The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lori Hamilton, Founder and President at Prosperity Productions

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Lori Hamilton, Founder/President at Prosperity Productions About Generated over $3 Billion in new business for our clients; won 58 awards for creative and marketing excellence along the way. Personally interviewed over 25,000 people. Expert at insights, innovation, communications and marketing. Lecturer at Columbia University's Masters Degree Program in Strategic Communications as well as NYU Business School. I specialize in telling the stories that change the world. What's yours? See my websites www.ProsperityProductionsInc.com and www.TheLoriHamilton.com Specialties: Services: Qualitative research, ethnography, quantitative, segmentation, usability, video diaries, creative testing, new product development, filmmaking, webisodes, scripted film, documentary, website testing Industries: consulting, bus. services, electronics, food, pkg. goods, technology, Green, fin. services, telcom, pharma, banking, insurance, construction, building materials, logistics/distrib. software Audiences, b-to-b, consumer, Hispanic, teens, kids, analysts, small biz, futurists, MDs

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming over to another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you tuning in. Why did we do another one? I don't know. There's almost a thousand of these burned things, and we just keep making more of them. I don't know. Maybe we just need to get a job or something, get something to do. We just keep making more podcasts.

But that's good for my listeners, and we certainly appreciate you guys. Go check out my new book out October 5th. We just got the last shipment for the pre-sale sent over. And go to goodreads.com, 4ChessCrisp. I see everything we're reading and reviewing over here. To see this most interesting discussion in depth that we're going to have coming up here go to youtube.com for chest christmas hit the bell notification button it will complete you in ways that you have never imagined or felt before and remember unlike your family the christmas show

does not judge you also go to facebook linkedin twitter instagram and all those other places we judge that guy in the back that guy yeah you right there but everyone else is fine go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and all those other places. We judged that guy in the back. That guy. Yeah, you right there. But everyone else is fine. Go to all the different places on social media. Today we have an amazing guest on the show. Her name is Lori Hamilton.

She's the founder and president of Prosperity Productions. She has worked as a marketing strategist, researcher, and creative consultant for more than 20 years. Her work has generated over $3 billion in incremental business for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to startups. She has personally interviewed over 25,000 people. I'm getting tired. I haven't even done that. From global CEOs to people living in trailer parks and everything in between. Welcome to the show, Lori. How are you? I'm great. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited to be part of your podcast network machine here. The network machine. But I've only interviewed, I think it's under 1,000 people. So you've got me by 24,000 or so or something like that. So that's a lot of people. It is. Give us your dot coms for people to find you on the interweb and get to know you more. Sure. ProsperityProductionsINC.com.

Or if you want to see some of my creative work, I am TheLaurieHamilton.com. And same on the Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all the things. All the things, as they like. The kids say that nowadays, all the things, or at least that's what I hear. I don't know. I've got to check with them. So anyway, the, why is your company called Prosperity Productions? And then I also would like to know what was the art thing or creative process you do? What is that? What is that about?

Yeah. The deal with me is my dad died my freshman year in college, my first phone call home and my mom took all the money. Oops. So I had to get a job to pay for school. And I ended up getting a job doing research in UCLA Health Network, basically doing interviews and EKGs in people's homes in English and Spanish in Watts, California, that night. And I learned all kinds of cool stuff. And I studied linguistics and I studied modern British drama. And what I've discovered, Chris, is that the art of analyzing characters in a movie or a television show is very similar to the art of understanding people in qualitative research. So the two kind of come together. The reason I call my company Prosperity Productions is, have you ever had someone give you a gift and you're like, I know why you thought that was a good gift versus when someone gives you a gift that knows you really well. The same thing happens with companies because whatever you do best, you have almost no awareness of because your brain doesn't pay attention to things that come easily to you. Like, have you ever met someone who's,

I'm a people person? No, you're not. Or you're at a party and someone's like, I'm funny. What are the chances they're funny? Zero. But meanwhile, when you watch a character in a movie or a television show, you know them better than they know themselves because you can see the contrast between what they say and what they do. The same thing is true in doing insights and innovation work. Companies think they know what they're good at, but they true in doing insights and innovation work. Companies think they know what they're good at, but they're giving a gift that they think is good for you. And sometimes you're like, who invented this? Did no one try this? Did no one even, did you bring it home at all? And so what I do is I help the company understand, here's what you have that is a gift.

