Special 2: The Imperfect CEO - Scott Green | Faithly Podcast

They're excited, and they're scared, you know, which is healthy, you know. I've had a couple of faculty say, I didn't think you're going to approve my project. I've not got a deliver, you know, and I think that's right, you know, that's right. Welcome to the Imperfect CEO, a special series by the Faithly podcast with your host, Reverend Adam Durso, and author Jim Brown. Welcome to another episode of Faithly podcast. My name is Adam Durso, and I am joined during this season of Imperfect CEO by the author of that book, Jim Brown. Jim, what are you looking forward to today on today's episode? Well, Adam, I'm excited to be with you again on another episode of this Imperfect CEO series. Today we're going to dig deeper into the principles, the concepts that are in the book, and I'm excited because we are going to have a conversation with a leader that I've admired for 20 years. He's got a long history of working in New York City as the chief financial officer and chief operating officer of an international law firm. And he's taken all of that experience and brought it to a, in many ways, I would say, a public service role. He's become the president of the University of Idaho. He's been there for about seven years now. So we're going to especially learn how does he create a healthy culture in an organization that's so big that's got all kinds of system constraints. Well, we're going to hear more about it. Scott, it's delightful to have you with us on this conversation. Thanks, Jim. I'm just so happy to be with you and you and Adam. I mean, this is terrific. Thanks for inviting me. Scott, it is a great opportunity to talk to somebody from Idaho being in New Yorker here and super excited as I've gotten to do the research and find out more and more about you and just what a tremendous leader, the turnaround that you made at the University of Idaho that is just absolutely amazing. You're one of the few people that has actually read Jim's new book, The Imperfect CEO and our conversation is all about getting your help to apply the principles from Jim's book, especially for leaders of large institutions, which obviously you lead with your background. You have some remarkable experience. Could you talk a little bit about Jim's book, a little bit from Jim's book and how we apply those principles to what you're doing at the University of Idaho? Sure. I can say that Jim's book, what it really does is describe what a healthy organization looks like and he doesn't a way to make more sense in anything I've seen before. I love the case study method, if you will, and Jim actually deployed that as part of his book. I learned really well that way and I saw a much of what you described really as what I've been doing here. It was just really amazing how it all fit together, but I've never seen you want to explain what I'm doing. Now it makes just so much sense. It really does. The four peaks you described in the Ascent Model are incredibly accurate in my opinion and it all starts really with the collaborative culture. Jim, I know we've talked a lot about that in the past. It's kind of the foundation of everything. It just seems like human nature is, especially when there's scarcity that folks are more competitive than cooperative. How do you get through that? You lay that out very clearly and leadership accountability. Everyone will say it's obvious and important, but bit of the four is the one that I had to learn through some pain early in my career. You always have to unlearn certain things as you grow older and more mature, I suppose. The strategic momentum, I have to say that's the booster rocket and that's when I probably identified with the most. Now let me point out if any of the organizations aren't doing this kind of work to create a collaborative culture and leadership accountability momentum, it just won't happen, but you'll know it when you're in it because you feel it. Then that's when the magic happens with the final peak talent management, magnetism. It just solves so many problems and creates so much efficiency. Your organization just starts to run itself, which is incredible. I've been fortunate not only to experience all that here, and I think that's mainly what we're going to be talking about, but in several of my other roles as well, previous to here. When you know when you've hit that final peak because really your job becomes very easy and sometimes you always crash that question. So good. If you've hired the right people right around you, no, I don't need to dominate the conversation here, but that model's terrific, Jim. And I think everybody needs to pay attention to Scott. I think that's awesome. I'm going to talk to Jim here in a second, but you said something that was so key. The imperfect CEO gave you language for things you were already doing. It gave you vocabulary. Talk about that a little bit. Sometimes it's hard as a leader when you're actually doing it to then explain it to other people that are looking at what you're doing, but you saw in the imperfect CEO an opportunity to say, Hey, this is providing language for me to explain to the other people that are looking what I'm doing, the turnaround that's been made, and now be able to say, Hey, that's the model that we've been doing. That's the actual thing. Here's what we've been talking about and actually implementing. Yeah, no, it's it's a great point. You know, I used a lot of resources, different resources to try to achieve what we're achieving, but it's not cohesive, right? Heidi Gardner wrote a great book on smart collaboration, and I talked to Jim about