Link to the episode can be found here.
>> JACK: Welcome to the ExcelAbility podcast. This is a brand new series of conversations on success with people who happen to have a disability. Together, we’ll uncover the attitudes, habits, techniques, and practices that enable these individuals to achieve astounding success. Jim, do you have some sight now?
>> JIM: I’m totally blind. It’s a combination of skill and will when it comes to self-advocacy, and you got to have them both. So I was in the machine shop, and I was running some machines, and then the big boss found out that I was running these machines, and he said, “The blind guy’s running the machines?” You can go alone and go fast, or you can go together and go far. I remember asking, “You think people have reasonable expectations of me? You think my blindness gets in the way of that?” And he said, “Oh, man, yeah, people think you’re almost normal.”
>> JACK: Welcome to the ExcelAbility podcast. I’m your host, Jack Chen. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Jim Gibbons, CEO of Goodwill Industries International, an organization I’m sure most of us have heard of, the Goodwill stores. Jim has also served as CEO of National Industries for the Blind. Prior to that, Jim served in various leadership positions in corporations, including serving as the CEO of CampusWide Access Solutions, a subsidiary of AT&T. Jim will share with us the habits, attitudes, techniques, and practices that have enabled him to achieve incredible success in not only one role as chief executive, but in three roles as chief executive. Please feel free to contact Team ExcelAbility to share your comments, questions, or feedback, or to share your own story with us. We’d love to hear from you. You can find information about this podcast and previous and future episodes at www.TeamExcelAbility.com. That’s www.TeamExcelAbility.com. You can follow us on Facebook at Team ExcelAbility or on Twitter at TeamXLAbility. Hey, Jim. Thanks for being available and taking out time to chat with us on this really interesting topic of disability and success. I really appreciate your wisdom and your insights and your illustrative career. Thanks for taking time out to meet with us.
>> JIM: Oh, it’s my pleasure. I’m looking forward to the conversation.
>> JACK: Awesome. All right, well, let’s get started. Jim, can you describe your disability to somebody who may not already be familiar with what it’s like to have your disability? The daily impact, the kinds of things that are challenging for you?
>> JIM: As a blind person, I think people somewhat can resonate with blindness more than many others, but not necessarily in terms of day-to-day and so on and so forth, and certainly not in terms of how they might deal with it or not deal with it.
>> JACK: Jim, your current eye acuity, do you have some sight now or none at all?
>> JIM: Zero. I’m totally blind. For me, blindness, from a day-to-day perspective, certainly has its challenges–I never want to be naive to the challenges it presents–but those generally revolve around access to information and transportation. By and large, access to information is solved through technology, and then transportation really has a lot to do with where you live and how much available transportation, whether it’s public or in a city, or now with Uber and everything else out there, there’s lots of opportunities, but those are things that, as blind people, or as I as a blind person, think about all the time, and the way that I try to work with them is to, one, leverage technology, which is–the challenge there is learning all the new stuff that comes out all the time, and thinking ahead in terms of where I have to be and how I’m gonna get there. So those are two main things. Other than that, you know, I wake up in the morning, I shower, I get ready for work, I go to work, I go to the airport. It doesn’t really slow me down much, but there are elements that I just have to plan ahead for, and that’s really what I think a person who is blind who has a fast-paced career has to pay attention for. They probably have pretty good planning skills.
>> JACK: Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. You’re right. I mean, access to information and transportation. Jim, you know, a lot of people have heard of the Goodwill, but it’s so much more than just a place to donate clothes and other household items. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization and what some of your products and services are?
>> JIM: Sure. Sure. So I joined Goodwill as the president of Goodwill Industries International about almost nine years ago now. You know, Goodwill is an amazing brand. It’s a household name, and most importantly, it’s a high-impact organization throughout communities all over the United States, Canada, and 15 other countries, and the social enterprise model is what you mentioned, which is the retail thrift store. Hundreds of millions of people and transactions take place every day, where people drop off their used goods, and then they’re monetized through a retail process, and we deliver mission in two big ways. One is we leverage that entire business infrastructure as a mission delivery vehicle, and so many of our team members across the country are people with barriers to employment or disabilities who are looking for that first opportunity to work or looking to transition into new opportunities, or are in a transition, or are in a program that’s short-term but is allowing them to kind of step forward. So all of that can take place leveraging that business infrastructure, but then you have to recognize that you’re working with a variety of people that you want to be prepared to be supportive, helpful, whether it’s comprehensive case management, added tools, added supports, and, you know, the interesting thing is, for Goodwill, is we’re always excited when somebody wants to move out of Goodwill and be placed into another opportunity for their own personal growth. Then that business model will generate revenues, and then earnings, and then those earnings will then help to support incremental mission activity, which could range in programming from job training, job seeker skills, all the way through support with transportation, housing, childcare, or other supports that a person might need, either that are provided directly by Goodwill or by other community members, so a whole referral and community connection approach.
