CrossLead

CrossLead panel discussion, about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, sponsored by Red Cell Partners. Dave Silverman facilitates a conversation with former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Roger Ferguson, and former member of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Sipher.

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John Sipher

Roger Ferguson

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DaveFor today’s episode, I have the pleasure of hosting a panel discussion on the developing crisis in Ukraine with two exceptional leaders and patriots. Our sponsor for this episode is Red Cell Partners. Red Cell Partners is a design and incubation studio that brings ideas, capital, resources and talent together to build technology led companies that address the nation’s most pressing challenges in finance, health care in the national security space.

My first guest is John Cipher. John is a foreign policy and intelligence expert who previously served 28 years in the Central Intelligence Agencies National Clandestine Service. At the time of his retirement. He was a member of the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, the leadership team that guides the CIA’s activities globally. John’s has served in multiple overseas tours as both chief of station and deputy chief of Station across Europe, Asia and several other high threat environments to include Russia.

He’s a regular contributor to various news outlets and publications and very active, active as a social influencer. My second guest is Roger Ferguson. Roger is a former vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Fed. Reserve. We served from 1999 to 2006. He represented the Fed on several international policy groups and served on key Federal Reserve committees, including payment systems oversight Reserve Bank Operations and supervision regulation as the only governor in DC on nine 11.

He led the Fed’s initial response to the terrorist attacks, taking actions that kept the U.S. financial system functioning while reassuring the global financial community that the U.S. economy would not be paralyzed. He is a Steven A. Tananbaum Distinguished Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and the immediate past president and CEO of TIAA, the leading provider of retirement services and the Academic Research Medical and cultural fields, and also a Fortune 100 financial services organization.

He attended Harvard for his undergrad, his law degree, and his Ph.D. in Economics In today’s discussion, we talk about Putin strategies. It relates to Ukraine, the current military, geopolitical and economic situation. How this crisis might evolve and the global implications both economically and politically. And I’d like to start with John, and I hope that you could provide some context on Russia and Ukraine and sort of how we got to where we are now.

JohnYeah. Well, it’s interesting. Let me start a little bit to talk about Putin and what makes him tick, because, you know, at the end of the day, a week ago, you know, many people would have assumed he wasn’t going to invade Ukraine. And, you know, essentially nobody could answer, was it?

Whether he was or wasn’t, wasn’t going to. And as much intelligence as the U.S. and Western officials have they still didn’t know because it was all in the head of one person. You know, when you’re a dictator and you’ve created a system around yourself where, you know, people have to come to you and you don’t know. You know, I have no idea.

I was on his head. So a little bit about him. And then and I’ll talk a little about what he cares about, where we are now. So, you know, one thing that is most important to me about Leader Putin is he’s a career Chekist, but that means he’s a career intelligence officer. He’s a kid. It was a career KGB officer.

And that term, Chekist, really relates to the original Bolshevik intelligence service called the Cheka. And any Russian intelligence officer calls themselves a proud Chekist because the check out when the Bolsheviks took over in 1918, the first thing that new government did was create an intelligence service to sort of, you know, kill off any potential domestic opponents as well as to keep their enemies at bay.

And they did that right from the beginning, doing a lot of the things that we’ve seen since the 2016 election, for example. They use subversion, deception, they use disinformation assassinations around the world, all these kind of things. And they continue to do that throughout the Cold War. So that’s really important to understand. Vladimir Putin, because he grew up in a, in a system where they were using information warfare, creating false stories and disinformation and killing their opponents from the beginning.

The other thing to understand about him is, you know, he was in the KGB when the Soviet Union fell. You know, and I think it’s probably hard for us here to understand how that must have affected somebody psychologically. They thought they were in the world’s second greatest superpower. Liberator was the greatest superpower. He worked for the KGB, which is a sword and shield of that of the regime.

You know, the most important. Arguably part of the regime in protecting it. And his whole country fell apart. And he tells a story it even in his own biography about what that meant to him. And he talked about when he was a KGB officer in Dresden, in East Germany, when the wall was starting to fall. And there was protesters coming around his consulate where he was working.

You know, he contacted the military attaché in Berlin and said, you know, we need Soviet troops here. And the military attache in Berlin called him back shortly thereafter and said, you know, we’ve been trying to contact Moscow, but Moscow is silent. And Putin talks about this and use it in his own book to suggest that when the country needed to use its monopoly on brutality, when it needed to be tough, it was silent.

And his point is, whenever he would have a chance to change that, when he would ever have a chance to make sure that the regime was powerful and it used its brutality, his strength when it needed to, he would do it His view is, you know, the weaker beaten in the end. The most important thing about any government is to maintain a monopoly of power and a monopoly of brutality.

And so, you know, another thing to understand about him is, you know, we often talk about how does he negotiate? What is he doing? And I think a lot of us are now seeing that he’s gone into the Ukraine. You know, he’s a sort of a serial liar and someone who sort of is always playing others. And so it was Garry Kasparov the famous chess champion that sort of talked about he says, listen, Putin doesn’t play the situation on the chess board.

He plays the opponent. And so he has this sort of gift for sniffing out weakness and trying to then take advantage of that weakness to amplify it or to exploit it. So how do we get here? Like what are the things that he really cares about? So I’ll mention a few that he sort of claims and that led to this crisis.

But then there’s sort of one that it’s really important that when you talk about dictator sort of the first thing to realize is this whole thing is completely manufactured. There was no threat to Russia. NATO was not expanding. There hasn’t been talks for years about including Ukraine. There is no threat from Ukraine to Russia. It’s a much smaller and weaker country.

All of the things that he brought up, you know, that led to this were things that were for like the 1990s. You know, this is stuff that easily could have been discussed, negotiated, dealt with. But it has to do with that sort of mentality of the man. You know, he’s always had this sort of sense of grievance of emotional anger against the West in the United States.

His narrative is that when the powerful Soviet Union fell, it was because the West in the in the United States were trying to destroy Russia. They wanted to humiliate Russia and keep it down. And of course, you know, that’s another manufactured thing. I worked in Moscow in the embassy in the 1990s for the very organization that would try to destroy Russia if that’s what we were doing.

And the United States government was trying everything they do to bring Russia into the family of nations to support them economically, help them. And if there’s an argument to be had from that period of time, perhaps that we didn’t do enough, not that we were trying to destroy Russia or weaken it. And so there’s there’s a couple of things that he said consistently that he wants the death of NATO’s.

He wants NATO’s to go away. He wants he doesn’t want all of these Western security services on his anywhere near his borders. You know, in fact, when he took office, it was the NATO general secretary, I think Rasmussen, who met him and said, you know, Mr. President Putin, my goal is to increase cooperation with Russia. And Putin reportedly responded with the question of his own.

He said, Do you know my mission, Mr. Rasmussen? Is to make sure that your organization no longer exists. And so he’s had that view ever since. He wants the U.S. out of Europe and he wants NATO’s dead. And the other thing he wants is he wants countries on his borders to be weak and vassals of the Kremlin. It’s democratic expansion that threatens him really more than veto expansion.

He doesn’t want success for democratic countries nearby, which can be a sort of a sign to his own people. What’s what’s certain possible. In fact, you know, bear with me for a second on a quote George Kennan said years ago, too long ago, he said, quote, The jealous, the jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin can distinguish in the end only vassals and enemies and the neighbors of Russia, if they do not wish to be one, must reconcile themselves to being the other.

So with that said, those are the things he’s claimed sort of led to this problem. But the big one, and then I’ll stop for a while is he’s a dictator. It’s about survival. Dictators, you know, have to worry every day about staying in power, making sure there’s not people out there who maybe want to sort of take power from the north where they want to maintain control.

And so when there’s a country, when you create a country where there’s no means for a peaceful transition of power, everything is about staying alive, staying in total control. And so Putin, in his 20 years of being in power, has witnessed a number of really strongmen fall everywhere, from Egypt to Ukraine to Georgia and around the world. And, you know, he probably has visions of Gadhafi being filmed in a sewer, being sodomized in the lead pipe.

And that is what he is trying to do. It’s all about maintaining power and staying in power. And then as we go on, I don’t want to feel like I’m talking too much here. We can go on about sort of, you know, how we ended up where we are and where and what and what where we might go from here.

DaveRight. John, that was amazing. Given that context and background, can you give the audience here a sense of the current situation, as you understand it, from your vast network of spies and assets that you still probably actively engage with? And, you know, one of the questions just came in is like, what was that? What was the catalyst for Putin’s making the decision to act now?

JohnThat’s what’s crazy about this. There really wasn’t a catalyst. You know, he’s created these false narratives that, you know, NATO’s expanding. It’s a threat. And Will NATO’s wasn’t expanding hasn’t expanded since what, 2012 or whatever. And really, like I said, it’s about democratic expansion rather than NATO’s expansion. He worries about a successful and democratic Ukraine on his border that looks like a success to his own people.

So they can say, hey, what why? If Ukraine can be successful in Western and Democratic, why can’t we be. And the answer is Vladimir Putin. And so those are the sort of things that. And so where we are now you know I think you know when you’re a dictator for 20 years it’s sort of like sort of the classic thing.

There’s so much power around you. I think as time goes on, people are afraid to bring you bad news. No one wants to walk up to Vladimir Putin and say, sir, you’re very wrong about this. This is how we should change it. And so I think you know, having been in power for so long and we see it from those pictures where he’s like 50 feet away from his advisers that are at a table that sort of suggests this kind of thing.

I think he’s getting to a point where, you know, he believes his own sort of bull and and thought that he had to do this. You know, he went into, if you remember, in 2014, he went into Crimea and he took the eastern part of Ukraine. I think he believed that, you know, that’s a largely Russian speaking areas.

I think he believed that the Russian speakers there would rise up and be thrilled to be part of Russia and get away from Ukraine. Well, it didn’t work. And so he eventually had to send his soldiers in there to try to like, you know, fight their way in. And that still hasn’t worked. They haven’t even taken over the whole area they tried to do.