that, and so when I was struggling with collaboration, we brought her in, and when we were talking about accountability, we had to put in structures around that to create leadership accountability and values, and really revisit our values for that matter. So, I mean, we're just using different tools along the way to accomplish the outcome, which we all feel when we get there, just your organization becomes really self-sustaining and can operate really kind of without you almost. That's it. That's that Nirvana, that outcome that we all hope to get to. So, I want to jump in, Scott, if I can, what Scott is saying is really important because I want our listeners to realize I don't claim to have invented some wonderful new way of being a healthy organization. I'm simply reporting what I've been observing over the last 20 plus years where we've seen companies that are making it work, and there are patterns. So, I've just put language to what I've observed. This is not theory. This is the real world. This is what has been working. I've just put it in a package that I hope is easy for people to think through and carry with them. I wish I would have had this tool seven years ago. It's a great tool for anyone who's out there running your organization now. Scott, when you stepped into the presidency at the University of Idaho, before you made any decisions, before you announced any strategy, what did you sense was the emotional and cultural condition of the institution you inherited? It described to me a little bit of the fragility. We'll talk about the actual realities, but what on the inside was the emotional and cultural condition of the institution you inherited? That's a great question. It's really the reason I took the job. I grew up here. I was born here in Moscow and grew up here in Idaho. I'm sorry, I got to stop you there. Moscow, Idaho, because I got this completely confused. Scott, I'm just so glad for Jim correcting me during the pre-arrangement. I'm thinking, man, where did Scott come from? Went from Moscow to go to Idaho. How did he get there? Like, come to New York first. Moscow, Idaho. Okay. This is what I make sure we clarify for our audience. We're a small town in Idaho, or a college town. We at the university here, and my grandfather was a professor and ended up being an athletic director, and I'm a third generation bandal, if you will, we call it the bandal family. I grew up in this culture and this community, and it's just always been really supportive and sustaining. Our institution was in financial trouble. When I arrived here, we were running 20 million dollar deficits, and we had about 18 months worth of cash left, and morale was terrible. In fact, I don't think people even knew how bad it was the financial situation, and once they found out it was even worse. We had a lot of work to do, and you're walking into a culture of scarcity. People are very defensive. I called it the Game of Thrones. They're fighting for everything and against each other rather than working together. That was what we were faced with. To try to create a financial stability and change in that environment is a super challenge. Again, that's why I needed help to turn it around. That help came in the form of really just trying to get people to understand that we had to collaborate and pull the same direction if we were going to go anywhere. The first thing to do was to fix the financial situation, but then it was, okay, what other things we're going to focus on to become better. We had a strategic plan that had been developed, put on a shelf, had no funding, had 29 metrics, which none made any sense to me at all. We selected three. Beyond financial stability, which was student success, we needed to increase our enrollment, our persistence, and getting kids across the finish line. We also needed to improve our research capability. For a long time, the goal had been to become an R1 institution. It's the highest level of classification. The reason you want to get there is because 80 percent of most federal research will go to our one institutions. So it positions you better. We had a great research function here and some world-class researchers. We'd never done the hard work to get that R1 designation. The final part is it was really kind of around, we call it telling our story, but it's all around. We had to talk our story because we needed to fundraise. We needed to set some fundraising goals and start a campaign in motion, but we had to get the storytelling machine up first. That was what we did. So those were our goals. I'm pleased to say to do a foreshadowing, we accomplished our goals. We had incredible increases in enrollment. Don't give it all away, Scott. Don't give it all away. The audience stick around for the next 20 minutes and listen to how this unfolds here. You came in with a $20 million deficit, had a strategic plan that you didn't just stick in a draw somewhere, which is probably a good thing, which most organizations seem to spend a lot of time in effort creating and then just stick it away somewhere, but a bunch of metrics to your point that don't make any sense. Then Jim, you created a resource that is really helping the strategic momentum without heroics, and step one is naming the reality. Talk about that a little bit. Sure. Scott already shared. When he talked about the peak strategic momentum, he used the term, this is where the booster rockets come. That's why I want us to especially be talking about that peak in this conversation, because when we get this all working together, that's when we start to see output and results in organizations. The first step is to