>> JACK: Phenomenal. And can you talk a little bit about your career path up to this point, other places you’ve been and positions you’ve held?
>> JIM: I’m from Indiana, grew up in Indianapolis and went to Purdue University, where I got a bachelor’s in industrial engineering, and from there, after a lot of interviews landed an opportunity with AT&T. So I spent really the first dozen plus years of my career with AT&T in operations, product management, and mergers and acquisitions, and ended up running a subsidiary of AT&T in Phoenix, Arizona, called AT&T CampusWide Access Solutions. That led to an opportunity in the not-for-profit social enterprise space, where I joined National Industries for the Blind and served as the president and CEO there for about ten years, and then joined Goodwill about nine years ago.
>> JACK: Super. Jim, how did you first become aware of your visual disability, and how did it impact you socially, emotionally, psychologically, or otherwise?
>> JIM: I was in third grade when I started losing my vision, and I have an older sister, ten years older than me, who’s blind as well, so I would say that on kind of the emotional front, I was always pretty fortunate that I kind of rolled with it. I probably had an opportunity to observe my sister and see how she rolled with it. You know, it was a gradual loss of vision, so I was able to be successful in many things, whether that’s sports or schoolwork or at the social level as my vision deteriorated, and at those younger years, it never seemed to have a major effect. As I got older and in my younger college days, my vision was deteriorating at a faster rate. By the time I was a sophomore in college, I was totally blind and probably starting to realize that, you know, life has challenges. Whether you’re blind or not, life is hard. You know, I probably had moments through college trying to figure out how I’m gonna make this work. You know, maybe I wasn’t smart enough to know that the challenges–you know, how tough the challenges might or might not be, and so I just kept pushing through. You know, it was kind of a power through, a level of tenacity, and keep working hard, and in some ways, really adjust to developing the blind skills, the skills of being a blind person, kind of real-time while I was running the race. I often think that taking a break and focusing on some of those important skills might have been a good pause in that stage of my life, but I didn’t have the wisdom to do that at the point, and so I’ve had to kind of change my shoes while I’ve been running the race.
>> JACK: Tenacity. That’s a really important quality. Are there any other things that you did or ways that you thought that you found particularly helpful in overcoming some of the challenges that you identified initially when you started dealing with being blind?
>> JIM: I think for anybody with a disability, as you grow into being an adult, there’s a level of self-advocacy that you’ve got to learn to have, and there’s probably some real skills associated with that, and then there’s some will, so it’s a combination of skill and will, I think, and I probably learned that from my parents as they advocated for me in those younger years. Now, I never thought of the word “advocate,” quite frankly; I just knew that they were there and they would ask the questions, help me find the answers, and, you know, they helped me get through the system and navigate the system, whether that was getting large print books at the start of a semester, which was actually, way back in the day, was a pretty tough thing to get done, so that advocacy was something that was done for me as a child, and as an adult, I learned to advocate for myself, and that advocating means, how do you, in an effective way, let the people or organizations that you’re engaging with and interacting with know what’s necessary for you to be a valuable contributor to whatever it is you’re doing? So in the workplaces, what are the tools that you need? How do you advocate for the tools that you need as a blind person in the workplace so that you can perform and excel just like anybody else? And so that was a skillset. You know, there’s a combination of skill and will when it comes to self-advocacy, and you got to have them both.
>> JACK: I love that you put it that way. There’s got to be a skill component and a will component, so skill and will. Were there any other attitudes that you have innately, you think, that helped you deal with the onslaught, and, as you said, changing your shoes as you’re running the race? Any other attitude that you can think of that were particularly useful for you?
