Divulging the Secret to Innovation With The Wall Street Journal’s Best-selling Author, Atif Rafiq

Atif Rafiq

Atif Rafiq is the Co-founder and CEO of Ritual, a software app allowing teams to collaborate, innovate, and problem-solve. Atif is recognized as the first Chief Digital Officer (CDO) of a Fortune 500 company. His book, Decision Sprint, made The Wall Street Journal’s bestseller list a week after its release. Atif’s 25 years in the digital industry allowed him to serve in various leadership roles at brands such as McDonald’s, Amazon, and Yahoo!. He graduated with his MBA in finance and marketing from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Atif Rafiq shares why he wrote Decision Sprint
How to confront and conquer the unknowns of innovation
Crafting your problem statement to kickstart your workflow
Why Atif was recruited for McDonald’s CDO position
Atif discusses ways to combat resistance to change
How scaling culture influences the work environment
The impact of AI from a managerial perspective — and the future of AI in the enterprise
Atif discloses his latest business venture: Ritual

In this episode…

The ability to innovate may appear as an innate gift few are born with, but that’s not true. It’s possible to develop skills in ingenuity — the question is where to start.

The power to distinguish your business from your competitor is embedded in confident decision-making. Strong leadership and a deep understanding of current trends can transform your company and revolutionize your industry. It’s not enough to have an innovative mind — you must also craft your problem statement and strategize your execution plan. Implementing a proven workflow can dictate the future of your business.

In this episode of The Cyber Business Podcast, Matthew Connor is joined by Atif Rafiq, Co-founder and CEO of Ritual to discuss how to combat the unknowns of innovation and the resistance to change. Atif also shares his experience as the CDO of McDonald’s, how scaling culture influences the work environment, and the impact AI has on managerial roles and enterprises. These principles are further discussed in his book, Decision Sprint, and reflected in his recent business venture: Ritual.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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Transcript:

Matthew	Hey, Matthew Conner here, host of the Cyber Business podcast, where we feature successful business leaders, top law firms, green energy companies and more. Today, we are joined by a man who was the first chief digital officer of a Fortune 500 company, which just so happened to be McDonald's is. And he's had an impressive career over the last 25 years leading companies like Amazon, McDonald's, Volvo and MGM Resorts.
Matthew	He's the author of the newly released book Decision Sprint Decision Sprint The New Way to Innovate into the Unknown and Move From Strategy to Action. Atif Rafiq Arif, welcome to the show.
Atif	It's a pleasure to join you, Matthew.
Matthew	All right, before we get too far into it, a quick word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by CyberLynx Star Combat Cyber L. What an ex-con. CyberLynx is a leader in providing managed I.T. and cybersecurity services to small and medium sized businesses nationwide. CyberLynx helps companies reduce costs, grow faster and get more done. If you're tired of waiting for it or just want increased productivity while reducing costs, check out CyberLynx.com.
Matthew	That's Cyber-L-Y-N-X.com. And now back to our show. Atif, so you've got this new book. Can you tell us about it?
Atif	Sure. So Decision Sprint is a book that's really about innovation. I've spent 25 years of my career working on innovation from a lot of different facets. Sometimes as the innovator, sometimes as a person who was managing teams of innovators and occasionally in very innovative companies, occasionally in companies that were really more traditional, and innovation was a new muscle for them.
Atif	So I've looked at it from a lot of different aspects, and I felt there was a little bit of a void in terms of the hardest part of innovating, which is how you start with the messy unknowns. Because once you have a bright idea, the next thing you realize often is that there's a lot more questions than answers and that can that can kind of work against moving in good ideas forward and in my experience, I've discovered and really implemented ways in which those unknowns do not make us stuck.
Atif	But we were able to take and make them actionable so we could actually take promising ideas forward. And I decided to write an entire book on how that works, both as a system and as a detailed set of workflows.
Matthew	Well, I got to tell you, so I absolutely loved it. I thought it was great. And I love how you you brought in, you know, all this. You've had a tremendous career already and, you know, and it's only been 25 years. And it's really I love how you bring in the stories and you apply it directly, which is is fantastic.
Matthew	So I want to touch base on on what you just said about about how you you deal with these unknowns, because I think that for so many people, the unknowns, whether you're starting a company, you're in a company, you're doesn't matter what it is. You've got all these unknowns and I think a lot of times it. Some might call it analysis paralysis.
