Awful Policy 1: Only Allowing Planners to Select Successors from the chain of command under a position

Successors should be the best candidates for the role regardless of the current department or position they hold in a company.

Awful Policy 2: Heralding super-flat organizations as a nirvana of efficiency.

Communication, goal setting, career paths and many other issues are often crippled by the huge gap between levels in a flat organization.

Awful Policy 3: Allowing performance review scores to be weighted as high as 80% of criteria for placement as successor

Unless your performance management rates and process are perfect AND geared specifically for succession planning, you are setting yourself up for complete failure.

Awful Policy 4: Only doing succession planning for the top three layers of an organization.

There are key positions throughout organizations that need succession plans or replacement plans far more than many in the upper ranks of the organization.

Awful Policy 5: Producing future workforce strategies without reviewing the data of historic workforce trends and external market conditions.

History will repeat itself. It’s a famous adage and it applies to the lessons you need to learn in your own employee base as well. What can history prepare you for now?

Awful Policy 6: Avoiding line managers and business unit leaders when it comes to making employee policies, because they “don’t understand HR”

Help them understand their workforce and make sure you distribute the input gathering to include the management in the fields from succession planning, to compensation decisions, to team structures and many other topics. If they don’t understand the impact of their decisions on the big picture of the workforce, then shame on you, not them. It is your job to engage them with tools and conversations.

Awful Policy 7: Accepting that hard to use software is better because it is more complex and will do more for you. Or, cheaper software is merely simpler or give you a faster, yet lesser return.

You need to select software that fits your organization’s needs and the way your people think and process their requirements.

Oh boy, I could keep going but then this wouldn’t be a blog post, it would be a manifesto or something too scary to read.  If you are harboring out dated, closed minded or dusty traditions shake them off and kick them out of your company.  You know there are some ugly ones out there.  I didn’t even go to the illegal, discriminatory or evil things, that should be a given.  Improve your kingdom (or queendom if we have to be politically correct and in the spirit of the new Commonwealth perspective.

Seven ways to get included on the corporate succession plan.  There are many things that get evaluated by management and talent management teams when they are doing succession planning.  As I  observe succession plans I see the desired requirements for the planners.  However there are often gaps between the planners needs and the candidates focus on what they should be developing about themselves.  For many people these may be obvious, but for others I hope it will help them think about the things they do to develop and promote themselves.  There are, of course, specific skills required for different roles and career paths.  This list is more about the universal traits.

1. Think strategically. This may be one of the most critically evaluated traits during promotion consideration.   Department leaders that focus on their goals as if their department objectives are the end goal have just painted themselves into their ‘end goal’.  They can’t advance if they can’t understand and communicate their part of the mission as a piece of the greater objective.
2. Be a learner.  In order to take on new responsibilities you will have to grow.  In order to grow you have to learn new things.  Keep this skill always active.  Stretch yourself outside of your comfort zone until it becomes your comfort zone.  If you can’t look back at your year and see giant strides you have made, how will anyone else see the progress?
3. Mentor/Leader. Leadership is needed throughout all organizations.  Even if your next role is not a management position, the ability to mentor and lead others is needed.  If you can’t get enough visible practice within your organization, then practice these skills in your community, and make sure your employee profile and LinkedIn profile include these contributions.  The real boost to your career is when management recognizes you are developing others and leading teams successfully through projects that tie to the mission of the department or company.
4. Open/Flexible.  Business is changing faster than ever before.  You don’t want to be the barrier of progress.  Fads can be dangerous.  Trends are valuable.  Do you know the difference?  Are you ready to make several lateral moves within the organization to be prepared for a future role further up in the organization.  This is often a measurement watched during succession planning.
5. Be successful.  Excel at what you do now – if you can’t do really well now in your current position, then you won’t show up on anyone’s radar as a high performer.  Even if you are under-employed, don’t assume your past laurels will get you where you want to be.  A proven track record is essential to gain a champion for your career leaps.  People like to back winners.
6. Visibility/being connected. Let’s face it, if the world doesn’t know who you are, how will they know they need to consider you for promotion?  Some organizations have methods to find the hidden jewels in the organization for promotion, but most organizations still use direct relationships to consider who is going to be put into the pool for evaluation.  Both methods have good supporting arguments.  If you are not visible to your leaders, are you ready to be one of them?  However, this bullet comes with a warning sign – don’t make these connections superficial.  Add value to the organization and support the leadership to help foster the relationship.
7. Have a vision.  The main criteria I hear when executives are reviewing their management team for the future, is the ability to see and shape the possibilities yet to come. Know where you want to go.  Know where the business is going.

