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Thank you for choosing W4CY Radio. Welcome back everyone to the Geek's Geezers and Googleization Show, the home of Googleization Nation. Where we talk with HR and business thought leaders about the crazy shift going on in the world of business, technology and HR. Here's your host, Ira Wolf.
Hey welcome back everyone to the Geek's Geezers and Googleization Show and there is Joyce. Hello and Googleization Nation. We are in our 50th show for the year. That's amazing.
The most I've ever done before was 48. But we've had a very very busy year. We're not certainly running out of any topics, conversations, controversy, things to talk about. And so we are here.
This will be our last live show of the year. Next week we're going to do Joyce and I prerecorded some things. Still doing some edits on that. We reached out to many of our guests and they complied.
So we have some forecasts for 2021 from some other global thought leaders and experts. It would be great to hear from everybody again. Hopefully we'll get a couple more dribbling in today. And we'll put that together.
So next week's show is going to be a little bit of a compilation of our thoughts, Joyce, mine and some of the other thought leaders. And still debating on what the 30th is going to be a replay of one of our favorite shows and maybe excerpts. But we're going to make it within the next two days. So many responses, Ira, that we'll just have tons to do then, right?
Yeah, no, absolutely. So, but again, this is our last show. And today, I'm not sure we could have had a better topic than this. I was just talking with our guest Dennis Hill right before.
It's funny. We were hooking my mother up, trying to hook her up so we can see her. She lives a thousand miles away. She's in Florida.
We're in Pennsylvania. Haven't seen her for quite a while. But we're trying to put her on an Amazon Echo show. So my cousin was down there and they were trying to get that all hooked up.
But as I was watching the screen, what comes up is hospital ransomware attack. And on top of everything else that we're going through. So our topic today happens to be on cybersecurity. And we're going to be talking about Dennis Hill about that.
And Dennis. Very appropriate topic today under the circumstances of what the new, what's happening with the news yesterday as well. Oh, yeah, for sure. So we've been preoccupied.
I mean, for good reasons. COVID-19, the news about vaccinations, jobs, politics. So things like cybersecurity, which were huge threats, you know, was going to happen before the election and during that. And also data privacy.
I know there's been some investigation going on. Those things sort of took a back seat, right? The things that were right in front of our faces. Yeah, the very honor to do this.
But I bet you that most people, even in those times, doesn't give a really second thought to how. What's the word? How free? I guess we are with our data with our data.
We have just talked about Amazon Echo, but how many people have fit bits? You know, so Dennis, but Dennis brought up a couple other things about voting. We're all thrilled that vaccinations are there, but we're going to be tracked. Our personal data of what is effective, who got vaccinated, who had symptoms, where do they go?
Where do they come contact with? So there's so many other things. And the only time that we seem to worry about our personal data is when we get that letter from the credit card company, or there's a notice out there that there's been a breach somewhere. Oh, no, a text message, right?
Yeah, or information got stolen. And so many people think that, oh, I don't use, you know, I don't like that Alexa thing or Siri. I don't use Facebook. I'm not on LinkedIn.
I don't even know what TikTok is. They use a complex. They said, no, no, we don't use the same password on all our accounts. You know, we have a couple of different ones.
So everybody thinks that made your space, but they're not. So I can't wait to get Dennis on here and hear what he has to say. And good news is he, his company and many other organizations are working on some solutions. But then there's also one other thing.
It's not only protecting our data, but who actually owns our data? Oftentimes we just share that freely. And even if we don't give a permission, the data's out there. Many, many, many times and Dennis will confirm this.
We're giving our permission without realizing it. I don't have any apps I have on this thing. Right. And the small print.
Who's going to read pages and pages of small print? Well, we just ignore it. We just sort of accept that life. And there are disadvantages for that.
So before we talk about this all the time without Dennis, we're going to ask for it on here. Just one thing I want to thank all our listeners. And I also want to thank thinkers 360. Geekscissors and Googleization was selected as one of the top 50 podcasts to listen to in 2021.
So we were just received that news. I think it was right after last week's show. And so we're really, really excited about that. And I'm glad Joyce you part of it.
I want to thank Keith and back to my co-host for almost over two years. Keith was a big part of that. And certainly all our guests, you know, help contribute to being there. And I was one of them even.
So, double duty, double duty. So again, thank you. So I want to bring in, we want to bring on Dennis. We want to get as much data information out of him.