Matthew	I think it debilitates a lot of people. And, you know, and you've got some good good kind of systems in place. Can you? Let's just take a person through it just from the top place. How? I've got all these unknowns. What do I do? Where do I start? What do you do? How do you how do you deal with that?
Atif	Well, I have a mantra which is exploration before alignment. And I use this mantra and companies because we often are rushed to solution ing or trying to get started by building something. It could be a prototype. It could be a plan, an execution plan. And what we really shortchange is this process of exploration, which is where we give a home to the unknowns and we take action on them.
Atif	And the way to do that is sounds very simple, but it actually starts with a good list of questions. And if I had a team that met with me around a bright idea and said, we want to take a week just to make sure that we develop a great list of questions that we need to get to the bottom of.
Atif	And in this week, we won't have any answers, but we'll all we'll just surface the right questions and we'll feel very good that these questions help us avoid any blindspots. And they are the most relevant things to get to the bottom of. I would be delighted. I would be delighted. I would tell that team every single instance. Yes, please.
Atif	To use the week to go do that. Because once you develop, you know, a high quality question list and I'll explain more about how that works and how to get there. And then you start to get to the bottom with some answers to the best of the team's ability. Then there's a very high chance that the team will be drawing the right conclusions and putting the most of the best recommendations on the table.
Atif	Where we have pitfalls and organizations is where there's a rush to solutions. Maybe we put our judgment into it to color things before we've really explored or understood what we actually need to explore. Those things work against innovation because they just they actually just don't create enough clarity for people to be confident about taking the idea forward. So the way it works is broken the methodology up into three pieces.
Atif	The first is exploration. The second is alignment. And then third, it's decision making. And just to go a little bit deep on exploration, that's actually a phase of the work where basically you make a concerted effort to sell to surface the right considerations, especially the unknowns, and get to the bottom of that of those. And you do that through developing a great question list and on the basis of the answers you get from that exploration is when you move on to the process of alignment, which is drawing conclusions and seeing if the stakeholders around the organization agree with those conclusions.
Atif	Usually when you run a good exploration, that alignment is much easier and if you have alignment, then you're ready for the third phase, which is decision making, which boils down to committing to the necessary actions that you're actually going to put into your execution plan. So at a high level, it's these three phases of exploration alignment and decision making.
Atif	This is what teams spend weeks and months doing when they have a big idea and they want to get a company to commit to it. And I thought it was important to break it down. And in the book, I actually break it down further into 13 specific workflows.
Matthew	Yep. Absolute. Okay. I tell you what. When you say the 13 specific workflows, obviously that's a little much too detail. But when you say workflows, kind of can you give us an idea what that looks like and what that really means?
Atif	Sure. I mean, let's say that there's a bright idea. One of the very first things we need to do when we're collaborating on an idea is to craft the problem statement because people are trying to solve for different objectives. You know, you're not really going to get the support and alignment that you need across the organization. So crafting a problem statement is a very good place, place to start.
Atif	You know, if you're let's say you're Netflix and, you know, you know, there's a lot of password sharing. Well, what is the objective? Is it to crack down on it or is it to balance the needs of the customer with the commercial needs to actually be fair to everybody? It's probably more of the latter than the former. But if you framing it in one way or the other, you're probably going to come up with different, you know, recommendations.
Atif	And if there's you know, if you discover downstream that you were you kind of were going down the wrong rabbit hole and you're probably going to suffer, it's probably going to stall, you going to have fits and starts. So when I say workflow, I mean very specific steps, if you will, the first of which is passing a problem statement to guide the work.
Matthew	Okay. So let me ask you this. Speaking of questions, because I think it's really I think far too often people, they expect that, oh, I'm just supposed to, you know, make a quick decision and move. You know, better to have, you know, a decision whether it's right or wrong and move move forward. And I think they that that question asking muscle kind of atrophies.
Matthew	Right? We're never really asking questions because kids grow up and they go through school and they're trying to learn stuff. And a lot of kids don't even ask questions in school. And then and so I like that you take that that perspective because it's that exploration and asking the questions that I think is so important. So I want to ask a question here.
Matthew	You know, the your McDonald's story, it was it was fantastic. And I just love to hear it, you know, straight from you, because it you tell it in the book. But I'd love to get at it in your own words because it's just, you know, on the geek side, a fantastic such a huge undertaking. And I just love to hear the story from you.