There are many elements to the decision making process for promotions and developmental moves.  These are, at the same time, the fundamentals as well as the critical support beams to the structure of your career advancement.  They can be both the table stakes and the high stakes at the talent review table.  I suggest you focus closely on where you excel and share these strengths with your organization.  All will benefit from these qualities and that is what it’s all about.

Much of Talent Management can be summed up by paraphrasing Jim Collins in “Good To Great”.  It’s about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats on the bus. It is paramount that you build the right paths for your talent pool to ensure that critical roles in the company stay filled and filled with the right people. Here are two  key metrics to help you get there:

Successor Pool Coverage:  How deep is your bench for critical roles? This is not just for succession planning in the highest levels of management.  This is about replacement planning throughout the organization.  Can you fill critical roles quickly with ready talent?  What will be the cascading effect of these moves and are you prepared for outside searches where necessary? Monitoring your successor pool or employee bench strength mitigates the severe risks of changes in critical roles and puts you in a good position for long-term strategic goals.

Promotion Rate: Are you measuring your rate of internal hires and how many are promotions?  Are you developing your people enough to move them up? Do you know the Time-to-Fill numbers if you hire externally?  Do you know how long it takes you to fill the positions when there are internal candidates? Promotion rate gives you insight into how well you develop your talent and how prepared you are to deal with personnel changes.

These numbers will help you assess your risk of dangerous open positions.  They will help you measure the effectiveness of your talent management initiatives.  Are you building your talent so that they will be ready to move to the next level or into another positions?  Are you prepared for change in your workforce even in the current structure of the organization?  What happens if you add more products or services, will you have the bench strength to support the new initiatives?

Don’t guess or assume that the investments you have made in talent management tools, training or assessments are paying off.  Measure them and make sure your workforce is prepared for today and for the future.

Cheers,

Lois

Most interviewing cycles have several phases.  A typical one would have you go through a screening interview with someone in HR, followed by a more in depth interview with the hiring manager, and then possibly talking to his or her boss, followed by conversations with other specialists in the company.  The interviewer in each scenario will have a series of questions that you will, of course, need to be prepared for, but I find that the best candidates distinguish themselves when they prepare questions to ask me.  It is particularly effective if they can introduce some idea of a process or methodology that could help me or my company.   As a tip, next time you’re at this point in an interview try asking “What qualities do you or your company look for when evaluating high potential employees?”

The chances are that the hiring manager will struggle a little to answer that question, and that’s your opening.  If there is a board somewhere, ask permission and go draw a nine-box on it demonstrating how you use the tool to evaluate yourself.  The manager may have heard of a nine-box, but it is likely he or she never used it with any regularity.  This gives you the chance to visually paint a flattering picture of yourself while introducing a useful scoring tool to the manager to run his organization.  I can almost guarantee that he or she will remember you after the interview.

The reason the nine-box is effective is that strong leaders tend to be more visual than oral, so any chance you get to leave an imprint on their mind will likely leave you with a leg up on the competition.   Good hunting!

But, why should we stop there?  Aquire is implementing some great creative usage in the 9 box to help solve many business and talent-driven decisions.  I bet you would love to see performance rating on one axis and the scale of salary or raise % within a 9 box.  It allows people to fall directly into the 9 box and you can see the outliers during your bonus planning.  It is very powerful.

Another use of the traditional potential by performance 9 box view is during bonus assignments and raise awards. This has increased management’s satisfaction with the compensation process.  The managers feel better about the fairness and the distribution of funds, when they can visualize the value distribution of their key players.

A workforce analyst is diagnosing risk for retirement pain points by reviewing age by tenure on the matrix.  When you need to see comparative details to a group of people, the visualization of the distribution is very powerful and makes the data very easy to understand.

The 9-box is powerful and its power is magnified when you can compare, side by side, the individuals in any area of the 9 box or select individuals.  Multiply the power again when you can transfer the visualization of the 9 box content in a color coded map in the org chart.  NOW, you have the power to see the applicable information in the context of the hierarchy structure of the organization and the information has real meaning.

