The following is a conversation between Charles Conn, Chairman of the Board of Patagonia and Co-Author of The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times, and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.
Denver: In a world marked by swift change and uncertainty, conventional approaches to strategy and problem solving are proving inadequate. With industries in constant flux, standard planning processes are often ineffective, leaving many organizations in a state of paralysis or making hasty, risky decisions.
Charles Conn, in his sequel to the bestseller, Bulletproof Problem Solving, presents a unique perspective on navigating these tumultuous times. His new book, The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times, co-authored by Rob McLean, advocates for an innovative dynamic approach to strategy, framed by six strategic mindsets, and he is with us now.
Welcome back to The Business of Giving, Charles!
Charles Conn, Chairman of the Board of Patagonia and Co-Author of The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times
Charles: It’s so good to be here again, Denver. Nice to see you.
Denver: Likewise. You know, a lot has changed since you wrote that first book four or five years ago. How does The Imperfectionists build upon Bulletproof Problem Solving?
Charles: You remember the Bulletproof Problem Solving book, which has really been a terrific source for many people. In fact, I think it’s now in seven languages. It is a book about how to do problem solving, but what we realized, Rob and I realized, when we got into the pandemic, was that we really hadn’t covered in the first book how to deal with difficult strategic problem solving when things are changing very quickly, especially when there are exogenous shocks.
And then when you think just even about the last four or five years where you have an increasing importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning, more and more automation and robotics, programmable biology, and a number of other technology changes, overscored with war, pandemic, economic dislocation. We’re in a kind of setting now where a lot of problem solvers are hiding under the bed waiting for things to go back to equilibrium, right? Well, they’re not going back to equilibrium.
And so, this book, which you could call a prequel or a sequel, depending on your vantage point, is really about: How do you take those techniques from Bulletproof Problem Solving and apply them in the very difficult conditions we’re in today?
“When you’re in periods of very high uncertainty, you can’t wait for perfection; you can’t wait for the stars to align to actually begin making a move. If you do, a more nimble competitor will already beat you.”
Denver: That’s a good explanation. You could have given this book many, many titles, but you chose The Imperfectionists, and I find that to be such an interesting word. Why did you decide upon The Imperfectionists?
Charles: We talked and fought a lot about this question. For me, we were trying to picture a single idea that would capture this complex set of ideas that we wanted to get across, and the idea of imperfectionism or experimentalism were both sort of leading ideas here.
When you’re in periods of very high uncertainty, you can’t wait for perfection; you can’t wait for the stars to align to actually begin making a move. If you do, a more nimble competitor will already beat you, whether you’re in a nonprofit business or a for-profit business.
And so, what we want to encourage people to do… I’ll describe it to you over the course of our conversation…is use several approaches to gathering information and then make a series of moves, often in parallel, where you’re getting additional skills, knowledge, and assets in order to be able to compete in this topsy-turvy world– like a chess game rather than waiting for someone else to make a move.
Denver: And I guess a wonderful metaphor to try and explain a somewhat complex idea is that you equate this to a rugby game. Tell us how that fits.
Charles: You read the book; I love that. You always do the work.
In fact, I love the contrast of linear programming or chess, which are very regimented games. Chess is an incredibly complicated game, but we know all the possible moves. That’s why computer chess players can now beat physical chess players.
Rugby is a game which is much more fluid. The ball moves down the field in genuinely unpredictable ways, and there’s a number of different ways you’re allowed to move the ball down the field, and others not.
The real world of problem solving for both companies and nonprofits is much more like rugby, where it’s hard to foresee the next move, and therefore you need to be sort of positioned well for a number of potential outcomes rather than a game like chess where you’re looking for one move, and you’re trying to imagine the possibilities off that one move.
Denver: Rugby is messy, and this is messy. So, would you be saying that strategy is becoming a little bit more of an art than a science?
Charles: I think that’s true. A lot of us, and you’ll remember this too, right? We grew up in a world where the way we developed strategy… and it’s captured by Michael Porter’s Five Forces, but the work he based this on was older work, which looks at the market, the structure, and the conduct of players based on the market and the structure.
In a world where industries are tightly defined– this is the steel industry, this is the aluminum mining industry– that kind of way of thinking works pretty well. You know who your competitors are; you know who is the lowest cost position. You’re going to figure out what the dynamics of competition are. That’s not the world we operate in today.
