Episode #269:
Seth Carpien, Chief Growth Officer at Tricon Infotech, and Misti Fragen, VP of Change Management and Digital Transformation at Tricon Infotech, explore why trust must come before selling in modern B2B environments. They explain how leaders who invest time in building authentic relationships create stronger opportunities for collaboration, long-term partnerships, and sustained growth across industries. Their discussion highlights how genuine engagement, community building, and human connection allow organizations to develop meaningful credibility that influences buying decisions and strengthens professional networks over time.
“Be comfortable building relationships first and building trust first. You can design strategies and frameworks all day long, but in the end you still have to go out, invest the time, and put in the work required to develop real relationships.” – Seth Carpien
In this episode, Seth and Misti unpack why trust is not a soft idea in B2B growth, but a practical advantage that shapes buying decisions, strengthens executive relationships, and creates long-term opportunities. They share how authentic engagement, consistency, and community building help leaders move beyond transactional selling and build lasting credibility.
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[Transcript]
[00:00:05] Steve MacDonald: Welcome to the C-Suite Sales and Marketing Perspectives podcast. I am Steve MacDonald, your host. We have a very dynamic duo on the podcast here today. We have, from Tricon Infotech, the Chief Growth Officer, Seth Carpien, and I am not going to get this right. It is so big and so important, VP of Change Management and Transformation, Misti Fragen.
[00:00:29] Steve MacDonald: So there is a lot of brainpower in the room here today, and we are going to be talking about something that we do not talk about enough. I think every executive in the B2B industry would say we all know we live and operate in a relationship-based business. But then, how do we transform that? How does that actually inform what we do internally? How does it inform our go-to-market strategy? And then with that, relationships, how are relationships based on trust?
[00:01:00] Steve MacDonald: So we are going to talk about a trust-first advantage in modern B2B growth. And both of you embody and live this. Seth, you have had an incredible career, which I read all about in your book, Mentors. Thank
[00:01:14] Seth Carpien: You. Thank you. There we go.
[00:01:18] Steve MacDonald: It is going on my door, which, by the way,
[00:01:21] Seth Carpien: I love it. I love it. The first two books were bought. I love it. Fantastic.
[00:01:26] Steve MacDonald: I get a lot of books sent my way, and yes, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Oh, thank you. You wrote it from the perspective of just what it felt like going through it. I felt like I was there with you. There is so much to learn from that book.
When you and I first got together, and we talked about coming onto the podcast, we just had a mind note. We could get hit over the head on trust and how important it is, and it can be one of those words that is like value, right? It just gets used so often that it gets lost in the fray, and we all nod our heads and say, “Yes, trust is really important,” and then we just go on with our day, right?
[00:02:04] Steve MacDonald: Forrester, this last year in their predictions, said trust is the currency, right?
[00:02:09] Steve MacDonald: That is what makes the difference between getting into the deal and closing the deal. That is how important it is. And they went so far as to say, look, we have brand-building programs, we have demand generation programs, we have change programs, we do not have trust programs.
[00:02:24] Steve MacDonald: They called it the number one thing that we need to do. We are going to try to really unpack that here today. Misti, before I let both of you explain a little bit more about your background, I do not know how you got to be VP of Change Transformation and Management from being in the NBA as a publicist and handler, but you have a real desire and curiosity about how we take humans and human design and bring that into the business world. I would love to turn it over to you both for a couple of minutes to explain more about your background before we get started.
[00:03:00] Misti Fragen: Awesome.
[00:03:01] Seth Carpien: Great.
[00:03:03] Seth Carpien: Misti, you first?
[00:03:04] Misti Fragen: You nailed it, honestly, Steve. I really do have curiosity about myself, and I honestly think that is why, in my career, now I have this very long title, which we are still curious about what that means on a day-to-day basis, but
[00:03:15] Seth Carpien: We are looking to add more to it at some point.
