#142 - The Power of Leadership Principles and Positive Leadership - Michael Foss

[00:01:00] Episode Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Tech Lead Journal podcast, the podcast where you can learn about technical leadership and excellence from my conversations with great thought leaders in the tech industry. If you haven’t, please subscribe to the show on your podcast app and social media on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, and also on YouTube and TikTok for video contents. And to support my work in producing this podcast, you can buy me a coffee at techleadjournal.dev/tip or become a patron at techleadjournal.dev/patron.

My guest for today’s episode is Michael Foss. He is a leadership coach and the founder of CoachFoss LLC. And today’s episode is a leadership masterclass episode, you do not want to miss!

In this episode, we discussed the power of leadership principles and positive leadership. Michael started by sharing the important principle of building trust and creating a shared commitment with the people we work with. He then shared what he learned from his time at Amazon and explained why creating leadership principles is so, so important for any company to thrive. Michael also explained the powerful techniques for leading a successful process improvement, which are creating standard work and using Andon from the Toyota Production System. And towards the end, as a certified trainer, Michael summarized leadership essence of both John Maxwell’s Leadership and also John Gordon’s Power of Positive Leadership. And there are so many leadership insights you can learn just from listening to this summary alone.

I hope you enjoy listening to this great episode and start applying leadership principles and positive leadership in your work and in your life. If you are learning from this episode, it will be really great if you can help me share this with your colleagues, your friends, and your communities, and leave a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It will help me a lot in getting more people to discover and listen to this podcast.

Let’s go to my conversation with Michael after quick words from our sponsor.

[00:03:22] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today is another special episode. As you know, sometimes, I invite people who are in the leadership space. And today, we have a guest named Michael Foss. He’s into leadership, coaching, transformational change, continuous improvements. And he has worked in many, many industries from logistics, supply chain, operations. And today, we’ll be learning a lot about the gist of leadership insights from him based on his number of years of experience. He’s also certified John Maxwell Leadership coach and Power Positive Leadership. There will be so many leadership things that we will learn today. So thank you, Michael, for coming to this episode.

Michael Foss: Oh, thank you Henry for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:04:04] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: So Michael, I always love to start by asking you to introduce yourself by telling more about highlights or turning points in your life or your career.

Michael Foss: Yeah. Thank you. And I love the question. Cause only when you look back, as Steve Jobs is famous for saying, can you connect the dots. And when you realize in life when things happen for you instead of to you, you can use everything that’s happened to your benefit. And so I love that. And so when I look back at my career at what the biggest highlights and turning points are, everything, it really started as a child in my upbringing under my father’s leadership. He was very meticulous. I think he was the coolest 5S person, and I didn’t know what 5S was at the time. I would walk into his garage and he would have every tool on a peg board, outlined with Sharpie and knew exactly where it was supposed to go after I was done using it. And so he was very exact and very detail oriented. And I naturally picked up those things from him.

And I think the other thing before I started my career that really developed my leadership approach and style was playing sports. I played all kinds of sports. My favorite sport was American football. And I played the position of quarterback. And in American football, the position of quarterback is naturally a leader of the team, especially of the offense. And you see this play out over and over again. And what I learned is, as a leader of the team, you have to motivate and inspire your team to do what they don’t want to do to achieve what they want to achieve. And that takes a special relationship and trust and building of that community and unity in order to achieve that kind of success. So I think learning that prepared me well to start my career into leadership.

I know you recently had Ryan Gottfredson on your podcast, and he’s written a book called The Elevated Leader. And he goes deep into the study of trauma and how it affects people’s lives and how you really have to understand that and move past it. And what I didn’t realize until probably when I was reading his book was that I suffered some trauma that I didn’t realize that forced me to become much more dependent upon myself.

My father at the age of when I was 16, at my age of 16, he had a battle with cancer. And he fought that battle for four years. And at year three, we thought he was gonna overcome it. But then in year four, it came on strong and ended up taking his life when I turned 20. And, you know, that loss of him in my life kind of put some perspective on myself to take charge of my life and where I was heading. And to put a whole new perspective on where I wanted to go in life, to the point where I got a scholarship to support my engineering degree. I got a job to help pay for college, so that I didn’t have to assume any money from my mother at that time.

And so these things happened and, you know, there’s always two ways you can take it. You can look at it like, why did this happen to me? Or how did this happen for my benefit? Not that losing a father would ever be a benefit. But if you look at it from the perspective of what can I gain and grow from this, it’s much better for your life and for your outcome. And so, I was excited to continue my progress through my degree and graduated at Texas Tech with an industrial engineering and systems degree, which I’ve enjoyed using the practices of industrial and systems engineering my whole career.

And so I started working for FedEx while going to college, and ended up working for FedEx for 20 years. And a couple of major points in my career with FedEx. It was an amazing company. You don’t realize until you leave a company like FedEx and go to a smaller company, how impressive they were and how much organized and how many things that they’ve gone through in order to become a great company. In fact, they’re celebrating their 50th year of business this year, which is uncommon these days for companies to last that many years.

And one of my best learnings as a leader was when I transferred to the Memphis hub. I’ve been working for FedEx for 10 years, and I was a manager of engineering. And I accepted a position to run the engineering group at the Memphis hub. And the Memphis airport is the world’s largest cargo airport and is the heartbeat of the FedEx Express system. Upon two weeks after arriving, I did lots of observations out in the airport, unloading and loading of airplanes, trucks, sortation of product. And with great eagerness, I approached the Vice President of Operations and said, I’m so excited to tell you that we’re gonna double your productivity by the end of the year. And here’s how we’re gonna do it.

He entertained me for about a minute and then he stopped me. He says, “Let me ask you a question.” So I stopped and looked excited at him, and he says, “Have you unpacked all your boxes yet?” And I said, “No, not yet.” And he says, “Well, why don’t you stop, go back to where you came from and recognize that this is the Memphis hub. It’s the heartbeat of FedEx, and we just don’t make wild changes on the fly.”

What I realized is, I had an eager excitement to initiate improvement where I could see improvement was needed and there was a great opportunity, but I hadn’t established rapport, relationship with this gentleman. We had known each other throughout the period of my work prior to me coming to Memphis, but I had not established trust with him. And so therefore, he knew what he had to do to meet objectives. And the Memphis hub, you know, handles millions of packages. And it goes down to the very minute of the operation in order for it to be successful. You know, and a one minute delay is magnified throughout the entire system and can be very impactful to cost of service or even quality of service to the customer.