And they're like, oh really? That's amazing. And then I help them understand the person that they're giving the gift to, like the target audience, whether that be a high-end financial manager managing $667 million in assets, or somebody who's living in a trailer park who's an employee that's signing up for insurance. And when you put those two things together, prosperity is created because these guys are going, here's what we have. That's a gift. And they're like, Oh, happy. I love how you put it. It's funny. No, it's customer service seems to be the biggest crisis point of what some people think is a gift. I love this new world. I grew up in the world of Tom Peters and in search of excellence and the new revolution of customer service seems completely dead and backwards these days.

It's like nowadays I get these Zendesk things that are like, hey, thanks for your email. We've got it. We'll respond in five days because we don't care enough to have someone staffed up to respond to you. And we really just don't want to talk to you. Just take our buyer product and go away. Quit bothering us.

And yeah, it's extraordinary. There's some things out there. Now you said you have a creative site that you do. What's what's active on there? As I said, or you said, I've interviewed over 25,000 people. I write movies and short films and basically I take things that are painful

and I make them funny. I'm like a comedy recycling machine. I take the pain of life in corporate America And recycle it into things that are funny And so essentially what I'm doing All day long is telling stories That make the world A little brighter hopefully

That give you a little insight That you go oh it's like a great joke And you're like now that you say that Of course that's true So sometimes I do it on the corporate America side Where I'm doing the prosperity So sometimes I do it on the corporate America side where I'm doing the prosperity movement. And sometimes I do it by making little short movies or longer movies or things like that. That's awesome. You work with a lot of companies. I just noticed here,

your firm is to work with 23 research. You've conducted research in 23 countries around the world and won lots of awards. This is really cool because you see what's out there. Comedy is so great because it usually is an identifier to the failures of our nature, but it's cajoling or I don't know if cajoling is the right word, but it's in a way where we can look at ourselves and go, yeah, that's kind of messed up. We should probably work on that, but we can all laugh about it. We all are aware of what we do. So what are some ways that you work with clients and help them with your- Thank you for asking that.

And I'm glad you talked about comedy because people don't take comedy seriously. But the reality is that I did. And I said it on purpose. Oh. I said it and I meant it. Your brain does not distinguish between a highly imagined experience and a real one. So if you ever end up late at night watching a horror movie and then you can't sleep, nothing happened.

You just imagined it. And in this day and age where people are so data-driven and they're so overwhelmed and they're going from meeting to meeting, what stands out is a story, is an experience, is something where you can envision it. Because if you can envision it, you feel like you've experienced something where you can envision it. Because if you can envision it, you feel like you've experienced it and you can repeat it without having to look at the PowerPoint

deck. So a lot of times what I do is I try to be as thoughtful about the internal audience as we are about the external audience. Because if all I'm doing is coming with a research report and being the smartest person in the room, which by the way, don't ever be that because everyone hates the smartest person in the room because they want to be the smartest person in the room. People trust one resource above all others themselves. So what I try to do is go, all right, what's our preconceived idea over here? What's the reality over here? And how can I present that in a way that feels uplifting and motivating? Because if I don't get people engaged and excited about the insights, they're not going to do anything with them.

So it's really like you think about my first sale, if you will, is literally getting buy-in on the client side. So I basically am naturally curious and ask obnoxious, long, detailed questions that would probably get me kicked out of any cocktail party, and I get paid for it. Hooray. Hooray. That's awesome. Some of this, I wrote about my book about asking questions and innovating. And a lot of people never ask questions. One of the stories I say in the book is the turkey story. If you're familiar with the turkey story, I don't know if you've ever heard of it. Why don't you tell it to us? I'll paraphrase it because you may have

heard of it. But basically, there's a million different versions of this. There's like a Jewish version. There's a million different versions. But basically, a young newlywed wife makes Thanksgiving turkey for her husband the first time. She tears off the legs and cooks them separately from the main turkey. And the husband's – and so she was taught that by her mother. And so they call every generation up to the great-grandmother who goes, I don't know, my mother taught me to do it that way. And they find out that the great-grandmother, great-grandmother, who's barely still alive, they did that because the old original stoves they first started making weren't big enough to hold the whole turkey.