>> JIM: Yeah, there’s probably two. One is an attitude of gratitude. I think that–and I don’t think that this is simply something for somebody with a disability, but I think if you have a disability, at the end of the day, we as people have interdependencies, and demonstrating and showing appreciation and gratitude to others I think is something that helps anybody, but as a person with a disability, it also lets folks know that you appreciate what they bring to the party, and in some cases, they bring things to the party that help, you know? I think the other one is an attitude of accountability. One, we have to always advocate for systems change to make the system and the environment successful, but at an individual level, having a personal level of accountability kind of in the process and a personal level of ownership in terms of how you find your own success is important. So you need a system or an environment for success, and you need personal accountability and ownership for success, and when you find those two things coming together, I think a person with a disability has the optimal opportunity for success.
>> JACK: Take us back to a particularly memorable pain point for you as you were beginning to deal with your blindness, and how did you handle that particular moment?
>> JIM: For me, through my life, it was really that young adult era. It was that blindness coupled with growing up, really, was maybe the pain point, and the pain points I can’t say were a particular event, but it was recognizing the reality of blindness and the work that I would have to do to accept and deal with that, and that that work was my work to do so that I could find success in a very competitive world. When I was a senior at Purdue, I interviewed with about 50 companies, and I got 50 rejection letters, and those rejection letters were called ding letters. You know, there was an upside to that, ’cause ten ding letters got you a free beer at Harry’s Chocolate Shop. But they didn’t feel good. You know, in that particular case, I felt like I was doing the right things from the personal accountability and the personal ownership, but yet the system wasn’t working for me until I finally interviewed with IBM and AT&T and did receive offers from both of them, but it was a lot of rejection before I got those offers, but it took those types of organizations that created enabling cultures that then a person who’s willing to own it can find success in. I think the key was, after all that rejection, was that tenacity, that stick-to-itiveness that we all have to kind of remind ourselves it’s important to persevere.
>> JACK: Awesome. I love the fact that you’re bring up tenacity again, but that you also brought up the recognition and acceptance that it’s your responsibility and your game to play. When you were younger, and after you found out that you had macular degeneration, you played a lot of sports–baseball, basketball, football. Did your vision loss come into play at all when you were involved in those activities, and if so, what’d you do?
>> JIM: Yeah, I was always a good athlete–not a great athlete. I wasn’t the–you know, in the neighborhood sports, I wasn’t the first guy picked and I wasn’t the last guy picked, but I loved sports, still do, and I played them as long as I could. I played baseball till 7th grade, and then the ball was a little bit too small, and basketball until 8th grade, and then the inside lights didn’t work with my visual acuity, and then football as a freshman, and then it went to night games, and then I ended up wrestling and throwing the shot put and discus. So kind of as my vision deteriorated, I would exit from my extraordinary career in those sports. I kind of remember my last baseball game. I was playing shortstop, and I caught the ground ball–I mean the line drive–with my face, and I kind of remember my last basketball game on a fast break, and the buzzer went off, but my teammate threw the ball anyway, but I quit paying close attention, and the ball bounced off my head, so those are my dynamic exhibits of athleticism. So it was kinda, as I had to step away, and then I would find new sports, and then I competed with the Indiana team for the United States Association of Blind Athletes and played goalball and continued to wrestle and track and field and so on and so forth till I was 21, 22.
>> JACK: When you were younger, did you think that your visual loss would have an impact on your future success? How did you think about that?
>> JIM: As a young kid, no, I just didn’t think. It was those years, college years, that I–yeah, I think that was the angst that was created in my own mind, and I had those fears. “How will I overcome it?” and, “Will I be able to find a job?” and, “Will I be able to do a job?” You know, on one hand at this stage in my life, it’s like, absolutely, every young person who is blind, they can rock it, you know? But when you’re 20, and whether you’re blind or not, you’re wondering, “Gosh, can I work? Can I do the job?” So I definitely had those feelings. They didn’t overtake my life, but they were real. I remember once a year kind of sitting down and having real deep thoughts on it and feeling emotional.
>> JACK: And what kept you going despite having those fears and emotions?
>> JIM: Good friends and good family, having a network, a support network, people who would be cheerleaders, and also tough love providers, like, “Get over it, keep going,” or, “Hey, you can do it.” You know, that’s probably an important lesson for a young person out there. Interpersonal relationships and having the abilities to work well with other people is probably a very important attribute or skill as well. We all need a little cheerleading once in a while.
>> JACK: So true, so true. Now, in an interview I read that you said, referring to your parents, “They had high expectations for me and then surrounded me with the tools and support that I needed to find success.” What does this quote mean, and tell us about some of the expectations, tools, and support that you think of from your own life?