Dennis has a pretty long bio. Let him explain a little bit. But he's a founder and I think it's title as CEO president of Exact Corporation. You can discuss what that means.
But he's involved with quite a few other organizations. But I'd like to bring on Dennis Hill. Welcome, Dennis. Yeah, well, Dennis is coming on.
I'm coming in from the green room. So you saw that quick poster up there about Googleization Nation for anyone who wants to get updates about our guests and follow up some things. Just sign up for Googleization Nation, go up to the website. It's free.
You'll just get updates about shows and events and other things. So I'm going to point out a big, big, big 2021 there. Dennis, I'm not sure you have such a long bio there. It's a little bit about Exact and what you do on a day to day basis.
Okay. So I started out in my professional career many decades ago as the inaugural chairperson of a computer science and engineering program, one of the first in the country to be accredited at the age of 23. So when we talk about computer with kids, we sometimes don't think about the fact that they too will grow old and they collect social security. But I've turned 60 this past year and I've always been interested in technology and its application.
So many of our graduates at the University of going on to lead companies such as General Electric and Vidia. So I'm very proud and I believe that's probably the one contribution that I made in my life and most proud of is that educational aspect because education shows like this that broadened the mind are your greatest force for social progress. You want to build a ignorant nation, just don't educate. And great thing is we live in a wonderful country that encourages that and supports that.
That's number one. Number two, I have spent my lifetime working with small and medium sized businesses on integrating systems and trying to find ways to do things efficiently. And that includes a lifetime commitment to security. In fact, I had as a researcher in the 80s, the only secure communication process or outside the military was made by the federal systems division of Honeywell.
And again, my graduates have gone on to working companies in both the public and private sector and computer security. We were part of an undercover group where I had students infiltrate a group called the 414 Club, an explorer post back in the early 1980s that were hacking into computers all across the nation. And so that was kind of my fury into the into the computer security realm. And the film for stand for for Wisconsin.
It's interesting. It is coincidental that it is the area code for Milwaukee and the explorers post was located here in Milwaukee. Okay. Just curious.
It goes way back and Wikipedia has a nice story on it. I've edited parts of that because there's some information obviously on the inside. It's not public knowledge, but it really gave down to the fact that people just didn't change passwords. I mean, literally it was any user manual.
They didn't change the passwords and these kids got all of that information and they broke into the same systems across the country, everything from hospital and so forth. So the funny thing is that the symptom, the symptoms haven't changed. We still see data breaches. As you mentioned, Joyce, the solar ones exposure yesterday.
Yes. Yes. This is all timely. And I said in 1987 and it doesn't start an article, which you can see up online.
I said 19 and he says, this is 33 years ago that companies will not invest in security, normal individuals, except in knee jerk response to catastrophes. So it's nice to look back at 33 years and know how prophetic those words were because that is not only true to today, but fortunately, there's some new technologies that will eradicate these issues that we've been plagued with. What that sounds like to me, Dennis is a Nelson Mandela quote, people change either because they see the light or feel the heat. And you're saying it's always feel the heat in the data.
Yeah, because down the site, you know, people just kind of take for granted the security that's on their phone. They take for granted what they do on these web pages. And it isn't that they aren't doing enough. I mean, the solutions that have been provided, whether it's virtual private networking or malware checking or virus fighting software for the systems, that's all symptomatic, right?
That's all treating the symptoms of the problem. The problem is that our data is maintained on central computers. You see databases at a hospital, it's amazing to follow the stats on this. Every day last year in 2019 and it was surpassed again this year in 2020, a hospital database was breached.
Wow. Every day. Every single day. And in fact, I think one commercial company says that individual identity theft occurs about every 30 to 45 seconds with millions of people exposed.
But that breach occurs just like the SolarWinds activity did and all of these other breaches, and I don't want to name all the companies. It's just a long list of companies that are doing to centralize computing, right? All your hospital information records are maintained on their system. All of your financial records are maintained on the credit card or the banking system.
Now banks and lawyers have caught up to a new technology called blockchain. And we all know about Bitcoin. If we don't, cryptocurrency, what this means, how can anything in the vapor space of the ethernet have value that we can convert into tens of thousands of dollars? It boggles the mind.
Yet it is true that the value of that piece of paper in your wallet is only based on faith. And it's based on a reasonable desire from somebody to give it and another person to receive it. That is the same thing with Bitcoin. If you're willing to transact with Bitcoin, the might Bitcoin has a $20,000 value.