And so when I would go into departments and try and innovate or reimagine them, I'd say to people, why do you do it this way? They go, I don't know. This is the way we always done it. And you know what you're saying, asking questions and being inquisitive. A lot of people don't feel like they're empowered to do that or don't want to do it or management. Don't question stuff. This is the way it is. I used to get told places to work. Hey, we spent $2 million to build this company. You want to do things your way, you will get your own $2 million and start your own company. So I did. Like you say, asking questions is really important because people have this mentality where they go, I don't question why. I just, I don't know. It's the way we always did it. And you want to ask people, the key question is,

tell me a story. Because the way your brain works is that you have an emotional response and then you justify it with language but because of the way your brain is wired you think you had the rational response first and you can prove this to yourself if you've ever been up late at night eating ice cream or potato chips and you're constructing an effective argument in case someone bursts through the door going why are you eating that's an example of you justifying what you're doing and there was an interesting experiment that was a study that was done. There was a guy who had a massive stroke. And the only thing that was impacted was his emotional center. So he could read, he could write, he could talk, he could drive,

he could do everything. The one thing he couldn't do, Chris, make a decision. Because at the end of the day, that's what makes the difference is our emotion. Yeah. Well, that'll do it. So I'll tell you a story about that. This is a B2B story. It's a company that we worked with called Johnson Controls, and they are the leading provider of energy management systems. So if you want to massively change what's happening with the climate, if you want to massively change your energy footprint or just your cost for basically no downside as a company, you want to do a better job of managing your energy, where your air conditioning going, all that kind of stuff. So every CEO they talked to

said, yes, this is a priority. And yet, we weren't making the decisions. So they realized that the gatekeeper was the facilities manager. So we said, okay. And again, what you want to do is people don't do things for business reasons. If people were rational, no one would smoke. I have a saying. Captain Logic is the worst superhero ever. I need this on a shirt and a hat that I can wear. Yeah, I have a lot of those on. Captain Logic

and a few today do the logical thing today. But no one listens to Captain Logic or a better luck next time captain logic so do you have a video on this so i can banner this on my facebook or something i want to i want that i have a cartoon of it i'm working on a video actually we're working on a video for that yes we get so we're talking to facilities managers at organizations that are $500 million and up, whether it's a school or a retail environment, construction, manufacturing. And I asked them, okay,

what makes you feel successful as a person? What do you love to do as a person? And they all said something similar. I'm a gearhead. I'm rebuilding a 57 Chevy. I make soapbox derby cars. I read biographies. I like to know how things work. I'm making a model airplane. Great. Okay.

So let's talk about, now this, that sounds like, why would you even care about that? But stay tuned. So then we asked them, all right, when it comes to news and information from the outside world, everybody has a certain daily diet of news and information from the outside world. What is your meal on the go that you have to have no matter how busy you are? What's your dessert and what's vegetables? So meal on the go, no matter how busy they are for facilities managers, what would you think the one piece of information they have to have from the outside world is?

New features or innovations or how to repair? I don't know. I'm not a facility manager. The weather. Oh, the weather. Right. What impacts facilities more than anything else? The weather. Yeah, those hurricanes. Right, right, right. So based on what I told you about what they love to do, what is dessert? What's the fun stuff that they get to read and use as information just because they... I think it would vary, but I can do some guesses, but you two probably won't like them. I don't know. Do you tell me? Again, similar to what you just said.

How things work. The mechanics of stuff. The things that they love because it's fun. That's dessert? I would think like gaming or something. Well, I mean, they just said what makes them feel successful at home is mechanical things and how things work. Oh, okay.

So it makes sense that what's dessert for them, what's fun, are mechanical things and how things work. Okay. Clearly I'm not designed that way. Well, that's why people like me exist in the world. Yay. Okay. that way. Well, that's why people like me exist in the world. So vegetables, what they had to read, even though they didn't want to, was every single publication our client was advertising it.

So the answer to the question, Chris, how do you change the world? How do you get facilities managers to pay attention to a message from an energy management company, the answer is talk about the mechanics and put it in the weather section. In an ad? Yeah. And they put little digital ads right around the weather section. Here's the cool gear. Here's the cool thing how it works.

And now all of a sudden an ad becomes dessert in the one place that we know that facilities managers are looking at news and information every single day no matter how busy they are wow this is like a book you could do ads it's the ads that are desserts or ads it's dessert or it's gonna have to be worked on but yeah yeah dessert ads wait i think i have dessert ads in my Instagram. I have so many food things I follow on Instagram. It's complete food stuff that goes on there. It's like cake. Oh, pie.