>> JIM: What my parents did for me in having high expectations, they were high expectations as a student, as a neighbor, as a citizen, as a kid brother, as a son, and they were to show up and to show up on time and to do the work and, you know, all of those things are hard, right? They’re all things that, you know, showing up a little late and not doing the work makes life a little easier. As it related to the blindness, my dad read me my math assignments for my high school career almost every night. It was the era where I didn’t always get the large-print books, and so he would go through them if I needed help, and he also would tutor me, I think. My mom, at that stage, I remember I had got a book on tape, and then I dictated to her a book report, but at the end of the day, they were always there, and I would study with friends on the phone. I had wonderful friends who were always there, and I think we learned from each other, so, in a way, my visual loss became a vehicle for all of us to grow.
>> JACK: That’s an amazing insight, that your friends and your network can benefit from your own vision loss in the sense that they also grow. I love that sentiment. So, Jim, you’ve been an executive now for almost a couple of decades, at least, and your first job was as a janitor. Can you tell us how that job motivated or demotivated you, considering that it happened around the time that you were starting to deal with your visual impairment and looking for work?
>> JIM: Actually, it was an incredible job, and it had no demotivating qualities whatsoever. When we talked earlier about advocacy, I went to work for my dad’s company, who had a program for college kids of employees, and they couldn’t figure out what to do with the blind engineering student, but my dad actually went in and met with the HR leader, and, you know, I have this vision of him pounding on the table, which I’m sure he didn’t do, but he advocated for me. Now, I didn’t think that language, I didn’t think that word, “advocate,” but my dad went in, and so I ended up getting a job as a janitor, and it was an incredible summer experience. I found a guy to carpool with who lived not too far from me who worked generally in the same vicinity, I got to work every day on time, I got my duties assigned to me, I executed those duties. Sometimes I didn’t do as well as I needed to and learned how to get feedback, but what I really learned was that every job matters, so as a janitor, people counted on me to do the work that I did in many ways so that they, one, had a nice environment to work in, and two, they then could do the work that they were required to do. What I really learned, personally, is a lot of those work ethic and responsibilities and feedback skills, or at least the introduction to those skills, and then I learned that every job matters, and every job’s important, so that was the life-impacting opportunity for me. I also got in trouble a couple times. Some of the guys liked me, so I was in the machine shop, and I was running some machines, ’cause I wanted some new experiences, and then the big boss found out that I was running these machines, and he said, “The blind guy’s running the machines?” And so we all got in trouble, and I quit running the machines.
>> JACK: Awesome. Awesome. Hey, Jim, you’ve been a pioneer, especially in the sense that you’ve been the first blind person get an MBA from Harvard Business School. Can you talk about some of the challenges that you encountered during this period, and what enabled you to find success?
>> JIM: At the stage of my life when I was attending the Harvard Business School, I had worked for a number of years. I knew I wanted to get my MBA, so do I go to a night school, or do I quit and go to school? And my wife and I had been married for a number of years, so we were also, like, at that stage of thinking about a family, and I thought, “How am I gonna–can I work? Can I go to school at night? Can I start a family?” I mean, I’d probably end up doing a bad job with everything, and so I’d applied to the Harvard Business School. You know, when I got in, it just seemed right. It felt right to quit work and go to business school. And that was a big leap for us–couple of kids out of Indiana and going to Harvard Business School, and ultimately there were very few challenges related to the blindness at that stage of my life. It was a case study methodology. It really was a beautiful way for learning for me. There was a lot of information, so that access to technology piece, the business school was amazing. They worked with recordings for the blind and had the cases recorded. The only miss, I think, there was–I was probably about a year or 18 months early. We almost were at the stage where we could have converted all those cases to electronic cases, which would have worked for me and would have been one of those wonderful examples about how doing that work from an accessibility perspective would then benefit everybody. That was the big miss. You know, it’s like, “Darn it!” If we could have done that, it would have been–and maybe if I was better with technology at that stage, I could have pushed it. I didn’t. And the tapes worked for me, but I always feel like, you know, when universal design works for everybody, I thought, “God, that would have been a beautiful example of it.” I just missed the window on that one a little bit.
>> JACK: Jim, turning to your business life, and referring to your visual impairment, do you feel like it was something you just had to overcome, or did you feel like it was a driver of your work, or did it have some other influence for your success?