And so over the next year, we worked very well together. Me and the team focused on working on projects in tight relationship with him, gaining his approval. And then once we started to show some trust by small wins that we could do, that ensured we were not putting any of his service in jeopardy, we were able to work on some of these larger concepts. And at the end of the year, we actually not only beat that productivity target, but exceeded it. So it was a pretty exciting experience, but it really taught me the importance of relationship, especially in a process where I was in a supportive role. He didn’t report to me. He was actually at a higher level in the company than I was. But I was supporting his group to help him be successful.

So fascinating. I think one other experience of a turning point for me at FedEx. I took a role at FedEx corporate once. FedEx started buying companies. They created a corporate holding company. And I worked for a small group called Operations Analysis that reported directly to Fred Smith. And that group was a very intelligent group who looked at mergers, acquisitions, large political changes. And it was a fascinating group to be a part of.

And what it taught me was how important your circle of influence is. You know, I was around people who went to Harvard, Yale, Wharton, who really looked at things differently, who asked great questions. And it broadened my experience just the year and a half that I was with those team members to really look at things differently and really elevated myself, kinda like Ryan talks about in his book. There was definitely some vertical development going on in my own life by being around people who had a different perspective and a different learning, and really a different set of experiences coming into that role.

So, fascinating. 20 years with FedEx. I then decided to think about do I wanna be a FedEx person the rest of my career or is there something else out there calling me? And I had the opportunity to be the Vice President of Logistics for an oil and gas company, running about a $1 billion organization across 18 different countries, running all logistics, supply chain, distribution, and transportation for that company. And that company was in complete disarray when I got there. And so it was an incredible turnaround. What that experience taught me was preparation meets opportunity.

For the 20 years that I was working for FedEx, it was preparing me to handle all kinds of situations that I didn’t realize until I was confronted with them in this oil and gas company. Even how to hire people well, how to train people well, how to write good standard operating procedures, how to pay attention to customer needs, how to execute a conversation between the CEO and operators to end customers to define what’s really important and what should we focus on, and how do we move forward to create the best success for the company and the client overall.

And so we used a very cool continuous improvement approach. I worked for a gentleman who was trained in Japan under the Toyota Production System. And we used Kaizen events every other week to basically change the entire process and improve everything that we did at that location. And it was a complete turnaround. It was a really success, Really amazing experience in my career.

And so I continued onto another company called Cameron International, who was recently bought by Schlumberger. And they did business in about 82 countries, a half a billion spend in logistics. And so that was a really exciting experience for me to learn all modes of transportation. And, you know, again, another, another opportunity. So that company was built over 150 years through acquisition, and so they had 252 subsidiaries. All of them operated somewhat independently. And so my goal, my task was to combine all of those groups with some synergy around a common logistics and distribution thread where we can maximize spend and our philosophy and approach to take the benefit of quality and service and spend at large with that kind of discount.

And that, again, pulled on my ability to have relationships in order to, you know, get to know people and affect change without us coming in saying, “Hi, I’m from the corporate office and I’m here to help. Oh, by the way, here’s a new plan, follow this.” You know, without understanding the complexities of their business and making sure the solution was gonna be successful. So, you know, another great opportunity, a turnaround.

Because of the merger and purchase with Schlumberger, I had the opportunity to leave and go to Amazon, which was a fascinating four years of my life. So many stories there to share. I was the Head of Process Engineering and Continuous Improvement for the middle mile segment, and which is now called Amazon Transportation Services. And I led a group that created best practices and stand to work across 70 different sort centers in the United States and Europe. Led a continuous improvement strategy and program that developed tremendous improvement in savings. And a couple of really cool stories that we’ll get into here in a little bit. But it was an amazing experience, you know, to see behind the curtain of a company who has no obstacles and no barriers.

You know, I had the opportunity to interview a couple of the people who worked very close with Jeff Bezos in a book called Working Backwards. And to see how intentional Jeff and the leadership team was about creating leadership principles, there are now 16, and how they incorporated them into the daily practice that really created an opportunity for tremendous success and growth within the organization. So fascinating time in my career. Incredible growth as well. They moved at a very fast speed and scale. It’s at a level that I hadn’t experienced yet, the scale of growth. It was really impressive to be a part of that as well.

And so then I’ve jumped into my own business the last three years, doing business transformation through positive leadership and continuous improvement. So I’ve helped some large companies and small companies really turn around their businesses and help them improve through leadership development and continuous improvement. So, you know, those are some of the highlights and kind of turning points in my career that has brought me to where I am today.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! Listening to your story. Thanks for sharing it, by the way. So I think have worked in so many large companies, you know, multinationals. These companies are also like operationally efficient, I would say, like, you know, FedEx, Amazon, right? They are very well known about operational efficiency, transformations as well. So I think when I listened to some of your stories and some of the gist that you pointed out, right? I think those are really key for me when we talk about leadership.

[00:15:35] Building Trust

Henry Suryawirawan: The first thing that probably you can touch on is about building trust in the first story when you mention about FedEx, right? So many leaders that I’ve seen, at least from my experience, whenever there’s a new leadership came, they would just straight away want to make change, right? So the transformations, business transformation, digital transformation, whatever transformations, but not necessarily knowing the context of the team that is already in place.

So maybe if you can start by this trust first, right? How should a leader actually build trust? Especially if you’re at the higher leadership position, right? Not necessarily just the leader at the middle manager level. But at the higher leadership, how do you build trust with the people inside the company, especially you work with hundreds and if not thousands of people?

Michael Foss: Right. That’s a great question, Henry. And this is a big topic that people have looked into for a long time. In fact, I listened to Dr. Henry Cloud speak live about a month ago here locally in the Texas area. And he just released a new book titled Trust. And he talks about five key areas that are necessary and for people to establish strong trust. And it’s a great read and it really boils down for me from my experiences in understanding that people, especially people on your team, they’re asking three questions. As a leader, you have to realize it’s never about you. It’s always about your team. And that’s one of the key points that I’ll make later.