Pie. Yeah. I'm on a diet, though, so I'm living vicariously through the pictures. I can look, but I can't touch. We talked to a pre-show in the green room about corporations and valuing employees and how they approach it and some of the work that you've done with the kind of pseudo undercover boss if you want to explain some of that some more to us there are two basic philosophies that i've observed in my many years working with different companies from the very bottom i started as a temp at chase manhattan bank and they had free sandwiches and there was one project we did it was a multi-billion dollar

construction products company one of the biggest in the world. And one of the largest pieces of the puzzle was given to me by a man in Toledo, Ohio, who had more tattoos than he had teeth. But he was looking at the truck.S. Chamber of Commerce about the U.S. workforce. A couple of things to keep in mind, Chris. One is we use the same resume now that was originally invented by the Greeks. So we hire people based on skills and we fire them based on attitude. So we throw away lots of people, moms, people who've been out of the workforce because they're taking care of a parent or a child, somebody who's a vet who doesn't know how to turn their skill set from the military into a skill set translation into corporate America, people who don't have a college education, people who are over 50 who have tremendous loyalty and

know the company, but they don't happen to know one new software program that PS, everyone in the company is going to have to learn. So what I see are these two philosophies. One philosophy is the employee is an asset. Everybody says, our employees are our most valuable asset. Are they really though? Do you invest in them? Do you care about them? There's a great book called First Break All the Rules rules it's a quantitative study on what makes a great workplace globally and there's only 10 things do i understand the purpose of my work do i have what i need to do my work does somebody at work care about me just a few simple things companies that really make a difference in terms of i'm going to invest in my employee i'm going to assume the best and bring out the best and give them the best possible chance to succeed. That's one group. And you can see that statistically,

they do far better financially in terms of performance, not only because they have lower turnover, but you get more value or like I call it discretionary passion from that group. Maybe you've worked for a company like this. I'm just wondering perhaps in your life, they think of employees as an expense and their philosophy is the employee is basically bad and you must catch them at all the terrible things they are doing. You must limit their time.

You must look at every single detail. You assume the worst. And guess what happens when you assume the worst about people? You bring out the worst or you bring out the worst and you keep the worst because the people who are the best leave because they don't like being treated that way. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I've worked at places like that. Some people get so deep into the numbers. They don't see people

as people or people as one of the things that I've told the story of is one time we had insurance, we were trying to get a blanket insurance company for all the employees. And they literally came to me privately and said, there are two employees that have the highest health problems and they're increasing everyone's premiums. Is there any way you could figure out a way to get rid of them? And I was like, that's completely unethical and moral and wrong. Turns out there were two of my top employees who worked the hardest. They were there the latest at night. They gave me everything in their all. And there was, aside from the insurance story, these two individuals worked their hardest for me. There was no way to really measure it other than just me knowing personally that I would go over to that

department and be like, why is the light on in one of these offices? And they'd be in there working. And you can't measure that on a graph or, I mean, I suppose you could pick it up on their punch in and punch outs, but no, they were all my other employees for the most part in many departments, but they would have that runner's stance at a four 58 at the door where they're like ready to go. And you're like, Hey, I got this form. They're like, ah, no. The, and then your starting bell goes off at five. And you know that they're at the punch out clock holding that thing up, just waiting for the click over.

But yeah, looking at people as numbers really invalues them. What do you think about how are, you know, these, I grew up with the rise of the Ivan Bajoski age of Wall Street and the death of Main Street and this whole age that started with, hey, being a CEO of a major multimillionaire company is all about stock price and valuation for investors. It's not about anything else. Oh, you want the stock to go up and get your bonus? Fire 40,000 employees. And we talked a little bit in the show about how companies need to start thinking more about what the true all-around impact of some of that stuff is. Agreed. I don't want to go back even before that because the basic foundational issue that I see is that the structure that we now think of as corporate America really started in the early 1950s after World War II when we had a culture

of the military. And in the military, the people at the top are responsible for the people at the bottom and the people at the bottom are responsible to the people at the top so the people at the top get you talk to generals and you read their autobiographies and the hardest thing is when they're sending soldiers in and they know that there's going to be casualties when somebody that they know and care about dies. There was a story in World War II of this terrible general. My grandfather was actually in part of this, that they didn't give them winter coats because the general thought that they would be done. And so they're literally in the swamps in Germany without maps in freezing cold water in summer gear.