And so this is sort of the third step is, you know, they’re going to go in and sort of crush Ukraine. And so I think he expected this one to go quickly. I think he’s seen, you know, Western armies and U.S. Army go in and use sort of pinpoint attacks. And very quickly, we’d be able to sort of the regime would fall.

And then he would come in and put in his own sort of his own, you know, fake regime that would support Russia. And as we’ve seen, it hasn’t really worked out that way. You know, that the communication between their troops, all these kind of things have sort of gone into a mess. And they actually created a different problem for him as the whole world is now paying attention.

The whole world is now you know, a lot of us have been following for Russia forever have been saying, hey, we need to crack down on him. He’s exactly the kind of person if you don’t push back, he’s going to take that as weakness. And continue to move along. And multiple administrations have failed to push back on Putin so that when this crisis arose, we had very little to deter him.

He had gotten his way so many times. We had assumed every time if we gave him an off ramp, he would maybe come around and change and join the family of nations. And it never happened. He hates us. He wants us to go away. He wants to overthrow the rules based order. And so I think we now realize the rest of the world now realizes, you know, he is someone who has to be fought and deterred, is not someone we can negotiate with.

So one quick thing. You know, where are we and where does it go? And so what’s hard here is it really depends on how he responds to what the world is doing to him. You know, everybody everybody from Sweden and Finland and in Switzerland, or even, you know, pushing back Switzerland was was was neutral against the Nazis. But now they’re actually pushing back against Vladimir Putin.

So. So it’s a tough thing for the the world is watching. But his traditional way of doing things, as we saw him in in Syria and in Chechnya and other places, is to essentially destroy everything, to sort of carpet bomb and destroy the entire cities. And so I worry that, you know, if he sort of sees that it’s not going well rather than try to use his, you know, precision weapons, which we’re finding out aren’t so precision, they’re going to go back to the old traditional Russian way of war with massive artillery and bombing and sort of killing and murdering.

DaveAnd I think we’re already seeing some of that vigorous yet. John, thank you so much, Roger. As one of the preeminent economist it’s really the last several, several decades, certainly. I’d love to get a sense from you on where we are economically. I mean, the one thing that we have noticed is that there’s been a rapid coalition of, I would say, support and focus from the E.U. and from the U.S..

And to John’s point earlier, Switzerland has picked aside for the first time since the Vatican. So they’ve seen this be a sort of unimaginable even a week ago, are now sort of happening. I’d love to get a sense of where you see that current situation and how you see that playing out.

RogerWell, first, thank you. And secondly, to John’s first point, you know, when I was in government, we treated this not I personally, but the government in the US. It created this notion of the G7 G8 inviting Russia and inviting them into the G20. And so, you know, they they were early on in giving this olive branch to come in and be part of the part of the international financial order.

And where are we today where all of that has collapsed? We’re seeing an unprecedented coalition including, as you’ve heard, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, aligned against one country that is a large country, is that it’s not the largest it’s like the 17th largest economy in the world to be in that sort. So this is not a small country we’re dealing with.

And not only is there total alignment, but we’re using in the financial world a tool that has never been used against a country the size, which is basically precision exclusion of people from swift SWIFT is the international telecommunications system. It brings in 11,000 patients from 200 countries and you cannot possibly move money around the world accurately without using SWIFT.

And so what you saw is when you and the US decided to exclude an unnamed number of patients and now we know it’s just a handful of the ones immediately that led to a run of the banks, quite literally. And in Russia, individuals, you know, grabbing their rubles. We saw the ruble decline quite dramatically and they had to close the stock market and in Moscow on Monday.

And so, you know, this decision to start to exclude Russian banks from the international communications system of SWIFT has had dramatic effects in that country. In terms of undermining the trust and confidence in the banking system. The second thing that was also unprecedented for a country, the size was an effort to make sure they couldn’t use lawsuits, $630 billion in reserves and their central bank, again, unprecedented.

What that actually means is that they’re reserves and so reserve currencies and dollars and and euros and pounds, etc. that may be held in these countries in the West are not usable. So effectively that’s reduced their usable reserves to about, we think, a third a bit more primarily gold and also reserves like they have in the past. So their ability to support their economy, the central bank to support the economy has been dramatically weakened.

And then the final thing and all of these are playing together is obviously various sanctions against individuals and also against trade. Right now, energy is theoretically exported. But we’ve seen a number of Western companies that are critical to moving Russian energy oil around the world have been unwilling to to participate in that supply chain. So even though, you know, Russian oil has not yet been officially moved into the sanction list, effectively, it has because of the lack of payment ability for us to identify and then Western companies not wanting to be involved in transporting Soviet or Russian oil.

So unprecedented coalition of the willing to speak and beyond with Sweden, Switzerland, etc.. Unprecedented use of financial tools against a country that had been and still technically is, you know, in the closet with the G20. An unprecedented impact in a very large economy in terms of having the run on the banks, quite literally, that we’ve seen in driving a currency to being almost worthless.

So we are living in some normal times in the standpoint of the financial architecture of the world.

DaveNow, I’m going to Roger, a follow up question Where do you see this playing out? I mean, we’ve they’ve all these unprecedented actions have now taken place. Let’s assume that this is going to be a protracted fight for Russia and Ukraine. I don’t I don’t see this thing, you know, sort of getting resolved in the next you know, certainly next week or two.

How do you how do you think this plays out in the affects? Do you think that’s going to have on the global economy?

RogerSo with three different ways, it’s already starting to play out. One obviously is increasing the price of oil well over, I think $110 today. And, you know, a very, very important impact globally that’s increasing the discussion around some stagflation, the possibility that inflation picks up. And we still have slowing growth. The last time we had an oil shock of this magnitude back in 1973 and 1979, in fact that was one of the causes of the stagflation that we had to deal with.

This time things are slightly different. To be fair. And so we have a different well in the 73 and 79, oil prices first tripled. They stayed at a high plateau and then in 79 they doubled again. So while energy prices, oil prices have clearly gone up, we’re not talking about a doubling or tripling of oil prices right now.

The second thing that’s different from then is the United States has developed its own oil capabilities where energy independence and in fact we are the ability and not as much as we’re going to need, but we have an ability to export our liquefied natural gas, and others are as well to support to support the Europeans that need that as it gets.

Not now, but back in the 18 season, So one thing is risk of stagflation going up. But I think it’s not probable what we saw in 69 and 79. So when the talk is certainly higher and for sure this is doing the second thing which is creating some uncertainty for all the central banks that we’re on a process of normalizing interest rates.

Chairman Powell had this testimony today he opened by talking about uncertainty when he went on to continue the discussion around managing inflation. Probably not as as aggressively as some of his colleagues had been empty, but nevertheless creating some uncertainty there. The answer that he gave looks to me as other markets liked it, because there’s a lot of green now in the major indices here in the U.S. At least that’s the second issue.

You have a central bank to deal with this. And then there’s a third longer term issue, which is excluding using the swift tool, excluding a major country from SWIFT at this stage of the unpredictable spillover effects on how others think about their reserves how they think about linking to the communications system. I don’t know yet how that’s going to play out, but there will certainly be talk about in some capitals, not a major one, but some smaller ones.

You know, how do we think about reserves, how we think about Swift, etc. Those are questions that have really not been on the table since the fall of the Berlin Wall. So some uncertainty, some certainty. And then there’s longer term multiplier effects. Hard to gauge how that how things are up there.

DaveBut you’re happy you’re not your old job. Sounds like a lot.

RogerNo, just the opposite. It’s great to be in the Fed when these moments are occurring. They’ll handle it well.

DaveAwesome. So I want to I want to talk now about what we think happens next. So maybe starting with you, John, you’re from that from a geopolitical standpoint, where do you how do you see this playing out over the next month or two? And I’m very curious, not just tying that to the relationship with with with with Europe, but also with how it can affect China, because my sense is Russia sort of back to Soviet days as far as isolation and isolationism from from the Western sort of markets and opportunity sets and, you know, their biggest probably partner, you know, what’s available to them, at least today is China will be interested to see how that morphs and changes and evolves over as inevitably Russia’s military efforts sort of pick up momentum and speed.

JohnI’ll start by saying, I think, you know, the administration has done a pretty good job once they sort of started focusing on how to deal with Putin and deal with this crisis. But they came in with a pretty weak hand. The administration first started their policy towards Russia. It was to create a stable and predictable relationship with Russia.

Now, anybody, any Russia followers who have been seeing what Putin’s been doing for the last at least eight to ten years, he’s been at war with us. He’s had a political war. That’s why he’s trying to use disinformation and cyber attacks and all these other kind of things, you know, fomenting violent groups around Europe and all these type of things.

We are never going to have a stable and predictable, predictable relationship with him. He wants to overthrow essentially the rules based order. He wants us out of Europe. He wants U.S. and Europe divided and weak. And so he has tried to build a relationship with China. And just prior to the Olympics, he went out to China and met with Xi.

And they put together you know, it was quite an amazing statement. I listened to former Australian Prime Minister Paul Rudd, who is a China expert and was the ambassador in China, among other things. Talk about it. And he said it was really unique for China. Because it really tie those two countries together more than ever before and suggested that China was much more on the Russian following the Russian thing, saying negative things about NATO’s negative things about the West, which was surprising because they’ve always tried to be careful about, you know, never supporting something that would break across borders and maintain their markets.

And so, you know, what we’ve seen since the invasion happened is, you know, I think China had a real opportunity on the world stage for sort of really the first time to make a foreign policy statement to put themselves out there is, you know, a bigger player. And I think they really fumbled the ball here. You can argue that China is essentially winning the 21st century.

Their growth is incredible. They want and need a stable rules based order because they’re winning their rules based order to becoming rich on that rules based order. Whereas Vladimir Putin is a loser of the 21st century. They are. They’re losing big time. They want to overthrow that rules based order. They want. They want to create problems inside of it.

And so that that relationship doesn’t seem like a natural one to me. And I don’t understand why China would want to tie themselves to a violent and loser kind of guy like Putin with a really tiny economy the size of, you know, Portugal or Italy and you know, who might then invade countries in Europe, which then China is going to have to be stuck, whether they support that or not support that.

