Jonathan Hughes, Consulting at the Intersection of Strategy & Conflict Management 

Transcript:
151. Jonathan Hughes
SPEAKERS
Jonathan Hughes, Will Bachman

Will Bachman  00:02
Hello and welcome to The 92 Report conversations with members of the Harvard and Radcliffe class of 1992. I’m your host, Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Jonathan. Hughes, Jonathan, welcome to the show. Thank you Will, great to be here. So Jonathan, tell me about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

Jonathan Hughes  00:23
Okay, I will. It’s actually been a lot of years since Harvard. So I after graduation, I started my career in consulting, so I which I’ve done ever since. So never had a real job, lifetime consultant. Work for an economic consulting firm Putnam Hayes and Bartlett for a few years out in Los Angeles, and then had a little bit of a connection back to Harvard. So I, after doing that for a few years, I wanted to stay in consulting. Didn’t want to go back to business school, but wanted to do something different, and so I reached out to a group that I had gotten to know during my time at Harvard as an undergrad, a little boutique firm called CMI conflict management Inc, which was founded by Roger Fisher and Bruce Patton, so Getting to Yes and the Harvard Negotiation Project, and so I moved back to Boston, joined up with them for a few years, doing consulting work related to complex negotiations and kind of business partnerships, which was a lot of fun. And then CMI kind of disbanded, and a group of partners, and then me, at the time, and a couple of us and our dogs and cats started a small boutique firm called Vantage Partners, and I spent about 24 years at Vantage. Became a partner after a year or two, ended up as our board chair, did a bunch of stuff there, which was great, and then through some twists and turns, ended up facilitating a split of the firm and took about half the partners and our teams and bunch of clients over to BDO, which is a large professional services firm, primarily accounting. But I ended up going over there and leading the consulting management consulting practice, both in the US and globally for BDO, for about two years, and then left in July and trying to figure out what I’m going to do next. So that’s the high level arc professionally of what I’ve done over the last, God, almost 30 years, or something like that.

Will Bachman  02:41
Talk to me about the Conflict Management Institute, and I’m sure it’s obviously all confidential, but any, any sort of sanitized examples that you can talk about that’s a little bit off the beaten path for consulting, that specialized work that you did there,

Jonathan Hughes  02:59
yes, so and, and I’ll bounce around between private sector, which is mostly what I’ve done, but kind of public sector and some other things. So, you know, conflict for better or worse, largely for worse, is there’s no shortage of it. You know, the people I worked with earlier in my career, and then kind of my focus in that work has always been, how do you take conflict, which is inevitable, people have different goals and different ways of looking at the world and different priorities and actually make that a positive rather than a pathological phenomenon, and actually use differences as a source of creative friction to come up with better solutions, make better decisions, innovate – all those kinds of things. And in general, my experience has been that it’s not whether conflict is good or bad, mostly the issue is how people manage it, or organizations manage it and deal with it. So, you know, I’ll come back to the corporate world in a second, but I did a pro bono project with a team for a number of years for OCHA, the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian assistance out of the UN and that multi-year engagement was helping them look at partnerships with the private sector, lot of friction, very different cultures, very different goals, but a tremendous opportunity for OCHA to tap into, not just donations from the corporate world, but people, expertise, talent, capabilities, and then, of course, you have got to be a little bit careful you don’t want, you know, a private sector company, whitewashing, greenwashing, reputation-washing, whatever, by affiliating itself with the UN.  We did a lot of work to figure out how can you make those partnerships work. I’ve done, interestingly, a lot of work with conventional and special forces in the military, including with Naval Special Warfare (SEALs), Civil Affairs, CAG (Combat Applications Group), different groups which you associate with kinetic conflict. But in my experience, the military, of all people, are highly cognizant of the cost of conflict badly handled. And you know, pacifists would disagree, and that there’s reasonable debate of whether the use of force is ever warranted, but at a minimum, almost everyone would agree, if you can avoid actual kinetic conflict it’s better, it’s much less costly and it’s better. So a lot of these organizations that I’ve worked with invest a lot in negotiation training, conflict management training, influence training, as part of their missions, which, you know, as often or not, have to do with going in and stabilizing areas and trying to avoid flare ups of conflict or anything else. So those are outside the corporate arena. In the corporate arena, a lot of that work has been merger and acquisition work, complex negotiations, and it, for me, it evolved into starting off very specialized around conflict management and negotiation, and then into broader, traditional strategy work. But it turns out that you can do addressable market sizing and competitive positioning and develop strategic plans and all those kinds of things that companies need to do, but a lot of times, what derails those strategies is the reality of different people and groups, executives within your company who have some different priorities and ideas, or once you get past that, you’ve got to go out and your strategy involves working with customers and suppliers and business partners and doing all that stuff so conflict and dealing with differences and managing relationships in the face of those differences, is often the coal face of strategy anyway. So that was kind of my evolution from that is very specialized work to that suffusing just general business strategy work where I’ve spent a lot of my career.