You know what I mean? So corporate America was started with a collective, unarticulated agreement that we were responsible to and for each other. And what we started to see in the 1980s, you think about Prop 13, everybody thinking about taxes. If you ask people, this is from Yankovic, if you ask people in the 1980s, what a successful person looks like, people would say someone with a lot of money. In the 1990s, they said, ooh, someone with freedom of time, flexibility of time, you could work whenever, wherever. 2000s, flexibility of place. If you have technology and you can work anywhere, you're successful. But after the 2008, 2009 recession, a bunch of people went, this idea of I work hard today, I gain tomorrow, that doesn't work. That's a lie. And so what you see now are a lot of millennials, some millennials that are not so grown up, but a lot of millennials that think like people from the depression era, or think

like retirees. And they're like, my measure of success is am I living my life with purpose. And you see this in people walking away from jobs. I actually wrote an article that's coming out tomorrow. I'll send it to you. That's got a whole bunch of leaders during COVID. One of them was a CEO who cut his salary and gave everybody a raise. And Wall Street laughed him out of the room.

Guess whose company's doing a lot better? Is that the Gentleman in Oregon or Washington? Yeah, Gentleman in Oregon. And you look at the container store. You look at Zappos. You look at even Microsoft right now. I don't know if you know this fascinating program. They've started a program to actively hire people on the autism spectrum.

Because people on the autism spectrum can think in 3D like a computer does. So they can anticipate problems before they even implement them. And they have a whole socialization program to help them feel comfortable at work. That's talk about, let's look at people as meet you where you are and find your value. That's pretty amazing. We've had a few autism authors on the show and I've got friends that are out there artistic and on the spectrum. And yeah, they have some real, there's a lot of savants that have autism. They think of things in a very different way and they have assets, most of us that don't, that aren't on the spectrum. And the more assets you can have, the better. Let's talk about different ways that

you can help companies, how they can reach out to you and get in touch with you and all that good stuff. Sure. You can come to my website or just Lori, L-O-R-I at prosperityproductionsinc.com. But before I even do that, here's some things you can do literally this afternoon. When you are talking to a client or a customer and you want to find out what's going on with them, don't ask them, why did you do that? Or what did you, what do you want? Ask them, tell me the story about whatever it is. And if you want to find out what's great about what you do, ask them, all right, you're a super fan.

You're a great customer. When you're telling somebody else about me, what do you say? And what you want to do when you're having these conversations is first put yourself in a frame of mind of no vested interest, just I want to be an expert in your point of view. How often during our lives do people talk to us or listen to us without waiting for us to stop talking so they can talk? Just literally listening and listening with an open heart. There's a thing called the vagus nerve, which is from the back of your brain into your stomach. It's what gives you a gut

reaction. It's a nerve of mirroring. We are literally designed to connect and mirror with each other. When you hear someone sing, your vocal cords involuntarily mimic that. So if you want someone to be open, and as you just said at the beginning of your show, if you want people to not feel judged, you can't come in judging yourself, trying to be perfect. You can't come in judging them. So even if it's your daughter or your son saying, so tell me about your day. I just want to hear your point of view about your day. Just tell me about that. That's all I want to hear. And then listen and say, tell me more and ask questions about it or just mirror back. Wow. That sounds hard. They say it's terrible. That sounds terrible. Literally. If you repeat back what people say, they'll think you're a genius.

Wow. Note to self, be a genius. Repeat what people say. they'll think you're a genius. Wow. Note to self. Be a genius. Repeat what people say. Wait, did I just do that? That's another fun thing. Two fun little tricks is when someone tells you something that instead of saying, I know, say, you're right. So when someone tells you something you should know, you just say, wow, you're right.

No, I'll stop doing that. I'm just kidding. You're right. And the second thing you want to do, just be a genius. Whenever you meet someone and they tell you what they do for a living, no matter what it is, say, ooh, that sounds hard.

And then let them talk about themselves. And they'll tell you. That's pretty brilliant because wouldn't they be complaining or trauma dumping or drama dumping at that point? What happens is sometimes they'll disagree. No, it's not that hard. What you're doing when you say that's hard

is you're inviting them, tell me more. I'm actually genuinely interested. I actually care about what your life is like. Please tell me more. And I met, I was at a wedding this weekend and I met a teacher in the Bronx. And I said, wow, that sounds hard. And she said, it is what it is.