And we can see in recent days that China is sort of again fumbling to try to say, well, you know, yes, we said we are with Russia, but we’re not really allies. But we really we don’t want war, but we want to support what we like. So they’re having a tough time dealing with these kind of issues and actually, the China Russia thing, you know, in the long term is not really natural for Russia either.

You know, there’s Russia’s going to become a pariah here. Its economy is going to depend on that. Relationship with Russia and is taking a tough man as Putin is. He’s going to find himself being a little brother to China. And at some point, China is not going to care about the little brother. And, you know, Putin in Beijing is just all he wants, but he’s not.

If that’s the relationship, if he’s reliant on China, he’s really sort of in a weak position even with his own people.

DaveRoger, one of the questions that came in was maybe going a layer deeper on the oil piece for for Russia. You mentioned it is far as effective and isolated, but you know, I think I think the core maybe if you can go a little deeper when the question that come is given that oil prices are at a seven year high and that.

Long or not, VICE has taken that next step. Do you think that’s even an option that that that Europe would consider doing, just given, you know, how much this has escalated in the last the last couple of days?

RogerWell, I think the answer is given the unprecedented nature of what they’ve already done. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the next step, partially for the reasons you pointed out, which is effective Russian oil is basically a commodity that much of the West doesn’t want to touch in terms of moving it around. So already, regardless of what has been officially decided, there is clearly some motion that is making it more and more difficult to get hold of oil.

And think about it. How do you know how much you’re going to pay for it? You know, it’s not all the media. Its banks are excluded from the international payment system. You know, recognize something else that happened. The Germans decided to not certify the Nord Stream two gas pipeline that would have increased the amount of gas coming from Russia into Germany and to Germany to the rest of Europe estimated 50%.

So it’s pretty clear that, you know, energy as a stick is not nearly as potent as it had been before. Now, what is going on? I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with the appointment. John made this sudden easy. Very interesting.

Alliance. That’s what it is between Russia and China that has very important energy overlays to it. Right There was an agreement, I believe, between Russia and China a few years ago to trade with each other in their currencies and not in the U.S. dollar. And to the point that was made earlier, natural gas and oil would be very, very beneficial to the rapidly growing economy of China.

So I can imagine the Chinese playing a bit of a game in which Russian oil comes out through, you know, perhaps some Chinese companies there are a large number of Chinese oil companies. We don’t really know how much their reserves are. We see them around the world, you know, drilling for oil or price. And so this may end up being a very helpful answer in terms of getting that useful commodity, not having to use any hard currency and avoiding some geopolitical concerns of really some very, very unsavory countries.

So I can imagine that being an outcome. Let me pick up on a point that Germany I’ve observed the same thing, which is, you know, and he’s more aware of these issues than I am. But, you know, the Chinese wanting to play a constructive role, I think they submit around the Ukraine. And he’s also right that the Chinese have benefited greatly from the existing trading system and they want to stay in that system.

So one of the things that might limits them is the fear of secondary sanctions against their company. So it’s a complicated story with China. We’re trying to play a leading role, trying to position themselves as the alternative to the West trying to position themselves even in the payment system world as an alternative to swift. Those things might start to arise.

And this linkage on energy will find some rest more likely coming out of China. But at the end of the day, you know, I really think China is not going to get to the point where an earlier play, you know, overly supportive of Russia for obvious reasons. And therefore, I think even even with oil going up in the price, it’s not going to be sustaining the Russian economy as much as it might imagine.

DaveYeah, that’s super helpful. I heard a an old colleague of mine back from that from the military days was talking about the calculus that went into Russia making this decision. John. Roger, to invade. And obviously, you know, Putin’s on record as you as you said, one, that he believes that the worst geopolitical failure of the 20 20th century was a collapse of the Soviet Union.

And it’s sort of his stated objective as a sort of reconstitute that and he’s probably looking for the right time to do that if you look at the last five years, you could argue that you know traditional relationships had been sort of deprioritized or hard even frayed potentially under under you know some of the actions that you know, us and other allies have taken.

And so maybe he saw as a moment of weakness. But what I heard, which was interesting, was that sort of the events of Afghanistan specifically that, you know, sort of the botched pull out of Afghanistan at the beginning of this year or so, sorry, saw that the fall of last year sort of set a clear message that says, well, look, you know, this wasn’t really handled well and wanted to it’s sort of a clear sign of like how they sort of think about your allies and partners.

And that was sort of I heard like one of the major final straws I said or I can go in is probably not what these guys are going to do about. In fact, I heard about a meeting that the Russian foreign minister had with senior officials in the U.S. where he stated, hey, we may we may not go into Ukraine, but there’s nothing that America is going to be able to do about it to start the process.

Right. Just so sort of like the flip it sort of arrogance. And then separately, I know there’s a lot of discussion, you know, maybe to Roger’s points that this could also be seen as an opportunity for for China to continue or saber-rattling potentially take the next step in Taiwan, which obviously had significant significant geopolitical implications. And my assumption is, given the swift response economically and how interlinked China is the global economy, that my guess is that’s pretty massive deterrent.

But I’d be clear to see you guys talk about that for a second. Maybe start with you, John.

JohnYeah, I do think like I said, I think multiple administrations have misplayed Putin. I think he’s essentially been at war with us sort of in their intelligence doctrine, political warfare, information warfare, whatever you want to call it, to try to weaken us from the inside for a minimum of at least ten years since 2008 when he went into Georgia and he stated it, you know, directly at the Munich conference there.

JohnThat was his goal. And I think since that time, multiple administrations have tried to deal with him. And every time he’s done something where we really should have and could have pushed back, we didn’t do so because I would think we thought, hey, well, if we accommodate him, if we give him an off ramp, you know, maybe he’ll come around You know, presidents have big egos and they think that, you know, if there’s a problem, they can solve it with their wonderful personalities.

And I think we realize that, you know, so we came into this in a pretty sort of weakened space. And Afghanistan was a huge problem. I mean, we we looked we we didn’t work with our allies. It was, you know, essentially surrendering to the Taliban. It was a complete mess. And it was certainly seen by the Chinese and Russians as weakness.

But a bigger thing, I think, is our own tribal nature, political nature here in the United States. And he’s been trying to foment and exploit that and and use all sorts of disinformation, deception to mess with us inside. But, you know, you look what happened on January six and all these other kind of things, you know, a good portion of the Republican Party is less supportive of Putin and doesn’t care about what he does around the world.

And and Americans are sort of see they we see our political opponents as the enemy. We don’t see Russia anymore as the enemy or foreign people. I think we’ve been so used to essentially years and years of success and peace and economic growth that we sort of forget there’s a price to pay for that, to try to deter people who want to change that rules based order.

And of course, now we’re faced with it. And so even Biden in his speech last night said, you know, we know that we’ve learned a lesson that if you if you don’t push back against dictators, they will continue to create chaos. Well, that’s absolutely true. And we didn’t push back for quite a long time and sort of we ended up sort of stuck here.

And so, yeah, Vladimir Putin, the person with grievances against the West, created sort of a false narrative about, you know, the West being a threat to him and having that nose for weakness, I think put all those things together and perhaps having been a dictator so long of not getting real information any more thought that this he could go in and the West would not be able to push back.

I mean, Europe really has been weak over the last couple of decades. They have not invested in defense. They have been really inward focusing. And so, you know, he didn’t necessarily misread that, but he forgot that the size of our economies and our long history together and the fact that we have allies and they don’t allow us to sort of quickly come around and push back.

And so I think hopefully he’s very surprised about how quickly Europe, the United States and Western leaning countries around the world have come together on this.

RogerYeah, let me let me jump in and say, from the economic standpoint, there was an economic equivalent of not pushing back, which was when he went into Crimea. There was discussion, rumored talk of using the swift tool, moving some Russian banks out of access to Swift. He explicitly said they would be perceived as an act of war. And we didn’t do it.

There was a moment when I met that they should have, but to John’s point in the finance world, clearly a point of weakness. Similarly, you know, the using the oil and more natural gas to act on the economics, perhaps decoupling Germany, Western Europe from the U.S. around that. And there have been quite a bit of friction around this question of Western Europe becoming more and more linked to Russia in the energy sphere.

So perhaps you read that that’s not the sort of economic story that feeds very much into the John story. Sort of, you know, perhaps Germany won’t stand up. And one of the things that I think is really quite amazing spilling over a little bit into what John talks about. But the focus that the Germans now have on spending much more of their budget on defense from the standpoint of an economic policy, that is a pretty dramatic move to finally get up to two and a half percent of their GDP on defense.

All of that triggered by this. And at that point, you think about finance using economics. Most of the early signals were, you know, maybe Europe is not going to jump behind us around these things that perhaps they’re going to go their own way. So I can imagine. I know nothing about the psychology of what I’ve just heard from John but if he were looking for points of weakness in the Western alliance on this economic topic, there could have been two or three straws in the wind that might have reinforced what he saw around Afghanistan and other things.

So, you know, all of a peace and I think all of us rescued and as well are surprised at the strength of the unified voice in the economic space as well. The geopolitical space on this one it’s not clear, even if it’s one would have predicted that ten days to two weeks ago. The other thing to note economically is no other than energy, Western interaction, financial interaction, business interaction with Russia is relatively limited There are very few banks that have really like turned to Russia.

They’re not normally thought of on this energy as being sort of credit worthy. And so, you know, they’re the collapse of their economy. Other than this question of energy is unlikely to have a negative spillover effect back to US banks, for example, or even most European banks. So. And then we saw today the stock market turned around. So know there are no seem to be no replications in Western economy other than how this oil thing plays out from the the turmoil and chaos that has emerged in Russia because they have over many, many years tried to decouple from the West.

And the result of that is we look like we can penalize them more than they do as us in the world of finance and economics.

JohnRight. Because one quick answer, one and one quick thing is in a sense, when you look at Vladimir Putin, you got to look at someone who is essentially like, you know, a bully or an organized crime boss. And he has that mentality. And so, you know, when you talk about we didn’t push back over all those years, he also has that real skill.