>> JIM: It’s probably something that was a driver for me to overcome, to some degree. There’s probably elements of personal challenges to demonstrate that you can do. There’s probably elements of that in my psyche. But I think for the most part, I think of blindness and what has been positive attributes from a business perspective–growing up blind or losing my vision, you know, certainly the tenacity, the stick-to-itiveness, is a pretty important element of business. A business is usually not overly complicated. It’s about tenacity, and it’s about follow-through. If you follow through, you’ll find success in life in most quarters. But I think it also gave me an opportunity to develop very strong listening skill, and in the world of business and in roles of leadership, if you’re not listening, you’re missing a lot, and so I think it really helped elevate my ability and my capacity to listen and hear from important stakeholders. And then the third element that I would attribute is inclusion is a really important cultural attribute of the organizations that I lead, and I think my blindness has helped me foster a belief in terms of inclusion and how diverse perspectives help strengthen an organization and a team, so those would probably be the three areas that I think really improved upon because of my blindness.
>> JACK: Yeah, I love that the tenacity, as you mentioned, as well as the ability to listen and this understanding of the need to be inclusive all play a huge part in businesses, as you mentioned. Now, in your current role, are there any particular challenges that you face with your blindness now, or do you feel like you’ve been able to sufficiently handle them so that they don’t become a day-to-day challenge for you anymore?
>> JIM: Well, I think I always have to focus on skill building. We’re just not in an environment where you can be successful if you’re not a continual learner, and so with the changing pace of technology, and the use of technology is an important blindness skill, so that’s one that I always have to stay conscious of for that access to information and ongoing learning, but I would say that’s the primary challenge in my role relative to blindness. I’m a very data-oriented person. There’s lots of ways to see data, and absorbing lots of data in the world of spreadsheets and massive amounts of big data, yeah, it’s a little tough for me. I mean, the best of the best blind guys I know are pretty good at how they can sort through. I’m good, but I’m not as good as I can be. You know, data and sorting through a lot of information, a lot of numbers, is really important from an executive perspective, so I have to create mechanisms. Now, on the other hand, I also have resources around me that allow me to get information in formats and ways that make it easier. Those are tensions that push up against each other for me in terms of how my disability affects my ability to perform in my job. They’re real. They’re not insurmountable, but they are real. You know, if you’re not focusing on continual learning and continual improvement, I will fall short.
>> JACK: I like that you mentioned there are mechanisms and ways of creating efficiencies, so can you just talk a little bit about what some of those are?
>> JIM: So if you think about it, as a chief executive, so, one, you know, I have the ability to frame the problem and then request the kind of information I need. A more junior professional on my team or on another team may be the one who has to then create that format, so I have the good fortune of a being able to kind of drive a body of work. As you grow in your career, you’re doing the body of work, and so having the tools and the access technology and the ability and the skills to sort through that are the mechanisms that I think are important, and again, because the tools are changing so rapidly in today’s environment, you’ve got to be a lifelong learner to adapt, or you all of a sudden will be a dinosaur. You don’t just start declining at a slow rate in today’s economy; you know, it’s a cliff. So ongoing learning and ongoing growth in these technological spaces are pretty important.
>> JACK: For sure. Learning is always important for everyone, for sure.
>> JIM: Yeah, for everybody.
>> JACK: Are there any particularly funny stories related to your blindness that you have from your career?
>> JIM: Probably way too many. I remember, as a very young person in my career, asking a team member, “You think people have high or reasonable expectations of me? You think my blindness gets in the way of that?” What I was really searching for is fitting in. And he said something like, “Oh, man, yeah, people think you’re almost normal.” I was just like, “Oh, man.” You know, and really what he meant was, you know, “People treat you like they do anybody else,” but he threw in that word “almost normal,” and I thought, “Oh, well.” But how people characterize, how people think about you and you and the context of your disability, you’re not gonna be able to control it. You know, you will influence it, and you’ll influence by how you engage and interact and, in the business sense, deliver results.
>> JACK: Is there something in the beginning of your career potentially related to your blindness that you wish you knew that you know now?
>> JIM: Early in my career, I had a job where I led quality management efforts, and I had to lead teams that did not report to me, and so I had to learn to lead through influence and not through control, and that has been a very important skillset throughout my career, because, actually, leadership is more often than not through influence and not control. As a blind person, I have had to learn to let go of control and trust, so I think those two things come together, because as a young blind person, I learned to trust–trust a guide, trust a reader, trust a friend–in a way that I think I learned to trust first, where a lot of people really don’t trust until it’s, quote, “proven” to them, and so those two things have come together for me that I think has been helpful in my life, and I think a lot of people may not resonate with that, but to me, they’re two kind of important points that have come together pretty powerfully for me.