actually name the reality that you've inherited. Scott, I'm curious and suspicious, frankly, that as much as you had your arms around some of the problems that you were saying, yes, I'll take this lead role and tackle these things. I'm suspicious that you discovered even more skeletons in closet, so to speak, in the first 30 to 60 days. You had to somehow help the people that you share leadership with to be really clear about that reality. You already said that some of the leaders didn't even understand the severity of the financial problem that you had. That's scary in itself, isn't it? Wait, they're in charge, and they don't understand it. Again, come back to where there are some things that you were even more surprised about the challenge. How did you help people get their blinders off to really recognize, no, this is where we are, because we can't take people where they need to go if we don't all agree on where we are to start with. What I did was I actually done a lot of pre-work before I actually showed up on campus, and so I had a good idea of where we were. What I also knew was that we didn't have really good financial reporting. It's really managed our reports for our deans and our vice presidents. When I showed up, literally day two, we gave them targets. We knew we had to cut. I put a number out there. I think it was $14 million, which I thought if we get that in the first year we're doing really well. We're going to be doing really great work and moving towards our $20 million goal, $22 million, what it ended up being. But we had to get the deans and the VPs to understand their budgets. Many of them didn't even know what their budget was. They weren't getting management reports. We had to develop them all. We did that. We put together monthly meetings and we gave them their targets. They had to figure out how they were going to hit their target. I wasn't going to tell them how to do it. Left it up to them. That was where some other games got played because some put their sacrificial lambs out there that were our crown jewels. I said, no, you're not going to cut that program because that's our bread butter. It's a differentiator. You need to find real meaningful cuts and not expect me to just say no. Actually, one dean did put one for that. Probably was their crown jewel, but when I sat down and spoke with her, realized that they really didn't have much choice. That was it. We did make that hard choice to close that crown jewel. Something that really meant a lot to the community. We met with them every month and they got to know their budgets because I was asking questions and really holding them accountable to their plans and helping them where I could. Felt that part of our role was to help them get the tools they needed to make those changes, those hard decisions and make those changes. Is this just, I mean, you work in such a more broad area of organizations, companies, is this just a university of Idaho issue or is this something that charities and organizations are dealing with in the current reality of 2026 right now? I'm sorry to say it's almost universal and especially in the non-profit sector, whether we're talking charities or just nonprofits. I actually did a little bit of research to check some numbers, so let me share some things that I learned. If you focus on universities and colleges, you've been very involved in the fraternity of universities and college leadership, so you won't be surprised. But the number is that there's $950 billion of deferred maintenance backlogged in that sector. That's on the edge of a trillion dollars. If you only look at nonprofit hospitals, it's two to 300 billion dollars of deferred maintenance and capital. And then other public and nonprofit cultural institutions, it's tens of billions. This is a epidemic problem. And I would argue part of the reason for this is that people who have a real heart for the cause of these organizations say yes to leading, but they do not understand the complexities of financial leadership. Let's remind you, he was the chief financial officer of an international law firm. He didn't come in hoping that someone would be able to coach him on understanding financial statements. He came in with real strength in that regard. And I want to say to leaders of all of these nonprofit organizations, if that's not your strength, you better find someone that can be your partner who has that strength and who won't pull the wool over your eyes, who will help you see clearly, because if we do not manage the financial reality, we are just hoping and wishing. Scott, it doesn't sound like you walked into an environment where people were just simply not working hard. It seems like they needed to understand the reality so they could all row in the same direction. Describe the need to move to a collaborative culture where everybody on the team is heading in the same direction. I mean, one of the peaks of the Asset model that Jim has written about me in perfect CEO is this collaborative culture. How was moving the team first out of hate desperation scarcity? Maybe we're going to lose our job. We're $20 million in the current annual budget to then know now we've got to move toward how do we row in the same direction so we're accomplishing the same goals after you define that reality. Yeah, so I mean, obviously the first thing was to fix the financial situation, but to move on to collaboration, you know, you've got to live your values, right? You've got to discuss them and people got to believe that you're going to hold them accountable for that. One thing that, you know, I've noticed everywhere I've gone is that