You know, again, he’s a dictator. He doesn’t have any threats internally, have to worry about about intimidating and threatening and pushing back. So every time. You know, we even hinted that we might do these kind of sanctions. When I push back, he sort of went nuclear and pushed back and made it clear he separated us from our allies by everybody saying, hey, it’s not worth going that far because he might do something crazy.

And we’re seeing that now. He’s threatening, you know, nuclear war. And you guys have said mean comments to me. Therefore, I’m putting my nuclear by your nuclear weapons on alert. I mean, it’s the same kind of thing. He’s he uses those threats to scare us and push us back and then have some, you know, allies it’s a hard thing to keep, you know, to throw allies together and things.

Some people are going to be like, oh, my God, let’s back off. We need to offer them, you know, face saving measures. We need to listen to what he wants And so, I mean, he’s very, very good at that game of sort of, you know, a bully tactics of, you know, threatening and making people back off.

DaveYeah. No, I totally agree. That there’s two question just came out. I want to ask you that when I guess I think they’re related. The first is, is the Russian military performing as poorly as is suggested in the press? If yes, what are the implications longer term? That’s question one. Maybe, John, you could try that. And then my question, too, is acknowledging that Putin is a dictator and that weakness is an existential threat probably to his his is his hold on power.

How does this resolve in a way that allows Putin a way out that doesn’t guarantee his downfall? What does that path look like and in what timeframe specifically is they’re acceptable course of action to Putin that would lead to the end of sanctions? Maybe take that, Roger. Maybe, John, start with the Russian military performance to date, as you said, relative to our assessment of them going into it.

And then and then and then what is a way out of this process? Is there a way to save.

JohnA quick comment on the on the way out? Off-Ramp thing is, you know, there’s a lot of that now now that he’s made these nuclear threats. There’s a lot of that we have to have he has to have a means to save face he has to have an off ramp. He has a way and a way to stay in power here.

And sort of one quick thing is, you know, he manufactured this entire thing, thing out of whole cloth. There was no threat to him. There was no pushing needle. There was nothing here is his grievances and anger are based on things from like you know, the 1990s and such. He may he he made this up and my take is like, listen he if he needs a way off to face save, he can make he can kill a bunch of people and claim victory and back off and he can, he can make up his own face.

Saving things is not on us to have to somehow give him a way out of this. But on the on the military thing, it’s, you know, I’m not a military expert. It’s hard to follow these things. It’s certainly hard to follow them through the media. There’s sort of this world of, you know, military Twitter, people who are finding things in the world of Open-Source Intelligence has gotten so big, you know, the Bellingcat of the world.

I don’t know if you guys follow that group, among others, that have been able to use big data sets to pull together, you know, incredible amount. You know, if there’s a bomb that goes off somewhere now, there’s so much social media and pictures taken around there, they can be sucked in and pulled together and, you know, tic Tacs and everything.

So on one hand is making it hard for Putin because Ukrainians or others are sort of putting pushing out to the world the stuff they’re doing. And so, yes, it looks like they they really screwed this up. I think, again, he’s a dictator. I’m sure they’ve told him that, you know, the military is strong and ready to go.

But at the same time, the people around him, you know, it’s like they’re massive criminals. They’ve been stealing money it all places. So whoever the Shoigu, who’s a minister of defense, has been saying, yes, sir, yes, sir. We got this covered. I’m sure at the same time, you know, he’s got another another crony of Putin who says, well, I want my company to do X, Y and Z.

And even if that company is, that is the worst choice. That’s the way that guys skims money. And so over time, I think they’ve created this Potemkin village where they think their military is more powerful and put together. It is, but it’s often a kludge together by these corrupt cronies who are all making money off of this thing.

And we’re seeing it in action now. So a lot of the things that our professional military says about communication and, you know, and surprise and all these type of things, you know, they’re not showing themselves to be terribly effective. There’s you know, they’re running out of gas. They’re running out of food. You got Russian soldiers turn around and walking home the Ukrainians are using the sort of social media against them.

So it doesn’t mean that Putin can’t now go to the old school thing and just raze whole cities and stuff that certainly possible. But, you know, he does have the whole world watching now. So in terms of real details about how the military is doing, you know, doesn’t look good.

DaveYet. Doesn’t, Roger, what’s the path out economically? Well.

RogerI think it’s very narrow, frankly, once we’ve gone to the place we’re willing to exclude some of their banks from on the international communication networks. I indicated once we got to the place, unprecedented, where we said to a central bank we’re going to limit your ability to use or you reserve you know, it’s you you know, the only way to come back from that is to say we are going to be good financial citizens.

And, you know, it doesn’t seem like that’s in the Putin playbook. The other thing it’s fascinating is that we all know when you see a run on banks as occurred during the Great Depression, there was a I’m speaking to you from from the U.K. There is a line around a bank here at 28, 2009 governments tend to change, i.e., citizens think that is unacceptable.

When I am not sure that I trust the banks, the government really should be held accountable in some way for that. I don’t see how that works in Russia. You have been said so. I don’t know where a couple of questions came in. Yes, I do think west western banks that have been, you know, putting Russia in more and more off limits are going to continue to do that.

You know, we have in the West all these rules about sort of know your customer and anti-money laundering, etc.. Well, the money in Russia X the you know, that’s the oil and energy is in the hands of these oligarchs. They don’t tend to bank in the West for obvious reasons. So I think what the way out is, you know, Russia becoming more and more isolated, you know, more of a small economy, more limited and their trading partners probably a broader type relationship with China and a few others.

And so I think from the standpoint of economics, this is really backfiring and has pushed to the further away from any ability to actually, you know, drive and claim these kind of great economies. And we didn’t have one before. He has even less of one now. And the working around of is one big resource, which is energy and others I think is is going to continue and we’ll find other ways to get to get along without the raw materials that are, you know, the major exports from Russia.

So we’ll be very, very interesting. And I don’t see around other than, you know, trying to be really good citizens and separating the average Russian from government. And I honestly have no idea how that unfolds in a dictatorship.

DaveSo, John, do you think then that literally Putin’s got to do in order to fix this for Russia, the Putin has to basically go away like I mean, like like lose power be overthrown? I mean, that’s that’s sort of the doomsday scenario here because because he holds a nuclear arsenal and it’s a real threat that’s obviously creating a lot of anxiety collectively and yeah. Anyways, let me ask you that.

JohnWell, the problem is he’s created a system. He’s changed the Constitution. He stayed in power. They don’t really have a means of sort of of a changing of power in a nonviolent way. And so we’re sort of stuck. And so I see a few possibilities. You know, the one is sort of this becomes an ongoing sort of quagmire.

There’s a number of these. So, you know, since 2014 they’ve been stuck in in eastern Ukraine and Crimea and in Georgia and in in Moldova of these sort of frozen conflicts that aren’t completely solved. And there’s Russian soldiers in these places and you know essentially what in the quagmire possibility he bombs the hell out of the place you know kills off the leadership there you know tries to put in his own people.

There’s this sort of low level insurgency against him and it sort of goes on forever like it has in eastern Ukraine for the last eight years. There’s the other one is, you know, there’s an old iron curtain comes back down over Europe. You know, the brutality cracks down. He has to crack down really at home because he worries about being overthrown.

And so there’s more people thrown in jail. He types up and civic type tightens up domestically. Europeans and NATO has to rearm and sort of push up. So we have an Iron Curtain. There is a possibility of of sort of a larger war here with NATO. Right. A lot of people talk about the no fly zone. No fly zone means we’re shooting down Russian planes because this is a this is a whole different thing here.

If you’re bringing in more with NATO and with the West, you know, or over time and one of these sort of frozen conflicts, we’re sort of rearming from NATO countries and the Baltic people are sending things across the border. I can imagine problems. You know, wars don’t follow a script. You never know how these things are going to go once they get going.

You know, if you see if you look at the map, there’s a little small part of Russia that’s separated from the rest of Russia. In Kaliningrad, it was old German, Königsberg you know, I can imagine now that he has sort of Belarus and Ukraine, you might want to make a connection to Kaliningrad, the other part of Russia. And that goes through natal countries in the Baltics who he despises and thinks are weak.

Then you’re at war with NATO or they’re there’s some sort of dirty compromise that sort of has this will go away. And then the one you mentioned, it’s the Putin in the gutter scenario that, you know, that the former foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, put out a tweet yesterday the Russian foreign minister saying, telling people in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that they should all quit.

Like this is really something inside a country like Russia. So, you know, when there’s no legal way for this to happen, some sort of civil war, some sort of you know, violent overthrow is certainly a possibility.

DaveAnd press at times. So we’re getting we’re getting to the top of the hour. We’ve got to cut this off. I’d like to hear any closing comments. Roger that. You might have before before we end the session.

RogerWell, you do it unprecedented a few times. And, you know, that’s the main thing from the standpoint of finance, a country that’s not huge. What has the or not irrelevant is now clearly being made up. Ryan and I suspect from a financial standpoint is going to be a remaking of the international economic order with a rethinking of energy.

And in particular and I don’t know where it’s going to where it’s going about Russia’s certainly is an important source of many commodities that we need in the West. But it’s hard for me to see quite how we pull back from all these sanctions. And so very, very messy opaque future as far as I can see here.

DaveGreat. John, in closing comments for you.

JohnYeah, quick and I apologize. I don’t mean this to be domestic political comment, but there is one way that Putin actually wins this thing. It’s hard to see how this comes out really well for him. But there is one way he truly can win. And in fact, if he affects our domestic politics so much that the Trump is reelected and Putin actually does win.

Right. The United States pulls out of NATO that we sort of weaken our relationship with Western allies. He allows Putin to do what he wants in Eastern Europe. And so you know, there is an effect here that if if, you know, it affects our domestic politics to the point where Donald Trump or a Donald Trump like candidate wins again, that really is sort of a lifeline to Vladimir Putin.

And the other one is to think about it. Right. You know, now, obviously, the Ukrainian people have incredible bravery in there is really something. And besides the Ukrainians who are suffering here, the other people to think about who are really, you know, being thrown under the bus here are the Russian people later are Putin essentially in the great tradition of the Russian czars and the Communist Party bosses, they don’t give a shit about their own people.