Think about it today. Let’s say, you’re a consumer bank. You’re in the business of offering Main Street banking services. Who are your competitors today?
Denver: Amazon.
Charles: Amazon being one of the prime players, but there’s also thousands now of FinTech companies that are trying to disintermediate part of what you do. Your attacker is very likely to come from outside your industry, and you will have never even heard their name before. And super competitors exist like Amazon, Apple, and Google, who operate in many different segments. So, industry boundaries have been dissolved, and the rules of competition based on structure and conduct are also thrown out the window.
Denver: It kind of reminds me, when I went to business school, we had Economics 101, which taught me about economics, and then in Economics 201, it told me why 101 doesn’t work. That was the theory. And 201 was a little bit more of the reality.
So, how does The Imperfectionist challenge traditional norms? And I’ll give you an example of that– strategic planning. I must have been engaged in 50 strategic planning exercises in my lifetime. Those three-year strategic plans, those five-year strategic plans. Do they just go away? And what do we do instead?
Charles: That’s exactly the right question. I think that idea of an annual strategic planning cycle that generates a document that gets put in a drawer– that is out the window. Now, strategic planning as an idea, I don’t think goes out the window. We still need to be constantly thinking about what our plan is, but I think strategic planning has to be done in a much more dynamic and ongoing way, and it shouldn’t be done by the strategic planning department.
Strategic planning needs to be done by the people who are closest to customers or potential customers. And especially when you can make moves that are relatively low cost and relatively low consequence, those decisions should be made by people close to the coalface, so to speak, and not waiting for the CEO.
In the rare cases where you do need to make a “bet the farm” acquisition, or you make a move that can’t be reversed, then that needs to be pushed up. But otherwise, the whole organization should become a learning organization, and everyone should be a strategist.
Denver: Absolutely. Well, let’s talk about the six mindsets you talk about in the book. We won’t get through all of them, but maybe two or three of them.
One, let’s start with the “dragonfly eye,” which was, again, part of my learning here. I had no idea dragonflies had these kinds of eyes, so that was my extra bonus. Tell us a little bit about what the dragonfly eye is.
Charles: So, dragonflies… you’ve seen what they look like, and if you look up close, you’ll see that their eyes are compound eyes that are made up of something like 3,000 separate lenses. We don’t really know how these insects see, but we use it as an analogy for making sure that you’re seeing the problem through multiple perspectives.
Typically, in that old world that you and I grew up in, if you were US Steel, your only window was US Steel. This is the world that we’ve known forever; we’re No. 1 in steel; we know who our competitors are. If instead, before you make any strategic move, you think about who are your suppliers, who are your customers, who are your near substitutes in other metals, who are potential entrants, who are potential hires. You look at it from the perspective of everybody inside your ecosystem and some players outside your ecosystem. You often end up with a much more nuanced idea about what your strategy should be.
And I’ll give you an example. There were two young people at Stanford Business School– one of whom is a dear friend of mine– who were thinking about what business they wanted to start, and one of the two was wearing braces and he’d recently got his braces off, and he noticed he didn’t wear his retainer for a couple of days. When he tried to put his retainer back in, it hurt, showing that his teeth had actually moved in response to his retainer.
Denver: I’ve been there.
Charles: When the two of them then reasoned: I wonder if this relatively curbside friendly thing, a clear plastic retainer, done in a series of different step changes, could actually move teeth the same way these ugly metal braces that we all grew up with move teeth. They looked at it from a consumer perspective instead of the perspective that a dentist or an orthodontist would look at it, and they utterly revolutionized the entire field of orthodontics. Now, that business is worth $20 billion a year.
Denver: Wow.
Charles: Now, the distinction between dentistry and orthodontics has been dissolved because dentists can actually fit people for Invisalign. Now, there are two or three other competitors in this space. So, these two people who were curious and who saw things through a different lens invented something that none of the dentists or orthodontists did. That’s the kind of story we love to see.
Denver: That’s a great story. You put the customer at the center. You have empathy for the customer, and Eureka! You have an idea that comes from it.
I go so far back, I think, when you talk about we don’t know who our competitors were…When I grew up, our competitors weren’t even outside of this country. It was pretty much the US-based companies… just looked at other US-based companies, and then we had that tumultuous time when, Oh my goodness! We have international competition, and this just seems to be another phase in that process!
Charles: That’s absolutely right.