I generally don't need to get the people who don't believe to, you know, to leave. They'll leave on their own, right? They don't like to be held accountable. You know, so when we did set these goals and we made that incredible success, you know, very early on, you know, that gave us a lot of credibility. But then to move into these other areas, like achieving R1 and fundraising, you've got to have people walking across, you know, working across the university, across silos, and you've got to make them understand that, you know, it's not optional. It's something we all have to do. And so you were limiting higher ed and that we don't have a lot of merit pay that we can put out like we do in the private sector to influence folks to do the right thing. So it's really just kind of, you know, almost pure pressure, you know, in these meetings, you know, holding each other accountable. We had an operating committee that met every single Monday. And we still do today every single Monday. And, you know, if somebody's not growing, you know, pulling their way, it shows up very quickly, you know, in those meetings. And, you know, folks over time, you know, because, you know, we're all looking at each other. And including they're looking at me too, a question to me, you know, if we're not pulling our way and collaborating and communicating, it becomes very apparent. And that is very uncomfortable. So, you know, if you're not comfortable, that you'll move somewhere else. And that's really kind of how we started to build this. But, you know, as I mentioned also, we ended up, you know, bringing in Heidi Gardner and talking about the benefits of collaboration. So not only is it the right thing to do when we hold you accountable, but these are the things that can do for you. And there's case studies there too, you know, that show, you know, partners in law firms, particular, particulars, which is where I'd met her. You know, those who, you know, are brain makers can bring in $10 million. But those who have a client contact and Pro Cell can bring into the firm $50 million. Right? And who do you want to compensate more? The person who's collaborating, the person who's not. So she was able to make that same argument in higher education for our folks. And that really helped. You know, it still took a few years. I admittedly, we still have times when people aren't collaborating and we have to reinforce the message, you know, and people are still maybe both are trying to do the right thing for the university. These are good people. All of them are good people at this point. They all want to do the right thing. In fact, right now they all are doing the right thing and they're all doing it independently. And we really don't have to do much to keep it moving. They're reaching out across lines almost instinctively now. But in the early days, that's not natural. And you've got, you've got to kind of, you know, win their hearts and minds, but also, you know, trust but verify, right? You know, make sure it's happening. Adam, let me interject. One of the things I love about Scott is that by nature, it seems that he just isn't a take credit kind of guy. He's a share credit person. So I want us to just spend a little bit more time on the amazing accomplishment that they reached regarding their deficit. In less than one year, they turned around their financial situation. And Scott did it in a way. He led so that the people responsible for their areas had to make the choices about what cuts would be made, had to be reporting. And then he made heroes out of the people that did what they said they would do. And then everybody could celebrate, oh my, this is counting. This is, we're getting traction to the point that he could wave the, the U of I flag saying, man, you guys have done it. We have turned the financial mess around. So be brave. Tell us a little bit more about how you managed to do that, Scott. Yeah, happy to do that. I didn't want to get ahead of us, depending on what you wanted to with that. But yeah, literally, you know, in the first year we broke even and that was $22 million some savings. If you recall, I asked him to, to do 14 million. So they did more than even I thought they could do. Yeah, I showed you how much they cared about the place. And, and I gave them full credit. I mean, I'm not the one who made those cuts. I was not the one who made those decisions. I was not on the call phase. I'm not that faculty member saying I can save some money here. I'm not that staff member saying, oh, here's in an area that we don't need to spend money on anymore, right? They did that. And it was remarkable. I've never seen anything like it in all my years. And I've had to cut a lot of budgets. And in the private sector, usually when you say, cut $100, they'll cut $100 exactly, right? So to cut $22 million, which was not insignificant. Our budget really around general education is about 200 million. So, you know, you're taking 10% over 10% out of one year, right? And literally from the state, it's 100 million. So, you know, the rest is tuition that covers that. That's about half of our overall budget. That's very substantial in general education, because it's hitting the classrooms, right? So, what they did was remarkable. And we did celebrate, you know, as nobody could believe it. And, you know, we got kudos from around the state. You know, our alumni were happy. The legislature clearly was happy with that progress. The state board was ecstatic. And, you know, frankly, everyone felt proud. And that occurs, again, you know, that's just reinforcing for all the other things and all the other accomplishments to