[00:03:17] Misti Fragen: Absolutely. It is alphabet soup at this point. In my background, I have sat in enterprise-wide organizations, but I have also been a small business owner, so I have seen both sides of the coin. I also worked for the NBA and NFL very early on in my career, but there has always been something instinctual about what I have done. It has never been something that is just run-of-the-mill. And if anybody knows me, Seth, you can keep your mouth shut because I am sure you will say it, but there is nothing run-of-the-mill about me either.
[00:03:43] Misti Fragen: So very early on in my career, as I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, Seth talks about this in his book about job versus career. I wanted to not do what everybody else did, and in the day, they called it internal communications as I was coming up through the ranks, but that encompassed everything.
[00:03:59] Misti Fragen: As I continued through my career, I was very fortunate to have leaders in product and technology and other areas of the organization who saw something different. I could not only come in and write communications for leaders all day with my eyes closed, but one thing I could do was study the elements of people and look at how to build a culture within an organization that was part of the macro culture of an enterprise, but also the microculture of what those teams were doing.
[00:04:25] Misti Fragen: That would encompass everything from learning and development, to change management, to communications, to onboarding, culture, and engagement. I have really made the bulk of my career studying that and bringing that to other leaders in other organizations, not only internally with them but also externally. If someone is rolling something out or there is a reorganization, how can I go in and immerse myself in helping them do it successfully?
It is something I am extremely passionate about. It is really nice because one thing I am able to do working alongside Seth is to bring that expertise even in a business development mindset, because it is still relationship building, it is still studying people, and I am able to bring that element in.
[00:05:08] Steve MacDonald: I love that. I love it. Seth, your turn.
[00:05:11] Seth Carpien: Wow. Such a defined direction in her career, and what Misti has wanted to do, has really been consistent as long as I have known Misti. What she has been doing has been very consistent. On the other hand, you have me, who looks like a mutt when it comes to my business career.
[00:05:30] Seth Carpien: I have had a lot of jobs and career paths that may have changed throughout my business life. But I think the one thing that has been consistent for me throughout my path, having been in sales, finance, and technology, owning a restaurant at one point, and then moving into product and running product for large organizations, is that I have always maintained a desire and a need to grow, learn, and understand the best ways to build relationships and networks.
[00:06:13] Seth Carpien: That has always been consistent throughout my career. I have learned the wrong way several times, and I have learned the right way. What I have seen is that it has blossomed into business relationships that have become personal, allowing me to continue to grow.
I really do find that it has also made me into the leader I am today, not just from the book, where I am trying to share what I have learned with many different people. As a leader, I am continually sharing my learnings with the team so we can help them grow.
[00:07:00] Seth Carpien: I think that is one thing. While I may have one perspective and Misti may have another perspective, which is chapter 17 in the book, by the way,
[00:07:01] Misti Fragen: The best chapter there.
[00:07:03] Seth Carpien: The best chapter, as she always says. That is the one piece that we both rely on and believe in. We want to continuously learn and grow, and make sure the team we work with is learning and growing as well. It has been a great path.
[00:07:18] Seth Carpien: At this point.
[00:07:19] Misti Fragen: It has been a path.
[00:07:21] Steve MacDonald: Now it is time for us to absorb all of that wisdom. Seth, in our conversation before, you framed something so simply and eloquently that I wanted to start the podcast with it. Now you are probably thinking, what was that. What you said is that it is more important for them to know us and trust us than for them to know what we do. Once they know us and trust us, it is important for them to know what we do. To your point, you told me a story I would love for you to recount about being in a prospect’s office, where the gentleman looked at you and said, “What do you do?”
[00:08:02] Seth Carpien: What do you do again, right?
[00:08:03] Steve MacDonald: But you had built up so much trust that you were there and had the meeting. Tell us a little bit about this idea of knowing and trusting first, and then knowing what we do. Why in that order? Because we try to flip it all the time.