Your planning is stronger.  Your decision making is more confident.  Your processes have a reduction in risk, when you can really see the information you need in an impactful view.  So to really deliver value to your management, I ask…What’s in your 9-box?

Cheers,

Lois

Mike Molinaro, VP of HR Operations at Comcast, and Tom McKeown, our president and COO, will be at ASUG Fall Focus, presenting Comcast’s succession planning case study. If you will be at the conference, be sure to support us and learn how Aquire has developed a state-of-the-art succession planning system for Comcast’s 100,000 employees! Tom and Mike will be presenting on Thursday, October 7 from 9:15-10:15 a.m. In the meantime, check out the presentation deck above! If you’re not already registered, register here.

But besides all the rabbit holes we could go down for that specific topic, let’s talk about the needs for succession planning.  Do you think that 6 months ago BP thought they would be discussing the replacement of their CEO this summer?  Do you think that there is only one person being replaced at BP? – NOT  What about the people that specifically managed the work around regulations to avoid building a relief well?  I would bet these less visible positions will be turning over quickly too.

Any given high level position change is likely to target 2 – 6 more moves or hires within the organization.  Each person that get moved up, leaves a position that needs to be filled.  New people in new positions, whether hired from the outside or promoted from a succession plan is going to consider their new team and evaluate if they want to make changes.  This creates another cascade affect.  Companies need to be prepared for this dynamic. Staffing changes ALL THE TIME!  Critical roles cannot be left unfilled for very long, regardless of the reason they were made empty.  What are you doing to either…

1)help prepare your organization deal with the trickle effect of replacing people throughout your company

or

2)make sure you are qualified and willing to step up to new responsibilities in the organization when opportunities arrive.

Look at the steps for succession planning (these are very high level, there is much more to the process, but these  will get you started.

Know that when a decision goes wrong, there may be ramifications up and down the chain of command.  Succession Planning is not just for the c-suite.  Are you watching the trends of your organization to see where the highest turnover is taking place?  Could you change those turnover trends by doing a better job of succession planning?  Are your people being developed so that when they are needed to fill another position? Are they are trained and familiar with the teams and processes in the department?  Are you measuring which leaders are preparing your future executives by promoting them and providing career and project mobility?

These are critical questions to be asking of your organization and putting systems in place to make all of this information visible and the plans executable.  What are you doing to make sure you are contributing to the stability and growth of the organization?  You think that might be a hot seat today.  It is a much cooler seat then it will be when there is a crises for replacements raises its head, so step up.

Cheers,

Lois

Succession planning discussions aren’t limited to HR industry magazines and websites anymore – just Google search “Yankees succession plan” and you’ll get a host of hits from a wide range of sources. Clearly this is more than just buzz – it’s top of mind in the business community, as I believe it should be. A sound succession plan keeps organizations on the path to success.

So why do we hesitate to create that crucial blueprint? Confusion? Dread? Lack of resources and tools? Too many of us get bogged down in the concept of managing the process instead of focusing on the plan itself.

This is a subject that I’ve been tackling head on lately. So, I thought I’d put all of our recent succession planning resources here. I hope you enjoy!

The Fort Worth Business Press recently published my article Succession Planning Needed to Safeguard Future that addresses solutions to the roadblocks many organizations throw in the way of succession planning.

I also blogged about it – Five Succession Planning Steps: Don’t make it harder than it is!, It must have struck a chord, because that entry was picked up and reposted on the Entrepreneurs’ Organization website – a group of more than 7,300 business owners in 42 countries dedicated to sharing business and leadership knowledge.

So now Aquire has developed another resource to help break down the process into manageable steps: Safeguard the Future with Succession Planning – a short presentation that breaks down the process into five easy steps. It’s free to watch on demand with no registration required. What’s holding you back from succession planning? I’d love to know!

Cheers,

Lois

Bring up the subject of succession planning and most HR and other executives shudder. These highly intelligent, capable people often labor under the impression that succession planning is such a complicated, multi-step process that they are already too far behind to even begin.

Sound familiar? While succession planning is vital to your company’s future, it doesn’t have to be your nemesis. With the right plan and the right tools it can be accomplished.