And she went on and told me the most marvelous insight, the story of what it's been like to be a teacher in the Bronx during COVID. Wow. That's got to be an adventure. Being a teacher or a parent with kids in the COVID, the whole COVID thing is just, can we get over that now? Is it time yet? Okay. They say it's not time yet. It's going to be a couple more hours. Anyway, so what sort of client, people that are listening to this on LinkedIn and other places that we're going to repost this, people that are listening in, what is your client base or what sort of clients do you look for or customers that you look for that can work with you that identify best? It's a great question, Chris. The people that get the most out of what

we do are people who are genuinely interested in understanding and connecting with and engaging with their customers, whether that be internal or external. So if you want someone to just validate what you're doing, there's lots of companies that can do that. If you're really interested in learning more and learning more deeply, then we're the firm for you because we're going to find stuff that other people won't find. Okay, be an example. There was a company, I won't name the company. There are three manufacturers of contact lenses in the world. And there was a contact lens company that did a $500,000 multi-nation global study on what makes a great contact lens brand. And six months later, with the results of that study, it had made no difference in sales.

Can you guess why? They forgot to ask one key question. How many people even know what contact lens brand they have? And the answer is less than 18%. Think about it. You get your contact lenses, you throw the box away. Yeah. And then you're looking at a blank container. And what brand do you know? The brand of cleaner for your contact lenses. But you don't know the brand.

Maybe contact companies should buy the cleaner. You said it. Every time I go into my contact lens to get updated, it's here. They go, Brandy, I don't know. And I'll tell you something else. We do a lot of work with pharmaceutical companies and with financial companies. And the biggest message I always get is please speak in plain language. We did a bunch of studies for a financial services company. And what we found

is only about 20, 23% of people, when they hear something they don't understand, will actually ask you, will feel like they deserve to know. The other three quarters of the population assumes they're not going to know. Some people, they don't understand what you just said. So they try to make friends with you so that you'll teach them whatever the trick is. Some people go, can't trust anybody, they just look at the numbers, and they buy on price. And they may be buying the wrong thing, because they literally don't understand what you're talking about. And then there's a third group that's, oh, I'm stupid, or, oh, corporations lie. So there's all there's, if you want to fix the wealth gap in the United States, one of the best things you could do is make insurance and banking and financial services speak in the language of literally an eight-year-old so that everybody feels smart when they listen.

Instead of when they hear it, they go, I don't even know what all those words are. Yeah, it did, and we should teach it in schools and stuff. The survey thing really is an interesting thing. I get these surveys, and I'll have complaints that I want to make about a company or beef that I have and I get the survey and I'm like, cool, I can respond now and tell them what I really think and maybe they'll fix their problems. And there are always these surveys that I think the survey company doesn't want to make their client mad or they want to impress their clients. So they made these surveys that are usually the person who's up on the sacrificial altar is the employee. And you're like, no,

I don't want to tell you how the employee is bad. The employee tried as hard as they could with your idiot system that you have. I really want to tell you how your idiot system and your company sucks, not the employee. And then you realize that a lot of the questions are geared or controlled to just make the company look good. How much do you like the company on a scale of one to 10? You're like, I don't like the company at all. I see what you're doing with the words there. I'll give you a couple of quick examples that illustrate what we do that gives people benefit. IBM Global Services was working with the largest auto parts network in the world. They're doing something called network to network purchasing, which is where you can go into one place and you can buy it from lots of places. At the largest, one of their customers, they had 70%

of the orders were coming in as workarounds from the new system. So we went in and I interviewed the person who was at the hub of it. She got a lot of her personal enjoyment from work by doing graphic design, by putting little leprechauns on for St. Patrick's Day or hearts for Valentine's Day. And they took all that away. They also made it so you couldn't change the size of the typeface and she couldn't read it. So she internalized that as this system is hard to work with and actively encourage people not to look at it because they didn't put a simple feature in it that made it legible for okay so that's another

example company that does medical exception claims processing i talked to the president of the company and he told me for an hour in terms that i still do not understand all of the complicated software stuff that they did and And I talked to his client. How many of them talked about the software and all these changes? Zero. They said, he gets patients cancer treatment faster. He figures out that there's an error and can fix it

