember Katie and I were working on a project together a few years ago. Michael, I think you might’ve been in this room. We were in California around a conference table and this woman comes out like, “Look at all the good stuff we do,” and I think there were over 450 initiatives that they were involved in. Super proud of them. Really excited about them, but what happens? We’re going to talk about all 450 of them. You’re never going to get anywhere. And so on that end of the continuum, what ends up happening is you have to narrow your focus so that people know one action or maybe three actions you take that are symbolic of your larger story. The other problem that we have with clients is oftentimes, they’ll have the flip side of this, which is they’ll just assume people know all the good stuff they’re doing and they just think it’s enough to say, “We’re a good company.” Then they don’t get into talking about actions at all. That’s really dangerous because then it seems hollow. So there’s a sweet spot that we really need to be in that we talk about the actions that matter most, that tell the story in the best possible way to show the kind of company that you are. This is really an exercise in focus. Sometimes it’s as important what you don’t say as what you do say, and sometimes it’s just really, really important that you just get those things right in front of people. You don’t make it hard for them to find, and you don’t assume what people already know about you because often there’s baggage behind the perceptions people have of you and these actions are the kinds of things that can totally disrupt your perception of a company.

Michael Maslansky:
I think what we see is this virtual circle between language and action, that if you talk about language but you can’t support it with the right actions, then you’re going to lack credibility and authenticity. Similarly, if you talk about actions but you don’t have the right language, then people are not going to be able to connect the dots and you won’t have any impact. So even though we are in the language strategy business, the actions that we elevate and amplify to support our message that we help to support our clients’ purpose, and that ultimately the way that we talk about those actions is really critically important to the success of any effort to drive purpose through an organization and out towards stakeholders. One of the ways that I know we do that a lot is through stories. I know each of you have been involved in different situations where at the core of our efforts around purpose is the need to tell better stories. Somebody, help me understand, what makes a good story in the context of purpose?

Katie Cronen:
I’ll take that one. There are a couple of aspects to a really good story that pays off your purpose. I think one of the first things that we’ve talked about is that it has to actually tie back to your master narrative and pay off the main point that you’re going to try and tell, but good stories draw you in. They have a really interesting headline or a hook that grabs your attention and doesn’t just launch into a thesis statement about why you’re great. They’re emotional. They have some tension, and this is really interesting. I think, and I probably learned this from you, Maz and Lee, but there are a lot of anecdotes that have been used in state of the union addresses over many, many years and it used to be really novel when you could turn and say, “And just like Mr. So and So over here.” Then you would tell a story about him and that would tie back into your policy point. Now we’ve grown kind of skeptical of those as cherry-picked one-off anecdotes. What we’ve seen can make the big difference between a really powerful story versus something that gets interpreted as, “Oh, that’s just a one off. You found the one instance that your company was awesome.” You have to tie that emotional story, that anecdote with a scalable fact, a fact that says, “Hey, and here’s evidence, now that I’ve given you the emotional part of what we were up to. Here’s evidence that this is actually emblematic of the way that we do business.”

Michael Maslansky:
So Katie, how do you kill a Toyota?

Katie Cronen:
How do you kill a Toyota? Well, I will tell you a story about that. The show Top Gear actually set out to kill a Toyota because they were trying to test this idea of just how dependable and how good is the quality of a Toyota Tacoma? They actually did a really cool video about it. I’m sure it’s still up on YouTube, but they put the truck underwater at high tide for a lot of hours and then pulled it out and then got it to start. They set it on fire. They dropped it off of a building, and each and every time they had a mechanic who only had simple tools to try and get it to restart. And each and every time, they could not kill that Toyota. This is a perfect example of the scalable story. So you play this video or you tell this story to people and you say, “See? That’s because Toyotas are built to last.” They say, “That’s awesome, except that was for a TV show and what kind of tools was this mechanic actually using?” They just start thinking that we cherry picked the anecdote. But if you pair it with ending by saying, “And in fact, 80% of the Toyotas sold 20 years ago are still on the road today, suddenly we’ve got a different conversation going.”

Lee Carter:
The so-called scalable fact.

Katie Cronen:
The scalable fact.

Michael Maslansky:
Sachi, how about you? Are there situations where you’ve found that stories really help bring to life a purpose?

Sachi Pettit:
One that comes to mind is when Google partnered with the California government to provide computers and internet to California students studying at home when the pandemic started. You could visualize the computers. You could visualize the WiFi routers being installed. You could visualize the students being able to finish out their semester all from the headline, so I think that’s an excellent gut check when you’re starting to tell stories as well.

Katie Cronen:
Oh, I have another headline example, if we want one.

Michael Maslansky:
Go for it.

Sachi Pettit:
Do it.

Katie Cronen:
Yeah? Speaking of headlines, that actually reminds me of some work we did more recently with a company in healthcare. There’s a simple fact that they wanted to drive home about how their product has demonstrated efficacy for something up to seven years post-administration. We looked at that and we were like, “This is a big, important fact for them to drive home, but it’s very, very clinical and we’re totally losing sight of the fact that this is a product that is given to babies.” Rather than just talking about demonstrating efficacy for up to seven years post-administration, what if we talked about how this product offers protection for seven years from infancy to second grade, so that in the same number of words, instead of just talking about post-administration and demonstrated efficacy, we’re getting you to picture just how much happens from a baby that is crawling to a kid who is reading and reinforcing, “Hey, this product works that whole time.”

