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Tom: Today I have with me one of my favorite Authors, Daniel Pink. He has written four
bestselling books and he's really a thought leader in many different ways. He has a unique
ability to identify a trend in the marketplace, articulate it in a way that's useful and give
insightful advice that's actionable. He has done this in a surprising array of areas of
expertise. Over the last decade or so I think he has
put out four books starting with Free Agent Nation. He has written a Whole New Mind, The
Adventures Of Johnny Bunko and one of my favorites and his most recent before the one we're going
to talk about today Drive : The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
And this is something where Dan you talked about really a need for a whole new operating
system in management. Where the old style of carrots and sticks is effective in a diminishing
amount of areas, particularly where we need creativity or innovation. That's an area that
has been near and dear to CIOs and IT executives hearts for a good long while.
Folks out there who haven't seen the TED Talk its one of the top 20, in the 2009 TED Talk
that Dan does on this topic and he talks about autonomy, mastery and purpose. And a whole
model for looking at how to motivate teams based on intrinsic motivation rather than
the older model. So this is a book near and dear to my heart
and I don't have it to hold up here because I keep loaning it out. It's one of the first
books I recommend to new managers or folks that are struggling in this area. And it's
on loan right now to somebody in that situation. Dan is a guy who's worth listening to and
I'm thrilled that you agreed to be with us today to talk about your new book, To Sell
is Human. This is a book all about sales and marketing
and Dan it's the number one book of 800 CEO reads. It was just named as the 2012 business
book award in the marketing and sales category and I didn't know you were a salesman. So
maybe you can give some insights in sort of the overview of the book and how you came
about it and welcome. Dan: Well thanks Tom and thanks to that nice
introduction. Actually you hit on two things that help I think get into this topic. I mean
really two things that kind of got me into this book on their own. The first was this
book you mentioned Drive. That was a book you did a beautiful job of summarizing it
and what it says is that rewards as you just said that are this carrots- and- sticks rewards
are good for some categories of work and not so good for other categories at work. And
as you said very appropriately in the categories of work that they're good for is shrinking
and shrinking. In response to that book some people emailed
me and said, all right what about sales? What about salesmen and women who're often heavily
commissioned? What about them? Do they respond to these kind of rewards? And I didn't really
write about that in the book. And I was curious about it and so I started looking into it.
I started hearing from other readers some of whom ran organizations and they would tell
me these things that seem bizarre which is that, "Hey Pink I think you're right. In fact
I eliminated commission from my sales people and we saw sales go up." Wow, it's kind of
a freaky set of circumstances there and so I became very interested.
So that's one avenue I got interested in sales and you also say that I didn't know about
it. So in order to answer these greater questions I tried to learn a little more about it and
I found that it was a really fascinating topic. And it was also something that I thought was
poorly covered in the traditional kind of popular business literature.
A lot of what you read about sales is 41 steps to power selling, 13 ways to close the deal.
I thought it didn't give the craft of sales enough respect actually. I thought that we
enforce some of the biases that people have against sales. So that's one way that I got
into it. The second way which you alluded to is this;
you said to me a moment ago, "I didn't know you were a sales person." And neither did
I but couple of years ago I looked at my schedule and I started thinking what do I do all day.
And being this *** retentive guy I went back and looked at calendar, looked my sent emails,
looked at what I was doing on twitter and so forth. And I realized that at some level
I'm a salesman. If you unpack actually what I do each day,
how I spend the minutes and hours of my work day I spend a huge a potion of it, it turned
out, in sales. Now sometimes I'm trying to get people to buy a few more copies of Johnny
Bunko. But in many cases what I'm doing is persuading, influencing, cajoling, convincing
in trying to make people to part with resources and make an exchange.
It is essentially a selling activities and it runs the gambit. It's can I get this airline
gate agent to switch me from a window to an aisle. It's can I get my nine year old sun
to take a shower after baseball practice. It's can I convince a magazine editor to get
rid of a stupid story idea that he wants me to do. And I realized that these two roads
kind of came together and I said; there's nothing good written about sales and my God
I'm in sales too and that led me into this exploration that culminated in this book To
Sell is Human. Tom: That's great and I enjoyed the book very
much. In the set up in the beginning of the book you point out how we're all in sales
and you do this is in an interesting way. The way you just described about if you look
at your day to day behaviors and also globally in an economic sense.