And so in building trust, those three questions that the team is asking is, one, can I trust you? Do you care about me? And can you help me? And when a leader realizes that when you come into a new organization, that you have to satisfy those three questions first before you can truly start to affect change. And before they’ll even start to hear your message and your vision for them, it puts a great perspective on your approach.

So I’ll give you a great example. In 2017, I was in Cincinnati. We had just opened a new large, the largest sort center for Amazon’s sort center network. And the regional director over the northeast called me and said, “Hey, can you come to Baltimore tomorrow?” And I said, “Well, sure, uh, um, you know, what’s going on?” And he said, “Well, I need you to be here from the rest of October through Christmas. So about three months.” I said, “Well, I might need to stop by the house first and get some clothes, but I’m on my way. Tell me more.”

And basically, the site had been failing and not performing the way that it should. And there had been some process improvement plans put in place by the leadership team that just weren’t taking root. And so the site leader and the assistant site leader and the head of human resources all decided to exit Amazon, and leaving 5,000 associates looking for some immediate help. And October’s about the time where volume almost starts to pick up towards peak in the Amazon network.

And so upon arriving in Baltimore, what I decided to do for the first week was what I call Gemba, which is go and see the work at the place where the work is done. It’s a Japanese term that falls into the continuous improvement structure, but it’s simply putting myself on the floor with the associates, doing the work alongside them, having conversations and getting to know them. Over my time of being with Amazon for a couple of years, and being in the role that I’ve been in for continuous improvement and process engineering, I immediately saw bottlenecks and challenges that were impeding the opportunity for the team to be successful. But what I wanted to do was really learn from the associates and gain their trust in order for us to turn the corner on the situation.

What I was told by the regional director was one word, apathy, is that that was the problem with everyone from the associates all the way through leadership. Apathy, meaning there was no care. Nobody cared about the work or working together or getting the job done. So it was a big cultural shift that we needed to create, and it really had to start with trust. And so every day, I would spend time through unloading vehicles or sortation or loading pallets or loading vehicles, talking to people and I would ask them, “What do you like about the job?” Get to know ’em a little bit. You know, fist bump them. Say “great job” when they’re doing well.

And then they would start to open up and share about some of the struggles that they’re having. And I would say, if there’s one thing you could change, you know, about the way things are set up or run, what would you do? And when those changes were, to me, like a just do it. Simple changes that we could do immediately. I would hold the leadership team every night between 2 and 4:00 AM, was the only time the operation didn’t run, and we would make changes.

So one example was we would sort over a thousand different sort ways in that location, meaning the outbound product was gonna go to a thousand different destinations. And we would sort these small Amazon envelopes. And they were set up to sort into, USPS totes because they would go to the post office or to an AMZL location for delivery. And that was the best way that they had decided to do it. Well the orientation of the totes for sortation was not numbered 1 to 1000. It was numbered 1 and then 27 and then 16, and then 814. And so a very smart engineer decided to lay out the floor in the way that was best for flow of the product to maximize balance between all the lanes. But what you didn’t think about was the recipient of an associate grabbing that envelope and saying, okay, I’ve got number 814. Where’s 814? I have to go find it. And if you had a group of people that worked that same area every day and it never changed, over time they could memorize it and they would know where to go.

That’s not how it works at Amazon. You know, they have 70% of their staff is a temp agency by design. And so every day, you could have someone new in the space doing the job. And so our job, my job, and as the head of process engineering, was to create standard work and make it so simple that within three days of an employee starting, they could hit quality expectations and productivity expectations. And so, what we did that night was we renumbered the dock sort area from 1 to 1000. And then we turned on the system the next day. And we accounted for some high volume destinations, and so instead of putting just 1, 2, 3. If two was a high volume destination, we put a couple of totes. So it was 1, 2, 2, then 3.

And so the next morning, we came in to watch the sort. And you felt, you know, it felt like it was Christmas morning in Baltimore. People were high fiving, going, “I can’t believe somebody listened to our recommendation.” And everyone was sorting and they knew exactly where to go. And we hit a better sortation hour with an adjustment, a significant adjustment, you know, on that first day than they had seen in years in that space of the business.

And so those little wins like that, just listening to the team, started to establish a tremendous amount of trust where people from other parts of the building were coming to find me to go, I have an idea and we can change this. So truly by the end of the week, we had changed the complete atmosphere of the organization from really apathy to, hey, somebody actually does care about me. They’re interested to hear what I have to say, and they’re gonna help me do my job, so therefore I can trust this person.

And you know, there was a lot of other things at play that we did in that location over time. But I’d say that’s probably the single most important thing that we did to help turn that location around. Going from 180,000 packages a day to 500,000 without failure the rest of the year. So it was a tremendous turnaround, but it all started by trust.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! It’s a very inspiring story. I personally couldn’t imagine myself working in these kind of environments, right? I would imagine it’s so complex and I’ll get lost in all the, you know, details and so many things running around in parallel, right?

[00:23:00] Creating Standard Work

Henry Suryawirawan: So one thing that I piqued interest when you said just now about your story is that in your process engineering work, right? You try to create a standard work whereby a new person coming in within a few days, they can just, you know, get up and running, and maybe even do things as what it should be, right? The standard operating procedures.

Maybe, for people who listen, probably they don’t work in industrial logistics, supply chain, and all that, but how can we translate these kind of principles? How do you create this standard work to be applicable also in many other situations, many other companies. Are there any kind of advice that you wanna give to people?

Michael Foss: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it really forces us to think differently about how we created standard work. I’ve learned that complexity is the enemy of execution. And so when you can simplify work to a point where it creates the opportunity for the associate to fall with almost out fail, that’s the most optimum standard work. And really standard work is the creation of a habit. You know, most of our days are 60 to 80% habitual. And so when you can create standard work that creates a habit for the associate to follow. A habit is basically defined as doing something without thinking, and you do it on a daily basis, then you’ve won. You know, so then they don’t have to refer to the document. They see a cue that creates a craving. There’s a response and a reward.

One of my favorite books that I’ve read recently over the past few years, Atomic Habits by James Clear. And he talks about this process. And this is exactly what we used really at Amazon to create an environment where through visual work management, good instruction, it was very clear for people to know exactly what to do in the role that they were in. And so, you try to break down the complex environment into simple pieces of what the associate is really there to do.