[00:08:16] Seth Carpien: We do, and we do try to flip it. I think it is interesting that Forrester is now saying that we need to earn trust. Frankly, my entire career, because I started in the financial services industry, I learned very early on that in order to get someone to give you their money to invest, they had to trust you. So it was all about getting to know someone, or having a referral, or whatever those things may be. Then they would give you the money. If they knew you or someone knew you, or whatever that path was, they had to trust you.
[00:08:53] Seth Carpien: So when I started doing what we do now, I was with another company years ago, which was acquired very quickly within the first year. I spent eight years at that company. Within the first year, I realized I had nothing tangible to sell. I was selling trust. I was essentially saying you need to believe me that my company will deliver what we promise. It is a service, not a product.
[00:09:18] Seth Carpien: It hit me at that point. I realized that I had to build and earn that trust first. Then I could ask difficult questions. I could get them to sit down with me and talk about their problems. But until then, it is transactional and commoditized, and that is not how you build a successful business, in my opinion. I have been selling trust for years, and I really hope that many people listening to this podcast are not relying on Forrester to tell them it is time to do that. I hope they have already been doing it.
[00:09:54] Steve MacDonald: So here is a question, Misti. I would love for you to take this one. Traditionally, we built trust by proving what we could do for you. We deliver, then package it as a case study. By the way, there was a great study that came out a couple of years ago that 74% of B2B buyers do not believe the customer evidence that we present to them.
[00:10:15] Steve MacDonald: And then the most recent LinkedIn Edelman Trust Barometer, 68% of 32,000 respondents worldwide said that they think that we, as business leaders, are being intentionally misleading. Intentionally misleading. No matter what our values or morals are, or whether we put trust in relationships first, we are lumped into the B2B world.
[00:10:40] Steve MacDonald: Which is why B2B buyers are waiting longer and longer to even want to talk to us. How do we build trust in that environment?
[00:10:48] Misti Fragen: I think, to me, it is simple. The reason that is, is because people are too focused on the end result. They are focused on the dollar and the sale. They are not focused on the journey of how that gets there. If you actually start and focus on the journey and the beginning, and you are not focused on the dollar amount at the end, because if that is all you are focused on, you are never looking at the actual person.
[00:11:07] Misti Fragen: You are never actually looking at the relationship, the company, or the difference that you are going in there to make. If you are focused on that, that is when trust builds more and more, every single time. We see this every day. That was a funny story that happened, where somebody did look at us, and I was like, what do you guys even do? But we are sitting in their office.
[00:11:23] Misti Fragen: They are buying us, right? They are buying us. They are buying like, hey, Misti and Seth have been there for all these months, or for the last year and a half, helping connect me to this, talking to me about this, providing this, just guidance on whatever. At the end of the day, if there is something, they were never focused on just getting a deal with me. In fact, they never even talked to me about what that was going to be. But you know what, when I said that my daughter was going to go to X, Y, Z college, they said, oh, we have somebody who graduated from there. Let us connect the two of you.
[00:11:52] Misti Fragen: That is the stuff that matters. That is the journey. You cannot be focused on the outcome at the very end. You just cannot be, or you lose the trust in that translation.
[00:12:01] Steve MacDonald: Now, this is a really important question because we live in a world of short-termism. A lot of our clients are on the street. They have short-term rewards. Our sales departments are judged on short-term quotas. We never go into a board meeting, ever, and have a board member say, “Hey, Seth and Misti, how is that trust-building program going?” I mean, come on.
[00:12:27] Misti Fragen: How awesome would it be if they did…
[00:12:29] Seth Carpien: Right?
[00:12:30] Steve MacDonald: They would, right? Yeah. But that is not the world that we live in. How do we build trust, build these relationships, in a world that is not expecting us to do that, not rewarding us to do that? The entire system around us is not against us on that, but it is not for us.
[00:12:52] Seth Carpien: You are dead on. What I think is interesting is that if you go and talk to sales leaders, this is a guess. I have no study to back this, but I would wager that 75% or more would say their success comes from the relationships they have built. But then they go and hire people. Now, and this may not be because of the sales leader. There is a lot of pressure from the board, the CEO, the CFO, whoever it may be. There is a lot of pressure to hit those numbers.