Now for CIOs, IT executives and any IT professional out there I think there has been a sense that
we're in sales and part of the conversation. Part of this paradox I think has been understood
at some level for some period of time. And as the context that we operate in is changing
so technology is more pervasive, everything is going digital. IT used to be a back room
function but it's coming out and taking a leadership role. So we end up with this best
word I have in mind is the CIO paradox. There's a woman by the name of Martha Heller.
She works for CIO magazine and the CIO executive council there. She's active in profession
organization, The Society for Information Management and that I'm very active in. She
points out this dilemma that these CIO are in where they have this tremendous functional
responsibly for things like security and keeping the lights on and these sort of nuts and bolts
stuff but at the same time are called upon and expected to be innovative.
To build a team in IT organization you'd have to have folks that know technology. I mean
that's what it's all about. But the people skills are what are going make or break you.
So one of my themes in my career in these conferences that I attend and folks I bat
around these ideas with, a pervasive theme which has been in alignment with the business.
So IT used to be sort of different and could easily sort of slip out of the alignment,
because you get so caught up in the details because they're many and its complex and there
are systems that run everything and technology is for everything.
So one of the first things that you talk about in the book here instead of autonomy, mastery
and purpose you have attunement, buoyancy and clarity in the first major section of
the book. And this idea of attunement sort of struck a chord with me because I thought
that kind of relates to alignment. But you brought it out in way that I think
folks could probably use on a more of a day to day basis to get attuned with the folks
we're working with. So IT can be easily be misunderstood and IT needs to be in alignment
with the business. I was hoping you could talk for a minute about attunement, what you
mean by that and the essence of it. Dan: Sure and I think you make a good point
about the nature of CIOs. I think in some ways foolish to think CIOs are not in some
level in the sales business. In some level they're selling all the time. They are certainly
selling in terms of recruiting people to come and work for their particular operation when
really high level of IT talent has a lot of options today.
So the CIO has come and say, how can I get the very best talent, how can essentially
sell people on the idea that this is the best place to work. They're certainly selling internally
because they're trying to get resources for them. They're trying at some level even to
sell the function of what they're doing that IT is not simply a cost center but its part
of the strategy of the business as well. So it seems to me that even the CIOs, not
the folks who are CIO but more sort of the general business reader might say, oh CIOs
they're just a bunch of geeks who sit behind the computer all day and they're not in sales
at all. But if you actually unpack what they do, I think they have a heavy sales component.
They're not necessary making the cash registering ring directly but they're influencing, convincing
and cajoling. A new point to this quality of attunement
what I call the ABC's, attunement, buoyancy and clarity. Attunement is really seeing things
from the other persons perceptive. It's a very powerful human quality and it ends up
being enormously important in all forms of sales. Whether it's traditional or what I
call non sales selling. I think it's doubly true for IT executives and CIOs because what
they have to do is they have to be attuned to their internal constituents. Are they understanding
what they do? So I think there's a lot of mystification
on the part of other people inside of a firm, what actually goes on in the IT department.
So they've to be attuned to say, is this person actually understand what I'm talking about?
Can I see this person's perspective from his perspective and not from my own perspective?
They end up having to do I think a lot of explaining too to sort of explain, what's
does this IT division do, what's its purpose, how is it aligned to the business and why
is it not simply a cost centre, like the electric bill. And why is it part of the strategic
imperatives of this particular firm. But the prelude to all of that is understanding
what other people think. Understanding things from their perceptive. One way to do that
and comes out of the social science is this idea of reducing your power a little bit.
Now at some level the CIOs, IT executives and other people in that function actually
are very powerful, because they have specialized knowledge than a lot of other people don't.
So if you go into a situation in some level lording over other people, your technical
knowledge and your specialized know-how, you're not doing a very good job of selling them.