Atif	Sure. I mean, the back story is that I was transitioning from Amazon to McDonald's. And so in the year 2013, you know, McDonald's was not doing great as a business. It essentially flatlined sales and it was looking for new ways to grow. And it had identified, you know, a couple ways that could that could kind of revive the company.
Atif	And digitization was to the credit of the CEO, something he put his finger on as something that that could be one of those growth drivers. And so then his next line of thinking was, well, I need to go to either Google Amazon or, let's say at that time Facebook and pull someone pretty senior out of there to lead the charge.
Atif	So I was the person that was sort of tapped on the shoulder for that role. And I made the the move from Amazon. And mind you, I had built my entire career in pure play and native technology companies. So that was the culture I was accustomed to. And now coming into McDonald's, which is a great company and iconic company in and of itself, but culturally extremely different, mainly because, you know, it's so successful that you kind of, you know, you don't really you try and do the same things a little bit better as opposed to do new things.
Atif	So that was the recipe, if you will, to keep, you know, McDonald's growing into the future. And as a Fortune 500 company, you know, doing the same things a little bit better will help you get, you know, 5% more growth year over year, which is sort of what how that kind of company works versus, let's say, Amazon, where 5% is like, oh, my gosh, you're fired.
Atif	It is. It's more like 50% or 500%. Right? It's more it's it's brand new space, brand new territory. So the reason I mention this backdrop is because the little did I know I was writing the cultural fault line of these, a cultural fault line of a situation where, you know, innovation was was sort of the norm versus innovation was something a little bit unfamiliar but at the same time badly needed.
Atif	Right. So that made my job really hard because it wasn't about coming up with the right ideas that wasn't good enough. It was also about getting people on board with those ideas, which is much more about culture than it is about the merits of the idea. So some tips around that, you know, which which helped me. One is to speak in familiar terms.
Atif	So, you know, any kind of jargon or slogan or tech talk, you know, that I didn't I tried not to do much of that, but I tried to speak in familiar terms. So, for example, I would say McDonald's is a great company and a global leader because it's really about three things taste, value and convenience. And it's the third thing around convenience, which we've always known and we want to make sure we own for the next 50 years.
Atif	And how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to invent new ways of using McDonald's. That's where digitization fits in. When you speak in this way, you know, you make people very comfortable because you're not trying to upset the Apple card. You're just trying to take something that's very familiar to the heritage of the company and modernize it and who can be on board with that.
Atif	And so I would go out with that sort of elevator pitch from the board of directors through, you know, sort of my peers in the C-suite and then enable my team members to go out there in the field with that same idea and that that's sort of settled. People like, okay, let's let's see what these specific ideas are.
Atif	And so from there now you can get the business on launching some of your major initiatives, whether that's something like delivery or, you know, mobile order and pay to things that have scale that McDonald's like getting rid of lines and moving people towards kiosks where they do a self-service order and the food is brought to them at a table.
Atif	Those new models didn't exist before I arrived, but working with a lot of smart people, we were able to get those things into the McDonald's customer experience.
Matthew	Know. You know, I think part of the brilliance there is that I think that people see that all day, every day, that that sort of resistance to change. And and a lot of people just chalk it up as, oh, people are afraid of change. They don't people don't like change. But I think I think you you have a really great example of of that's not necessarily true.
Matthew	That's not what holds people back. I think what what stunts it a lot and I think your story and your approach to that, what was so brilliant about that is it it says, Hey, look, if you're coming at it from their perspective, what they're comfortable with and helping to to take their story forward, how do we, you know, do that versus, hey, I'm the new guy or I've got this great new idea and trying to shove that down people's throats, which I think people often do, then they're met with, with resistance, because what's been working has been good and who we are.
Matthew	Everybody wants to be a part of a team, part of a culture, and you come in there and try to disrupt it. No, no, that's not going to work it out. You're not part of the team. Right? But you came in and we're like, Hey, I'm part of the team and here's how the team moves forward. And I think if people apply those same sort of things and like how big or small the team is, that same level, that same approach, you take that resistance and you turn it into cooperation.
Matthew	And that was just such a brilliant tactic. I mean.
Atif	Is that brilliant or a survival mechanism? But I mean, I think that, you know, in the end it means you need the collective intelligence of the organization, because any given idea, it's impossible to really develop that idea and executed from one corner of the company. It just doesn't work that way. Right. For McDonald's to get into any forms of needed service models of what I call them.