And I can give you some of that or part of that. And those transactions related to those are immutable, meaning they cannot be changed or edited. If I've allocated to you so many dollars on the internet, that cannot be changed. If I vote it with a blockchain system on the internet, that cannot be changed.
Right? We hear a little... See, these issues become very, very important in the emerging technology known as blockchain. And what blockchain does is it takes a decentralized approach to your data.
It chops it up. It's lots and lots of pieces. And when I say lots and lots of pieces, I'm talking about billions of billions of pieces. Wow.
To quote Carl saying billions and billions. One piece may not even constitute a single character on a letter. It might be just part of that. It depends on the algorithm to break that up.
And the chance of a hacker decrypting that little block is one in 15 trillion with a T. Ah, that's why it makes it so much safer. Yeah, you don't have the patience, even with quantum computing and some of the new technologies that are coming out, blockchain presents a very formidable secure platform. And again, it's a completely new architecture because we're all those billions of pieces of data.
They're scattered on nodes all across the internet. So with blockchain, we actually could keep our data safe in 2020. However, what you're describing is in my head much more like an enterprise scale than an individual scale. So can we as individuals keep our data safe in 2020?
Well, that's where the laws have finally caught up to the realization that your data belongs to you. Right? GDPR out of Europe, the California Consumer Privacy Act that went into effect at the beginning of this year is not coincidental. We've had an agreement for the last several years between the EU and the US on sharing private personal information between the nation's states, which was actually invalidated earlier this year.
It was called the privacy shield. And the companies that have subscribed to that and haven't certified underneath that are expected to continue doing this while some other legislation has put into place in other guidelines. The reality is though that in order to own your data, you need a tool to own it. Right?
So that is the answer to the problem. So blockchain is the answer to the problem of keeping your data safe. Well, that and having a network architecture that we do digital processing with, whether it's communicating or web browsing or whatever, that has a hardware level of security in it that does the authentication of the user and the authorization to the data. Those are fancy words.
It's a lot of words to add to what I'm basically going to say is it is a hardware software combination and we are seeing something rollout nationwide called 5G, which provides a completely new set of protocols for security that for the first time replace what we've been living with for the last 45 years in the PC industry. And that is actually security protocols that were started in World War II. Wow. So we don't all need VPNs.
We all need 5G. We all need 5G and that's why you see such an aggressive marketing campaign. It should not escape anybody that your cable companies try to sell you telephone services because they see a disconnected cable free world running on 5G. The little circles that you see when you're waiting for stuff disappears because the transmission rates on 5G are a thousand times faster than what you get on a cable today.
And of course what it does is it authenticates you at a hardware and personal level. So you say well what if I lose my phone? Well your phone is still key to you, right? There's still going to be a crypto key or something on there that you have to put in to activate it and keep it activated.
But what 5G? Maybe or maybe in the case of iPhones your thumb, right? Or some other finger. Well you know imagine it's the fact that they're using facial recognition.
Is that what it's called? Yes facial recognition. But imaginative screenplay writers will tell you about those times when they chop the fingers off or they slice the face off and you know I'm just thinking of the lambs and some of these are so serious. You know the whole genre is going to come up here in the cyber crime industry that we haven't seen before because of the The last night we were looking for something to watch.
And last night I was just waiting for the first one. There is a new movie and it's about COVID 23. It's off the subject line. It's over 23 and it's this movie and there's 110 million people who died and they quarantined people in these camps filled with trailers.
I mean I watched the two minute trailer I was just curious of what it was going to be. But it's like I was just waiting to see the next play out of all these movies not about a documentary about how we got there. But just extrapolating on everything that just happened. So it's already there.
I don't remember the name of the movie. I remember the movie. Oh I remember what it was. It's called Somburg.
Oh. It's heard of that actually. I don't know what it was. It's not heard.
I didn't pay attention enough to learn what Somburg had to do with COVID 23. But it wasn't that smart. And I'll take us down the rabbit hole a little bit. But wasn't that smart of them to do a movie where they could have everybody be masked.
Mostly right? What the pandemic has actually done is it's I call it time compression. It's accelerated technologies that all of us under normal circumstances would have recognized would take 20, 30 years. Everybody is doing Zoom today.