As I mentioned in my article in the Fort Worth Business Press, you must consider these five succession planning steps to get you started:

1. Identify the critical positions in your company. There are the obvious C-level players, but also consider any positions that you’ve filled in the last two years. If you’ve hired anyone during this lackluster economy, it was probably for a critical role.
2. Determine what skills people in those positions need. Doing this can be as basic identifying five top talents that a candidate has, then matching those to a position requiring some or all of those skills.
3. Find and assess potential successors. Even if you don’t have a formal competency model in place, you can jumpstart your initiative by identifying the most obvious candidates. Doing so will help you understand you create a working process.
4. Involve managers and leaders at all levels throughout the company. They often know where the hidden talent lies outside the “inner circle” or the excellent qualifications of an underemployed individual.
5. Commit to developing internal talent and monitoring their progress. It’s more cost effective to promote from within and often results in better leadership.

But most of all, take advantage of the tools that are available to help you create

and maintain successful succession planning systems. Retire the manual org charts, hand-colored spreadsheets and email round-robin. We created OrgPublisher Premier and OrgPublisher Succession Module to make the succession planning process more manageable so that you can concentrate on selecting the right candidates who will provide the best future for your organization.

Cheers,

Lois

I’ll let you read it and then I’ll ask a question…”Are you a CEO  afraid to build out your succession plan because it’s planning your own funeral?” I have at least two pieces of advice for you.

First, you need to find some good Mid-West American sensibility and get over it. You know it’s going to happen sometime. Of course you plan your own funeral – if you want it to go your way!

Second, most public company CEOs are compensated with a large amount of shares in your company. If you want those shares to be worth more after you leave, then you need to develop a really strong team that can rise to the occasion and excel after you’re gone.

Any CEO who thinks the company will tank after they leave is not only an egotistical fool, but also a poor leader because it proves that they didn’t develop their team. Hmmm…

The same goes for every manager who is afraid to create your departmental succession plan. Come on…what are you afraid of? Get a succession plan – I dare you!

Any business that does not have succession plans for the replacement of key employees is ignoring a serious element of their risk mitigation planning. A gap in the leadership presents so many risks. Least of them is the possibility that key strategies will go astray when there’s no leadership plan to assure business continuity.

We often find the scary part preventing businesses from performing proper talent reviews and building the model for succession plans is they’re afraid that the process of building the successor map also requires them to dive into dozens of other processes they don’t know how to do. Now, with easy tools like Aquire’s OrgPublisher Succession, you can dispel those fears. OrgPublisher Succession is direct and user friendly, providing side-by-side comparisons of potential successors, as well as powerful searching and filters that can align people into the 9 box comparison most commonly used for potential and performance analysis. You CAN get managers to participate in the succession planning of key employees if you help them keep it simple.

The Talent Strategy Group and its book One Page Talent Management also help businesses realize they can create succession plans and simplify the process. Businesses must build their replacement plan strategy and map their talent. When successors are built and chosen from within, employees realize there is a career path possibility for them. When shareholders understand that the business is planning for the movement of talent and has built the path for successors, they are more confident in investing in the organization. Without these plans in place your business is at risk of faltering in so many places.

My Mom used to tell us, “you can’t start any younger, so start today.” She was a wise woman.

Cheers,
Lois

Performance management is often a challenge for the manager. It’s important to recap  the annual feedback during these discussions. Hopefully, your reviews are more about the future than about the past. I tried for years to  call them goal setting sessions and projections instead of reviews. I have not succeeded in the renaming, but we have succeeded in the content of the conversation. Our processes are geared towards looking at the future; setting the goals and, now, about succession planning and career development in more earnest and in common, corporate-wide terminology.

How did we get a real succession planning discussion going? We asked everybody the question.

In our annual employee meeting, I presented an outline of the revenue growth and proposed product growth of the company through 2015.  This led to breakout discussions allowing individuals to talk about where they wanted to be in 2015, and what the company would have to look like to get there. Oh, my gosh, for all of you saying “that would never work here,” try it – or find another place to work.

Because it was awe-inspiring. Honest, and sometimes a stretch of the imagination, conversations occurred across all levels. People were helping others in different departments paint a picture of the future of the company and possibilities for growth.

They were on FIRE.