>> JACK: Yeah, and trust, and connected with influence, how do they fit together?
>> JIM: When you think of the Goodwill network, so the network I lead, I lead a network of independent an autonomous community-based organizations, so each Goodwill has their own board of directors, so I do not lead through a top-down, command-and-control structure. I have to lead from east to west, not north to south. I can either expect everybody to trust me or I can start with the perspective of trusting them, the Goodwills and their intents, and then earn their trust, and then have greater influence. That’s how they intersect in my life, and that happened with National Industries for the Blind. It happens when you’re involved at any community-level action where there’s not a top-down directive. That’s the world we live in. How we bring diversity together and a diverse group of perspectives together really makes for the long game. It’s kind of like the old expression, “You can go alone and go fast, or you can go together and go far,” and I’m a big believer in going far together.
>> JACK: Is there someone with a disability that you most respect, and if so, is there anything that we can learn from that person?
>> JIM: As I got into my professional career, I had a mentor early on. He was a guy named Carl Augusto. He’s retired from the American Foundation for the Blind. Carl was a friend and a mentor through my career, and when I took on responsibilities as a CEO, he became even more of a mentor, and he offered perspective without judgment, offered counsel without criticism, and was a real good sounding board for me, both for my professional growth and, as importantly, my experience as a blind chief executive. So role models and mentors are very important.
>> JACK: You know, Jim, many people struggle with the question of whether they should talk about their disability with people at the place that they work. Now, whether it’s because they feel they’ll be judged or because they just don’t know how to talk about it. Do you have any advice for people who are in that position, and if so, what would you say to them?
>> JIM: Everybody has to work with their styles, but if you’re asking in terms of the job-seeking approach, and when do you kind of share that you have a disability, that too has to be, like, personal choice, but I think something that would indicate that you’re blind is–I think it’s a healthy start–the interviewer’s gonna find out anyway, so I would say that in processes I’ve gone through, a little bit of a heads-up is helpful, but people have different disabilities. Some are visible, some are not, and so I think they got to kind of weigh that, but for a blind person, you know, maybe an item, you know, engaged as a leader in a group that indicates that, “Yeah, this guy must be blind,” is good. When it comes to being a part of a team or even in the interview process, I put it out there in the interview process myself. Probably the HR people would say, “You’re not supposed to bring that up,” and so the HR people probably aren’t. I bring it up, because I think that if I don’t answer the kind of questions that might be on their mind, they’re gonna fill that narrative with their own thoughts, and I’d like them to know how I problem solve and how I do work and how I get things done and that kind of thing. In the workplace, again depending on who you are and your style, I think educating and informing people is always healthier than letting people create guesswork on especially what you might need from them or the organization to improve your effectiveness.
>> JACK: I love the way you talk about invitation and how that creates this sense that, you know, you can share about your information and what you need. Otherwise, they will, in fact, create their own narrative. What do you think that your experience with disability and success can teach people who aren’t disabled about success?
>> JIM: Well, here’s an interesting thing. You know, we all have our own story, right? Throughout my life, being a blind person becomes something I identify with, but had I not been blind, I’d probably have other issues that might be more on the surface. In fact, I do, right? What I think everybody can learn from people with disabilities is we all have our own story, and throughout our stories and experiences, we all need tools and supports and other people to find success.
>> JACK: Tools, supports, and other people. Absolutely. Jim, thanks so much for being available. I really appreciate you taking out the time and speaking with us. You have such great wisdom. Thank you, and look forward to our next meeting.
>> JIM: All right. Thanks a ton. Have a great day.
>> JACK: Thank you for joining us for this conversation on success with Jim Gibbons, CEO of Goodwill Industries International. Jim has shown us that finding access to information through technology, continuously exhibiting tenacity and stick-to-itiveness no matter what the situation is, and learning to trust people first and using that as a way to build influence with others have enabled him to achieve incredible success. Please feel free to contact Team ExcelAbility to share your comments, questions, or feedback, or to share your own story with us. We’d love to hear from you. You can find out more information about this podcast and other resources by visiting us at www.TeamExcelAbility.com, on Facebook at Team ExcelAbility, or on Twitter at TeamXLAbility. Thank you, and have a blessed day.