Everybody is doing video chatting. The idea of having a video conference where people don't see each other is absurd because everybody wants to see each other. Even the idea of having a 97 year old woman, she's on wireless. She does use the computer.
She does use emails. Nothing much more. But now we're hooking her up. She's on wireless.
We're talking about your mother. Right? Right. Well, and there was a movie that came out earlier this year.
I think it was on one of the subscription services. I don't remember if it was Netflix or Prime called social dilemma. Right. It's on Netflix.
That's excellent watch. It is. It's highly recommended. In our promotions, we use the term Orwellian overlords.
You can define if that's big tech or big government or big pharma or big, just big data users. But have low-Vian users. That's what social dilemma talks about. You hear the ding, ding on a Facebook message.
And immediately you can almost hear the salivating of the users. You watch the kids nonstop. I'm investing in carpal tunnel syndrome surgery in the people because these kids just move so fast. And people are just adapting this technology.
Adapting to the technology much quicker than we thought it would be. I explained to somebody the other day that flying cars are more of a reality now than they'd ever been. Because if everybody drove an autonomous vehicle that floated in the air, that was controlled by a local FCC smart city hub, we'd eliminate accidents. We would, yeah.
Tell me this is about it. But this internet of things should not be separated from the internet of people. And so our approach to this is that we have to have solutions that provide that security and that retention of privacy. We have to put the data beanie that's out there, all of our digital DNA that we've spread across the internet.
Willy Lee, you mentioned it just the check mark. Nobody reads it except the lawyers that wrote it. All of that, we can put that genie back in the bottle now that we have technology that we can use going forward to ensure its privacy. Now, that doesn't mean that your history is going to be out there by a surfer of fish, just or nefarious people.
But with the laws, getting back to the laws like technology notion, with the laws that are there now, there's finally teeth that people have that can go back to the targets or go back to the seers or go back to the banks that they've applied for loans through and say, look, that's my data. We have a relationship. You've given me an account number. You've given me a credit limit.
You're tracking the transactions. You don't care about my name or address. You don't care about my birthday. I don't get Christmas cards or birthday cards from you anyhow.
So, you know, all that information that you have, please identify who else you've shared it with and then scrub it. That's what the laws are now starting to say. You can make those demands. And that's what the exact it does.
We've written software now for 45 years to help streamline businesses. If you've ever used an ATM, we developed software for the banking system very early on. We still do that. If you've ever purchased software, I'm sorry, products from an insurance company online, we've written the software to do that.
So, we're kind of like that quiet company behind the scenes that has helped a lot of businesses develop mission critical commercial applications. And about four years ago, we decided to turn our attention to the family, the fundamental social network. If we're going to restore individual privacy and data retention and reclaim those digital twins we have running all over the internet, it has to be done at this level. And there has never been a solution before what we're offering now in the go-go.
So, let me ask you a question, Dennis. So, as you were talking about the centralization, the first thing that came to mind was Amazon. So, you got AWS. I mean, everybody recognizes Amazon because that's where everyone's buying things, that they save this issue.
But the reality is, is behind the scenes is their biggest operation happens to be AWS. So, everybody's relying on Amazon. So, even more centralized. Where does that come in the blockchain?
Are they applying that? Or is that, where do we go with that? They do have a blockchain solution, as does IBM and companies like Ethereum. And that is where some blockchain issues are coming down the road to bear because these blockchain implementations are incompatible.
They're not interoperable. And so, one of the things- That doesn't help, does it? Well, we're back to beta and BCR. Exactly.
It's a very similar thing. So, one of the roles that I have is a board member of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management. And your HR audience will appreciate this. Is that we established this year a consortium, a global consortium of employers, HR associations around the world, to come up with standards.
So, that interoperability is there. That communication is there on HR shared data. So, for example, if we're going to employ a person from overseas, we would like to know that there's some verified validation of them having been given the COVID-19 vaccination. When I had it, where I had it, who gave it to me, and all the things that would be associated with the human, I'm sorry, hospital information system, is not necessary.
All I need is for me as an employer to be able to query that decentralized database on HR and say, is Joyce vaccinated? Yes or no? Now, the beautiful thing is you get notified of that inquiry. Okay, you grant it.
Are you rejected? Right now, thousands of those inquiries go on on a daily basis about you and all of the information about you completely transparent without any transparency. You have no idea who's really sharing what. So, that brings us to, and we don't have that much more time, our final question, which is, what should we as individuals be doing to protect our computers from theft and hacking today?