The follow-up exercise now is for each manager to discuss these aspirations and their subsequent development plans during the goal setting  process this month. Because each employee was involved in the discussion, they know the managers and co-workers were asked to draw a greater picture. It changes some of the succession planning discussion to a personally-chosen career development program. The management teams are now looking at new types of “next step” development activities. We’re aggregating training ideas across disciplines, and building opportunities for mentoring and coaching, along with formal training to help people get much further than the traditional “what training must we have to get the jobs done this year” exercise.

It’s another tool in great workforce planning to know where people want to go – not just where managers want to put them. Let’s just call it Engagement Royale!

Cheers,
Lois

I have never liked the term “climbing the corporate ladder.” It implies that your career path is going to be linear. I have seldom seen paths to career nirvana as straight lines. Instead, there is an analogy, pulled together by Lindsey Pollak, that aggregates several examples of why building your career as a pyramid is valuable.

This is a great analogy. Now, employers need to recognize that, in order to develop their talent and keep employees interested, they need to provide many lateral moves in their structural design. If employers don’t do this, they are forcing the employees to build the wide base of their career in multiple companies. This is counterproductive for employers.

As organizations go through their reorganizations, downsizing or merger exercises, they need to consider their succession planning and their  replacement planning as they relate to career development and retention. Will their new organizational design allow them to add to the pyramid of their employees’ careers? Can they use the analogy to help someone understand the value of a lateral move in building the foundation for future promotions?

If companies would consider the employee development value as important as they do their organizational planning, they would see better employee engagement, further career building, and thus better retention. Great organizational design and planning of the org chart lead to great monuments for personal and corporate history – the well planned career pyramid.

Cheers,
Lois

The information provided in this recent article, Plan For CIO Succession, in this week’s issue of Processor® , is very valid for many positions.

As is so often demonstrated, the talents of the executives must be a blend of many competencies. Identify the skills you want to see in your organization’s leadership and then track them for each possible candidate, better yet, for all employees. Ideally, executives must be able to balance their strengths at:

• leadership
• coaching/teamwork
• functional experience
• cross-functional awareness
• innovation
• strategy
• global understanding
• customer focus

A great technician does not necessarily make a great CIO. As the article points out, there is often more strategy involved in the job than technical work. However, in my experience, in order to build strategy about technology, practical experience with technology is also needed. A CIO with little or no “in the trenches” technology experience will find it much harder to do their job and nearly impossible to gain a following as a leader of technology resources.

So how do you get a CIO (or a head of sales, or marketing, or finance)? The simple answer: You must mentor and develop them.

The concept is the same for all positions, the execution of the development may vary. After you identify possible executive candidates, they need to be involved in strategic discussions and decisions, as well as budgeting and relations with other business units as a portion of their jobs. To develop a cohesive succession plan, you must analyze and groom many people then test their abilities to assist in many capacities of the business at hand. This is how you will know who is ready to succeed a leader.

Cheers,
Lois

Succession planning has traditionally been centralized because it was only for the top elite of the organization. As business units grow and talent development becomes more decentralized, so does the development of management. However, business units often don’t incorporate succession planning at this level because they fear their best people being taken away if they flag them as high potential.

There are many arguments for either style of succession planning and, at times, a company may really need to look at both options. Sometimes, a manager just needs to sit down and sketch out his or her vision of succession planning. Some key questions to consider include:

Managers may occasionally be asked to submit recommendations for potential layoffs or departmental transfers to fill gaps in the workforce. If potential successors for key positions are not already identified, strategic people could be misplaced during any such organizational change. (Quick product plug… this scratch-pad style independent succession planning can be done with OrgPublisher Premier.)

The organization as a whole may need the ability to centrally manage – or provide the tools to decentrally collect – the ideas of the management team for the succession or replacement planning of the entire organization. The deeper the succession planning, the less it can be managed by HR and the more decentralized it needs to be. In this case, it’s critical that the data can be seen as a big-picture map of the organization and its workforce bench strength. (Again… OrgPublisher Succession is great at this succession assignment process.)

Peter Cappelli wrote a terrific Human Resource Executive Online article, Maximizing Talent Management. One of my favorite tips from this article is:

“For example, in any set of managerial and executive jobs, there is a common set of competencies across them as well as a set that is specific to each subgroup. In terms of effectiveness and efficiency, the ideal approach is to treat the candidates as part of a common pool for as long as possible, developing all the competencies that are common across positions first and delaying those that differentiate functions and jobs until the last minute.”