Will Bachman  07:05
Doing the work with special forces in the military, sounds fascinating. Talk to us a bit. You know, respecting confidentially as required, but can you tell us a little bit about the maybe some examples, or the types of influence training that you would be providing to these special forces. What’s an example of a situation they might be in where you would be giving them training of how to deal with it?

Jonathan Hughes  07:33
Yeah. So one thing that is interesting, and it’s a parallel between the military, civilian, government and private sector, for that matter. For all the differences, it’s still human beings inside organizations dealing with other people and organizational dynamics. So there are a lot of parallels. And the interesting thing is, we would kind of bucket negotiation and influence working with special or conventional forces into a few different categories. So one is a lot of work with units that we’re deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq a number of years ago. So they would engage in a lot of negotiations with local government and tribal leaders right and around a range of things, scheduling and conducting patrols, trying to get access to information, to deal with insurgents, trying to manage, you know, safety and everything else. And so there are those negotiations with local civilian government and leaders. There’s also always a component of negotiating with what they call partner forces. So you know, Afghan and Iraqi military and, you know, friendly militias and things like that. And so again, it’s a lot about – “Who’s going on patrol, who’s following who’s lead. And then a lot of those local forces, they don’t have the resources that the US government does. So there are always requests for money and resource’s, “Can we get night vision goggles, etc.” and we need this and that if you want our cooperation.  And then the other big category is negotiating with Department of State, civilian government agencies, embassy staff. And within whatever your local embassy is, you have your Chief of Station for CIA. And so a lot of times, and this was a big thing for the SEALs when they would want to go out in a mission, depending on whether there was a declared conflict or the situation on ground there are certain rules and laws governing the permission teams would need from the local embassy to execute a mission. So those, and a range of other kinds of interagency negotiations. And so the parallel back to corporate is these guys would generally say you would think dealing with like local governments or partner forces like in Iraq or Afghanistan, that that would be the harder thing. It’s like, no, it’s, it’s almost always the internal and interagency kind of stuff that’s actually harder. And that’s the pattern I’ve seen in the corporate world. 99% of the big like, multi-100 million dollar, multi-billion dollar negotiations I’ve been in the corporate side. People are negotiating with that supplier or that partner, or that whatever  – that in-license or that out-license partner, that’s hard, but the hardest thing to get that deal done is, we’ve gotta align internally, we’ve gotta herd a bunch of cats and align different stakeholders and executives on our side. We want different things. Someone wants a partnership with this company, but that company competes with a different business unit, and so that executive is like “over my dead body” and it’s those internal negotiation where you think, “Hey, we’re all on the same side here.”  “We’re all Americans” or “We all work at Company X” and it turns out that’s often harder to work through those differences. And I think part of it is an issue of expectations, right? When you’re negotiating with an external party, you’re like “Okay, we know the negotiation is going to be a little bit of a balance between common ground and differences.” And I think a lot of times internally, we expect, well, we’re all on the same side, so like “Why are you arguing with me?” And the larger the organization, the more organizations are not monolithic, right? So different groups and different departments – they’ve got their own budgets, their own priorities, their own missions, their own objectives, and there’s a lot of friction there. So that makes for no shortage of interesting work.