I mean, we need to, like, as soon as this podcast is finished, each of us needs to go get that done. What do we need to be doing? I just want to quickly, just let everybody know. I mean, I've got security, I've got my password, I use VPN, I mean, I try to do as much as possible.
But I did a scan the other day, and I can't remember what program came up. I did a scan, and it said, how many breaches? It was basically how many times has my information be compromised? I looked up and went back to 2007, and there were accounts that's like, I don't even know what that was.
I don't even know if it existed. But, you know, again, we didn't pay that much attention. So, it didn't have to be what happened today. It doesn't have to be, oh, I lost my information because of Equifax, or because of Chase.
No, I mean, it was shocking how many of these sites that we've signed up for. Well, and even the security on the big companies, I've used AWS as an example. There were breaches over the last two years that were actually that occurred on AWS by insider. See, you can't protect yourself from the unscrupulous use of your data by authorized people.
So, that's why we have to move the data off of these centralized computers and onto your personal data warehouse. That's number one. That will happen much more quickly as a result of 5G and blockchain and can be in applications like the ones that were at others are developing. What you can do today is just like a migraine.
You got to treat the symptoms, right? If you suffer from chronic migraines, you know they're going to keep coming. So, what happens is you end up treating the symptoms. So, you use VPN, you use strong firewalls, try to use daily, if not real-time, bit block checkers, virus checkers, malware checkers.
You can't execute enough protection today to prevent infections. You just can't do enough. And that's cheap. It really is.
I mean, a good virus protection anti-malware software that runs with a fairly good reliability will run you about $50 a year on a system. That's very cheap. I remember the days when I could buy a washing machine for $200 and was guaranteed to run for 20 years. Today, I spent $2,000 and is guaranteed to run for 90 days.
Some of them, next year, let's keep aiming. So, you know, virus protection software anti-malware using virtual private networks. Now, that doesn't change, again, the attitude of the user who's willing to put personal information out there. Let me talk about your mother, okay?
HIPAA prevents us from discussing her health issues, right? But when you send her a text message or you send her an email or you're just communicating like that and you're using a service bureau or your family is putting it on their private group on Facebook or social media, that's all being recorded. That's all being collected. It's all being analyzed, gathered, and sold.
So, I mean, we could spend, we literally could spend hours talking about these things and keep the attention of your audience. But the reality is, there isn't any solution to the problem when we spend all the time treating the symptoms. The solution is get off a centralized databases, let those who own the data, now with the teeth of the law, have that data space. It'll be early adoption that leads the way, but that's the way it is for every disruptive technology.
Wait, wait, Dennis, I feel like we've kind of contradicted ourselves just a little bit, so I want to go back and ask you a question. We talked about using blockchain versus VPN, but now you're suggesting we need a VPN. Well, you asked what we can do today, right? The 5G has enrolled down everywhere yet, and that's going to take a while.
The blockchain applications are just emerging, the nice thing is that it's low code, it's not highly technical, it's just like anything else, it's misunderstood, because people are being able to do it. People say blockchain and they talk about cryptography, and their minds just shut off and their eyes glaze over. The simplest, like I said, you've taken this data, chopped it up into billions of pieces knowing that any one piece has a one, it's going to take a hacker, one in 15 trillion to hack that one piece, it's just not going to happen. So those applications are all out, and it's important for people to realize that at some point, you're not even going to know that you're on a blockchain application.
Can you give us some examples of how people could buy an application and use it? That's blockchain? We just go to blockchain.com? No.
I think I'm correct in this. We don't buy blockchain. Blockchain is like buying, we're not going to buy the code that Amazon has. Blockchain is going to be the code that they use.
We're not going to be able to buy that and put an application on our phone. We're going to be using that as an individual, whether we want to or not. Right, but what I'm asking is, is there some software that we haven't talked about that employs blockchain that we should be going to and using and putting on our phones? And that's why you have me on the show today, I think.
We have introduced the world's first decentralized blockchain based application that allows individual users and their families to secure that information. And we give them a process to go out and recover and reclaim all that information. That's called Family Organizer Plus, and it's launching on Indigogo this month. Thank you so much.
Really? Thank you, Dan. It was the fastest half hour we've had on the show, Ira. We've had very fast hours last week with Alan below for the economy for next year, which is good news.