come, which we'll talk about, I guess later. Jim, I mean, it sounds to me like what Scott is describing is an urgency, critical moment. I mean, it's okay when the boat is in the water. It's not okay when the water is in the boat, so to speak. I mean, and you wrote this quote that I've mentioned to you. I think I've brought it up a couple of times this week. It says, and you put this in your strategic momentum without heroes step two. This quote is, in pressured environments, speed is seductive, but speed without stability feels reckless. How do you make sure that in an environment where it looked, you know, you're 22 million this year in the whole. And everything inside of you is, I've got to move because people are not going to be patient that I've got to ensure stability. Because speed will make it feel reckless if I don't do it right. Yeah. And yet we have to appreciate that Scott would have been feeling pressure to fix this financial problem. And his board was probably not that they were beating on him, but they would be bringing it up all the time. And he couldn't get away from it. What I've noticed is that the typical leader, when we're under pressure, it's like we think it back to when we were in high school and we had to be on a team to do a project. You know, four people in your class write this paper together. And almost all of us have experienced that one or two of those people did nearly nothing on that job. I'm laughing, Jim, because I might have been accused of that. You know, I was always the guy that made everybody feel good, but didn't necessarily bring the best of the table. So that's why I'm sitting here with you and Scott. Okay. Well, I was guilty. I was I was the one that wanted a great mark. And when people wouldn't pull their weight, I would just do the work. It's like, well, I'm not going to take a B because there's a couple of slackers. Um, so the temptation is to become kind of like heroic to make the big things happen. I'm going to cut this. I'm going to win this new grant, whatever I'm going to do it. And they're going to see that I have saved the day. Again, Scott wonderfully, beautifully avoided that temptation and kept truly leading. Making it clear what the problem was and making clear the authority that the next layer of leaders had to solve the problems and then resourcing those leaders to do what they said they were going to do holding them accountable. Um, he he probably still got more credit than he wanted because that just happens in the leadership world. Um, but his response would be over and over. Oh, I'm so excited for the VPs that have made this work. We have such an incredible cluster of deans in this university that are making each of these colleges actually really perform and meet our budget. I can't help but wonder, Scott, how did you not get sucked in to playing the hero cards? Because that's what most people do. Well, you know, honestly, it's just not part of my my management toolkit, right? You know, you talk about things you had to learn in life. You know, uh, command and control is not a great system. Uh, I didn't work in, you know, in professional, you know, in public accounting and in investment banks, at least when I was there, they were partnerships and law firms, right? So, uh, it wasn't going to work, certainly wasn't going to work at a university. So, you know, the idea is that, you know, you explain the problem. Um, you divided it up, many hands make light work and, um, as people to pull their, pull their, their share of it. And, you know, when, when you define it that way, um, you know, people will rise to the occasion. In fact, you know, because they know they've got control, you know, and as you know, especially in our new strategic plan, which, uh, you know, we've just, just started on, uh, which is just an incredible thing that I hope we have time to talk about. Um, you know, I, I talk about the pillar champions being CEOs of their, their pillar and, and I used to talk about Deans of being CEOs of their, you know, their, their, um, college and, you know, our, our vice presidents, CEOs of their divisions, right? So, um, and the university's resources are available to them. They've just got to collaborate and get people to do to help them, right? Um, um, getting back to the core, um, which is collaboration. Scott, when did you know it was the right time to implement a strategic plan to make sure that everybody's fingerprints were all over it. So I think it have shared ownership. And now what does that look like as far as the momentum it's producing moving forward for the university of Idaho? Uh, I, it's saying a great, great question. I think it's instructive to, to take a look back at the old strategic plan, which I pulled, you know, those, those three things out of, um, and, you know, those were successful. We had three, you know, we've had 10 straight semesters of enrollment growth. And, and again, folks have owned that, right? We said recruiting is everybody's responsibility. And, and they, they owned it. And yeah, we had some people leave and said, look, I didn't come get into higher education to recruit students. Well, that's fine. You know, there's plenty of institutions out there where that's not going to be a requirement. But here, we're all pulling the same direction. Um, and we got, we made our R1 designation. We did it by, by funding. You know, we, we identified where the, where the needs were. Um, we did a, a very innovative, uh, financing with our, our, our energy infrastructure here, where we leased it out and created some funds so that we can invest in our research infrastructure, which we did, and