And we also heavily relied on an Andon system. You’re probably familiar with Andon systems from production environments. But basically, an Andon system is a signal for help or that something needs to be addressed. And we implemented this process by saying, “Here’s the three things that you have to do as an associate. If you get anything different than this, you pull your Andon, call for help and a team lead or a leadership member will come and help you.”

And we learned from this process, you know, like, why are people calling for help? How do we rectify the Andon process so that they don’t have to call for help and they can do their three things very well? And that was established through an official Gemba walk and we had Gemba boards and there was an, you know, what are the most common Andons call and we would address it on a daily basis.

It’s about being intentional and one of the things Amazon is most famous for is working backwards. So they’ll look in the future and say, what does good look like? And in fact, if we were to write a press release with some frequently asked questions of a new launch or a system, what would that look like? And then how do we make sure we achieve that level of expectation when we launch? And so they’re very intentional about looking forward.

And so that’s what the practice that we used in these work instructions was what’s the most optimal state that we want? And to optimize quality and productivity and the ability for the associate to do the job well and feel good when they leave. And set them up well for success. I think that were the keys that helped us break down the complexity and make it simple for them to be successful.

[00:26:18] Pulling an Andon

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think a lot of things that you mentioned come from this Toyota Production System, right, or maybe Lean methodology. And on, I think in the software teams, they also have heard, especially people who follow the DevOps and Lean methodologies, right?

But in the true reality right, how should this Andon be actually practiced? Because some people will think, if I ask for help, doesn’t that show that actually maybe I’m not capable? Or should I ask for help for all the different things you mentioned just now? Maybe you can come up with a few different questions like a checklist. If you cannot solve 1, 2, 3, for example, then you pull the Andon cord. So maybe if you can give some examples, how should people apply this Andon methodology?

Michael Foss: Yeah. Great question, Henry. I think there’s an underlying theme when you’re dealing with people to give some permission to call for help, which is, it’s always about the process, never the person. And so what we’re enabling the team to do, is call for help because there’s an opportunity for us to improve the process. And so it’s not a call to say, I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a call to say, I wanna make sure I follow the process right.

And the intent of an Andon, originally as I understand it, Toyota made looms for geisha dresses. And there were flaws happening in the geisha dress, and they weren’t catching the defect until it was too late in the process to address it. And what they wanted to do was stop the production as soon as the defect was encountered so that you don’t carry the defect down the line, which is the most ideal state. And that’s what where Andons are used heavily in production and manufacturing systems today.

And so that’s the concept. And so you encourage people to say, we don’t want a defect to go down the line. So if I scan a package and I get an error, but I’m like, I don’t wanna ask a question to make it look like I don’t know what I’m doing, and I put the package on the wrong pallet. Well, we’ve just allowed a defect to go to the wrong location and not meet expectation of delivering to the customer is what we want. And so we encourage them to say, because of the reason why we’re doing this, we want the customer to have an outstanding experience. We’re obsessed by the customer. We’re allowing you to stop the operation, and say, “I want help.”

Jeff Bezos tells a really fun story about when he was doing check-ins on the call center agents. And so he put his headphones on to listen in to the agent, and the agent got the prompt screen based on the caller’s number and said, “Oh, this person’s going to return this table.” And Jeff says, “How do you know?” And she said, “Oh, this table always gets returned.” So, Jeff says, he bangs his head on the table for a minute, listens to the call and sure enough, the gentleman explains the table arrived damaged and he needs to return it. So he asked the call center agent, “Well, what do you do?” He says, “Well, we refund him and we either, you know, ship him a new one, the same table or something different.” And then he says, “What do you do?” Then we close it out and I go to the next caller. And he says, “Well, what gets done about the table? What kind of feedback goes to anybody about it?” And she said, “Well, we don’t do anything about it.”

And so what he implemented was a tool called the customer service Andon. It’s a push a button that takes that item off the website, and it sends it to a queue for a special action team to then study it immediately, find out what the resolution is, and either work with the vendor to say we need to solve this or if it’s just nomenclature on the website that’s incorrect, update that and then get it back live on the screen. So what he did was he empowered the call center agent to have an Andon to take an item off the amazon.com website. But it stopped the defect from going down the line, so other people didn’t have to experience receiving this damaged table, which really was just an effect of not having the right packaging to ship through the system.

So it’s a pretty powerful tool. And it’s all about enabling others to act, which is one of the five exemplary practices of leadership that I’ve learned many years ago that I follow. And it gives them the power to do that.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thank you for explaining how this powerful Andon methodology, Andon technique, right? So as soon as you realize that there’s a potential of defect going through the line, you know, to production, right? So maybe you pull the Andon so that the customers or the outcomes that you wanna achieve is not affected. So thanks for explaining that.

[00:30:19] Power of Principles

Henry Suryawirawan: One of the things that you said you learned from Amazon is their power of principles, right? So as of now, I think there are 12 principles. And you personally also have come up with your own principles. First of all, maybe tell us why these principles are very important? And do you advise people to always come up with principles in an organization? And later on, maybe, you can also explain to us your principles, maybe, the key principles that you learn and that you apply also in your leadership coaching.

Michael Foss: Yeah, Henry. It’s really, really important for people to have principles and be based in a philosophy that really matters. And this is an important step I think a lot of businesses skip when they start a business, is that they don’t create the core values or their principles that are most important that they want to operate by. And then when situations occur, they don’t default to those, because they haven’t established them. And some companies make them, but never really implement them in their business. They’re just posted on a wall.

You know what, what Amazon did was they fully implemented them. They had 14 while I was there actually, and I think they’ve recently gone to 16. And in every part of the business, whether it was a production meeting or a review with an associate, you used those principles to say, how are you performing in this area or how could we do better? Or how can we run the operation better? Like, how do we dive deep into this problem or think big about the future and where we’re growing? And so I think principles are really important.

And over the time, we talked about one of the ones you know, that I’ve established into my own business, which is build trust. And trust is a requirement for long-term success in any business within your own team of associates and also with your clients. And you know, I learned something really simple from a coach many years ago. And his philosophy on the team was to build trust, you need to do the right thing, do the best you can, and show people you care. And so I built those also into kind of a very simplified approach. And then when you do that, it builds commitment. And the things that teams, whether it’s sports or in business do best and win the most is when you have the combination of trust and commitment.