And so they’re they they’re making their country an economic pariah. There’s no economic future for people in Russia. They’re going to be beholden to a massive China. They’re sending their men off to war to become back in body bags. This is not a good this is not a good place for Russian citizens to be either. So Russians and Ukrainians, the people are the ones that are really suffering here. And that’s.

DaveYeah, well said. Thank you both so much for taking time out of your incredibly busy schedules to to talk about this. This is really this critical topic. I can’t thank you enough. And with that we’ll we’ll go ahead and end the session. Thank you, guys.

JohnThanks.

RogerThank you.

JohnA pleasure, Roger.

RogerThank you.

DaveIf you want to watch the video recording of this episode, or read the full transcript, you can head over to crosslead.training to create a free account and get access to many other resources. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoy the conversation I’ve have with my friends, John and Roger.

In this episode of the CrossLead podcast, host David Silverman speaks with Vivian Greentree. Vivian is the Senior Vice President of the Head of Global Corporate Citizenship at Fiserv.

Vivian Greentree

https://bluestarfam.org/

https://www.fiserv.com/en.html

Want to discuss some of these topics directly with Dave? Join the CrossLead LinkedIn Group.

Dave

Welcome to the CrossLead Podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman. At CrossLead we exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimum performance. In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Vivian Greentree. Vivian is a senior vice president at Fiserv, where she’s the head of global corporate citizenship, as well as the Care Foundation.

Prior role at Fiserv Vivian had the same role at first data, and prior to that, she was a co-founder and ran research and policy for Blue Star families. Blue Star Families is a phenomenal nonprofit that strengthens military families and connects America to the military.

Vivian has a Ph.D. in public administration and urban policy. She’s a passionate Navy veteran where she served for eight years as a supply chain officer, and she is also a proud military spouse and mother and her nearly two decades of leadership experience across public, nonprofit and private sectors.

She has been a constant champion of community and employee engagement. Vivian was one of the first leaders that I met who had the passion, skill and mandate to operationalize DNI initiatives at scale inside of a large organization. Her ability to connect these efforts to business value was the inspiration to have her on today’s podcast.

In our conversation, we discussed diversity, inclusion, future of work, gender pay gaps, how you measure the effectiveness of such initiatives, and so much more. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoy the conversation with my guest and friend Vivian Greentree.

Welcome to the CrossLead podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman at CrossLead. We exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimum performance. So I’m super honored to have Vivian as our guest today. She comes to us with a massive amount of amazing experience.

Vivian, welcome to the show. I’d love for you to spend a little bit of time educating the audience here on yourself. You know, give us a little background who you are, where you’re from, what sort of shaped and made and informs the way you think about leadership going forward.

Vivian

Sure. And I think I’m a big believer that kind of hard work and luck. Hard work increases your surface area for luck. And because I do feel very lucky to be where I am doing what I do now for a living, but I also know that a lot of that, even if it was hard work, but also it was a lot of luck. It was a lot of other people helping me. And so I think that definitely informs my view of, of leadership.

And teamwork, and I feel a level of responsibility commiserate with how much I do think I’ve been given or how much people have helped me to get where I am based on that. And so my position right now is I’m the head of global corporate citizenship at Pfizer, which is one of the world’s largest fintechs. And we’d like to think one of the best in my position with global corporate citizenship really looks at how we align or create a culture around diversity and inclusion, associate and community engagement, philanthropy, sustainability because we know that those areas of diversity and inclusion, associate and community engagement, philanthropy, you know where we invest time treasure talent, whether it’s for business or community, when those areas are coordinated and aligned, that’s really where you create high performing teams where everyone can say I am a valued member of a winning team doing meaningful work in an environment of trust. And that’s a good place to be right now because we need we need trust more than anything to to sustain high performing teams through. The unprecedented times, hopefully back to precedented times.

Dave

Yeah, we do. We absolutely do. So where did you grow up originally?

Vivian

So as a Georgia fan, Georgia. And went to The University of Georgia. On the Hope Scholarship, which again, I think, you know, just thinking of early things that that informed my my outlook. You know, the Hope Scholarship was created to allow students who couldn’t have afforded it otherwise to attend state preeminent state schools in the in the state of Georgia.

Dave

So I don’t think I knew about the Hope scholarship. So is that for every every resident of Florida, that that’s qualifies academically for the school, they are eligible too.

Vivian

Eligible, right? So the state of Georgia pays the tuition for qualifying students to any state university, which really, you know, when you think of meritocracy, expanded the opportunity for people like me to go to Tier one research institutions like the University of Georgia, which I think is right and which I think it just continues on because I knew that I was going to school based on taxpayer money. The same, you know, being in the Navy you know, being paid by taxpayers, you want to really earn that. And then when you have a good experience somewhere or you know to whom much is given, much is expected, you want to turn around and do that for others.

Dave

What did you major in at Georgia?

Vivian

Oh gosh, that was so long ago political science and journalism.

Dave

OK, and then and then you joined the Navy after after college that we did or.

Vivian

I did, ironically, to get out of the state of Georgia.

Dave

I’m Georgia to my core, but I want a little break.

Vivian

I I really it was like Dorothy after the Navy took us around for 20 years. There is no place I wanted to be more. But then then the back in Georgia.

Dave

So you joined the Navy. What year to join the Navy?

Vivian

So right after I graduated 2000, 2001.

Dave

To right before 9:11?

Vivian

Yes, I’m a pre pre-nine eleven.

Dave

Wow, OK. And what did you do in the Navy Supply Corps?

Vivian

And so I saw the supply for school, funnily enough, was actually in Athens at the time, though I didn’t know it. That’s not why I chose this course, but my husband was aviation and Pensacola. And now both of those schools are up in Rhode Island. I think so. I served on active dDuty in and in the reserves and the supply corps. Mike, my husband, was aviation. He did his his 20 years. So I was lucky when I transitioned out that, you know, I had things like my health care was, had continuity. I had a my spouse was still earning a paycheck. I use my G.I. bill to go back to school for public administration and really focused on that. That public service aspect, why? Why people want to go into public service in the first place, how we can increase the antecedents towards that and then support them when they do.

Dave

And you got a Ph.D., is that right?

Vivian

I did, like many transitioning service members, use my G.I. bill but also at like military spouses. When you’re moving around, you have small kids, your your spouse is constantly deployed. It’s hard to find. It’s hard to go to. Employers and really sell that. So I put my eggs in the basket of if I can show that I have. This forward trajectory that I have been doing continuous learning. And then started. I did help to found blue star families during that time. But really it was around, you know, several military spouses getting together with these backgrounds in policy or research to say, if we can present a cohesive view of the impact of service on military families to political leaders, military leaders, we can make the all-volunteer force sustainable because we’re supporting the families who choose to serve.

Dave

You got out of the Navy in what year in 2013 or something in 2014.

Vivian

So I I got off active duty around two, I think 2005 and then did the reserves well, because at the same time, Mike, my husband, was taking different orders and so we moved around.

Dave

OK, sorry. So you got out in 2005. When did you start your Ph.D. program? 2007 2007. OK, and you were doing that while moving around?

Vivian

Well, by then we had. We had moved back to Norfolk. So Old Dominion University is where I received my Ph.D. They actually at the time were sixth in the nation for students utilizing their G.I. bill, which isn’t surprising. I think given that Norfolk’s the largest naval base in the world is right right there, but they had a part time program which I think, you know, just force for service members that are using their GI Bill or military spouses using the transferability of the GI Bill. Universities that do have that flexibility in, they’re recognizing that more and more students are nontraditional are the ones that are going to attract that you know, that talent?

Dave

Awesome. And then how long it takes to get your see, I know for a lot of people, it takes a long time.

Vivian

It seems like that, right? It’s an endless. But I think it took me about five years for the coursework and for my dissertation. So when I was pursuing my Ph.D., it was the same time. Around 2007 2008 when military families were really being impacted by the post-9-11.

Dave

Yeah, by then it’s real, right? I mean, it’s go through multiple cycles, right?

Vivian

And so it was. Really it was impacting military families, the likes of which had never been seen before. At the same time, there was little research, little data to actually back up. If you went to your congressmen or you went to your military leadership to talk about the workouts, the deployment cycles, the time between deployments, the impact on military kids, things like that. So I was able to structure my research within my Ph.D. program to align with the founding BlueStar Families, which is the country’s largest nonprofit designed to support, you know, connect and empower military families. And so my kind of piece of the puzzle was to create a national survey of military families that went through kind of the wellness, military, spouse, employment, mental health, military children and the impacts of service so that we could create a global. Network of military families, regardless of branch or rank or active or reserve components, so that in totality there was recognition that there is an impact to service on the service member and our families past the immediate deployment cycles. Sure.

Dave

That’s amazing. So Blue Star families, you started, you know what year was that.

Vivian

Right? And we, you know, it was again right when President Obama was elected and really made military families. You know, our research was a precursor to their joining forces.

Dave

Forces.

Vivian

Emphasis on wellness and and employment.

Dave

Yeah. And it still endures today, right? Blue Star families are still endures.

Vivian

It does. And so it is joining forces under the Biden administration.

Dave

Did it take a sabbatical during the Trump administration? Probably not, right. But a lot of certainly Blue Star families did. So that’s good. Awesome. That’s that’s amazing. Thank you for that. By the way, I know I know a lot of people that have been very positively impacted by some of the work that you that you helped start and found back in 2009. And that’s a remarkable service and the country owes you debt for that. So then after blue star families, because you were kind of running that I first met you, I think you were just being hired by by first data right at the time. Is that right?

Vivian

Right, right?

Dave

I can’t remember.

Vivian

No, it was because we which is which was funny, because you said, you know, talk about a little bit when you grew up know, I always thought, you know to me, was Southeastern Conference. Now it’s the Securities Exchange Commission.

Dave

Yeah, it’s a it’s a governing body that regulates our banks.

Vivian

And they’re both governing bodies.

Dave

Conference of Presidents, football and basketball and swimming and soccer and everything else. Yeah.