So to some level you're better off kind of lowering your power and the science shows
this very clearly. You're better actually reducing your power a little bit and going
and saying, you know what I'm not the powerful one in this situation and that's going to
allow you to see other people perspective and actually be more persuasive, convincing
and influential internally. We tend to think of it as "soft skills", but
I would say if you were to look at successful CIOs my guess is the ones that are really
flourishing, the ones that are really contributing to the organization obviously have the technical
knowledge. But they also have some of these things that we often deride "soft"; perspective
taking, communication skills, the ability to explain and the ability to make things
clear. Tom: Perfect. And you're leading right into
my next question which is about clarity. So it's something that you talk about in the
book. It's one of the chapters the need for clarity, and how to obtain it. You cite some
of my favorite authors the Heath brothers and some other work in there that sort of
digs in there, because communication is an ongoing challenge for everybody. But particularly
for those of us in IT who absolutely suffer the Heath brothers would call the curse of
knowledge. Dan: Sure right.
Tom: And once you understand something so intimately it's really hard to know what's
it's like to not understand it and to communicate that. One of the ideas you have in this book
that struck a chord with me is that when you're trying to get the clarity in that communication
clarity and get to the clarity piece of it with somebody. You talk about problem identification.
We've got to get out of this mind set particularly in IT that we're problem solvers. So we sitting
around waiting for somebody to define it and then we're going to create as a spec and then
we meet the spec. Instead what's valuable, what's indeed necessary you argue well in
the book is the ability to identify problems to help build problems.
I wrote a blog post on this a while ago, I called it that your job is to create problems,
which is around the same idea. So I was hoping you could share a little bit of the science
behind that and what folks can do with that piece of information.
Dan: Yeah, well you make a good point. We can look at this kind of globally that there's
this notion. Forget about the CIOs or IT executives for now. Let's broaden up to the entire workforce.
There is this belief that what really matters today are problem solving skills. The ability
to solve problems and problem solving skills are actually important. But in terms of influencing
people, persuading people, selling people if that customer prospect again whatever the
realm is. If that customer prospect knows precisely
what his or her problem is today they can probably find a solution for it. They've got
enough access to the information but they can actually come up with the solution. This
is the phenomenon that you see where people go to the doctors with reams of printouts.
They go to the car dealership with reams of printouts. And generally I think that's good
for the world. The challenge it faces for those whether CIO
or other people in the persuasion and influence business is that that you can't simply be
a good problem solver when people can do a lot of self help. What you have to be, as
you suggest you have to be a good identifier, you have to be good at finding problems. Of
uncovering hidden problems, of servicing problems people don't know that they have.
That's ends up being extraordinary valuable to people and certainly if one is a CIO and
one is trying to sort advocate for your own budget, your own function and your own staff.
The ability to identify problems in the organization doesn't realize that it has is actually an
effective form of advocacy. It also good for the organization as you're suggesting.
It's not simply a kind of an inbox approach to the task saying what are they putting in
my inbox now. It actually does the things that a lot of CIOs have been wanting to do
which is actually being a strategic component in an organization. So this move from problem
solving to problem finding as the most valuable skill is happening throughout the work place.
But I think it's a very crucial move for CIOs in that kind of heavily technical and heavily
function. The interesting thing is that there's a slow
recognition in the business world that problem finding is important. I'll give you one example
of this. There's a survey recently of school superintendents here in the United States
and also some CEOs and the question was, what are the most valuable skills in business today?
And the school superintendents number one was problem solving. Problem solving was the
number one skills that superintendents said was essential today.
The executives actually had a different view. They actually ranked problem solving number
eight and instead ranked problem identification number one. So this is happening throughout
the workforce, but I think it's particularly prominent among CIOs. And the thing is if
you're indentifying problems and servicing problems that the organization doesn't know
that it has, that's very persuasive and it's great for advocacy and it's great way to align
what IT is doing with rest of the organization. Tom: That's interesting your example about
superintendents and business leaders. So what people are being taught at school versus what's
needed in the market place. I've been to many conversations around STEM initiative, Science,
Technology, Engineering and Math. And really as CIOs our big concern is we're not developing
a workforce they're not going to be there down the road and the skills sets are changing
and all of that. There are a lot of conversation similarly
happening between IT leaders and organization like the Society for Information Management.
They're very active in outreach and making sure that profession itself is healthy and
doing a lot of work on that. That's another area I think IT folks are selling, hey you
should elect this career versus other options. Dan: Sure but also within that career I mean
this to me is one the challenges in STEM education that STEM has been largely about problem solving.