Will Bachman  11:40
Now, when I was at McKinsey, the most valuable week of training I’ve probably had in my entire life was at this thing called ILW initial leadership workshop, and where they the one week of that two-week session was really around influencing techniques and where they introduced me. I mean, for me, it was kind of my introduction to, it seems obvious now, but they talked about, they gave us this whole toolkit. And I think they had 12, you know, Cialdini and his book influence has, yeah, but we had about 12. And they, you know, had us sort of list that, list them out, and then we would go through a bunch of role-playing scenarios. So, yeah, legitimizing. That’s they say, oh, you know, the CEO wants this to be done, or the procedure requires it to be done. And logical persuading with data. And then we got into appealing to friendship. You know, Hey, come on, John, you give me a break here. Help me out and socializing, taking a consultative approach, where you get the other person to like, oh, you

Jonathan Hughes  12:43
You want engage people to help create the solution, more likely to support than if you just try to impose something from the outside of persuade, absolutely,

Will Bachman  12:52
yeah, and appealing to values, which was not an obvious one to me, which I ended up becoming one of my go-tos, where to your, you know, to your point earlier, like you’d sit down and say, hey, you know, someone doesn’t want to give you the data or something, and with a client, say, look, I think we both have the same goal here. We’re both trying to grow sales. So that was so helpful to me, to open my eyes to the there is a toolbox, and to be deliberate about what is the other person going to respond to? And so how do I just be thoughtful about selecting those tools? Tell me about how you would run this sort of training, and what sorts of tools would you be training the special forces or, you know, corporate or other kind of clients.

Jonathan Hughes  13:39
Yeah. So a lot of the things that you mentioned right, similar things. One thing, because you had mentioned a particular kind of data and being fact based. And I think, you know, those of us who are consultants, we have a special affinity to that kind of thinking. And I’ve done a lot of work with,, engineering teams and executives, and it was actually a lot of my evolution when I was back at Putnam, Hayes, and Bartlett, beginning of my career as an economic consultant. I’m just kind of wired to think that, all right, there’s a problem; figuring out the right answer is a matter of data and logic. And I did learn that the world is messy, it’s made up of people, it’s a little bit more complicated and messy than that. And there is a big element of persuasion and influence and getting people aligned around a common solution or decision that is kind of psycho-emotional. And so, I’m a believer.  I have done a bit of work here and there, alongside McKinsey but I have found there’s not just one answer. And fact-based negotiation, fact-based influence is critically important. Sometimes it is a matter of putting the right information in front of someone else in the right way, and they’re like “Oh, I see it differently. Now that’s persuasive.” A lot of times that’s not enough.  Understanding non-material kinds of issues: emotion, ego, psychological, all these other motivations and things that people care about is very powerful. You mentioned legitimacy. So coming out of the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project and Roger Fisher and some of that, I’ll use a different phrase that a colleague of mine introduced me to about 20 years ago “calling people to a higher purpose.” And you know, one of the things about human beings, who are very complicated, and most people are not devils, fortunately, but nor are they saints. There are a few of each of those running around, but most of us live somewhere in the messy middle. You know, people are very prone to self-deception and to fooling themselves and everything else, but there’s tremendous power in realizing that people also have a drive for psychological consistency, and that turns out to be a very powerful lever in influence and negotiation. One flavor of that, one could say, is the test of reciprocity. So I’m negotiating and trying to persuade someone, I think they’re being unreasonable, like just the question of “Hey, wait a second if, if you were in my position, would you agree to what you’re asking me to agree to?” And you know, sometimes people will say “Well, it doesn’t matter, because I’m not your position, and I have the power” but, for most people, it’s very uncomfortable to be confronted with that, and to actually have to explain why an unreasonable demand, why they’re asking for.  You know, there’s a certain class of people who like, don’t care about that. Most of them are under the age of two. It’s like “I want it because I want it.”  But asking “Why? Why is that fair? Why is that reasonable?” is very, very powerful. And again, when you can point out  “Look, I believe that you as my colleague, you as my customer, you as my supplier – we want what’s best for the end-customer, or we want a deal that’s fair. We don’t agree on all of it, but I think that I actually believe that you are a person of integrity, that you want a deal that’s fair, that is we, our companies, do business together in a way that’s sustainable.”  Right? And if you can, most people will say yes, and then if you can shift from I want, or demands and arguments into “All right, well, now we’re back to problem-solving. We don’t agree, but we’re aiming on trying to figure out something we can both agree to that is fair. And I’ve been involved in multi billion dollar negotiations where one side, on paper, kind of formally had all the power and made a demand that was unreasonable, and we went back and said “Hey, help us understand. We’re on this big construction contract. You’re asking for this massive upfront payment before you do anything. And the reality is, you are probably the only contractor who can build this new power plant or this new lab facility for us. So yeah, we, we really do need to do business with you, but we, we assume we’re going to work together. We want a reasonable partnership. So we don’t think this upfront payment demand is fair, but, but we don’t know what we don’t know, right? I’m not – once I start accusing them, I’m going to get defensiveness. So it’s like, where does that number come from? You’re asking for $500 million upfront. Why is it $500? Why is it not 100? Why is it not some other number? We’re going to have to go back and sell this, by the way, inside our company. So just help us understand. I remember doing one of these deals, and the team I was working with, they’re like “Well, the other side doesn’t care. They know we have no choice but to work with them.” And I’m like “OK, maybe that’s what they’ll say, but then we’re no worse off, so let’s see what they do. They came back, and they’re like “Well, there are all these long lead time items that we have to purchase when we’re starting to build this facility for you. And, blah, blah, blah. We got that back. We’re like “Okay.”  Well, they cracked the door open. So we did some back of the envelope stuff. We went back to them. We’re like “That, in principle, that’s totally reasonable. We’re just not getting your calculation, because our calculation for long lead time items is like, 10% of what you’re coming up with. And we again we didn’t say, “Oh, you’re lying. You’re trying to cheat us.”  We’re like “We just don’t understand and we all we want to do is understand, because we assume we both want what’s fair and reasonable. And so they came back, they’re like “Oh, this is wrong. You’re missing this, and you have no idea what you’re talking about, but we’ll go back and look at it.” And they came back a week later, and they’re like, “Fine, we’ll do it. We’ll reduce the upfront payment to what your calculation was, even though it’s too low and you don’t really understand.” And I had the opportunity to go back months later, as we worked together, and talk to some of the guys on the other side. They’re like, “Honestly, we just thought we could get it. And when that question came back, it was, like, really uncomfortable. We couldn’t justify it. Yeah, and we were actually kind of like “Oh, these guys, they’re on the ball. They know what they’re doing. And so it just felt like, fine, let’s get past it.”  And after that, dealings were much more, I would say, kind of reasonable, not that weren’t disagreements.  You know, this commitment to fairness doesn’t always work. There are people out there who are and, you know, there’s a formal class of people, sociopaths, who are generally impervious to that kind of social pressure. But for most of us, and it’s fascinating, you can look it up on YouTube, capuchin monkeys. You know that the experiment with the monkeys, so they’re monkeys. I’m not a big fan of monkeys in labs, but it happens, and hopefully they get a good life after they’ve gone through their experiments. But their research is that they train the monkeys to do some counting or moving of like little stones, and in exchange, they get, like, I forget what it is some kind of snack, like, it’s a cucumber or something. Well, so, yeah, it’s the first thing they get is something that’s not as good as a grape.