I'm going to grow for the next few years. So at least for the next few years. But no, absolutely not. I could be listening to you for hours and hours.
So for other people who are interested, they want to hear more about you. I know you're pretty active on LinkedIn. Where can they find out more about you or listen to more interviews? I get them.
Okay, so LinkedIn's a good source. We have a marketing group here so you can go to the Exacta Corporation page there. We're on Facebook as well. I think you should Google Exacta Corporation.
My handle on most of these sites has managed change. It's not even my name. Yeah, I wondered about that. But it was FamilyOrganizer.com, correct?
What FamilyOrganizer Plus. Oh, sorry. Let's add the plus. And ExactaCorp.com would be the main site, Indiegogo.
If you've never done anything with CrowdFunding, we're not doing this. We've been a business for 45 years. We're not doing this to raise money. We're doing this to raise awareness and to build a community.
This is a movement based on disruptive technology that everybody will benefit from. So, indiegogo.com, FamilyOrganizer Plus. Thank you very much. Thank you.
And congratulations on being a top rated podcast. And thank you for being here. Hopefully we'll even move up further in the ranks because of your presence here today. But it's great to have you.
It's been a pleasure. I know I wouldn't give a shout out to JobSync. I mean, that's where we, you and I met a couple weeks ago and on another panel, another conversation. And I know our conversation will continue.
Hopefully you'll come back. Give us some updates as this goes along. Pleasure. Pleasure.
Happy Holidays. Thank you so much, Dennis. You're been great. Wow.
Absolutely. So, what a way to close out our... Yeah. That's my guest of the year.
Absolutely. We are going to take a short break. You're listening to GeeksKeezers in Googleization here with Joyce Joya, my co-host on MyReWolf. And we will be right back.
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If you just are tuning in now, you missed a great segment with Dennis Hill. So be sure to go and listen to the replay. Absolutely. We definitely will want to hear it.
You get the replays on YouTube, Facebook, and whatever your favorite podcast is, Apple, iHeart, Google, Stitcher. We're on Amazon Audible, so you name it. We're there. We're going to do real quickly, not quickly, but this segment is devoted to a head of the curve, normal 2.0.
And I know we're going to be talking about recognition in the normal 2.0 in the second. Again, I want to give a reminder to everybody to you can join Googleization Nation and follow us. You'll get updates about future guests, best guests, and the offers that we have coming up. We've got a really active 2021 coming up.
We've got a couple of events, a couple of interviews, additional interviews with some people. We have a few webinars coming up. So please do that. And then on this Friday, we do our monthly conversation with Ed Gordon for the Gordon Report.
Ed's been doing the Gordon Report for a long time. For those who don't know Ed or haven't listened to the other ones. Ed's expertise is certainly on workforce development, workforce forecasting, looking at people. But employment is going to look like with types of jobs.
And we're doing our monthly update on Friday at noon. You can also get to those on youtube.com forward slash I will wolf. So you can go there. You can subscribe to it.
You'll get notified where you can go watch any of the replays that we've had. And this is a forecast that's always been incredibly accurate about. I've covered some in my Herman Trend Alert. We've got the Herman Trend Alert.
That's something that I do every week. And I think you have 29,000 or 39,000 people. International, internationally. What we're doing with this segment is ahead of the curve.
Joyce is highlighting something she's researched or investigated or are already been distributed to that network. And this week's topic is recognizing. Doing recognition right in normal 2.0. So I know this came through a colleague of yours.
It actually came because I was attending IMC, the Institute of Management Consultants Annual Conference, was virtual this year, as were all of them that actually happened. And one of the speakers was an amazing speaker named Steve Pendle Pemberton. He's the Vice President of Human Resources for an organization called Work Human. And I've always believed that bonuses were important.
I think that bonuses are very motivating to people. And I think that to a degree they are expected. What I've learned from him just really blew me away because timing is everything. It turns out.
So if you give someone a $2,000 bonus, say on January 15th, that bonus tends to have an effect on that individual for maybe, I don't know, it depends like, three months, maybe six months, right? And what if you took that $2,000 and gave it to all of the people that work with or report to or he reports to them or she reports to them and allowed them to reward that individual through the year. What happens is you get a very different culture in your organization. You get a culture of gratitude because then the employees, the fellow employees are motivated to express their gratitude financially to each other.