Vivian

Right. So it shows, you know, kind of perspective. Where are you, where you come from it and then just even your own bias, you know, since I know we’re talking about. Diversity and inclusion today, we all have. These unconscious biases. You know, mine was the first time. I heard when I was at a New York meeting, I thought, Why do they care about.

Dave

Georgia football?

Vivian

And I thought, Wow, we really are right. And I thought, Why do they care so much? I mean, I think. Are important, but I don’t know that that has have.

Dave

The stereo. Gone? Yeah, awesome. OK, so so what year was that? I try to remind me when.

Vivian

It was 20. So 2014, which you know, at the time, a lot of companies based on the impacts and recognition of just huge amounts of service members that were transitioning out. We’re looking to start military programs but had never really before, you know, thought or looked at that community as anything, really. Maybe then other than if they had a guard or reservists who had activated and how to calculate that leave or turn out turn or pay on or off, but really hadn’t considered that that talent pool. And then. You know, as we built that program, it really taught us how to relook. At human capital management because, you know, when you’re recruiting, when you want to show up holistically in the military community to recruit transitioning.

Vivian

Service members and their spouses, you have to have done. That’s kind of like the tip of the iceberg. You have to be military ready to to show up in a way that’s authentic and really can speak to you. Why would a service member or veteran pick your company over other companies, you know, based on the benefits, policies, culture of your company?

Dave

Yeah, that’s amazing. So you first data was really at the time leading, in my opinion, the P.A.C. on progressive ideas and around, you know, some of these these these different diversity groups and veterans, obviously, having been of that and going to New York and seeing some of the work that you guys are doing, I was always really impressed. You guys sort of seemed at the forefront of a veteran friendly organization that saw the value reach maybe talk about, you know, I feel like a lot of people do it because it feels it feels right, right?

Dave

It feels like morally and patriotic. We just decided we’re right. But I think what amazed me about what I saw the work that you guys were doing for and now five serve is that you really saw it as like a differentiator in how you approach business. And I thought that to me, that makes it more enduring love for you to talk a bit about that.

Vivian

Well, I mean, even you know how quickly we met when I came to first, first data and we reached out to CrossLead to be our leadership development partner. It just shows how integrated the thinking is and really wanting, you know, our C.E.O. Frank Bisignani, wanted look to the military.

Vivian

For leadership. You know, the benefits of the lessons learned from the military community in a way that, like you said, many other companies want to. Get involved. They want to do the right thing, but they don’t really see it at the very basis as a value add. And I think that’s the that’s the difference because, you know, just expanding on that view. When we started recruiting veterans. And military spouses, we brought in more women, more minorities. And then it’s not just about what is your guard and reserve leave policy, but it’s what your family forming benefits policies. Where is your representation? Do you have employee resource groups that allow them outlets for expression and kind of aligning their purpose with your profit? Because we do know that diversity is a fact, but that inclusion piece is the choice and that. If the systems that a company. Has are set up that create obstacles or challenges for anyone to show up kind of at work desk ready discretionary effort at the ready, then that’s on that’s on the company. And we know that talent is just distributed equally. But what’s not is that opportunity, access and exposure. And again. If it’s the systems that are set up that are reducing your. Space in place in the. In the mind view of the generations that are coming out of school or coming out of the military.They just won’t see you because they don’t see themselves represented in your leadership or in your products or in your services or, you know, and your in your community investments.

Dave

So, so yeah, that’s that’s it feels exactly right to me. Can you talk about how you guys have sort of, you know, mobilize these groups to drive your purpose and ultimately, you know, value for the firm? My assumption is to address the issue you just talked about, which is like, how do you get people showing up every day, get being their best selves, right? So you’re unlocking that latent potential that exists across the workforce? I think that’s phenomenal. You’re talking about how you guys structure and think about it and incorporate it into into to Pfizer’s operating model.

Vivian

Yeah, I mean, I love that you. Operating model, because it really D.N.I. has to be in the D.N.A. of the organization, and as much as we talk about diversity of thought and experience. You really can’t have diversity of thought and experience until you have physical representation of diversity at the table. And when you’re operating and governance structures, those are essential when you’re thinking about how you set up your systems for recruiting internal mobility leadership, inclusive leadership models, even product development and innovation. And that’s where those employee resource groups come in. They’re not the only lever, but I would say arguably one of the most. Vital, because again. It’s it’s your human capital management, it’s your talent. It’s allowing them and creating space for them to have opportunities for meaningful engagement in a way that meets them where they’re at. And if you channel and target that towards. Whatever that thing is. That your company or organization’s mission is like for us, small businesses is what we do every day. You know, start scale, grow from Main Street to Wall Street, and our employee resource groups are right, and they’re coming up with ideas for how to engage small, diverse businesses, how to support small, diverse businesses or social innovators within large businesses. How can we help our large scale enterprise clients support small, diverse businesses, whether it’s through their supply chain or whether it’s through their products or services? And that’s really it’s. That, you know, the systems view.

Dave

Yeah, no, I think I think that’s that makes a ton of sense. So as we think about, you know, just some of the questions that typically come to mind around that diversity inclusion topic, a lot of companies are putting a lot of effort into how they recruit, specifically trying to create a more diverse workforce. Everything from that senior executives like you were talking about earlier down to, you know, entry level talent. But they they’re struggling. And it’s it’s not just to find those people, but it’s also to retain them once they get them because it’s become a very competitive love for you to talk about about that. Why does that happen? Why is it so hard?

Vivian

I mean, that’s like the. Crux I think of where we are, because in the past companies have said they’re military friendly. But are they military ready? And I would I would evolve that conversation now to say companies want to be diversity friendly. But are they. Really diversity ready and addressing.

Dave

What do you mean by by ready?

Vivian

Right. So in the same way, when you show up, it’s I’m showing up at a, let’s say, a women in tech recruiting event. Is it all males that are with me? Do I know the open positions? Do I know our family forming policies? Do I know our benefits? Do I know if we have pay equity or we’ve had a pay equity review in the past three years? It’s because that’s what women graduating from colleges with their coming out of the military with choosing between companies. That’s what they’re going to be asking for because they’re it’s, you know, it’s a hot labor market right now. And to differentiate yourself when you show up in an organ in. The same way that we expect potential hires to come. With a general knowledge about our company when we show up in our recruiting, we need people, you know, our recruiters to have a general working knowledge. About. Diversity and inclusion and what our culture is, what our our employee resource groups, what community partners do we invest in? What have we done? What’s our representation on the board? And I’ll tell you too. That comes up not just with talent, but with clients and several, you know. Several meetings over the past year that has. Been the crux of the, you know, the questions are have you had a pay equity review? What is your representation on the board? What are what are your sustainability policies and how or how are you responding to social justice? It’s really it goes back to if you’re looking at the recruiting process, the opposite side of that coin is retention, and it’s looking at not just tracking new hires, but engagement, performance, internal mobility, satisfaction and your pipeline. And that’s where, again, the benefits in the culture are huge. Do you have guard and reserve leave policy, paid parental leave, domestic partner coverage, anything that shows your employees that you are investing in who they are as a person outside of work so that they can show up at work as their best self? And it’s. You know, publicly. Facing statements but that are backed up with substance. That’s why so many peer groups or Criterion Nasdaq Stock Exchange Business Roundtable are requiring publicly facing statements that link to documents around human rights or around social justice around your board diversity.

Dave

Yeah, you’re talking about the larger sort of E.S.G. movement. We’re seeing this. Even with access to capital, right, there’s some of these institutional investors and obviously large family offices that are allocating capital to these various funds that then make it available through various instruments are saying, Look, there needs to be an E.S.G. bent here, and if there isn’t, then we don’t want to support or basically have our money be loaned or leveraged for for these organizations. So it’s actually to me having driving a massive sort of movement positively, you know, towards some of these these issues, which which are no longer sort of niche, they’re becoming more mainstream. Can you go back, though, to on the diversity side? I’m running a business, small business or large, but it doesn’t matter, and I take a self on it and I go, OK, my pay, my pay is is equal. Hopefully, if not, I sort of fix that, but I don’t have the numbers I want, right? Like the composition makeup still feels, feels up to me, whatever that whatever right looks like, but it’s not there. OK, where we’re underrepresented and we don’t look like maybe the communities that we operate in the services that people would provide. How do you fix that? How would you advise that that leadership group to really try to address that? Would you do almost like like like a quota system or or how do you think about that?

Vivian

So, you know, it’s a marathon and. A sprint. Because it really for most companies. It’s it’s it’s not an and or but it’s a both or it’s multiple. Because it’s there’s. Lack of representation at the top for sure. And you can’t you can’t hire at L1 and expect in the next 20, 20 years that something is going to be different on the L10 level. And so you really need a you need a strategy for both.

Dave

And then it’s that and right. You’re saying you’re saying yes, let’s make sure our hiring practices at the entry level are obviously unfair. But there’s but that we’ve got to do something to address the mid and senior levels at simultaneously.

Vivian

Right. And that’s where it’s, you know, it’s percent of new hires, but it is percent of retention. And it’s also it’s it’s comparing. Groups and having enough representation that you can compare between groups to say, you know, is there something significant, you know, statistically significantly different in the way that women are voluntarily attracting from the from the labor force? Because we know that right, that that did happen over COVID. So within a particular company, you can look at that and say voluntary versus involuntary attrition to.

Dave

Give some of those stats. I don’t know that anybody’s aware of that. I mean, when I heard this stat a while ago, I was actually pretty surprised. It made sense once I thought about it. But like initially I was like, well covered. If anything is helped drive adoption around like things around work flexibility that previously were sort of we’re sort of relatively small time or niche like, you know, now I think it’s much more widely accepted that, you know, you don’t have to physically be in a space from a certain amount of time like that. We’ve got we’ve demonstrated the ability to be productive still and in a more flexible environment. Flexibility should lead to more inclusive work. Opportunities should, should do.