[00:13:20] Seth Carpien: But where does that get lost, that the people who have been successful, the leaders that have been around for a long time, especially in certain industries, they built their success on those relationships, on that trust that they have built over the years.
[00:13:34] Seth Carpien: Now, we talked about this as well. There are certain organizations that may have a slightly longer runway. They have been successful; they have been around, and that will enable them to build those relationships to get there. A lot of companies do not. Many companies do not have that.
[00:13:50] Seth Carpien: But here is what they try to hire for. They want to hire someone who has been in that industry or knows people in it, because they believe those relationships already exist. However, I have been in this space. I was at a company for eight years. I am now at a new company doing the same thing. They have to make sure that they trust me to back the new company that I am working with as well.
[00:14:16] Seth Carpien: A lot of factors come into play here. Again, I do not know that there is the patience for it. Maybe with Forrester coming out with a report, the boards and the CEOs will now listen. But that is really a difficult thing for companies to understand.
[00:14:32] Seth Carpien: I think Misti and I are very lucky to have a CEO who gets that. He built this company, Tricon, which has been around for 27 years, and he built it organically based on relationships that he has had over the years. I think that is why we, because the culture exists, and that is the other side of it. If the culture does not exist, which Misti can talk to again all day about, but if the culture does not exist, then they are not going to buy into it, and they are still looking for that transactional sale.
[00:15:04] Misti Fragen: Yeah. Right.
[00:15:04] Seth Carpien: That needs to happen. Misti, you see it all the time with culture.
[00:15:08] Misti Fragen: No, it is. That is it. That is really what it comes down to. You summed it up. If you are focused on the transaction, the trust goes out the window. You have got to be focused on something other than that. Here is the thing, too: it feels like it takes forever. Seth and I talked about that, and we have, between the two of us, quite a bit over the last, going on two years of this current role of, gosh, it just takes a long time. But at the end of the day, it is worth it. I am going to say that in two parts.
[00:15:32] Misti Fragen: Number one, it can be worth it if eventually there is something that comes to you for a sale and you land that. Great thing. The other side that matters to you is paying it forward. It may not happen with this person that you have put a lot of investment into and the relationship you have built and the dynamics that you have built, but guess what, there are two to three more people they are telling about you too, and that is something that comes back there. It is always a win-win when you invest in someone else and you ask the questions, and you are truly there for them, not for the transaction. That is what it has got to be about, and that is authenticity.
[00:16:06] Steve MacDonald: It is interesting because convincing our own companies, our own boards, our own leadership, our own counterparts, that this is important. I think Bain and Google did a study, Six Sense did a study, that said in our B2B world, day one, when the company decides they need to hire, they need to bring in a tech solution, they are officially in buyer mode. Day one, they determine four out of the five they are going to look at, and then they pick, over 90% of the time, they award the deal to one of those companies, right?
[00:16:37] Steve MacDonald: So to all of your points here, if you have not built the trust with that 95% of the market that is not in the market to buy, when they decide to buy, and they do not know you, they do not trust you, you are out.
[00:17:00] Seth Carpien: Yeah.
[00:17:00] Steve MacDonald: You are not considered, and if you are brought in, you are brought in just as competitive pressure for the other guys. That is at the very early stages. You talked to Misti about how you have to be there for the whole journey. How does trust impact not only day one getting on the list, but also how it impacts those early stages, mid stages, and late stages? How does the trust equity you built up that got you onto the list help close that deal, which might take a year?
[00:17:33] Misti Fragen: Again, I think it is the intentionality. People know if you are invested in them. Finally, something drops and they need something that you provide. As long as you have stayed the course, like I do not know that there is any relationship that Seth and I have currently built over the last almost two years that we are not constantly checking in on, not from a sales perspective, though, not from a transactional perspective.