Let's go to the graduate school level, the undergraduate in engineering. The way that
we traditionally have educated engineers is to give them problems sets rather than real
world problems or things that they have to go out and find. We give them clearly defined
problem sets because we say if they can solve these clearly defined problems they're going
to be good engineers. That's part of it. That's necessary today
but it's woefully insufficient. What we really want in STEM in the world of IT and in the
world more broadly is not necessarily people who can be vending machines for the correct
answers. But people who can think like scientist, people who can think like engineers and people
who can think as mathematicians. And the really good scientists, mathematicians and technologists
are very skilled problem finders. The curious thing about that is that problem
finding is a very much an artistic sensibility. So we had this kind of weird conversation
going on whether it's like science or art or technology or humanities but it's both.
And what we really need is this kind of synthetic view that says we need people who can reason
like scientists, reason like mathematics and reason like engineers. People who know how
to solve a math problem but who know much more than that. One who can see around corners,
who can indentify latent needs and who can uncover hidden problems. That's what we need
more broadly in the workforce and that's certainly what we need in the IT departments.
Tom: So in terms of problem identification and getting to that level of clarity, one
of the other features of the book I want to point out is after you present one of these
concepts you put a small section called sample cases. And these aren't like sample case studies
these are like meant to mimic the case of the salesman carries around and give you a
little something that you can try out. One of them in this area that we're talking
about that struck me was about learning to ask better questions and that was specific
recommendation in there. I don't know if you have a specific tip you could share at this
time. Dan: Sure I mean I'm glad that you mentioned
that because the way that I configured this book was it was part of my own frustration
as reader. So what I'll do is I'll sometimes read a book and it's a book about big ideas
and then it doesn't tell me what to do. It's like; okay it's up to you. Here's a big idea.
I'm not going to go into the weeds and tell you anything about this because that's beneath
me. Other times you have these self help books
that have a few instructions, but you're like where's the grounding and where is the theory
behind it. So what I tried to do is offer up a big idea, this idea that we're all in
sales now. The sales isn't what it used to be and offer a set of qualities that I think
are most important based on the social science. But then try to give people some tools and
tips and exercises so that they can put them into use.
And one of them is some exercises on how to ask the right questions. There's another very
simpler one that I really like and I think it's actually important for CIOs, IT executives
is the discipline a five whys. Where you ask somebody a question and you get the answer
and then you say why and when they respond to that you say why and when they respond
you say why. So be like we need to have liked a different internal email service here. Why?
Because things are getting lost. Why? And that actually ends up creating clarity in
way. And what it does is it actually connects you
to the previous question in that those five why's don't immediately go to problem solving.
They actually go to sort of uncovering borrowing down and saying what's the real latent need
there. What is the need that we're not uncovering here.
I think in any kind of field where there's expertise people tend to think that they're
more persuasive and influential when they deliver answers. But it turns out that actually
asking questions far more effective form in many cases of persuasion, influencing and
getting the problems. Tom: Yeah, and I think you talked before about
there's a lot of solutions ready at our fingertips for us in IT and for folks throughout the
business organization. So shifting the conversation from what I'm getting to so you normally gravitate
very quickly to what we're going to do because there are so many solutions and they're readily
available. So I think that's a great advice to shift to you know why. Why are you doing
this and it might lead you to down to a different course and get you a better answer in the
long run. Dan: It might get you a better long term answer
and it gives you a better answer. The other thing that problem identification does is
that it mitigates future problems to solve. Because a lot of problems again thinking with
the broad brush are problems because no one bothered to anticipate that there would be
problems. So we basically sat here waiting to see what's
in our inbox and if we actually spend a little more time on the front end asking questions,
diagnosing, doing five whys we might've averted those problems in the first place.
Tom: Yeah, and that's really a trap in IT that I found you can very easily fall into
a reactive fire fighting mode. That feeds on itself very well and actually quite effectively.
So to shift out of that is knowing you need to change in its cultural change at the end
of the day. But really does lead to a better long term set of solutions.
So I want to get one more idea at least in the book in a couple of specifics around email
subjects and emotionally intelligent signage that I think are really sort of good quick
take ways that people can take from this and act on.
But before we get there let's say I've got some clarity, I've done the questioning, and
I have created a problem and now it's time to pitch. As CIO, IT leaders we tend to be
data driven rational, analytical animals. That's why we're successful at large part
of our job. But the book explains why that's not the most effective techniques in terms
of persuasion. So I was hoping you can touch on that a little bit and maybe give us a tip
as to what's a better either alternative or supplement.
