Brad Jacobs

Obviously, we think it's valuable.

And these are the people who are going to make this company work.

And I look at those people as an extremely valuable source of information about the company that we just spent all that money to buy.

And I often find, and I write about this in the book, that I often find that employees at all levels, whether they're frontline, middle management, senior management, have never been asked, what's your best idea to improve the company?

Tell me everything that you would do if you had my job.

And when you ask them that, and then shut up and just listen carefully to what they're saying, write it down.

It's an amazing experience.

Sometimes you ask those questions and then

For 45 minutes, all the people you're interviewing just are piling on and interrupting each other because it's just such an exciting experience to say how they could improve the business.

It's unleashing these perspectives, this knowledge, this information about the business that you don't get otherwise.

I find a lot of companies, many companies, in fact, the majority of companies, they have this...

valuable thing there in terms of this repressed information that's not unleashed.

And if you can go in there and figure out ways to unleash this information flow and get these feedback loops going and recognize people for contributing to this improvement plan, wow, you can create tremendous opportunities, tremendous, and make a lot of money for everybody.

I should caveat that.

I've seen two types of travesties.

One is where a company just has way too much expense, just bureaucracy and red tape and people aren't really...

triplicates of every division.

Well, let me say, so how do you contribute to the value of the company?

This is long pause.

They're really not.