[00:17:53] Misti Fragen: Honestly, these are people we are building true relationships with, oh my gosh, how is the new grandbaby? How is this? It is not in any way unauthentic. We are truly invested in what people are doing and how they are growing their businesses. Oh, you just got a new role. Tell us more about it. Also, who can we make sure knows about that you are doing this, because that is going to be a better connection? At the end of the day, we are building community, and if you consistently have your eye on building that community, that trust continues to grow.
[00:18:22] Seth Carpien: Yeah, and I will add to that. Misti is correct. We do have conversations with these people in our community and network about how they are doing because we genuinely care, and they know that. I will say, though, there are times when we do have to ask that question. Are there any upcoming initiatives we can be involved in a conversation about?
[00:18:42] Seth Carpien: But it makes it easier for us to ask those questions because they know who we are. We were just on a call last week, and it was like, okay, so things are moving within the company, and they are moving at a certain pace. Do we set this call for three or four weeks from now? We can talk about kids and sports and whatever else it is, but to have a conversation about this particular thing, when do we want to have it? We build those relationships so we can ask those questions.
[00:19:11] Misti Fragen: That is so true. Seth will back this because this is probably the part, Steve, that I struggled with the most coming into this role. Because while I had done some development work back when I was younger in a very different capacity, this type of role was hard for me. While we were talking to people I had built relationships with and brought into this role of talking to and telling them about what I was doing, I remember the first time we were just inviting people to dinner.
[00:19:38] Misti Fragen: And I said to Seth, I am like, I do not think I can do this. I do not think I can do this. Oh my gosh, they are going to think I am selling to them. They are not going to want to talk to me anymore. I was like, oh my gosh, and then all of a sudden I was getting responses like, oh my God, I would love to do this. It would be great to catch up, and I am calling him and I am like, they responded to me.
[00:20:00] Misti Fragen: And I still, to this same day, Seth will be like, send a quick follow-up. We have not followed up with so-and-so. I am like, hi, I hope you are well. Like I struggle. But he is always right. It truly does come down; it is like we have permission to do that because people know there is a trust layer there, but it’s the part I’ve struggled with most.
[00:20:23] Seth Carpien: Here is the other side of the reality, or the other side of the coin. We will say. There are still people who will not look at it that way. They will still think because of our titles that it is a sale, and they will back away, and that has happened. It has happened. That is fine. That is okay. It is going to happen. But we are confident that we have built strong relationships with others. Yeah. That it is okay to lose a few. Maybe they did not want to be my friend anyway. I do not want to be their friend, either. That is hard.
[00:20:52] Steve MacDonald: So you guys have got, you just lightly introduced something that you have majorly gone in on and it is a trend that is starting, and I call it like reverse COVID, right, where after COVID, like, you know, like not meeting with people in person became the new thing. You mean I can just do this on a Zoom call or a Teams call? I do not have to travel all the time. Wow. But you have gone deep on the dinner table strategy, and I will leave it to whoever wants to explain it.
[00:21:27] Seth Carpien: I am going to, and here is why I am going to start, because when Misti starts talking, I do not know if I will ever get the microphone back, so I am going to introduce it, and then I am going to let Misti take it from there. It was really interesting, and it actually goes back to the story Misti just told. We had just started at Tricon, I believe it was the end of July, beginning of August. We had just started at Tricon.
[00:21:49] Seth Carpien: I had come from a product, and I was leading product teams at a company. Misti was doing internal comms for the product and technology organization at a company. We had not been doing business development sales of any kind; I had probably not done it in about four or five years, and that had been my focus, and Misti just had not done it in a long time.
[00:22:08] Seth Carpien: We have networks, we have people that we knew, some people that we had not talked to in quite a few years, so we said, let us just have a dinner. Let us have dinner and invite some people. What it is today and what it has grown to, that Misti is going to talk more about, was not originally where we intended to go.
[00:22:27] Seth Carpien: We just thought, let us invite some old friends together. We will have some wine and some good food, let us talk, and we will tell people where we are from. I am going to tell Misti this, and we have not talked about this in a while. I will never forget. There was at one point during the dinner, the very first dinner. One of our good friends in our network said, “Seth, why don’t you tell everybody what you do?”
