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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. So this story is about dis organizations, which is another word for companies I've worked for. And, you know, I've been working for myself since I was 12. Like in the neighborhood doing jobs, shoveling things, moving things, mowing lawns, touring driveway, whatever. I always prefer to work for myself than working for other people. Because other people are less organized than me. And most organizations are dysfunctional, that I've either been in or been witness to, or anything and by dysfunctional, this is what I mean, just to be clear, it's not the people. It's not their intelligence is not their work ethic, is not their kindness or their spirit. It's that most people have been trained to be managers, particularly middle managers. But people that weren't trained to be middle managers, which is usually the best person who could do a thing who got promoted to a middle manager with no training. No, no, no. How crazy is this, you're the best widget maker on the assembly line, you're the best you show up, you're on time you're dressed, to play ready to go, like you're ready to go, you're the best widget maker you make the most widgets, your visits are perfect. You're in the top 5% of all widgets in the entire world. And what do they do? At some point, you can only pay a widget maker so much money doesn't the idea. This is the idea. At some point, you peak as a widget maker. And there's no more like things you can do. So they invent this idea that that person that has to be a manager of other people. The best widget maker is the worst manager. And it's the clone problem. The Clone problem is this is typical entrepreneurial problem. The thing that made a person the best widget maker are the things that are rare, and human beings. And they show up there on time, they come dressed to play, which is prepared with tools and equipment ready to go every day, every single day. That's what they do. And they're the best one. But 99% of other people don't. And now you put this person in this highly skilled as unique, rare person in charge of other people that are not like that person. What do you think is going to have dysfunction. That's what happens. Because that instead of saying to this person who's the best widget maker in the world, your job is to clone yourself. And here's how you do it. First, you identify what makes you good. Second, we create repeatable tasks and steps that we can like train people in third week, find people who want to learn those. Okay, we give it to everybody else. And basically like the game of improving people can be learned and taught. And it's not like my experience. So you end up with a manager who used to be good at something and is now bitter and angry, because they're not able to achieve results through other people. See, management is getting things done through the efforts of others. And leadership is getting things done to the efforts of others because they want to do it. And you can learn how to do those things. And those are learnable things. But normally, my experience is that doesn't happen. What happens is you take the best person and turn them into the worst person. And then they get fired or quit reverse chaos. And as in as in this stage of my life. The story about you know, dysfunctions was was was my attempts to try to navigate these corporate environments, and try my best to create Win Win Win scenarios for everybody. Because like the logical ideas, if I can create like Win Win Win situations. Then I'm not in conflict with anybody about something that I would want to do. And what I learned so much about these corporations is there's different layers of management and organizations. My experience is you have the the frontline workers, then you have the best frontline workers. And then you have usually managers first year managers first level that are just promoted from the frontlines. Very little training, but they're still connected to the work enough, okay to bridge the dysfunction. And they're still well liked because they're respected because they were the best. But then you go one level up, which is like firmly middle management. These people are accomplishing a rock and a hard place. They're too far removed from the work to have a any credibility from the workers and because of the turnover in the workforce at that level, no one remembers they were the best two years ago. So they're just some person telling people telling some other person what to do, so that they can get the next raise, or bonus, or bending or whatever, like the game is that they're trying to play. But meanwhile, people that they work for, there's only like one or two jobs above them, that would make sense. In any organization, there's one more level like in the ones I've worked in, the person at that level, is cutthroat killer, who plays the game, the game of of having people, you know, make him or her look good. And the game of getting rid of enemies that could move up and take the position. And that person is good at that game, that game and that could be a good game to be good at like that could help create value in the business like it's possible to create alignment with with people that are competitive, but that way, but my experience is is the opposite effect. In my experience. The layer above that is usually the people that survive that environment. Which can be great people like that, like that level can be beautiful, empathetic, compassionate, caring, kind, and they can also be awful. And it depends on the leadership of the company. It depends on the person who's creating the vision for the company, and what kind of company is it going to be? And how are they going to treat people and handle people. But what I found is that is usually not designed, if the person who has the vision is, you know, running the company, at the sort of top position may be great at those things, vision, maybe even strategy. But you have to design the layers, like I just talked about, I don't just mean the job functions and the KPIs that you measure. And like the raise cycles, I mean, the culture because cultural is good or cultural is bad, and culture spreads either way. You know, it's possible to design the business around a good culture, of fairness, kindness, quality, the values, principles, procedures, policies. Or it's possible just to let chaos ensue and create dis organizations. And this was an important period of my life because this is when I decided I would never work for anyone else ever again. And that is leading to the next story where I started what became the profession for the rest of my life.