All right. Well, welcome everyone back to you've been heard. We got Ken Widener on.

And we have a list of bullet points to talk about today. But I was having a lot of fun reading your squeaky wheel article or posed here on LinkedIn.

So I think we should start with some true value and add that to the show before we get started because I found it to be very profound.

Yet we always hear like the squeaky wheel gets the grease and I actually give

that as advice but I think the foundation of the show is when IT leaders rise so

does everything else and more people should be listening to IT it's not the

separate department right IT is the business.

And I think IT leaders, for the most part, tend to be making decisions in a way that would be

hasty. I would say the good leaders are less hasty, right? So this idea of the leadership paying attention to what's loudest, I think, is relevant when it comes to AI and things that are going on in the space as far as advice that you would give to the C-suite or leadership.

But maybe you can speak for a few minutes on this concept of the squeaky wheel and how our society is plagued with it via social media, hype scales, marketing.

And how does that affect business and affect the IT world?

Yeah. And so it's called availability bias, right? And the concept is that whatever is most memorable, we tend to overvalue. And to your earlier point, it can be a really good tactic, right? I mean, if you speak loud enough and you make enough noise, right, somebody's going to listen to you. And so if your goal is to get your voice heard and have somebody take action,

the best thing you can do is just get in their face and, like you said, text them a million times or whatever, right? That's marketing. I mean, that's marketing's job. That's marketing's job to be heard more than everybody else. Sometimes the person that's just up in your face all the time is the one that ends up, oh, yeah, I remember that guy. but I forgot the other guy.

Yeah, exactly.

But it can be dangerous in various different aspects of leadership.

And as we get close to the year end, and I know, you know, some leaders are working on like

their employee evows, right? You've worked with these, you know, team members for an

entire year. And then in the last week, somebody issues a complaint about somebody or perhaps that

team member was late to a meeting. And that's what's most memorable. And so then as you're writing

that employee eval, right, you kind of forget about all the other good things that that person did

and you're stuck remembering that one bad thing or vice versa.

Maybe they were an underperformer for the year, right? And then all of a sudden they knocked something out like a rock star in the last couple of weeks. And so then you over inflate the eval.

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