[00:22:58] Seth Carpien: And I am sitting there at the table, and I am sitting there at the table, and I was not expecting to do it at that point, and it was weird because I tell people what we do all the time. I felt extremely uncomfortable. Like I was sitting there, all of a sudden it became a sales thing. Everybody was talking, enjoying, and just having a great time, and then it became a sale, and it just drained the room. You remember that.
[00:23:12] Misti Fragen: Oh, I do. Yeah. You were very uncomfortable.
[00:23:15] Seth Carpien: Yeah. So it just…
[00:23:17] Misti Fragen: Became it the last time it happened.
[00:23:18] Seth Carpien: Yeah, no, it was the last time, and it has grown into what it is now, and Misti has been a huge driver of it.
[00:23:26] Steve MacDonald: Misti, what is it, if you could tell us, kind of
[00:23:29] Misti Fragen: Oh, the elusive it. The elusive it. It is called the table. It is very simple. It is not rocket science. What we have done, it is a passion project for both of us. We are very proud of it and of what it has become, but it did start off exactly as Seth just said: bringing some of our contacts together. It just so happened that a significant portion of our close network was in New York, so we started with a simple dinner at a little restaurant.
[00:23:51] Misti Fragen: Getting people together. We had maybe one or two people who were new to both of us who had been connected to us from our network. By the end of that dinner, I think at that one, there were six other people other than us. At the end of that dinner, I would say five of those six looked at us and said, when are we doing this again. This was amazing.
[00:24:08] Seth Carpien: Wow.
[00:24:09] Misti Fragen: There is no secret sauce. It is literally putting people together around the table who just talk and get to know each other and we laugh and organic conversations happen. From there it was like, hey, we may be onto something. Let us definitely schedule another New York quarterly. Why do not we look at a few other cities, Philly, Boston, Chicago, we have network there. That was a year and a half ago.
[00:24:32] Misti Fragen: We just celebrated September 2025. We celebrated our year anniversary in New York, and now that we have named the table, that table has now grown to the point where we have to do two dinners every time we are in New York. It has gotten so large. We do keep it not too big. We want people to still be intimate and have conversations, and it be intentional. There is no assigned seating. Some people get there 15 minutes early for a cocktail. Some people show up 30 minutes late. Some of them know that they are.
[00:25:01] Seth Carpien: And they do not get to eat, though. They do not get to eat.
[00:25:03] Misti Fragen: Um, we do not, we do not do seating charts. Like we just do not do that. The feedback we have gotten on why it works is that not only is there no sales at all, but we will not even let people who might potentially talk about selling. But the reason I think it works is people say there is just no pressure. These are CIOs and CTOs and CD, like coming around the table, going, there is no pressure of nobody is talking up there, about now we are going to talk about what it means to be a great leader. Like, we do not do that. We are just having a
[00:25:34] Seth Carpien: We ask questions, we ask silly questions.
[00:25:35] Misti Fragen: We ask these silly questions, not like, so tell me about your best time, when you, what your, you know, the best time you led somebody, and you have great memories of it, no.
[00:25:44] Seth Carpien: What are your serial killer traits?
[00:25:46] Misti Fragen: It is what is your serial killer trait, right?
[00:25:48] Misti Fragen: It is, we have the best times, and from that we have seen these communities come up from that. The table is aptly named now, the table, everybody has a seat. At the end of last year in New York, we have now done some partnership work within a group called Build On. We worked at a soup kitchen. Our table attendees came; they gave up an entire day to do service in the Bronx, which was just incredible. Ended it with a dinner.
[00:26:15] Misti Fragen: We are just seeing these amazing, as I said, little communities pop up and people just being so excited about passing things forward and being a part of each other’s lives, helping out, continuing to move things forward of what we have built.