Atif	You needed operations. You need technology, you need marketing. I mean, you need you need to collect the brain of the organization to be solving problems and figuring out how you, you know, address these problems. So you actually ship something simple and easy and frictionless for the customer. And so you need to invite people into the problem solving effort without becoming bureaucratic, which is the whole art and science of of itself.
Atif	And actually, I do believe that the book provides that sweet spot of not veering towards bureaucracy because we don't like that we need lean teams, but also not doing autonomous innovation that causes resistance because you haven't evolved enough of the organization.
Matthew	I totally agree. I think that that's a great takeaway. And you know, it's surprising because your book is so, so new, but it's getting some pretty good traction. Yeah.
Atif	So today I'm happy to share that the book is hit The Wall Street Journal bestseller list in its first week. So enjoying some, you know, some great books out there on the top ten list. So I look forward to, you know, hopefully this is just the start of a movement where we're moving towards more purposeful innovation. I mean, we're in an environment where every CEO is talking about wanting more from their teams.
Atif	Today I learned Shopify did a 20% headcount reduction. You know, every CEO is talking about anymore more out of their organizations on their workforce. So we're kind of in a tumultuous time. I got to be honest with you, because we need innovation more than ever. These companies are not going to, you know, beat their expectations until unless they innovate and introduce new things.
Atif	But at the same time, they need their people to be on board and they need new ways of working that that sort of unlock that innovation. So I'm hoping to make a small contribution to that.
Matthew	Well, I think your book does that and congratulations. I mean, that is note no small feat. So congrats just one week out and already on the Wall Street Journal list. That's that's fantastic. So no, and I think it's great that you've got that recognition because I think what I really like about this that your your book is that you do such a good job of of relaying that.
Matthew	And I think all too often, especially in tech, you know, we we look at people like like the Elon Musk not to, you know we love the guy. It's a great mind. But I don't I don't get this and I don't know but I don't get the same, you know, feeling of, you know, cooperation from the team. I'm not sure that's necessarily his leadership or or team approach to things.
Matthew	He gets great results still got be wrong but I think you know when you take even existing companies and even new companies, I like the approach that you've that you've laid out here and I think it works for people beautifully. So I'd be surprised if it's if it doesn't land up there with the, you know, kind of seven habits kind of level of of things on the on the business side.
Matthew	So congratulations. That's that's well done.
Atif	Thank you so much. And I'm glad you mentioned Elon because, you know, there is the rare case of a founder, you know, visionary savant. But that's like an artist, right? Like it's it's very rare and for the rest of us mere mortals, we need a system.
Matthew	So.
Atif	You know, at some point Elon won't be there. And so, you know, one of the things I really respect about Jeff Bezos having worked at Amazon is that I think from the beginning he was very intentional about scaling culture. And so what does that mean? That means he's not in the room, but you're kind of thinking like Jeff.
Atif	And not that Jeff is the only and the only way to think is to think like Jeff. But obviously it's pretty effective to think like like Jeff Bezos and Skilling culture is there for, you know, something. You have to put a lot of time and energy to so that when you're not in the room, you know, teams are like really high quality problem solving.
Atif	And that's where you can get into all kinds of crazy spaces from grocery to pharmaceutical to, you know, entertainment and really have a pretty high hit rate of your innovation, which is, I think what makes him as different from the other tech giants is that their hit rate of innovation is is pretty good. They don't always win. Sometimes it's support their number of flops they've had.
Atif	But I think there's just less waste, to be honest with you as probably because the culture problem solving has has scaled whereas in the other case where you mentioned you kind of just trust me line and then.
Matthew	Yeah, and that's all well and good, that's fantastic. But you can't scale. Elon Right. I mean he's already, there's just one of him. Whereas you know, being able to, to put in a system that that allows you to scale, you know, your, your corporate culture, your people, that's really what businesses need. It's great when you can find an line, but they're, you know, once in a lifetime.
Matthew	I wouldn't even say once in a generation. We're like lucky if it's a once in a lifetime kind of deal. But, you know, speaking of innovation, at the near the end of the book, you you start talking about some of the tools that that that companies can use. And there's a few things I want to touch base on.
Matthew	But let's first start with with your take on on AI. And, you know, I know it's kind of all the all the rage right now and for good reason. You know, from a managerial perspective, how do you see it? What what should managers be doing thinking? How's what's what's the future hold here?
