Like, what's been top of mind for me has been parables.

All right.

And I think the reason parables are so interesting is that they're very memorable, right?

Like, remember stories better than just about anything else.

And there was a parable that, uh, that I've been thinking a lot about.

There's two different ones.

And they apply a similar lesson.

And then I kind of want to just, like, juxtapose that against a lot of different scenarios.

So I will tell you the first parable now.

You guys ready?

So this is the parable of the infected tooth.

So the CEO has a talented but toxic executive who drove short-term results but poison the culture.

Her board and employees warned her repeatedly, but she kept this executive, fearing the pain of removal and the dip in performance that would inevitably ensue after the removal.

So quarter after quarter, you know, she would rationalize.

She would say, well, next year, we're after this big contract or once I onboard this new customer, or after I hire, you know, fire replacement, et cetera, et cetera.

So then when she finally needed to fire him, she had to. Morale then plummeted. And then

project stalled. Three key employees quit. And so she goes to our mentor and she says,

see, removing him wasn't a good idea. And so then the mentor replied, the pain you feel isn't

from removing the tooth. It's from letting it rot so long that it infected the jaw. The extraction

just revealed the damage that was already there.

And so she realized that every day she delayed had made both the problem and its inevitable

solution more painful.

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