And you really can't overemphasize how much that could have an effect on the organization. Because it gives not only the financial recognition, but it also gives kind of a social recognition because people are acknowledging each other for the contributions that they're bringing to the organization. The benefits are many. Employees are more alert, alive and awake.
They seem to experience more joy, pleasure, optimism, and even happiness and even physical benefits. Now we know that when we smile more and when we feel a beat that that has a very bolstering effect on the immune system, right? Yes. In a certain way, yeah, if somebody sees you grumpy, then other people get grumpy.
If they see you smiling, they may say what he's smiling about, but it's still, they're curious. And interestingly, we experience fewer aches and pains also when we feel positive, right? It also reduces blood pressure. People tend to exercise more.
They sleep longer. They feel more refreshed. We're impersonating about the timing of this and we just have a few minutes there, unfortunately. But the timing of this is last night we had the final presentations for my graduate class in organizational leadership.
And one of the students presented a plan because they're in a distribution plan and they have people coming in that are supposed to be working eight hour days or working 12 hour days on a regular basis. And the morale is just crashing down because they come in and they expect to go and somebody doesn't show up or they have extra work to do. And they said, but we pay them overtime. And my suggestion to them was similar to this and they may not be exact use is what if you said the maximum you'll ever work, the maximum we expect you to work is 10 hours a day.
But if you work over that and we need you now, they gave them $25. A bonus for that. I said, why don't you pay overtime by the day if you work more than 10 hours and give you two hours of overtime? You don't have to wait to accumulate at the end of the week.
So every day they got a little bit of a reward, but that's still they'd have to wait for a week or two weeks. So they got the paycheck. But what if they got a gift card? What if they got a few dollars bonus that they can walk out right now with that?
What would that be? A cash in hand, right? Absolutely. And before we go, I just have to tell you a story.
My favorite meal kit company that is food that arrives in a bag to your house so that you can prepare it yourself is a company called Purple Carrot. And I've had some, they have had some major challenges with you with FedEx ground. And they train their customer service people just amazingly well. It might be the best customer service group I've encountered in a long time.
And the client, the customer, when there's a problem, you not only get a credit for any food that was damaged or wasted. And if it's more than three days, they give you full credit for the whole thing. But then you also get to give your customer service person either a cup of coffee, a free lunch or gift card. And I love that.
I just think it's brilliant. It's just brilliant. Now, the company, do they have continuing challenges with logistics? Yes.
And are there solutions that they could be implementing? I think so. But the fact that they have that ability for me as the customer to reward their customer service people, just it makes me feel good. It makes them feel good.
It's just a win-win for everybody. Immediate ratification. I think just that simple message is bonuses are good, but the timing is critical. Absolutely.
Truly. And next week, we have the Workforce Workplace forecast from IRN me. And then we don't know exactly what's going to be happening on the 30th. But I just want to prelude the fact that my trend alert next week will be an extensive 2021 forecast.
I do an annual Workforce Workplace forecast. And then when we come back in 2021 in January, I think it was December 30th, not January 30th, right? So when we come back in January, then I will be talking about that in the head of the curve. Excellent.
Well, we can't wait for that. But again, next week, we will not be live. We will be audio only. I'm going to distribute some of the interviews that we've done on video.
But at one o'clock on December 23rd and on the 30th will be audio only. And hopefully that you will join us to hear what we're doing. And we'll watch the follow us, follow both of us on or connect with us on LinkedIn or Twitter. And you'll get the updates there as well.
But because this is the last time that we're going to be live, we want to wish everybody a very, very happy holiday, whatever you celebrate. We wish you a very, very happy new year. We thank you for sticking with us through 2020 through 2020. We've had a fan.
I want to thank again all our listeners and all our guests. Amazing, amazing contributions. We're very grateful for your support and no acknowledgement would be complete without also acknowledging our producer rebel. Thank you, rebel for all that you do.
Last minute changes. And again, we know you were involved with us early in the year. Joyce, but we were only audio and then all of a sudden we went video and videos a whole other game. So really do appreciate you rebel and again appreciate everybody.
All the listeners, please be safe. We're not through this yet. 2021 economy looks good from the projections looks like we're going to have a robust economy. It's like an employment over there on jobs or a planet.
But we still need to wear those masks. Be safe. Please do what you need to do over the holidays. And we will see you live next year 2021.
And please, please take care of yourselves. Have a wonderful Christmas and a happy new year. Thank you very much.