Dan: Well it's a supplement really because you have to have the facts on your side. You
have to the data analysis to back it up. But you also have to be able to take your proposition
and distill it in a way it's memorable and persuasive. That is having 47 Power Point
charts is nice, but it ultimately not going to carry the day. It's basically a supplement
to what's the big idea, what are we trying to do here.
It turns that if you actually look at some of the social science literature there are
variety of other ways to distill our messages that are extraordinary effective. A very pitchy
for a world of short attentions spans and I think few people over 15 have shorter attention
spans than CEOs. Who're ultimately the people that CIOs are trying to persuade.
So there are a variety of different ways. There's something that I call the one word
pitch where you distill your sentence in to a single word. It requires a lot of discipline,
but it ends up being very memorable. It's going to sound goofy for CIOs, but there's
evidence from Lafayette College and research done there that pitches that rhyme are not
only more memorable but also deemed truthful and more accurate. So that became a way to
pitch. Pitching with the form of questions is actually
an enormous effectively way to do it if the facts are on your side. We tend to pitch much
in declarative statements, but if the facts are on your side you're better off pitching
as a question because what that does question are more active. So what it'll in the recipient
of the pitch is they'll start reasoning through things and can reach to your conclusion. If
you reach my conclusion on your own you're going to believe it even more.
You mentioned even things like email subject lines. There's a research at Carnegie Mellon
that shows very clearly two kind of emails subjects. An email is a pitch. It amazes me
that people don't understand this. It's a pitch. It's a short burst of information that's
a plea for attention and engagement and that's a pitch. Research at Carnegie Mellon tells
us there are two categories of effective pitches with email subject lines. An appeal to utility
and an appeal to curiosity and that's pretty much it.
So utility means in the subject line explain crisply why this is useful. So for a CIO sending
something to the CEO you know it could be three solutions to our data storage problem.
That's a pitch that might get open more than a pitch with an a email subject line that
says data storage. So very useful. The other way is and I think it's probably
less of a viable option. It might be an option for CIOs who're pitching prospective employees
or even their own staff. It's a pitch related to curiosity. What's interesting is that when
people have somewhat lighter load, emails subject lines that peak curiosity actually
get opened all the time. This is one reason and it drives me crazy that I do this. I'll
get a hundred emails there and somebody I know and they send me a subject line is blank
I'll open it. And it drives me crazy that I do, but I'm like I wonder what it is but
you can do other kinds of things. It's curious that Obama's presidential campaigns
send out a lot of emails, they're the most opened emails and they're the most persuasive
emails. The subject line was I've got to spell it to make sense HEY.... Most opened and most
powerful email they did. It did appeal purely to curiosity. You don't want that kind of
flaccidness of something else. Utility, curiosity that's how you do email subject lines. No
other choice. Tom: Yeah. I spend a lot of time thinking
about, advising others and writing on my blog about how to craft an email message. The habits
I've built up over the years from blogging have paid huge dividends in terms of messaging
an email format. Being in an enterprise or anywhere else but your book caught something
that I haven't spent a lot of time on which was that subject line.
Dan: The subject line, that's the thing. If you open your email, I'm looking at my computer
right now and I go over here and to look at my email. And all these emails stacked up
and that's 47 of people pitching me right now. Whose pitch am I going to engage with?
And Carnegie Mellon tells us having looked at during analysis is something like 30,000,
it's a pretty significant data crunching data exercise: utility and curiosity. Utility curiosity
that's it. Tom: One cleverer tip that I think folks ought
to be aware of and who are watching this is what we call emotionally intelligent signage
and I know this is feature of your blog and it's also included in the book. But what I
thought was interesting from the CIO's perspective roughly rolling up a new system or implementing
some type of change. We're launching a new product and a lot of this are take a full
multimedia campaign to get people engaged. Multimedia means also printing out signs and
putting them up. You know I've done this for a number of different things. The emails are
a whole challenging area to break through and get somebody's attention. You know we
can send our video cast, podcast with all these technology but good old fashion signs
are effective. What I like about what you talked about in
your book is how to make some of those signs more effective. I don't know if this can be
seen. But there's one here that you talked about you align somewhere and the sign doesn't
say information that's analytical like 15 minutes from this point. It's says don't worry
this line moves very quickly. And that little adjustment to the sign makes the difference.