Atif	And I think generally I, I, I look at it as a bar raiser for the work of teams. So it's a companion. And what I mean by all this is essentially I mean, let's say a team is chartered with an initiative. You give them two weeks to go figure things out, come back with a recommendation. Right. It's very typical stuff in a company.
Atif	Well, now they come and they put their recommendations on the table. Often what you're trying to do is poke some holes as a leader and say, well, walk me through how you arrive at these recommendation, this kind of thing, and you start asking them questions. Right? What we want to make sure is that the questions the team explored, that there were none, that, you know, that they left, that they didn't verify, could have been raised or answered by, let's say, chat CBT or Bard, where, you know, there's different information coming back that, for example, revealed a blind spot, that wouldn't be a good thing.
Atif	So if I was the leader and I separately went into barter or in chat CBT and asked it some questions and said, well, maybe you should think about X or Y, and then the teams recommendation. I said, Well, how do you think about X or Y? And they were like, We didn't really think about X or Y. That wouldn't be a good thing.
Atif	So in this scenario, what I'm trying to paint a picture of is using a I generally VII as sort of a tool to help you get to the first draft of the right questions and considerations you should be factoring in to your work. You know, you really need to be able teams need to be able to do that, and I think that's coming.
Atif	And so I think that's kind of getting to first base. But if you really want around the bases where we're going with A.I. in the enterprise, it's huge actually, because GBBN works on the public domain, right? It's 4 billion Web pages. But what is the knowledge in the company that's here on the whiteboards in people's heads and the PowerPoints, emails and slacks?
Atif	You know, that is actually the real enterprise repository that you want to point generative A.I. at. So imagine if every PowerPoint was sucked into some data lake or something like that. Then you point generative A.I. at it and you bring it to a meeting and you ask it, What do we know about X or Y? It? And that is the that's sort of like the old term we used to have like 35 years ago, which is knowledge management.
Atif	Remember that one? Yeah, it's sort of resurgent I think now.
Matthew	Sure, absolutely.
Atif	So I see Enterprise as being a thing which is maybe even going to dwarf the Chad Djibouti on the before billion public Internet pages thing, because companies have a lot at stake. It's their intellectual capital, it's their thinking, it's their ideas. They're going to want to protect it and secure it. I think that's going to be pretty big and is going to be a way to interact with that knowledge.
Atif	Basically.
Matthew	I think that's going to be huge and of great value to me, to the enterprise where it's it's a massive repository of of of knowledge, of information That's it's all out there now. Well in there hopefully in the, you know enterprises, you know eco system and to have it you know, able to answer questions using that that's invaluable that's going to be a huge I couldn't agree more now speaking of teams, I hear you've got a new venture on the on the horizon.
Matthew	Can you tell us about that?
Atif	Sure. So I've launched a product called Ritual. It's a collaboration app for teams you could find as a ritual dot work and the main idea here is that, you know, when people read a book like mine, they're like, Oh, we like this way of innovating, we like this way of problem solving. And they go, Well, read your book and we'll change how we do our meetings.
Atif	And that's great. But the easiest way is to use software workflows. So I almost couldn't resist, you know, the idea of creating a product to enable, you know, this way of innovating and problem solving. So that's what ritual does. And it does feed into this larger idea of enterprise AI, because when we talked earlier about, well, the teams are brainstorming, deep diving and problem solving, but it's on whiteboards, it's hidden, it's in emails and slack and everything.
Atif	If you start to use a workflow for it, well, guess what? All that's that will feed these data lakes. And then, you know, you can sign your licensing deal with a WAC or Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. That's not what I do for a living and use their AI and point at it and then start to say what knowledge that we have and the company is heard and is that knowledge?
Atif	But the only way to actually begin to learn this hidden information around problem solving, thinking, innovation and move it from hidden and not hidden is through using some type of software tool, which is kind of a ritual fits into that layer. So I recently started the company with my co-founder Mike, Mike Bo, who's one of the first employees at Facebook.
Atif	He's a great co-founder. And you know, we're on the founder path.
Matthew	Fantastic. Well, we do love founder stories. You kind of hit hit at it, you know, a little bit there. But can you give us the story? I mean, you know how it came to be, What you know, you started out it was it went from how do you go from idea to actual product creation, You know, first employee, the real founder story, the juice.
Matthew	I know and I know it's early on but I'd love to hear the the story.
Atif	Well, about three years ago I was inspired and I started to build we started to build software. So we built something for decision making where it was a very easy tool for companies or for any team to say like, Oh, what's the you know, what should the decision be? And it sort of help them do that. And we built them.