And so I think when you’re a principle based, it’s really important. And we saw this really play out through the pandemic over the last three years, where companies that had strong principles and core values, they didn’t give up on those. In fact, they held strong to those, because that’s who they are and who they represented. And those are the companies that really weathered the storm well and came out strong in the end. I think the ones who didn’t do well or really offended their customers are the ones that gave up on their principles, or just said, “Oh, well this pandemic is so crazy, we’re not gonna do this anymore. You know, we’re gonna give up on this. Or we’re gonna change this.”

And I think that you lose trust fast. And trust is one of those things where it takes a long time to build and a very short time to lose over time. And so that’s why it’s really important in your own life and in business to be very principle-based and to know what things are really important. What do we stand for and how are we gonna treat our employees and our customers?

[00:33:18] Building Shared Commitment

Henry Suryawirawan: So I really love your principles, actually. You said first, build trust, do the right thing, do the best you can, show the people that you care. And the last one is build commitment, right? So trust and commitment. I really love that. So we’ve covered a lot about trust. So the commitment part here, right? So except building the trust, of course it’s a given, so we need to build the trust.

But what are some of the strategies maybe that you have seen working in your career. How can you build commitment, a shared commitment between the people inside the organization to achieve the same objectives? Because sometimes, it’s very tricky, especially when you have a large number of people in the teams. How can everyone row the same boat, right? So not to go into different directions and build commitment. Because commitment to me, sometimes it’s very tricky. Some people just wanna do half-hearted on the things that they have to do. Or some people are more hardworking and they wanna pursue even much more, right? So how do you build this shared commitment among the team?

Michael Foss: Yeah. I studied a lot of different things on this, and I’ve come to a couple different conclusions. One, I read a book called Primed to Perform by Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor. Neel and Lindsay worked for McKinsey for many years. And they put together an analysis that said, you know, what are the things that create the highest performing cultures and gained this kind of commitment as a group? And what are the things that don’t? And there were top three things that they found that gained commitment, were introducing Play, Purpose, and Potential at the individual level.

And so in Play wasn’t necessarily having a foosball machine in the break room, but it was more about allowing a person’s individual creativity and what their working genius is, if I can use the term from Patrick Lencioni, the areas that you thrive in, in order to use that to do your work that creates the most excitement for you. And then when you have Purpose and Potential, you know, Purpose is you’re doing something for a reason that’s big, and I’ll talk about that. And Potential means that there’s opportunity for you, if you do well, to continue to grow within the company and affect change and continue to add value at a large scale.

And so that opened the door for me to study more about Purpose. As a sports player, it’s a very emotional game when you play sports, especially American football. And in order to get people to do what they don’t want to do, they have to be bought into the mission. You can motivate someone, but motivation doesn’t last. You know, what you have to do is ignite and inspire. And when you inspire someone, you’re igniting a greatness that’s within them that they already have, but you found a way to ignite it that starts to drive them internally, which is much better than motivation.

And so I started studying this reason of purpose and how do you create purpose in an individual. Because I like Jim Rohn’s quote on it. He says, “When the why is big, the how becomes easy.” And what that means is when there’s enough reasons for a person to make a change in their life or their business, they’ll do it no matter what it takes.

And so I was working with a very large retailer earlier this year in their supply chain. This organization has 43 distribution centers across the US. Significant size. And they’re in the middle of the supply chain. They receive goods from retailers that they purchase from, that manufacture the product, and then they ship to stores. So they never see the actual customer that’s buying their product.

They had lost sight of the true purpose and intention of why they’re there. When I walked out on the floor, I could see there was opportunity for them to start to resonate. When they see a crate of goods, that it’s not just moving that box from one place to another. It’s creating the environment for a customer to walk into a store and find this perfect bottle of shampoo, or whatever, in a way that’s upfront, clean, without damage, at a great price.

And so what I did was I created an environment for them to see the role that they played in customer environment. So I went to the local store, for example, and took pictures of the store. I found some shelves that were fully stocked, looked great, the sell price was amazing. And then I took some pictures of shelves that were at disarray or items were missing, or something was even knocked over, or maybe there was a spill. And I said, “You know, which environment do you want your customers, your end customer to see?” And obviously they said the first one. And I said, “Well, what role do you think you play in that?” And it started to get the wheels rolling in their mind in a way that they’d never seen before.

What I wanted to do was create purpose, and in their mind, for everything that they do is for that instate of the customer. And to be done in a way that creates an amazing experience for them, but at a cost that makes that company very successful. So it creates the win-win kind of environment for them to be efficient and smart about how they do the job. But also very careful and protective of the product so that the experience for that customer is amazing.

And so I think that’s the biggest thing about really how to drive for individually trying to find purpose with people. And everyone is driven by different things. You have to find out what excites them and what gets them motivated and passionate within themselves. But I try to create a great big why so that then the how that we do things becomes easy.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. It’s like what Simon Sinek always says. Start with why. So you come up with your purpose or maybe you ignite and inspire them so that they see the bigger why, so that the how they do things becomes much, much easier. And I like that you also mentioned about play, right? Because not necessarily everyone has to be serious and always do the hard work. But try to incorporate some kind of play that they can probably enjoy the journey as well. And the last one is about potential. So they should also grow within this journey as well.

[00:38:58] John Maxwell & Power Positive Leadership

Henry Suryawirawan: So I have one impossible question for you, because I know that you have certified John Maxwell leadership and also the Power Positive leadership. I know that we won’t be covering all of them, right? But if you can summarize this two kind of leadership approach into maybe your own unique version. So tell us what kind of leadership that you learned from these two different certifications.

Michael Foss: Yeah. Well, I’ll start with John Maxwell, who is probably most well known. I think he’s written 87 books. Started writing 40 to 50 years ago. Just released his newest book this year called “The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication”. And he found what his passion was, it was really about leadership and communication. And so he started to study what makes leaders successful and what doesn’t. And he was also experiencing this in his own life, and really gained some incredible insight. And so he’s written some of his best books are the “21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” or “The Five Levels of Leadership”, " Everyone Communicates, Few Connect", you know, some really great books. I love also the “15 Invaluable Laws of Growth”. And so in fact, I’m just rereading his book that he wrote 40 years ago, and then he relaunched it called Developing the Leader Within You 2.0.