Vivian

And yeah, because there you know, there’s a lot of there’s several, I think themes that that did emerge. You know, going through COVID one was that more women are traded from the from the labor force. So even though we were learning lessons during that time and even now on. Just the effects of, you know, your life external to your job, affecting your ability to show up, whether it’s in the office physically or virtually in your in your home, but that it did disproportionately affect women. But even, you know, we serve small businesses and we had. Numbers coming out of COVID that. Survive COVID for another variety of reasons. one Just all small businesses were affected the ability to go. Go out physically, but they also were less likely to be able to access capital through traditional means or even the P.P.P. loans that were designed to. Help small businesses. But they didn’t have accounts large enough with large enough banks to take advantage of it or couldn’t. Dedicate. The full time person towards filling out all the paperwork. And so there were these themes where, you know, we all go through the Same life events, but they are affecting as an impacting us in different ways based on, you know, our individual circumstances. And if there’s enough of a population that is marginalized or unrepresented that is not able to, then, you know, experience and come out at the same pace and we have systems set up that are promulgating that, that that is kind of the the crux of where we are right now. So we don’t want to lose women from the labor force. We don’t want to lose small minority owned businesses and if you have your time treasure. Talent of what your company does can is at this inflection point can make a difference because of your benefits, because of your policies, because of. Even a focus on. Mental health, which again, you know, I think the military drove that way earlier based on, you know, combat experience. But now. I’ve heard mental health and wellness mentioned more times over the past year than I have in the past ten years.

Dave

I know it’s a it’s really everybody now, right? I mean, everybody, everybody’s going through. I mean, this has been this has been emotionally draining COVID for sure. And so I think people are much more acutely aware of the impacts of Saddam. Go back to the women, if you would, because I mean, I think this is this is concerning. I feel like to the extent that we’ve made progress on these fronts, it feels like Kobe was a massive setback on gender equality and representation in the workforce. If what you’re saying is that disproportionately the people that left their jobs were where were or female? And is it getting better now or how do we address that? I mean, how do we how do we make up for that?

Dave

Because to me, that’s I mean one. That’s awful. I’ve seen some stats that says, Hey, the effects of this downstream are going to are significant, like ten or 15 years from now. It’s going to be even worse, like the fact that we had this major setback.

Dave

I’m curious to see your thoughts on what you’re seeing people do and try to to counterbalance that. Knowing that Pfizer particularly mission is to help small businesses thrive and address some of these. These these challenges. I’m curious to see you know how you’re thinking about this?

Vivian

Well, I mean, we know so the gender gap existed pre-COVID. Any you know, anything else equally did did nothing but kind of enlarge that gap.

Dave

So one thing that got made it worse.

Vivian

It may, right? It made it worse. And you’re right, there’s like that. It’s a lagging indicator and it will take years to to catch up to it. But then I also at the same time have great hope because of COVID did make as I think, more vulnerable. We were certainly, you know, we’re in each other’s homes in ways that we had never been before or hurt people’s dog bark or their children come in. Some people didn’t even know or. Acted like people didn’t have children before COVID, and. The reality is that that impacts our ability to show up. And so just recognition that people are whole beings, they want to pursue purpose and profit and. Don’t necessarily see it with millennials. And younger generations. Don’t even really see a delineation between that. They actually think that they actually think. But I mean, they think that they. Should be able to pursue purpose within their profit seeking job. So you see these because coming up, I certainly think CrossLead is one of those where you’re providing value more than. You know, leadership training. It’s also opening. The door to. Discuss things like, you know, how integrity and and shared consciousness and trust, you know, so that you can have psychological safety on teams, which again, the military has done for years because you know that that does show up. In your every day. It does show up in how you, you treat your team members. But I don’t think that the corporate sector had that recognition. And certainly that. Benefits everyone, right? Whether you are a parent or a caregiver. For for your for your parent, you know that sandwich generation that is caregiving children, but also their own parents and. And that again, you know, it shows up in in your productivity and your satisfaction and your engagement. And ultimately, whether you choose to stay to work at a company that helps you be the best you Lacob.

Dave

It’s been been really hard on a lot of a lot of businesses. I know it’s disproportionately affected small businesses and and from the employee standpoint, it’s disproportionately affected, affected women. Could you could you maybe talk about what you’re seeing, both working at a large global, you know, 500 company as well as the small business you serve and how executive group should think about tackling this near-term problem and solving the more the more systemic problem of of diverse and inclusive workforces?

Vivian

Yeah, because there are thematically lots of lots of trends. That are emerging. Some, you know, like you mentioned, negatively disproportionately affecting certain populations. But I want to also put a pen and I do think that’s an every challenge is an opportunity. But first, looking at the negative or populations that have been disproportionately affected by COVID, I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics just put out that there were 2.2 million less women in the labor force in October of 2020 than there were of 2019. Which which definitely tracks. Within themes within the Great Exodus. The disproportionate effect of women. Probably for things that Have always been there around caregiving for children, but also parents or just the, you know, the second shift that’s talked. About about additional work at home. And we know that COVID as you mentioned the effects on small business that it also disproportionately affect minority owned businesses. So while everyone experienced the same inability to have in-person physical gatherings or shop in person, some of the some of the small businesses that were least able to react as quickly because they didn’t have larger lines of credit or didn’t have online or e-commerce options, which we happened to know about because those are our clients. So when we started to see the numbers and heard that up to 40% of minority owned businesses might not make it through COVID. In addition to the client services that we already had, that’s when we. Actually came up with our back to business grant to be the inflection point to connect those small, diverse businesses with access to capital lines of credit e commerce order delivery to pick up setting up online shopping carts, anything that we could do to to be there. And that’s where when I said there is a positive coming out of COVID, I do think that there is an opportunity for companies to look at work life balance. So if you’re looking at your employee base, looking at work life balance, understanding that people do have lives outside of work that do affect their ability to show up at their best. And then design operating. Models that are more inclusive and holistic so that you can unlock. The whole idea is that high performing teams, right whenever you draw the line of why does any of this matter at the very base? It’s to make money to sustain your business operations. But to do that, you really have to take a long term view of not just output, but outcome.

Vivian

When you talk about succession planning, recruiting market share, investor relations, all of that really depends on your employer value proposition. And so I’m hoping that we come out of COVID as a culture, but also globally. Where we’re more progressive thinking creative about how we create opportunities for people to meaningfully engage while pursuing. Both purpose and profit. And I think that that’s exciting there. There’s a huge upside there with know unlocking productivity. You know, there’s a lot of. Money to be made there. If we do it right. But there’s also some very significant problems short term that we have to deal with because companies are losing people every day.

Dave

You know, I just find it fascinating. This is obviously something that we obsess over at cross. I mean, our whole goal is is to make organizations more effective, you know, help them sort of unlock latent potential. And the exciting thing about about COVID. The upside is executive teams are able to reimagine the way they work. They’ve had to just to survive. And so they’ve built muscles that they didn’t previously have. They discovered technology and tools that they previously were weren’t leveraging, and those tools themselves have gotten significantly more effective. So I’m optimistic that, you know, the executive teams that are meeting in the boardroom as they try and discuss how they’re going to to establish an operating model that continues to drive value is now much greater than it was even even two years ago. And so my hope, my hope in all this is that with those added tools, with those added that capabilities, it’s going to create a more flexible and inclusive work environment which potentially could start to take on those more systemic historical issues of of misrepresentation by gender or disenfranchize minority populations in the workforce. Because flexibility should be should be a key tool in helping, helping keep some of those groups engaged for longer periods of time and continuing at the ladder, which I think will net just benefit our society and our individual companies tremendously. an you? Let’s switch now to how you basically assess an organization’s effectiveness when it comes or die programs. I mean, if we take the actual the composition aside, how else what other metrics do you use to look at D.N.I. programs and see if they’re actually working or not?

Vivian

You know, there’s a lot of different. KPIs, and we’ve hit on some of them. And certainly representation is is a is a base. But there’s also. It shows up in your products, it shows up in your tracking, it shows up. You know, not just tracking.

Vivian

Though, for employees, but suppliers and vendors, clients, community investment partners. It shows up in publicly facing statements. You know, going through just doing a catalog of of a company’s website is their diversity and their marketing materials. What conferences are they showing up at and who’s speaking at the conferences that they’re showing up at? And then you mentioned definitely. On the investor side, what indices are they showing up on? Because it definitely you can draw a direct. Line for financial impact or you. Can have the one or two kind of removed because engaged employees are more productive employees, they delight clients and then you have client retention and maybe client gain. That’s market share increase of market share, which then increases and delights your shareholders and so there is this virtuous cycle. That that is created between that return on investment, that return on inclusion for employee engagement, client engagement, which makes more money so that you can pay your associates and increase your share price. And so I think those areas, it’s everything in between. It’s it’s your it’s your leadership programs. I too am excited about some things that are coming out of COVID one because leadership. Trainings and leadership courses like, you know, in an organization. Like Crossley, you’re focusing on inherently an inclusive leadership model, and I don’t think we’ve always talked about inclusive leadership, more leadership. And it’s it’s really baked into the, you know, to have empowered execution to have shared consciousness and trust. There’s those things you have to attain first, and one of them is is diversity. And then to me, you’re inclusive leadership model is what drives the inclusivity where everyone feels like they have an equitable chance to join, belong, contribute and progress. And we need that now more than ever, because people are feeling dissociative with what they do for a living versus how they exist outside of what they do for a living. And they do need to build trust through geographic spacing because we’re not physically together. We do need to address and talk about mental health and wellness and keeping ourselves and our bodies functioning so that we we can show up at work. And I think.

Dave

You’re looking at performance more holistically, which, you know, it’s something in special operations we’ve done for a long time and we still got a long way to go. But the idea that like how you physically show up and mentally show up has a massive impact in those mission critical situations.

Vivian

Right? And not every leadership program really talks about that. And I know, you know CrossLead does, and that’s something that, again, the corporate sector can. Benefit from learning from the military on that.