[00:26:29] Seth Carpien: And what is interesting, what is even more interesting about this, Steve. So we have a table in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. We both live in North Carolina. We are actually doing one near where I live, and we are trying to grow one a little bit farther east. But we have so many people coming to this that this will be the second conference.
[00:27:00] Seth Carpien: We did a conference last August. We had a few people from different tables come together at a table during the conference. So they met new people there. We have another one coming up in March, where the same thing is already happening the night before the conference kicks off.
[00:27:06] Seth Carpien: The next day, we are having a table. It is some people who have been there before, and some new people, and now it is taking on a life of its own.
[00:27:14] Steve MacDonald: Well, so here is what I want to do. I want to take a step back and ask you the serial killer question. No, just kidding!
[00:27:19] Misti Fragen: Oh, no.
[00:27:22] Seth Carpien: I know, Misti. Steve, we need to hear yours. Here is the deal: we will get you back on that one.
[00:27:28] Steve MacDonald: Here is the most important question, okay. Because we have covered a lot of territory here. If there was one thing that you wanted to leave the audience with today, other B2B C-suite executives that are looking to plot their own course, their own go-to-market strategy for success, what is the lesson learned that you want them to take away?
[00:27:53] Seth Carpien: Wow. So I will say this. The first, which is just the most obvious one. Be okay with building relationships first and building that trust first. Be okay with that. However, here is the other side of that: I do not care. You could spend all day whiteboarding a framework, a strategy around building trust, but in the end, you have to go and do it. You have to get your hands dirty and be willing to work on it.
[00:28:19] Seth Carpien: We have built some great relationships. We work very hard at this, Steve. Misti and I travel; we spend a lot of time building up these relationships. Regardless of what strategy or framework you put together, you just have to understand that it is work, and you are going to have to get your hands dirty and go after it.
[00:28:39] Steve MacDonald: Yeah. I love it. Misti.
[00:28:43] Misti Fragen: I would say for me, I think sometimes people forget that we are just human. I think we go into rooms with other people and look at titles, and we forget that we all just woke up and made coffee that morning. We all just woke up, threw on a collared shirt to hop on Zoom, and we are all still dealing with things. It is easy to go in and not be authentic or intentional about what we are doing.
[00:29:06] Misti Fragen: If we go into that with the mindset of being authentic and being intentional, no matter what titles are, and I think going back to the table, I do think that is one reason it works, is that there are no errors, there is nothing. It is just people sitting around enjoying a meal and a drink and laughing. If we could do that more and more in the rooms we go into, and remember that throughout our careers, I think there would be a lot more trust, a lot stronger bonds and relationships out there, and a lot fewer bridges that have been burned.
[00:29:35] Steve MacDonald: I feel like we need an entire podcast series on this, because I want to go on for another couple of hours. You never
[00:29:41] Misti Fragen: You never know what you are going to get with.
[00:29:41] Seth Carpien: We could talk.
[00:29:43] Misti Fragen: I will tell you, we could talk,
[00:29:46] Steve MacDonald: The mission of this podcast is that we get to listen to our peers.
[00:29:52] Steve MacDonald: We get to listen into what they are doing, how they are rethinking, how they are innovating, what they have tried, what worked, and what did not. I just talked to a Chief Growth Officer who said, “What I am doing now, I was not doing three months ago, a lot of it.” That is the one thing we all know. The rules are constantly changing on us, but one of my big takeaways from this is that the relationship and trust have never changed.
[00:30:17] Steve MacDonald: Yep. We are all, to your point, people, and we trust others, right? That is a huge takeaway for me: no matter how AI is impacting what we are doing, no matter what kind of digital change and transformation management program we have got going on, no matter what pressure there is to close a year out, trust is a constant foundation for all of that. And so I just wanted to say thank you for shining a huge spotlight on that today.
[00:30:45] Misti Fragen: Awesome.
[00:30:45] Seth Carpien: Yeah. Thank you, Steve, for giving us the opportunity to talk about it. It is great.
[00:30:50] Misti Fragen: We loved it.