“..he said it ahead of time, ‘This may not go to plan, but we will learn something.’ This is the core idea of imperfectionism. You may fail; that’s why it’s imperfect, but you will learn a ton.”
Denver: “Current behavior,” and this is “restless experimenting.” Tell us a little bit about that.
Charles: This is one of those funny terms we liked. A current behavior means what’s actually happening, not what you think or hope is going to happen, and a lot of times, out there in strategy world– and I’ve been there as you know as a McKinsey consultant– you use existing data sets; often you use them and you bend them to make them prove something that you want to believe already.
Denver: Confirmation bias, there we are.
Charles: We all do it. Daniel Kahneman reminded us how often we do it and how dumb it is, and what we want to encourage folks to do is to collect new data, and to make up their own experiments. Sometimes, that’s relatively easy to do, like in internet businesses: You can often set up an A and a B version of your interface, or an A, B, and C, and see which one works better with different parts of the population.
Sometimes, you have to work harder, or you find a natural experiment. So, in COVID, for example, you had two countries that were very similar, Sweden and Norway, who followed different policies around COVID, and they got different results. So, almost a controlled experiment because they were otherwise very similar countries.
And sometimes, you actually have to do big expensive physical experiments. One of my favorite examples here is SpaceX, and whether you like Elon Musk or not, you have to admit he’s turned this whole thing upside down.
Before that, when you went to make it into space, you said NASA, because there really was no other game in town. NASA did two or three or four launches a year, and it cost nearly $2 million to send a kilogram into space. Well, over the course of the last 15 years, SpaceX, which now is doing 20 or 30 launches a year and is constantly experimenting with new materials and new ways of constructing rockets, has now driven that down by 95%.
Denver: Wow.
Charles: Now, occasionally, they have unplanned disassemblies.
Denver: …just the other day. I love that word, disassembly. That’s what a disassembly looks like? Wow.
Charles: That’s what it looks like. But you know, and he said it ahead of time, “This may not go to plan, but we will learn something.” This is the core idea of imperfectionism. You may fail; that’s why it’s imperfect, but you will learn a ton.
Next time they launch that rocket, they’ll know more, and they won’t put a person on it, or a dog on it, until they’ve actually got it worked out. They’re not afraid to make a mistake even with a multimillion-dollar rocket. That is the heart of imperfectionism.
And if someone said, 50 years or 60 years after the beginning of space travel, that someone would be able to lower the cost by this enormous factor, you would’ve said, “No way!” But they did it.
Denver: We only had one paradigm that we were thinking of, and that was the paradigm that we were given, and we never even thought it would be possible to have another one, and he had that eureka moment, and it has changed everything.
You know, when you were talking about some of that existing data, what flashed through my mind, Charles, is driving a car and spending the entire time looking in the rearview mirror and seeing what’s behind you, and that’s really what existing data is. You’re going to crash because you don’t know where you’re going, and that also got to the point about getting to the front lines because it is that line data, that bottoms up data, which is going to help you navigate your way forward, and not that institutional data, which is like, “Well, that’s what happened.” It doesn’t make any sense, whatsoever.
Let’s do one more: collective intelligence.
Charles: I love this one too. Bill Joy, who was the founder of Sun Microsystems, was also one of the parents of Unix, the operating system, and what Joy’s famous saying, and this is Joy’s Law, is that “The smartest people are not in your room.” They’re probably laboring in someone else’s company or “garden,” to use the term that he actually used. How do you get them working for you too?
And of course, open-source software is one of those ways, and the operating system that powers Apple and the operating system that powers the Microsoft world, both have their origins in that open-form Unix system; the kernel of that system is still in both of those operating systems. But that’s only one way that we can take advantage of people who are outside of our organization to bring talent inside our organization for cheaper, for free.
One of the other ways it’s really common now is to use various forms of crowdsourcing. Now, you can do that on a platform like Kaggle. So, here’s an example. Nature Conservancy is a conservation organization. Great people. They don’t know anything about computer vision, but they did know that they had a problem, which is when fishing boats are at sea, they put out their nets or they put out their lines and they’re reeling in fish, and it’s an incredibly topsy-turvy environment, oftentimes in weather, and they’re bringing fish on board. How do you determine quickly what is a fish that you are allowed to keep? Because it’s a fishery that’s sustainable, and what’s the fish that’s endangered and therefore you need to put them back over the side?