Lee Carter:
That’s a great example.

Michael Maslansky:
Often when I’m teaching classes with college students, I will ask them whether it’s more important to have a good story to tell or to tell a good story.  I’ll make a four box matrix with good story to tell on one side and have a good story on the other. They’ll almost always say it’s more important to have a good story to tell because you’ll be authentic, and if you don’t have a good story to tell, then you’re one of these bad companies that’s just out there spinning. My response is that, actually, if you don’t tell a good story, then it’s like a tree falling in the forest. Your good deeds go unnoticed, certainly unrewarded, and often they have less of an impact as a result. In this world that we operate in today, it’s not enough to have a good purpose. You really have to live it and share it and show it all the time if you want to make the impact that you think that you can have.

Michael Maslansky:
Yeah. We’ve covered a lot of grounds here about how to define your purpose and bring it to life, but it somebody really wanted to put these into practice, Lee, where might they go for a guide, a roadmap?

Lee Carter:
I think they might go to my book, Persuasion: Convincing Others When Facts Don’t Seem to Matter. There’s a workbook in it and it really gives you the tools you need to try and identify first what is your master narrative. Second, what are the symbols to bring your story to life? How do you identify those scalable stories, those stories that are really representative of who you’re trying to do? And how do you find those actions to support what it is that you’re doing? I think whether you’re trying to build a purpose for a huge organization, for a small business, or just for yourself, I think going through this exercise is really, really valuable.

Michael Maslansky:
Lee, what’s your master narrative?

Lee Carter:
Oh, lord. I can tell you what my purpose is.

Michael Maslansky:
Really? Go for it. What is it?

Lee Carter:
Well, from a thought leadership perspective, when I think about what I’m trying to do when I go out there wherever I show up, it is really to try and help people understand what they don’t already understand. So if I use that as my lens and my filter for whether I’m going to say yes to a media interview or yes to writing an article, I’ve got to think about it through that lens. Am I adding, I don’t want to add to a pile-on. I always want to be flipping perspectives and helping people see things differently. That’s my own individual purpose.

Michael Maslansky:
Mine is to spread happiness through an unvarnished, positive attitude.

Katie Cronen:
Mine is to edit, not draft.

Lee Carter:
All right, so guys, I can’t thank you enough for joining us. We wouldn’t be doing our listeners a service without asking our final three questions, which we ask every guest. The first question, Katie, what is your favorite or least favorite word and why?

Katie Cronen:
Least favorite word has got to be utilize. I’ve never come across somebody saying “utilize” when they couldn’t just say use.

Lee Carter:
Do it.

Sachi Pettit:
I’ll have to circle back to you on that. It’s actually a phrase, the circle back.

Lee Carter:
Visceral. Visceral. If any of our listeners use that, I’m sorry. I’m not sure how we feel about you now.

Katie Cronen:

You know, it is the danger about getting into corporate jargon because while there are some I hate, there’s absolutely some I love that I will later find out is somebody’s pet peeve, so oops.

Lee Carter:
Oh, do you have one that you love? You have corporate jargon you love?

Michael Maslansky:
Can we double click on that?

Katie Cronen:
I don’t know that I’ve done double click, but yeah. I’ve it thrown around. It depends on the audience.

Sachi Pettit:
You leverage some good jargon?

Katie Cronen:
Here and there.

Lee Carter:
Michael, I’m curious. What is your favorite piece of corporate jargon?

Michael Maslansky:
That’s a good question. I think just in terms of pure joy when I say it is mechanism of action. I kind of like that from a pharma context. Just, it’s cool. I feel like I want to know the mechanism of action. I don’t know that I would use it really in a normal sentence, but you know.

Lee Carter:
How do you feel about when people shorten that to MOA?

Michael Maslansky:
See, that bothers me. Acronyms, they bother. And then I use them and then they still bother me, but you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.

Lee Carter:
Awesome. I do think-

Katie Cronen:
Stay tuned for our jargon podcast coming your way.

Lee Carter:
There’s no question. We got to do one.  My final question is what is one thing you wish everyone would take away from this conversation? I’m going to say read my book, but Sachi, Katie, I’d love to hear from you.

Katie Cronen:

I mean, it’s got to be find your version of it’s not credible if it’s not edible.

Lee Carter:
Well done. And Sachi?

Sachi Pettit:
Find your symbol. It’s hugely, hugely important. Don’t just rely on your purpose. Find your symbols.

Lee Carter:
That’s awesome.

Michael Maslansky:
All right. With that, I will say thank you to Katie Cronen and Sachi Pettit for joining us. Your input was amazing. Really appreciate you coming onto the show, and thanks, Lee Carter, for co-hosting with me today. For more language insight and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, follow us on LinkedIn at Maslansky-Partners and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. If you’ve got questions, feedback, want to tell us how wrong we are or ideas for us, please reach out to us at [email protected]. That is all for now. Join us next time on Hearsay, because it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.