But basically, what John has done is he’s really studied great leaders and leaders who have failed, and have compared, you know, what they’ve done to get into that state and to share that. And then he’s developed a pretty significant organization called the Maxwell Leadership Organization, where there’s about 50,000 members now worldwide in the organization. And he focuses on developing those leaders to be great speakers, coaches and consultants, either through his work or combining their own work with his, which was what I have done.

And his whole philosophy and approach is you start with recognizing that you are a person of value. And that you have value. And that you value others. And you want to give value to them and create that return on investment of growth. And when you realize that is the essence of true leadership, I mean, he defines leadership as influence, nothing more, nothing less, and everything rises and falls on leadership. And so when you can influence someone by adding value to them and creating, you know, a step level change in their life in a positive direction, then that is the essence of true leadership.

And so, I love his approach and his philosophy, and he’s added some amazing influencers to his group. Jeff Henderson, who was the head of Chick-fil-a’s marketing team for 14 years, as well as a couple of Major League sports teams. And a couple other amazing people. Don Yeager and Tim Elmore who’ve really studied a lot of things about different ways leaders thrive and teams and organizations and diversity and growth. And so it’s a really amazing way to develop yourself.

And one of the practices of leadership is you can’t give what you don’t have. And so it all starts with being intentional about your own development. And so that’s what John Maxwell offers people, is development to become better. And when you focus on developing yourself, then you become a better leader, a better father, a better husband, a better person in life, a better in your community. And then you can give the more maximum version of yourself. And really, that’s what we’re here all to do as a leader, is develop the team to be the best version of themselves. And so that’s what I love about John Maxwell.

John Gordon, I met him in 2017 at a logistics conference, and he spoke on positive leadership, which I just resonated so well with. And I got to actually sit next to him at lunch at a small table. And we conversed over the hour. And he’s a really special guy and he’s been through a great story in his life to get to this point. He wasn’t naturally a positive person, but he got to a point in his life where negativity was hurting him, and it was not a path that he could continue to go on. And so he made an intentional decision to look for the good in life versus the bad in life.

I started our conversation with life is not about what happens to you, it’s what happens for you. And when you change that perspective, it really changes your outlook on life. And so he’s studied a lot of sports teams and businesses on what creates success the most and has put those into books, “The Power of Positive Leadership” and “The Power of Positive Team” and “The Energy Bus”.

And so I’m certified in those programs in order to help leaders unite and come together, and be the best positive version of themselves. You know, there’s so many stats and facts out there about how your creativity, your productivity, your innovation, all excels when you look at it from a positive approach. And to the opposite, when you have a negative mindset, they all decreased dramatically. In fact, in Trevor Moawad’s book “It Takes What It Takes”, he had some stats in there that showed really the incredible negative impact of a negative mindset. And includes illness and mental illness, physical illness, you know, it gets exacerbated or started when you have a negative mindset. And so there’s really some science and power behind choosing to be positive in your approach.

And when you engage that in the workforce, people love to come to work. They know it’s gonna be environment where they know that they’re gonna be, you know, trusted, and there’s a trust in environment, that they’re gonna enjoy the work that they do. They’re gonna be encouraged to perform at their best level. And it’s a great experience and that’s what really we want in life is to have that.

Now, businesses are challenging and very complex, and there’s a lot of intense environments. You know, in fact, I was doing a hackathon with a company. On day four, and we were tackling five major problem areas. And both the operations team and the analytics team that were working together were kind of at a point of frustration. They were close to solving these things. We knew we had a deadline Friday to come up with some hacks to help. And they needed a push to get over the edge.

And so I took them all out into the lobby and I had them stand up and I said, “Each of you, tell me who your favorite superhero is.” And they’re like, “What?” I’m like, “Come on, just play with me for a minute and let’s run through this.” And so from one-to-one had Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Batman, Ironman, whatever. Some pick their mother or father, which is amazing. I love that. So I said, “Okay, picture that superhero in their most strongest stance, like in their most creative, powerful stance.” And so I said, “Now, get into that stance.” And so, you know, if you’re Ironman, you’re going like this going I’ve got this. Or you know, Wonder Woman crosses her arms.

So everyone gets into the stance and then we laugh a little bit. And I said, “Well, what you just did was you created a chemical reaction in your body that created some positive chemicals and endorphins and a reaction to create a positive mood and a change of your state.” And so now I said, “Now, let’s go back in there and conquer this.” And, you know, there was a new enthusiasm that was done just from a simple practice of stopping what you’re doing, getting in a power stance, and saying, I’ve got this. And so, you know, I think it’s exciting to understand the power of positivity and when you can understand the depths of this.

One other tool that I love that’s out there is called the mood elevator. And you can look this up. A gentleman wrote a book about it. If you picture a 20 story building, where 10 stories are in the basement and 10 are above ground. Physically, you can only be on one floor at a time. And that’s the same with your mental state or your mood. You can’t be in two moods at the same time. And what the mood elevator does is it kinda shows you the different steps. And as you go closer to the bottom, you get towards complete depression. And how you counter that is you be intentional about going to a positive floor. On the positive floor, it starts like being creative or starting to ask questions or starting to think what’s possible. All the way to the point of the highest floor, what I would call the 10th floor above ground, it’s being grateful, gratitude.

You know, when John talks a lot about that in his books about when you have a daily gratitude and gratefulness process, it gives you great perspective of your life and it encourages you to give much more and be acceptive of the amazing things that are actually happening in your life instead of getting bogged down in the negative side of life. I love that about John Gordon and his focus and where that takes it. So that works well with my perspective as an athlete and the leader in the supply chain industry and how I like to inspire business transformation with companies today.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! Thank you so much for trying to answer this impossible question, but I think you did it really well. So I think many people would have known John Maxwell, right? Like you said, he has written so many books, really well known in the leadership space. I also follow and listen to his talks, podcasts, and things like that.

But also the power positive leadership. I think you gave some tactical approaches. Things like the superhero stance. The mood elevator, right? And the power of gratitude. I think I also learned through some books that gratitude is the ultimate thing. You cannot be grateful if you are in a bad mood, right? So it always brings positivity. And I like that you mentioned it’s like the highest floor in the mood elevator.

For me, personally, I also sometimes use mantra. So whenever I’m in a negative mood, I always use the same, maybe, positive mantra, the thing that works for me. And kind of like recite that. And maybe it switches something inside of me and it brings me to a better mood, so to speak. Not necessarily fully happy, but at least, it switches the emotion internally. So I think thanks for sharing all this.