Well, you need to have an algorithm that’s really smart that works with the shaky onboard camera that can determine by the fin shape or by the shape of the head or by the eye: this is a fish that needs to be returned to the sea. What Nature Conservancy did is they created $150,000-prize on Kaggle, and they got about 3,500 entries from people who developed these computer-vision machine-learning algorithms, and the best one of those, the highest predictive one, they’ve actually put aboard fishing ships in Indonesia, and it’s working.
Denver: Fantastic.
Charles: Yeah, and so it’s one of the ways that we could create sustainability. And what’s beautiful about it is those were capabilities that didn’t exist inside the Nature Conservancy, that they were able to borrow for a relatively small amount of money.
Many other versions of this, now that we have machine learning you’ve heard of, for example, swarm.ai, where you have multiple agents, sort of…
Denver: I go through that all the time before every big game. He’s been on the show. Then try to figure out who’s going to win.
Charles: Right, and so it’s better than an individual expert. It’s better than the AI. It’s better than the AI plus the individual expert. Experts plus algorithms in a big group will beat those every single time. And now, we can use the power of multiple brains that we would never be able to hire into our small companies.
Denver: You know, I had Jeremy Utley on the show recently, and he is the co-head of the d.school at Stanford, and he said essentially what it really gets down to often is the quantity of ideas and not the quality of ideas. And the example that he gave was an art class, and in that art class, they broke them into two groups: one would get an A if they did a picture for that entire art class, and the other group would get an A if they did a hundred pictures. Turned out no one in that first group did an art piece good enough to get an A. In the second group, every member of the class received an A because they did over a hundred pictures, and over half of them would have gotten an A in the first class because they had great pictures. And really, we don’t appreciate the quantity of ideas and that whole concept of crowdsourcing and what it can lead to.
Charles: Yeah, and Gladwell’s talked about this too. You need to do a bunch of iterations in order to find that nugget. I think that’s fundamentally imperfectionist. In that hundred bits of art, there was a bunch of rubbish. That’s okay.
Denver: That’s right. I remember reading about Jony Ive. I think he was saying that he would have lunch with Steve Jobs every day, and Jobs would come down with an idea every single day at lunch. And he said they were the most awful ideas he ever heard his entire life. Except about every six months, he would come down with one, and the food would fall out of his mouth. So, there’s a lot to be said about volume.
So, how does leadership fit into this thing? It can be hard. You’ve been trained; you’ve gone to Harvard; you’ve been in business school. I went to business school; there are certain ways of doing things. Now, I’m trying to lead an imperperfectionist organization. I don’t want to lower the standards here. How do you grapple with that?
Charles: First of all, I don’t think it’s easy, and I think we should just be honest about that because the old command-and-control world where we kind of knew the game that was being played and you’d run your playlist, I don’t think that’s the world we can operate in today. But what that means is, leaders actually have to trust the people down below them to make good decisions without constantly having to report back up to the top.
And I think the critical thing here, and I mentioned it earlier, is when decisions are reversible, and when the amount of money that needs to be committed or that could be lost by a decision is modest, those decisions should be made by people who are closest to the business or, in skunk work, closest to a new business.
When the decisions are existential for a business, are irreversible or incredibly expensive, either in investment or in potential losses, then those decisions need to be pushed further up, and I think leaders need to understand the difference between the two. Jeff Bezos calls that type 1 and type 2.
Denver: Yeah, one-door decisions and two-door decisions. It’s a great example.
Charles: I personally think that’s confusing because there’s type 1 and type 2 errors, and it’s not the same thing. But for Bezos, he said, we often mistake type 2 decisions, which are relatively inexpensive, reversible decisions for type 1 decisions, and we take forever thinking about them.
Denver: That’s right.
Charles: Organizations can’t afford to do that now. We don’t have an annual planning process; we’ve got continuous strategy development. That’s the first piece, and the second piece is even more important for leadership, which is, “We don’t punish failures where we learn something; we celebrate it.” I don’t know whether people got bonuses or pink slips for the unplanned disassembly space lifts,, but I’m betting that if as long as folks could demonstrate further up the chain what they learned about why that occurred, that they weren’t punished. And that’s really important and goes very against the kind of way that business worked when you and I were coming up.
“The higher you are up in the organization, the more humble you should be because you’ve been around the block. You know how many ways things can go wrong. Young people don’t, and that’s what’s so beautiful. So, look into all the ideas..”
