Matthew Kohut

This is one of my favorite things to pick on when I see something that I know is written by chat GPT, because it's never in the short words.

It's always in the long Latin eight, four syllable words.

Oh, I couldn't agree more.

I'm going to tell the story of one of my co-authors in a book I wrote called The Smart Mission.

And my late co-author and mentor, Larry Prusak, was probably one of the world's leading authorities on the whole idea of knowledge in organizations.

And he told me this story.

It's apocryphal, but I know the person who this worked with, who actually had this happen.

A knowledge expert was talking to the leader of a Japanese corporation, CEO of a large company there, a tech company back in the 80s, 90s.

And the leader gave this consultant a carte blanche to spend time anywhere in this giant organization over a week to try and figure out how they could do better at sharing what they know to spark innovation across the organization.

And after a week, this guy comes for his little 15-minute chat with the CEO and

And he says, more tea.

And the CEO said, excuse me?

Japan's a tea drinking culture.

And what he meant was more conversations of the informal type that people have while they're taking their tea break.

And it's that exact same thing with the leader as well.

It's breaking bread with people.

It's having that cup of coffee and just getting to know people when they're

they have their guard down a little bit and there's no better way to do that than to break bread with people.

So I think that this is a hugely valuable thing that a lot of leaders just kind of leave off the calendar and it's a real missed opportunity.

Sure, yeah.