that helped get us to R1. Scott, let me jump in because I think a bunch of our listeners won't know what R1 is. So this, this is a designation in the university system about the, the quality of research that your institution is able to do. Help, help us understand that better. Yeah, it is the highest ranking you can get. It, um, it, it, um, it designates those that the government will lean on when it needs, when it's dulling out, uh, grants, um, about 80% of, of grants will go to R1 institutes and the best research. Um, so, uh, getting that designation really just validated everything that we're doing. And as, like I said, it was a long-term goal, and it was always in the other strategic plans. We'd never got next. There was no funding behind it. There was no focus. There was no plan, right? So, uh, you know, we, we put together that plan, we created incentives for our faculty to write new grants, um, uh, and, you know, through basically providing them matching funds and matching, uh, you know, resources, if you will, with postdocs and PhD candidates. And, and boy, those incentives just took off and got us to where we needed to be. And, and of course, our fundraising, uh, which we're all fundraisers too, right? And, and I knew we had great alumni. We, we, they were very passionate about this university. And, uh, we're very pleased. We gained a lot of momentum as we made progress. Our alumni came with us, right? They may have been skeptical at first, but then they came with us. And we set a 500 million dollar goal, which, you know, people kind of laughed at it initially, but wasn't that like twice as much as what you've ever aimed for? Yeah. The one that we did previously was an impressive $2.61 million dollars. And everybody was like, really impressed we got there. I said, we're doing five. And, and you know what? We did do five. We got, and we got there eight months early. I'm doing five hundred and fifty million. Uh, so, uh, you know, it, you know, it can be done. And it's just, it's setting the goals and bringing everybody along. And we put together a great committee to, to go out there and, and to, um, uh, you know, help us fund raise, right? You know, I mean, just incredible leaders from across the industry and, and business communities and, uh, just, you know, just not to cover off the ball. So I purposely, deemed back to Adam's question, I purposely delayed why we were working on this, doing our own strategic plan. And I was getting pressure from our board to do it, because all the other universities in the system had had their plans in place. But honestly, it worked our benefit because we had all this momentum and people just now believed we could do anything. In fact, our campaign was called brave, bold, unstoppable. And we were, and we are, we feel that now, right? It's, it's who it's who we are as part of our culture. And with AI coming out, you know, my, the latest message to our, our community is, look, is AI is a game changer. And you can believe it now or believe it later, but it is a game changer. And we need to be preparing our students for this brave new world. And we need to prepare our faculty for this brave new world. And we need to be prepared to make big changes here, because AI can replace all the software we've got operating here and everything else. So we put together a five, a five pillar plan around igniting student success, which is all about still recruiting and, and persistence and, and getting our students across the finish line. And, and improving that along the way, because, you know, if you don't finish, you know, you don't get the economic value of your diploma, right? Driving an experiential learning. We want every student who comes out of our university to be, to have that real life experience, whether it be, you know, in a lab, a field, an internship, and all of them to have an AI component to it. So that they understand how AI is going to impact their real life jobs when they come out, adapting the educational model, you know, the traditional model may not even be around, you know, 20 years from now, right? Where, you know, people go to a destination campus like ours. So we need to take our educational capabilities to where the people are. And I also think the model will be changing, you know, you know, people may, may start out in the factories and then come back for a college education or, or, or, you know, my start in the technical fields and then come back for a college. And so we need, we need to be able to go to where they are and deliver it through different medium, you know, and not require everybody to be here alive in a classroom. Then harness research and innovation and partnership, you know, industry partners are the most powerful people we have here in the state as driving all of our research now and our new programs. So again, strengthening those partnerships and making sure that we provide real value and then finally optimize operational excellence. This is where I'm talking about using AI to, you know, to replace our infrastructure to make us more efficient to take the drudgery out of the work that we do every day to raise the level of the work that we're doing as an institution. So that is our new strategic plan. It's been signed off by our state board and we're excited about it. And if you can bear with me one more minute, I just want to say, then we went to our faculty and our staff and said, what would you do? What kind of projects would you do to align with this model? And we got 135 proposals. Well, it would have cost us $60 million to do all those projects. Couldn't do them all. But we are doing about 35 of