Denver: If I look at it carefully, I think a lot of it gets down to ego. People want to be right, and you want to say, “Do you want this organization to thrive and do better, or do you want to be right?” And although nobody would ever admit it, they would want to say, “I’d rather be right.”
I think you made a great point also about leaders– that they need to talk last. And talk a little bit about why you really have the junior members get up there and speak their mind before the leader kind of directs them in one way or the other.
Charles: It is such a fundamental thing, and it’s one of the ways you can demonstrate your leadership, which is the fresh thinking in the room isn’t you. Fresh thinking in the room are the younger people who have just come in. They probably also have much more recent analytic techniques in their training, and they don’t have wisdom yet, but wisdom can come last. Hear those new ideas first, and you said it a minute ago: This requires letting your ego, making your ego be sublimated to the quality of ideas that you’re hearing. In the book, we call it “epistemic humility.”
Denver: Right.
Charles: The higher you are up in the organization, the more humble you should be because you’ve been around the block. You know how many ways things can go wrong. Young people don’t, and that’s what’s so beautiful. So, look into all the ideas and then say, “That’s an interesting idea. I think this is where that could go wrong.” It’s important that you don’t always impose your past pattern recognition on what can go wrong. Be open to it. But then really promote ideas which have come up from below, including when they fail.
Denver: What I see so often with leaders is that they tell you what their disposition is. “We’re thinking of expanding this market into England, and we’ve talked to the board, and we’ve had a couple consultants in, and we all think it’s a good idea. But hey, I wouldn’t think of doing this without hearing from you. What do you guys think?”
Charles: Right. We always call that “heliotropic stalk,” so imagine you’re the head of a sunflower. As soon as Denver says that, we’re like, “Oh, that’s what we’re going to tell you.”
Denver: Absolutely.
Charles: That is a management consultant instantly. I now know what my deck is. I’m going to prove to you why you were right.
Denver: You were right.
Charles: Obviously, that’s not the way we should be doing business.
Denver: Let’s pick up a little bit on that. You’re the Chairman of the board of Patagonia, and you discussed the importance of maintaining a flat organizational culture, and also one of continuous improvement.
You’ve touched on that a little bit, but expand on it, and particularly as it relates to your current role.
Charles: It’s a good example because when you’re in the outdoor gear and apparel business, it has to work. And the only way you can know if it works is to put it out into the field.
And what it means is the people who run the different groups in Patagonia are also athletes, and they and their friends spend all their time when they’re not at work out in the field making sure that that stuff works. It’s a fundamentally experimentalist culture. And, Yvon, who is the founder of the company, is famous for saying, “You can study everything scientifically, and by the time you figure out what you think the answer might be, someone else will already be there.” Much better approach is to try it out, see what doesn’t work; go back to the lab, fix it, try it again. That continuous improvement comes from the real experience of trying things.
It’s just like your example of the art: If I try and draw the one perfect painting, I’m going to fail.
“…the attitude of, “That’s good; we can do better.” So, you never rest on your past achievements. You always say, ‘We can do better.’”
Denver: It’s trying to, like, if I have to trace my handwriting, I can’t do it, because all the natural flow disappears. I’m like this, and it looks awful; whereas you can just write it really fast and really quickly without any effort whatsoever.
Do you guys feel pressure at Patagonia? You are the beacon. That’s all I always say, that it’s not that easy to win a championship, but boy, repeating it is really hard, and sometimes when I look at Patagonia, I say they are the tops and that, I don’t know, I guess there’s just a lot of… How do you stay there?
Charles: Well, you stay there because Yvon has always had the attitude of, “That’s good; we can do better.” So, you never rest on your past achievements. You always say, “We can do better.”
So, in Patagonia, we spent a lot of time measuring our environmental footprint. We can now do that very specifically for each product, and we can tell you exactly how the energy that went into the product was produced, how much carbon we produce, whether we use dangerous chemistries or not, and how much net pollution there is.
Five years ago, we thought we had the perfect system too, and it was cruder, and five years before that, we thought we had the perfect system and we now…
Denver: And you had it three times.
Charles: And we’re about to do it a fourth time.
Denver: Wow. That’s amazing. What a mindset and what an attitude that must be!
You know, we talked a little bit about school before. What do you think is happening in our colleges, in our business schools? I try to follow this as closely as I can, but I don’t think anybody is teaching any of this stuff.