Michael Foss: Yeah. It’s good, Henry. It’s what you’ve mentioned is you’ve started to recognize your thoughts, capture them, and ask the question, is this helping me or hurting me? And if it’s not helping, you have a mantra to replace it. There’s some studies that have been done on this. And Chad Wright, a Navy Seal, talks about this a lot. There were times in his life in battle where he had to pull in these very positive themes into his mindset in order to overcome challenges. So that’s great perspective. I love that you do that. A lot of people could learn well from that. Craig Groeschel’s written a book called “Winning the War in Your Mind”, and he talks a lot about replacing those negative thoughts immediately with a positive mantra that helps them change their state. So yeah, great idea. I love it!

[00:48:34] Mental Health & Wellbeing

Henry Suryawirawan: You also mentioned something that, which I think really, really important in these days, in this modern era, right? You touched on about mental health. And for leaders, especially leaders who work in a very complex organization, a lot of disruptions happening, how should a leader maintain their mental wellbeing? So maybe if you can give some advice here as well.

Michael Foss: Yeah, that’s a great question. In fact, there was a study done by Carnegie Mellon many years ago with 70 CEOs, ranging from 5 million to 50 million in revenue, and they asked them many questions. And they said the number one response back that they said was most important to them as a CEO group was self-awareness. And you know, what that meant to me was, you are always on view by your team when you’re the leader of your organization. And it really starts with your mental system and your mental awareness.

And I’ve done some studies on this, and I did a speaking session on limiting beliefs a couple of years ago, and then I did another one just earlier this year. And your belief system is really created between the ages of zero and six much when you really have no control of yourself, of your environment and your thinking or your own perspective, it’s all about your parents or whatever environment you grew up in, gets engaged into your mindset and becomes your belief system, whether it’s positive or negative or limiting or not, becomes wired into your system.

The good news is you can be intentional about recognizing that and starting to change it. Because your belief system is what triggers your thoughts. And your thoughts become emotions which become actions, which become results. And so when you recognize, working backwards if I wanna change my results, I have to go back all the way to my belief system and understand why do I think this way? And ask that question, is this helping me or hurting me? Is this a limitation? You know, where did this come from? Is this truth or not? And start to replace it just like you talked about with a mantra. And so when you can do that, you can start to change your thoughts.

And I think that’s really key, for a leader, to be able to make sure that they stay mentally positive and focused. And I don’t mean positive like Pollyanna positive, which is great but that almost like ignores the reality of life. And the past three years, for example, have been really challenging for a lot of people in a lot of different ways. Self-inflicted or not, you know, there’s been a lot of circumstances that have occurred. And I think when, as leaders, we can understand we don’t control circumstances, we control how we respond, that’s the separator and that’s what creates the big difference.

In fact, John Gordon talks about a formula in his book called E + P = O. And the E stands for the Event that occurs or the circumstances. And P stands for your Perspective on it. And that creates the Outcome. And so when you start to recognize that circumstances don’t create your outcome, it’s your response, perspective, and mental awareness of what you can do with those circumstances that creates the right outcome, you can have a much more positive approach to it.

There’s studies have been, I’ve been listening to many, probably the same people you have where mental issues have been stronger and higher in numbers today than ever for a lot of different reasons. And so I think this is a really important subject and topic for leaders to deal with and create an environment that lets people know, they’re special people. And that everyone’s created with an amazing, unique greatness that only they can deliver on. And when they recognize that they are someone who can do something amazing and you don’t want to ever be in a mode of comparison with others, cause comparison is the thief of joy. And so when you realize that I’m in a race only to be my best and I wanna become my best and you start to work towards that, then you can achieve a great level of success.

And so one of the biggest things that leaders have to do, and I did a series of talks with the Institute of Industrial Systems Engineers on the mindset. And I had leaders come in from all different parts of the industry included many in the healthcare industry, just talking about how their business environment has changed and what they’ve done to create an environment that still fosters a positive mental approach to overcome all these new challenges and regulations, and how to improvise and adapt and overcome and still create a positive mental state. And it all starts with us being intentional to recognize it and to do something about it and take some ownership towards creating that, especially in an environment like this. Great question!

Henry Suryawirawan: Thank you for such a positive spin to your answers. And I like that you bring it back to where we started, right? So you said in the beginning that don’t think as life happening to you, but life happening for you. And I think you touched on also about perspective, focus on what we can control, right? I also love Stoicism philosophy, right? Focus on what you can control instead of just the event, what is happening to you. But focus on what you can actually respond out of it. So thank you so much for giving this positive mindset.

[00:53:30] 4 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think talking about leadership, we can talk all day long. But unfortunately, we have to wrap up because of the time. Before we end the conversation, I would like to leave you with one last question that I have, which I call the 3 technical leadership wisdom. You don’t have to cover the technical part, so to speak, but you can also give the leadership wisdom here. So maybe Michael, if you can give your version of 3 technical leadership wisdom, what would that be?

Michael Foss: Yeah, great question, and I love this follow up question that you have. And I’m gonna give you a plus one, because I couldn’t narrow it down any less. And so, first really to wrap up the last discussion, it’s really about choice. Everyone has the power of choice. And when you look at it, you’re a direct reflection of the choices that you’ve made over your lifetime. And people don’t wanna receive that sometimes. They wanna say, oh, my circumstances are this, and it’s put me into this environment, and therefore I am this way.

That is not really the truth, you know? And so you’ve gotta understand that there’s tremendous power in your own choice. And that you can choose to do something different or receive it different or have different perspective. And so I think that’s a great way to wrap up that session.

So, my number one is to grow and develop yourself. Number one. As I said earlier, you cannot give what you don’t have.

There’s an amazing story about Ben Carson who became a well known pediatrician doctor and has served in government at the US highest levels. When he was in fifth grade in elementary school, he was known as the dumb student in the class. Meaning when they would take tests and they would pass it to a peer and they would grade it and they would read the scores out loud, they always knew Ben’s number was gonna be the lowest. Cause that’s how his track record had been.