Atif	We were pretty excited about it. So we shared it with a very famous venture capitalist, Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz. So I had a meeting with Ben and he he kind of clued me into something was I liked, you know, this good, but I don't think you're going to have a lot of mainstream usage because how often do companies actually make a decision?
Atif	It's pretty infrequent. It's like, you know, every month or every quarter. So that got me thinking, okay, if I need to solve for daily engagement with users because venture capitalists want to fund those kind of products and maybe I missed something, which is it's not about the decision itself. It's about all the work leading up to the decision.
Atif	And I know from managing teams that that's what they spend weeks and months on and and they dig they have daily usage over those weeks and months over this whole flow of like starting with we have no clue of what we're going to recommend to coming up with those recommendations. So then I shifted the company to focus on this part, which I call upstream, and it's actually a word I use introduce in the book.
Atif	So this rejection by Ben, it wasn't a rejection, it was like a I wasn't really pitching, I was asking for feedback. But he kind of gave me the feedback on either, which is, Hey, you need to kind of pivot and solve for a different workflow. You're you kind of at the end of it when they ready to make the decision.
Atif	So that was great because I spent the whole 18 months shifting the product development toward, towards that part. So that's, that's one one. Use the founder story, which I found which I found pretty pretty helpful, but it kind of put us on the right track. I guess the second one real quick would be that we got we got some API patents two years ago and a lot of people thought we were kind of a little nuts where it's just way ahead.
Atif	Like how is A.I. going to affect decision making companies? So you just can't script this stuff and like the way it's turning out now where we may actually may be in the right position at the right time, You know, let's see. You know, it says you just can't script this stuff as a founder.
Matthew	That's great. So at this point, with ritual, is this something people can go and get and integrate into their Microsoft teams now or what? What stage we're.
Atif	So it's for any team in any company and they can go download the app. There's a version up on our website right now, but in 30 days. So let's say June 1st and we're going to have our our kind of our beta released to the public. And in that release, any team can take it down and start using it, meaning it'll be in one of the app stores.
Atif	And so it'll be very easy for someone to, you know, download it, invite a couple of other collaborators and kind of get going with a lot of these processes and workflows around exploration, for example.
Matthew	Very cool. All right. Let's see. We do like to ask all of our guests before they leave, you know, if there are and you've got a lot of kind of great stories in your book, but if there's a mentor that you you'd like to give a shout out to, if by all means the floor is yours.
Atif	Sure, I will pick Haakon Samuelson, who's Swedish. He is the former CEO and president Volvo. He ran the company for ten years. He is. He was a CEO up until like two or three months ago. So he literally just transition. And I really connected with him. And he I think he is really defines kind of a modern CEO because he's he's what I call an upstream CEO.
Atif	I mean, he has he's very quotable, by the way. He's very hilarious. He's we learn a lot from him. But the main thing is, you know, he's so deeply curious and he's ready to roll up the sleeves with the teams and and not just manage outcomes, you know? And I've had been with CEOs who tell me things like, Oh, my job is to pick the right people and hold them accountable.
Atif	Wrong. That's like two days in a month of work. What are you doing for the other 28? I kind of is that kind of CEO who is there as a partner to help you think through, you know, the hard questions and, you know, help calibrate how you're thinking about the problem and doesn't tell you what to do and still gives you the space and still manages the 80 other things he's doing.
Atif	But he will create that safe space for for the thinking partnership. And any CEO who's thinking, oh, I just have to pick the right people and fire them or promote them based on results is kind of missing this work in the middle where teams need your help. They're craving for, you know, your you know, for you to be a thought partner.
Atif	So I give my shout out to him.
Matthew	And tastic and before we head out can you tell people where they can find your book and where they can find out about rituals again.
Atif	Perfect. Thank you so much. So I have a website. It's called decision sprint dot com on decision sprint dot com. There's links to get the book from any bookstore that you prefer. There is a link for ritual, which is the software product and there's also a link for my newsletter. Link is one of the top 20 on LinkedIn globally and it's called Rewire and you'll find the link there.
Atif	And that's where I sort of about my own leadership on whatever is top of mind at the moment.
Matthew	Oh, fantastic. Well, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show today and and I just appreciate you coming out.
Atif	I appreciate your time, Matthew. It's been great.
Matthew	I thank you. All right. And.