Will Bachman  21:11
Like, oh, right, right, right, right, right. Okay.

Jonathan Hughes  21:14
So then, so they, they train the monkeys to do it, and they give them a little bit, and then they start giving some of the monkeys for the same task, they start giving them grapes, and the monkey next to them is still getting, like, lettuce or carrots or whatever. This is how hard wired and deep in our evolutionary history, the guide to fair, the drive for fairness, is the monkeys who are not getting the grapes see the monkey next door getting the grapes, and they’re like, f this. That is not fair, and they throw their stuff back. They would rather have nothing. You know, I took economics and, you know, a number of economics courses at Harvard. I was like, Yeah, most people are not economists. Most people are not straight utility maximizers. It’s like, well, something’s better than nothing. Well, a lot of people would rather have nothing than be treated unfairly, and then you flip that around/ So not only do I want to be fairly treated by other people as well, but we also, unless we’re sociopaths, we want to be seen as reasonable and fair dealing by the people around us. And when, when you can confront people without attacking them or making them too defensive, with that dissonance between how they want to see themselves and be seen and their behavior, sometimes it unlocks, you know, a greater, greater flexibility – reasonableness to aim at something which, on the merits, makes sense, as opposed to every negotiation or conflict is just a matter of raw power.

Will Bachman  22:45
How has that conflict resolution training spilled over into other areas of your life? I can imagine that. Are you in relationships?