so that Tommy gets his diabetes medication and doesn't have to wait six months. They make us look better by putting healthcare into the hands of patients by finding all the little typos and problems that are in there so that we can fix it. That's what he does. The software is how he does it, but nobody cared about, but that what they cared about was the incredible benefit to their companies. And similarly, last one was working with a startup, these two kids from MIT who have invented a skincare that will, with a little

sensor, will adjust to your skin when it's warmer, when it's colder, maybe you have zits, maybe you don't, whatever. And what they thought was really cool about it was all AI. It was so smart and it was custom made. But it was when I talked to the people that actually bought it, they said, you know what I love about this company? These two people had acne growing up. So they understand what it feels like to have bad skin, to be told that you just have bad skin and to say, no, you don't have bad skin. You have bad skincare. You're doing a science experiment on your face every day with these five different products that you don't know how they work. We're going to take the guesswork out of it. You deserve to feel like you have good skin when you've

been told you have bad skin your whole life. That's really interesting. The people I've known, a lot of entrepreneurs, and it might be, I might have been guilty over all the companies we've owned where we thought we were doing something and the customer was like, that's not why we work with you. And sometimes why they work with you is the one reason that they stay with you and they haven't gone to your competitors. And if you don't identify that, you can't address that. And if you accidentally take it away because you're not paying attention, then they're like, yeah, I'm out. See you. Bye. And it goes, you're so right. It all goes back to emotional motivation. I'll tell you a horror story from when I was a VP of marketing for a bank and we had a credit card program that had the lowest rate in the country.

And we went from being a tiny regional program to being the most profitable credit card portfolio in the United States. Because what we said is not use your credit card for buying a boat or a vacation or points or this. You're smart. Because what we did was we analyzed the customer base. And because this bank had such a strict credit policy, only 30% of people applied actually even got the card. And they were people who were renters, not buyers. They were blue collar. They saved their money. They didn't have a lot of fancy financial products. They use the credit card as like cashflow to pay for their kids' school supplies. And these are people who are not traditionally told how smart they are.

And we said, look how smart you are. You got the best credit card deal in the country. Then a very famous, we shall go unnamed, consulting company came in and they said, oh, we know how to fix your credit card portfolio based on the prime rate. It'll save everyone so much money. So now the credit card that used to make you feel smart made you feel stupid. And even though they save more money, they turn the most profitable credit card portfolio in the country into a $3 million loss in less than six months. Wow. That's horrible. There you go. Very upsetting. There you go. We featured some wonderful stories and lessons from you. Anything more you want to touch on before we go out?

I think the thing to remember is that when you look at people as everybody has a piece of the mosaic and you just assume they're going to have something interesting to teach you or something to say, the world becomes a much richer place and you will be amazed at what you can find out. There was an experiment that was done with 20 men and 20 women. And they were each told they were going to be talking to somebody for a possible first date, just doing it on the phone. Half the men were told the women they were talking to were very attractive. Half the men were told the women they were talking to were not very attractive. And they listened to the women's side of the conversation and they could tell. So when you wake up in the morning and you go look at the immigrant, the coffee person, the person that's working at McDonald's, the person that is the fireman or the teacher, or even the CEO, when you make an assumption about who that person is based on what they're wearing or what their job is, you're missing the point. And you're also encouraging them

to be whatever stereotype that you have of them. So if you do nothing else today, go out in the world and look at people with love, ask them to tell you their story, and you're going to find out some amazing stuff. There you go. There you go. Lori, it's been wonderful having you on the show.

Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. So you can find me at TheLoriHamilton on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. You can find me at ProsperityProductionsINC.com. You can find me on Facebook under Prosperity Productions and TheLoriHamilton. And I can't wait to hear what you all have to say. I'm looking forward to hearing your stories. Awesome stuff. Thank you, Lori, for being on the show and sharing with us your insight and

knowledge. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. I hope you had a good time and I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you. I did too. I learned a lot and I learned how to repeat stuff to sound like a genius. Was genius the term? Yes. You're right. You're right, Chris. But I'll just start doing that through the show. I'll just repeat whatever it was. I'll be like, he's the greatest podcaster ever. And he'll be like, yeah, whatever, dude. Anyway, I certainly appreciate it, Laurie. Thank you for coming.

Thank you so much. It was really fun. All right. Best wishes and good luck with your book. Thank you. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to youtube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button.

Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to all of our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, where all those cool kids are playing. We are at, I don't know what we're doing with the cool kids, but we're trying to fit in. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time.