Charles: I’m afraid they’re not. I think there’s the beginnings of it in some of the better universities. I think, unfortunately, our university model is still stuck in what’s essentially an 18th century model, which is that, “We’re going to teach you some specific functional experience.” There are still Marketing 101 and Finance 101, just like it was when you went through. When in fact, almost everything that’s interesting in business is actually integrative, and what you asked about leadership, one of the other things that great leaders do is they know what the odds are. They know how to think in probabilistic terms. A lot of what people are taught in business school is not done in probabilistic terms.
Annie Duke, who wrote this wonderful book, Thinking in Bets, said every decision is a wager. Can you stop for a second and think, “Yeah, every decision is a wager on an uncertain future,” and I don’t think our universities are teaching the way the world actually operates today.
Denver: Yeah, but I think part of this is even our political discourse is always very black and white, and when you’re talking about probabilities, you really get into the nuances. If you and I were to ask somebody– our direct report, “What’s the chances of hitting our quarterly goal?”
If you’re going to hit it, they’re going to say, “Yes, I’m going to hit it.” But if you say, “What’s the probability?” They say, “70%.” “Oh, what’s the 30% you’re concerned about?” And not only do you get inside that gray, but you also get them to talk a lot more, whereas normally, they would just say that.
Do you have an imperfectionist mindset, or is this something you’ve had to develop? I mean, have you been somebody who’s sort of a straight line, by the numbers? McKinsey– is a bit of training there as well? Is this something that you personally have had to sort of, I don’t know, let go a little bit… and I guess go for speed at the price of perfection and accuracy?
Charles: I wish I could tell you I’ve always been an imperfectionist, but the truth is, I’ve really gone through exactly that journey that you described, which is the young, analytic person who thought there was an answer, would’ve told you the very high probabilities for that answer, rather than an experimentalist who said, “I’m going to try three things and see which thing works best.” With time and with age and with frankly lots of failure, where you learn from the failures, you realize, actually– that’s not a failure, that’s a lesson.
Denver: Finally, Charles, how do you think this imperfectionist mindset is going to evolve going forward? You talked about Patagonia and the fact that you’ve had it down three times now, and you’re embarking upon a fourth. And as wonderful as this book is, and it is a great read– I encourage everybody to read it– it’s probably just part of an evolution, and there’s going to be something that’s going to follow. What do you think that might be?
Charles: Of course, that’s the correct answer. Look, I think the revolution that’s coming is a revolution about data, and you said it a minute ago: A hundred is better than one; a hundred thousand is better than a hundred.
I think the next piece is people are very focused on algorithms around machine learning and artificial intelligence; they should be more focused on data. Because she who has the best data will win. And so when we think about drug discovery, for example, which has been quite a manual process historically, the ability to work with extremely large and especially proprietary datasets will give some players an advantage that goes beyond even the type of things we discussed in this book.
We don’t even exactly know what that looks like today, but we know that ChatGPT is going to look like a model A.
“People think the robot is going to take our job. The really interesting thing here will be the intersection of humans and machine intelligence, and that’s where I think the real beauty will come.”
Denver: Yeah, I was talking to somebody the other day, and I was thinking of the America Online 2.0 disks. When you got the beep, beep, beep and you wait about 10 minutes, and you got five hours a month and stuff like that. That is what ChatGTP is right now.
And the only thing I’ll add to that because you make the point in the book too, it’s not only the data, it’s those small groups of human beings, correct?
Charles: Yeah, and I think that’s the other thing, which is people think the robot is going to take our job. The really interesting thing here will be the intersection of humans and machine intelligence, and that’s where I think the real beauty will come. Well put. That’s the question not enough people are asking, which is: How can we harness those two forces together– the creativity of the human with the ability to process large amounts of really good data from the machine?
Denver: Well, you’ve helped us all a lot. It is an invigorating read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The book title again is The Imperfectionists: Strategic Mindsets for Uncertain Times. I want to thank you so much for being here today, Charles. It is always such a great delight to have you on the program.
Charles: It was really my pleasure. I look forward to the next time.
Denver: Likewise.
Denver Frederick, Host of The Business of Giving serves as a Trusted Advisor and Executive Coach to Nonprofit Leaders. His Book, The Business of Giving: New Best Practices for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Leaders in an Uncertain World, is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.