Jonathan Hughes  22:58
I mean, I’m a career consultant, so I do better giving the advice to others than incorporating it sometimes, but I try and, like I said, when I first encountered it was actually first reading Getting to Yes. I took a course in international diplomacy at Harvard, and, of course, in game theory. And so I, I learned some of these concepts academically. And then then I got into the real world at Putnam, Hayes and Bartlett. I was like “Oh, I can kind of see the relevance.” And then I went to CMI, and then Vantage Partners and started doing it. So hopefully, I have gotten better at, as the old dot.com saying goes, , eating some of my own dog food, or I have a client now talks about drinking their own champagne, which is a little bit more elevated. But, same thing.  That tends to be the work of a lifetime, like a lot of us get drawn to a career where we advise or teach or do something that we ourselves need to learn, and then hopefully, you start to incorporate that back into your own life over time.

Will Bachman  24:08
So hopefully, and after moving on from the Conflict Management Institute, semi, tell us how your practice has evolved, like what’s been your either industry or functional area that you’ve focused in you.

Jonathan Hughes  24:24
Yeah, I, I have never quite managed to focus, for better or worse in our age of hyper specialization. But, at Vantage over 24 years and then BDO, and then for whatever I do next, done a lot of work in life sciences and biopharma, a lot of work in energy, national resources, clients like Anglo American in mining that I did. I spent a couple of years essentially commuting back and forth, two weeks on, two weeks off, to South Africa. Doing a major transformation with Eskom, the state-owned utility there.  Done a lot of work at the intersection of software, financial services, data analytics. So not doing anything right now, but for good part of 13 years, was doing work all over the world with Equifax, the credit bureau.  Did work before the big breach years ago, and then during it, and then after again, a lot of that was on partnerships, negotiations, business arrangements with other credit bureaus like Experian, work with FICO, and that whole ecosystem, which many of us touch when we get mortgages, is fascinating. So the credit bureaus, the big three, compete against one another. They collaborate. They have very interdependent relationships and collaboration with FICO. They also compete. So again, a lot of my strategy work has been, the portmanteau is coopetition. This balance of, as you’re working with other companies, one day, you’re competing, the next year, collaborating in different parts of the market. How do you kind of keep all that straight and keep the competition principled, and keep it from leaking over and not affecting opportunities to work together to create value for customers and make money out in the marketplace.

Will Bachman  26:31
So outside of work, tell us a little bit about what, what, what’s been happening for you?

Jonathan Hughes  26:39
Yeah, well, until leaving BDO in July, I there was not a lot I was doing outside of work. Work has been a big focus of my life. I’m trying to remember how many years ago – my wife and I hooked up with some filmmakers in New York. And I’ve always had an interest in film, and a little bit of a creative side.  In some other life, I would do something more artistic. My job during at Harvard was, I was an usher at the American Repertory Theater. Amazing. So, yeah, but I’ve always like, you know, theater and film and everything else. So we hooked up with these filmmakers, and we were executive producers and got involved at the end of production, all the post-production stuff, a little documentary film. I think you can probably get it for 99 cents on Amazon or something else. It’s called The Cat Rescuers. And we followed really, these amazing people in Brooklyn who take care of feral or what’s called community cats. So, they’re homeless cats out there, and these people, they feed them, they try to trap them, spay and neuter them, to not perpetuate the situation – that was a great experience. I’m not working on any film projects now, but I hope to find another film thing to do at some point in the future.  And, lots of lots and lots of travel. I don’t know, 55 – 60 countries over the years. A lot of opportunity to tack on travel to business. I haven’t been scuba diving in a few years, but I’ve been diving in an awful lot of places, and I like it, and it’s a relaxing kind of thing to get under the water, just float around trying to think of what else. And I read a lot, and I write a lot. I, have not written a book yet, so I have no book to plug, but I’ve written, I think, four or five pieces for Harvard Business Review and a few for that other journal, the other school down on the other side of Cambridge, MIT Sloan Management Review, and California Management Review. And a lot of these on topics of negotiation, of influence, conflict management.  As well as other more pure business topics as well. So an artifact of lots of lots of time on planes. At some point, you’ve burned through all the movies and you can’t do it anymore, and so I took that time to write, and I’ve got extra time right now, so I’m working on a number of pieces that hopefully we’ll find a way to print at some point.

Will Bachman  29:38
Well, let’s if you can send me some links to some of your pieces, we’ll put those links in the show notes for listeners that want to check out your HBR and MIT

Jonathan Hughes  29:47
That would be great. I make no money from it, but you know, if you’re a writer, what you want is readers out there to read it. So I will definitely do that. And then that’d be great.

Will Bachman  29:58
amazing. Amazing. Tell us about any courses or professors you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you in some way.