them and, and, and I was worried we maybe, that wouldn't be enough to keep everybody excited, but everyone's excited and everyone's on board. And I've never seen such energy being unleashed in any place I've ever been. It's, it's incredible. We're having fun with this now. So Adam, I want to dig into this because this incredible plan, one, I, I, again, admire Scott to not get sucked into while everyone's supposed to have a strategic plan. So just get one written down for crying out loud. No, Scott first identified three urgent focus areas and got momentum, got results that involved people so that they could feel some ownership in that progress. So much of what Scott does, I just get excited because again, I see he is doing what we've observed from other leaders and other organizations that are the things that work. So another step in this document that we've been talking about strategic momentum without a row X is the step of redefining the strategy as an act of trust building. And what at, what Scott, you just described is you invited faculty to engage in the really the creation of this plan. They became co owners. And now they are watching their projects advance, meaning the strategy move forward. And the results be accomplished. It's theirs. It's their strategic plan, not the one on the shelf that they don't really understand and don't even care about. Yeah, you know, you that line it perfectly. And that was one of the reasons we went to them. I mean, there's other projects that we need to do to create the environment for them to be successful, like investing in some of the hardware and the inference chips and those sorts of things. And so we're doing those as well. But, but they're excited and they're scared, you know, which is healthy. You know, I've had a couple of faculty say, I didn't think you're going to approve my project. I got to deliver, you know, and we have regular check ins again, we've got our pillar CEOs who come and report out on the projects that fall under their pillars that these faculty are working on these and the staff are working on is terrific. It's a just it's an incredible feeling when when it all starts to operate that way, you know, Scott, talk about an amazing turnaround. I mean, $22 million in debt first year, you come in and then there's a turnaround that year. There's a $260 million fundraiser, a $550 million fundraiser, the R1 status. It is absolutely incredible and amazing. And Jim, obviously, we're all in perfect leaders. By the way, you got that book, you can show us a little bit of, you can wave it at us. Yeah, the interface, the netbook, the brand new book, you've got yourself a copy there. We have extra large challenges and urgent demands, Jim. And so you've produced this this curriculum, this, this, this kind of opportunity for us to engage before even the book comes out called strategic momentum without heroic strategic momentum without heroics. What is it and how people, how do people get a copy of it right now? They don't have to wait for the book. And that's exactly why we're doing this. We want to make it easy for people to have a tool that they can work with right away, because leaders are listening to Scott and they're thinking, oh my god, I want, I need to do that. And I can't wait till May 19th when the book comes out. So yes, we've created a digital tool document that we're happy to provide. If you would give us, go, you could go to my LinkedIn profile, search for at author Jim Brown and leave a message, direct message, just put the word momentum. And we will get this document to you, because we want you to be able to start Monday with your feet on the ground and a plan to for how to move forward. Right now, they can go in there and they can send to you a direct message on LinkedIn at author Jim Brown and send the word momentum. And for free, let me emphasize for free, they send the word momentum, you're going to send them this article that you this curriculum that you've created so that they can dig in right away, even ahead of the release date for the imperfect CEO book, which is coming out. And obviously we're anticipating and looking forward to it. And it's really describing what what Scott has been saying has worked at the University of Idaho. Yeah, please get. And more than that, you know, I just want to encourage all listeners to take advantage of of all Jim's knowledge here. I mean, I've had a chance to read the imperfect CEO. It's incredible. And these quick, quick resources are terrific. And he's got all these amazing offers at his imperfect CEO book.com website. So, you know, you can pre-order bundles and that's what I like to do. I like to, you know, order books from my team so that we're all talking out of the same handbook, the same using the same lexicon, if you will. And you'll just get so many more helpful resources there. So, you know, I just want to make sure everybody on my team gets a copy and I hope that you take advantage of it as well. So they can go to imperfect CEO book.com. And super, let me just say Scott, your energy, your smile, all of that presence, man, we just so appreciate you bringing that here to the Faithly podcast. This has been absolutely amazing. Jim, thank you for your wisdom, your knowledge, all of these 20 years of relationship with Scott. And you two working together for an incredible turnaround in the educational university space, which has been amazing. My name is Adam Durso and I'm helping to host this Faithly podcast, this series around the book, the imperfect CEO. Continue to track with us on all the social platforms and including Faithly. Take care and have an awesome day.