Can you tell us why? Dan: Well it's a number of different things.
It's actually a far amount of research in this regard too. It's really an interesting
study that I read about dealing with how you get doctors and nurses and health care professionals
inside of a hospital wash their hands more often. We tend to think the way to do it,
well actually what some of the research shows that if you install security cameras and record
everybody all the time you actually increase the level of hand washing.
That's one way to do it. It's a pretty expensive intervention. But cheaper way is to sort of
persuade people to do it and one way they did it is with signs and it turned out that
the convectional belief is that we should persuade doctors and nurses on the basis of
self interest. So put up signs saying; hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases.
It turns out those kinds of signs had no effect. But when they put up signs saying: hand hygiene
prevents patients from catching diseases that had an effect. Because people are much more
motivated by purpose than we give them credit for. There is a huge body of research on this.
When we try to move and persuade people, we are ultimately trying to serve them and raising
the sale as a purpose can be really powerful. Emotionally intelligent signage is sort of
a sibling of that. This is an idea that says if you think about signs they are usually
about announcing the rules or way finding. It's a purely analytical view of all of it.
If we give people information they will do things. That's just not true. You have to
people think more deeply sometime. So emotionally intelligent signage is an effort
to empathize with people, as that sign that you mentioned before. Where you get into the
line and it looks really long but the sign says; don't worry this line moves really quickly.
It's a form of empathy. It reduces people stress levels and it actually changes the
experience. The other one is to try and evoke empathy
on the part of the people who are viewing the sign. So thinks like, I read about a church
that had a big lawn and had a sign on the lawn of the church that could say; pick up
after your dogs. Because you don't want the dogs pooping all over the lawn. But this sign
not only said that but also said; children play here, pick up after your dog. It said,
oh wait a second, there is a reason for that. I think this idea connects to attunement.
Let's get into people heads. Let's see where they are coming from. They obviously don't
realize there is a reason that we don't want dogs on this lawn. The reason is we don't
want kids to get sick. By raising that you end up being more persuasive.
The other thing that is interesting here is one of the particular abilities that matter
most in this new world of selling is the ability to serve. I mean that in a very transcendent
sense. At some level IT departments are service departments in some ways. But what I want
to do is raise the caliber of that a little bit and talk about service from a broader
perspective, essentially saying you are making somebody's life better.
It think that when CIOs can talk about their department in that way, in a way that's says
we are actually an important part of this enterprise. We are actually doing something
valuable for this company and the world. That's ends up being very persuasive to other kinds
of stakeholder and also to staff. To some extent we don't appeal enough to those
bigger things. We tend to think, I care about this bigger thing but no one else does. So
I'm not going to say anything about it. But raising the salience of things like service
and purpose end up being very powerful tools in every CIOs toolkit.
Tom: Yeah and that's why I'm a big fan of your prior book Drive. It really talks about
that quite well and I found that instrumental in motivation. It gets you to back up to the
context and thinking about serving. I think we have to be careful in IT not to think about
service. Historically we've done and we've been order takers.
As we talked about in this discussion we are way beyond that now and to serve that higher
purpose. And to realize that we are directly connected to that is a great way to motivate
folks and help them understand. I want to motivate folks go to out and buy
a copy of To Sell is Human by Dan Pink. Really great book, I think it's great no matter what
industry you are in. I think it's particular valuable as Drive was for CIOs and IT leaders.
You give a great context. A great set up and a great set of rules. But you can go back
to this and if you go back to look up a chapter you will find that it's very concise and easy
to reference and a sample case gives you some features that you can go and run with.
So it's a very nice read through and a good one to go back to and reference for a whole
bunch of reasons. We only covered a small sampling of things today, but I appreciate
your time to dig into this from an IT perspective in particular today. But why don't you tell
folks where else they can find Dan Pink and hook up and connect.
Dan: You can go to www.DanPink.com which is my website. There is all kinds of stuff if
you're interested. For this book you can read the introduction there. There is a video summarizing
some it. All kinds of good stuff, all for the low low price of nothing.
Tom: Very good. Dan thanks again. I appreciate your time very much. This has been great.
Dan: Thanks Tom.