Well, I heard him speak live and tell this story a few years ago. And he shared that due to an unfortunate family situation, his mother found out his father was in another relationship, and so their dynamics changed and she needed to move them away from him for a while. And she got a job doing house cleaning in a fairly affluent neighborhood. And she said, well, I’m cleaning these homes, I’m gonna figure out what these people do to be successful. And she said she witnessed two things. One, there were few TVs and they were seldom on. And two, there were books everywhere and they were being read.

And so she came home with books borrowed or bought, and gave them to Ben and his brother and said, you’re gonna read these books and you’re gonna do a book report. Amongst some disagreement by them, they complied. And a year and a half later, like say the halfway through sixth grade, same scenario, Ben’s taking tests in class and they’re passing it to the neighbor. He’s now achieving the number one score in class consistently in and out.

And he said himself, he attributes it to that year and a half of development was the most impactful change in his life that created the opportunity for him to do some amazing things. That he was the youngest person ever at age 33 to be put into the chief of pediatric neurosurgery for the United States. And by age 37, I think, he had led the first successful neurosurgery operation that separated conjoined twins into successful two different beings, which is pretty amazing.

And so he contributes all of that success of becoming an amazing doctor and doing amazing work to growth and being intentional. And it’s true. The things that’ll change you the most from here in the next five years are the books that you read, how you develop yourself, and the people you hang around. So that’s number one.

Number two, add value to others. As a leader, it’s not about us. It’s never about us. It’s always about the team and guiding them to be the best version of themselves. Donald Miller often talks about in his books, you know, there’s always four main characters in the story. A victim, a villain, a hero, and a guide. The manager is never the hero. The manager is the guide. The hero is our team. And what we want to do is unlock their potential, remove barriers, and help them rise to a level that they could not otherwise without us and giving them support, direction, motivation, and helping them develop and sustain a new level of performance. So add value to others.

And I’d also say add value as a volunteer. I’ve done a lot of volunteer work over my career. And it’s just the return on investment when you do something without expecting something in return as a volunteer, there’s an amazing return on that investment that comes naturally. And I’ve met so many people and have had so many amazing experiences in my life through my volunteer work. And so I would say that’s part of adding value.

Number three, we talked about this a little bit earlier, is know your why. Your purpose. And if you don’t, if it’s not clear, one exercise you can go through is write your obituary and do it in the most courageous, outlandish, big, audacious way possible. Like if you were to stand at your funeral and talk about yourself on what you achieved and what you accomplished, what would you say? And then work backwards from there and say, well, if that’s how I want my life to end, what do I need to do to get to that space? And that starts to create reasons why you want to do what you wanna do.

I listened to Ed Mylett quite a bit. I don’t know if you listened to Ed. He’s a really amazing guy. His family tree had been prone to heart attacks. And he went to his uncle’s funeral. And on the way home, he was thinking about the funeral and somebody had said, “Oh, you look just like your uncle.” And so it started him thinking, am I gonna end up just like my uncle and my other families members who have died early from a heart attack? So he started to do some research into this, and found on the way home, on the airplane, Oprah Winfrey was interviewing a doctor who was talking about the heart.

And so he followed up and did some tests. And so he came in to talk to the doctor, and the doctor sat him down. And instead of just going over the numbers and saying we need to prescribe some pills or whatever, the doctor asked him a couple of questions. He said, “You have a daughter Bella, right?” And Ed says, “Yes.” And he says, “How old is she?” And he’s like, “One or two or something.” He says, “Are you okay with some other man walking her down the aisle when she gets married?” And Ed was like, “What are you talking about?” And he says, “You have a son, right?” He says, “Yeah.” He says, “Are you okay with him winning a great golf tournament and you not being there to see it?”

And so finally Ed’s getting pretty agitated saying, “Alright, what’s in this report? What are you trying to tell me?” He says, “Well, if you don’t change your life, he said someone else is gonna live the rest of your life with your family, cause you’re not gonna be here.” And that moment alone was his turning point that created enough why for him to change his life. He’s still going strong today, looks amazing, works out, eats well, and is adding tremendous value back to the world through his podcast show. And I just love that. So everyone has to find their why and their purpose.

And then last, the bonus one I’ll give you, is nothing sustains unless you have systems and mechanisms. And this is with any process improvement, whether it’s self-development as a leader or you implement a new technology that you want to be adopted in the world today. And it’s all simply because willpower and good intentions are great, but they don’t last and they don’t work for the long run. And what a mechanism is, is a mini system. And it takes an input and it puts it through a tool that’s adopted and inspected, and creates a predictable output. And when you implement change or any process improvement from this perspective, you can then create a very predictable output over time.

And that’s why I kind of talked about this in standard work is when you create a tool that’s very adopted by the team that’s doing the work, and there’s inspection to ensure that it’s being followed correctly and used, you’re gonna get an output that you expect. And so with anything that you do in life, whether it’s self-development, leadership development, significant technology innovations, it all has to be built on a systems and mechanism approach to sustain long-term success. And so those are the advices that I would give to wrap up the show. And it’s certainly been a pleasure to be here talking with you today, Henry.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! I wasn’t expecting the 3 technical leadership wisdom to be so powerful. So you really deliver like a lot of great insights in your wisdom as well. And the plus point as well that you mentioned the last one, right? I really love it. Systems and mechanisms. Leaders should always think about building those things. It all comes back to your principle, you know, like you’re building the trust, building commitment with other people as well within your team.

So thank you so much for giving us all these great, great insights for leadership and from your sharing from your experience as well. And powerful stories. Not necessarily your own story, but other powerful stories that you listened and heard from other people, right? Those are really inspiring. So thank you so much for that.

So for people who would like to follow up on you, maybe they wanna ask questions or they wanna look at your resources. Is there a place where they can find you online?

Michael Foss: Yeah, you bet. I welcome everyone to join me on LinkedIn. And I’m Michael Foss, or the LinkedIn shortcut is Coach Foss. Or you can go to my website, coachfoss.com. C-O-A-C-H-F-O-S-S dot com.

Henry Suryawirawan: Maybe, one fun fact. You have a short hand of FOSS. What is FOSS?

Michael Foss: Yeah, Foss. Foss is my last name, but I turned it into an acronym that says, Finding Optimal Solutions for Success, which is what I’ve done my whole career, so it’s very fun. Thank you.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Thank you for sharing that. All right. So thank you so much, Michael for this wonderful time. Thank you so much again.

Michael Foss: Yeah, thank you, Henry. It’s been a pleasure.

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