Peter states, “…the biggest source of efficiency is the ability to pool the candidates and then redirect them across functions and jobs when the inevitable variations in demand occur.”

One certainty is that succession planning must be done, and it must be deep.

Cheers,
Lois

From the perspective of the employer needing to do succession planning prior to Reductions of Force or a merger, the succession planning must go much deeper into the organization to guarantee that decisions don’t cripple the future of the organization. (See several January Blogs on this site.)

How are you changing your succession planning initiatives?

Cheers,
Lois

Now the trend is moving toward succession planning or replacement planning for the entire organization. This means we need to become familiar with the terms and tools available. One of the more common questions I get asked is “What is a 9-Box that I keep hearing about?” A 9-Box is a grid with which you plot employees based on their performance ranking and their potential for advancement (see graphic). It is a little like the magic quadrant that analysts use to illustrate different rankings for comparison.

MYTH TO BE BUSTED: Not every quality employee is a High Potential, High Performer employee. Yes, quality employees should be performing high. But they may not have the potential for promotion up through management. Lacking the potential to move up to management or to be an executive is not a requirement for a stellar employee with huge value to the organization. Specialists and experts in their field may not desire to manage people, but yield great results in their position. Moving ‘up’ may require re-location and that might not be in the family or life plan of an employee. Do not judge less than high potential people as anything other than not interested or ready for a move up the corporate org chart.

The traditional 9-Box should be used to focus the process of assigning successors because the individuals in the upper right quadrant have been identified as people with the potential of moving up. If your organization has gone through a formal process of identifying high potentials you may wish to begin the initiative or address the 9-Box process with management as they assess each team for successors. We are seeing some very creative uses for the 9-Box that are different than the traditional and not using the same data on the axis. If you want to learn more, let me know.

Cheers,
Lois

I’d like to do a deeper paper on this subject and would appreciate your feedback on the topic, as well.

Do you have succession planning on your scorecard? Have you identified those positions at risk? Have you identified all the positions in your organization that need a strategy for replacement and succession plans? Can you measure your positions that have replacement plans and those that don’t? Are you tracking the depth of your bench on your scorecard?

These types of measures are critical in making sure your business realizes its success in the future. Can you see anything on the non-financial side of your scorecard that will have a bigger impact on your business than the half of your workforce that’s going to change in the next 8 years?

I look forward to exploring this topic further with you, and I will share more of our customers’ progress, too.

Cheers,
Lois

So, why not keep managers in their positions a little longer, but give them practical experience through projects? For example, give your high potential marketing manager purchasing experience by adding them as a business expert on the new purchasing system team. Then, as they need financial experience, place them on a team analyzing the new business plan of a subsidiary.

You can do this without removing managers from their regular post. Team participation, managed well, can lead to expertise gained by the employee and, in turn, the project team gains the knowledge of the business expert. If you avoid the ‘every team member must be in every project meeting’ way of thinking, this practice can be a win-win for everyone. You can’t make the project a full time job and still expect them to maintain their regular duties, but you can certainly integrate managers into key projects.

Hint: Succession Management includes Succession Planning and a lot more.
(buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/)

But the importance of this book is its ability to provide nearly a primer on Talent Management. The authors define terms, and the book is stuffed with wonderful, practical, usable checklists for things like:
1. Talent Review Meetings
2. Talent Assessment Goals
3. Metrics you could or should use in the process

It offers up slide decks for you to present your ideas higher up in management or to business heads:
1. Explaining Succession Planning and Talent Management
2. What metrics are you needing and going to use in your succession planning

This book is a must have for anyone starting a new initiative in Talent Management, Succession Planning and Talent Review.

It can make you look good and feel like an old pro at these things, even when you are a novice.

If you are not a novice, it can still help you streamline your processes and refine your communication.

Ever wonder what to do with information that somebody is marked as a high performer or has high potential? Do you tell them? What if the situation changes? Read the book…it will tell you what to do.

Do you wonder which metrics you need to track in your succession planning? Read the book. You can also hire Ms. Sims for consulting which can include Talent Review Facilitation. www.successionbuilders.com

The authors don’t mention using OrgPublisher™ or Unifi™ for succession planning to help visualize your succession plan or to do the What-if workforce planning. But our customers are very excited about this process, so maybe we should put together a book about their uses of Aquire solutions for Succession Planning and Succession Management.