Jonathan Hughes  30:08
Yeah, God, so philosophy was my concentration, and I feel eternally blessed to have been at Harvard during what was just a remarkable period for the philosophy department. And I will tell people like, arguably the best or at least one of the top couple philosophy faculties assembled in the western world in the last 2000 years. I mean, I was there for the last couple of years when John Rawls taught Theory of Justice.  The professor who probably had the biggest impact on me, he’s gone now, Stanley Cavell. So who else?  There was a course, and it’s kind of funny. I referenced it to someone recently, the other day, actually, in context of AI, which one cannot get away from AI these days.  Sometimes feels like no one can talk about anything else, but the course Thinking About Thinking which was, it was like a general course but offered by the Philosophy department – Stephen Jay Gould and Alan Dershowitz, and I think it was Robert Nozick, also – Anarchy, State, and Utopia, who was also on faculty then. It was this kind of broad survey course at the Science Center, a million people in it. But it was super fun. And they, looked at basic questions around free will and moral responsibility and a bunch of other topics through these different lenses of science and evolutionary biology – thank you, Steven Jay Gould – and the law and philosophy. And that was just a super fun course. I mean, there were so many others. I’m trying to remember who taught the course I took on international diplomacy – Andrew Moravcsik. But I still to this day, I continue to read and even reread a lot of philosophy books, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, one of my favorite books. So I continue to have nerdish reading habits. I do not read business books as a general rule. I did a little bit of work with Howard Raiifa at the very end of his career as well. So The Art and Science of Negotiation, but, but in general, I skew toward philosophy and science and then just novels, because I just find that more interesting than business books, even though I made my career doing business work.

Will Bachman  32:54
So what’s one of your favorite novels that you recommend?

Jonathan Hughes  32:59
Oh God, I should have prepared for that question, because the recall of….I wouldn’t know where to begin for favorites, but I’ll tell you what I some things I am reading or have recently read. So Daniel Mendelson. I’m reading a new translation of The Odyssey, which I think is fantastic. The last time I read The Odyssey was in high school, so that’s good to get reacquainted via new translation. I, for whatever reason, and probably for a bunch of reasons – I reread the Ursula K, LeGuin The Earthsea trilogy. And actually that was one of the things that I would say is a theme of those books, at least in my reading right now, is kind of the acceptance of what I would call human finitude, which was one of the themes in Cavell’s work, and something which it just, it hits me with a lot of resonance now, as one of the hot topics in AI and tech community is, human immortality, or transhumanism, or whatever. And so I put a post on LinkedIn recently where I just for fun, I put out 10 predictions for 30 years from now. And someone asked me “Oh, you didn’t say anything about, human longevity or whatever else. And yeah, I just have very mixed feelings about it. Healthy lifespans and everything else great, but this kind of obsession with, like, trying to achieve human immortality, I think has kind of a dark side. But anyway, just rereading, for those who are fans of Ursula K Le Guin, I love those books. Hadn’t read them for 10 or 15 years.

Will Bachman  35:04
Jonathan, there are places that people can find you online, where if they want to find out more about you’re doing.

Jonathan Hughes  35:11
Well, I would love to hear from anyone who remembers me (or doesn’t remember me), from back at Harvard, or anything else. I stay off social media more or less completely, except LinkedIn, I have accepted that from a business perspective, it’s kind of helpful to be on it, so I am I am findable on LinkedIn, but not on Facebook or Twitter/X or anything else, but I can definitely be found on LinkedIn.

Will Bachman  35:44
all right. Well, we will include your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, as well as one or two links to your HBr and MIT Sloan writing. Jonathan, it was so great to speak with you. Thanks for joining.

Jonathan Hughes  35:59
Thanks so much for having me. Great to talk to you as well. Thank you.

Jonathan Hughes  35:11

Well, I would love to hear from anyone who remembers me or doesn’t remember me, from back at Harvard, or anything else I stay off social media more or less completely, except LinkedIn, I have accepted that from a business perspective, it’s kind of helpful to be on it, so I am I am findable on LinkedIn, but not on Facebook or Twitter, x or anything else, but I can definitely be found on LinkedIn,

Will Bachman  35:44

all right. Well, we will include your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, as well as one or two links to your HBr and MIT Sloan writing. Jonathan, it was so great to speak with you. Thanks for joining. Thanks so much

Jonathan Hughes  35:59

for having me. Great to talk to you. Will. Thank you. Thank.