Dave

What’s interesting for me personally in this journey is, you know, in the military, probably it’s because I was overseas so much. I was sort of desensitized to some of these, like larger social movements that were going on. I mean, it’s just take, for instance, like social media, like, I wasn’t allowed that U.S. access to social media when I was in the Philippines, right? So like, I come back and everybody’s on Facebook and Twitter and and like LinkedIn and all these applications, I’m like, Yeah, I would never put any stuff on that stuff, just given what I was doing and where I was operating. In fact, I was always being monitored by good guys and bad guys. I just didn’t. I just didn’t do it right. And so I was always desensitized to these themes. And then, you’re right, when we got into the foundations of how you create high-performing teams and things like shared consciousness and trust and common purpose and empowerment. You know, they and then how we think about operationalize it became obvious to me that like we had a massive premium on things like inclusive work environments. The fact that we have after action reviews, after every op where everybody, regardless of rank, title background, whatever is obligated to give people their honest perspective. What happened on that op so we could figure out to learn and then move forward. And we, you know, and then like, there’s fancy words like psychological safety that says this is what’s happening there. I don’t know what that stuff for me, it was just, that’s how you operate, because that’s what high-performing teams did. Right. That’s how that’s how you behave. And so it’s been interesting to see like, you know, D.N.I. is a social movement. I think a lot of times where leaders struggle to figure out like where it fits into their into their business models, they go, Wow, this feels like something I’m being forced to do because it’s larger social movement that I may or may not be be, you know, sort of attuned to. And for me, the way we came out, it was like, No, if you’re if you come back from something or you’re about to go on something, you want to make sure you’ve got all the best possible information perspective possible. Because if you don’t and something goes wrong, then how do you how do you, you know, how do you reconcile that? How do you rationalize that? How do you explain it? Some kids, mother or father, why their son or daughter is at home? Because, you know, we didn’t do our part and making sure we had the best possible plan that had the best collective of experiences sort of sort of yielded. So to me, I think just rethinking that in terms of that, I think goes a long way in saying, Hey, you know, wherever you fall in the social spectrum like discount for a second. This has real value to your to your business and it’s upside, and you should probably do it for all of social reasons. But like the value, you have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders who do not like you find a way to to make that happen. So if you think about like the leverage that that you guys currently pull in Pfizer specifically to around your E.S.G. programs to basically sort of address some of these changes, what are those? Maybe talk about some of the unique levers that you’ve seen that are, like, you know, pretty effective both for measuring it and sort of driving, you know, improvements around around those areas.

Vivian

Right? I mean, the KPIs, just. Like like any other parlor or any other operating model, it has to be integrated into and baked in to the very performance. And I think so one, having a culture of continuous learning. And really focus on leadership because when times, you know, progress. Does move at the speed of trust to everything you just said and you really can’t build trust. And in these inflection. Points of confusion and ambiguity and challenge, that’s when you rely on the trust so that it kind of greases the skids for, you know, when people don’t know what’s going to happen, but they trust that your company, your manager, your team has your best interest and has the best interests of the company and you’re kind of commiserate. With the level of service that you’re giving that you’re getting that back and so you see that show up. And I always said before, you know, the levers are within every single aspect of the organization and you can look at it as clients and external learning and development, certainly talent management. And that hits on a lot of that retention piece and an employee resource groups, internal mobility, professional development, your vendors and supplier diversity. There’s a reason again, why we met so early because we want it to benefit from the lessons learned from the military community when we were building our own leadership and talent development program and then ensure community engagement. Your strategic philanthropy.

What are you doing volunteering your time, treasure and talent? And it’s always best when those are aligned because it’s the first best use of whatever the company or organization’s purposes. Don’t divorce that from the profit or the ability to have meaningful engagements for four employees and then it’s your those easy things like code of conduct, your total rewards, your benefits packages. And it’s it’s less about. Although I’m, you know, I’m jealous of companies where they can bring dogs to work or they have beer on tap. But I think more substantial investments in pay parity, family forming policy benefits, guard and reserve leave policies. Because what they’re really saying. When you invest in those high value things is that you’re saying that I’m not as an employer forcing you to choose between serving your country and coming to work. I’m not forcing you that.

Dave

You’re saying, you’re saying we say guard and reserve. You mean National Guard.

Vivian

National Guard and Reserve Military Service.

Dave

The policies are the company let you go and you keep your job and that you can go serve your country and then you.

Vivian

And pay them. And of course, I have to say, because I serve as one of I always like to say the most expansive, I would love for a company to come back. And say, actually, our policy. Is more expansive. You know, we pay full, full salary. That’s amazing. For a while there, while our guard and reservists are on their orders. And so again, it’s saying that we’re not making you choose between serving your country and working here. But it’s the same with starting families. And there’s many ways to start a family and there. And it could be, you know, either parent or caregiver could stay home or so it’s a it’s just a more, if, like you said, progressive, expansive way to look at.

Dave

I love that. Yeah. And how we can expand that. Like if military is not your thing, you can expand that into any type of community or national service, right where you’re serving and making a difference in the community. And you’re saying this aligns with the values of principle.

Vivian

And then. Well, and I have to make you know, when you said levers or ways to measure, I have to also mention because CrossLead helped us so much with our with our culture building and the way we looked at the pillars of where we time treasure talent. But looking at employee engagement surveys and having questions that have to do and directly ask your employees, do they think they’re treated fairly with respect? Do they think that they have a path to career – professional mobility? Those are very important to ask on those employee engagement because that’s, you know, asking the people of the population that you’re you’re trying to reach. So even if you do have the policies, process governance, whatever it is, but you’re not seeing that reflected. Then there’s still a disconnect there.

Dave

Yeah, no, that makes total sense. So, so last question on this and I have some fun questions for us. So you’re the C.E.O. of a net new global conglomerate that’s a top five, top ten country in the world. What position are you creating on your executive team for to, to basically address these issues holistically? What are you calling it in like? And how would you describe the role and the responsibilities of that executive?

Vivian

You can call me anything,  don’t call me late for dinner is, is how I look at this question because it is such a topical question that comes up. Across regions, across companies, across industries. I think the important thing is to have a seat at the table and the idea that there’s going to be.

Dave

A seat at your table for an executive, there’s there’s going to be executive on your team. That has this as their core mission.

Vivian

Certainly, and it would look across dimensions of, you know, the entire enterprise H.R. product operations, marketing, procurement, strategic sourcing because depending on what industry you’re and or what market, you might be driven more by sustainability or environment, like with the energy, with energy companies or gas. Whereas in financial services, financial inclusion, financial literacy is, is really what we do best. And so we know that part of diversity of inclusion is ensuring that everyone has equitable access to financial literacy. And so whether it’s and it could be driven out of our D.N.I., it for for talent acquisition or it could be driven out of marketing as a brand or philanthropy, a foundation for social innovation or social impact. The important thing to me is that there is that seat at the table and someone looking strategically across the enterprise looking at how to have impact past economic outcomes and you know. Larry, Fink if you think, you know, that’s kind of a bright-eyed way of looking at it. Larry Fink and issues that letter every every year for BlackRock and and has led the charge at saying there is economic impact, past immediate outcomes and that companies when you’re talking about sustainability, whether it’s environmental or workforce sustainability, you have to include this triple bottom line valuation to a company. And again, that’s where it’s coming from. Investors, it’s coming to be included in the stock exchange or Nasdaq, or to be listed on the S&P different indices. I think more and more these these multinational. Companies that we’re coming up with top five. They are creating a seat at the table on their executive management committee for it.

Dave

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, ultimately, everybody’s in competition for talent. And increasingly, the talent that’s that’s both, you know, new talent coming into the workforce and or talent that’s decided to make a shift. And what they’re going to focus on and do is increasingly more aware of these issues. And they’re going to see organizations that take this seriously as a differentiation and where they want to go, spend their time, their energy and their efforts. And that’s going to be a massive differentiator. So it’s something that people have to get at. All right. So so I want to wrap this up. So given that I’ve done previous ones, I want to ask, I’ll say two words. They are things are they are people and you have to say you have to pick the name that that is right. So if I said olive oil and butter, which one would you pick.

Vivian

Sunflower seed oil?

Dave

Some fancy? OK, that wasn’t one of the options now. If you’re if you’re if you’re a chef and you got a choice between an olive oil or butter, what are you picking?

Vivian

No, I mean, I sunflower seed oil because I saw it on a tick tock. I mean, I don’t have to choose.

Dave

OK, so you’re going to pick oil then over butter, but you’re just going, not olive oil. You’re kicking. Some of us, OK, got oil. We’re about. OK. Michael Jordan or LeBron James?

Vivian

LeBron James? No, I’m kidding.

Dave

That’s what I said. We’re sticking with the Lebron James.

Vivian

That’s true. That’s from the office because I was going to say Michael. Michael Jordan, because my son is MJ. So everyone assumes. That it’s Michael Jordan. but, it’s Mike Junior. But LeBron James.

Dave

LeBron James, OK, good, Messi or Ronaldo.

Vivian

Is it bad? I’m not even sure who that is. Is that that’s.

Dave

OK, that’s OK. Just it messier another. No, I mean, these are football players, soccer players.

Vivian

Well, I think that tells you my unconscious bias.

Dave

Neither. OK, I did my Louie, Louie Hamilton or Max Verstappen.

Vivian

So this is another hard one, and I know you want one answer. Louis Hamilton, for sure. Except that when I first heard Max Verstappen’s name, I actually thought that. Matthew Stafford, who is a prior University of Georgia bulldog, had taken up Formula one racing and that he was in competition with with Louis Hamilton and. The last that came out of my husband from that. But so I like them both. I love Lewis Hamilton, though he’s going to win.

Dave

The national title on on Monday. Is it going to be Georgia?

Vivian

Alabama Bulldogs hand down, hands down? It’s our year.

Dave

Bulldogs. all right. We’ll hold you to that. Vivian, thank you so much for joining our program. I. This is one that’s a timely conversation, but two, it’s just so critical to how people and leaders need to think about about some of the today’s toughest challenges and how we address them. Can’t thank you enough for coming on board. It means a lot to you. Thank you.

Vivian

Thanks, Dave.

Dave

one more thing before we finish the episode, the CrossLead podcast is produced by the team at Truth Work Media. I want to make this the best leadership podcast available, so I would love to get your feedback. Our goal this season is to have authentic conversations with special operators, business leaders and thought leaders in the topics of leadership and agility. If you have any feedback, suggested topics or leaders that you want to hear from these, email me at [email protected]. If you found this episode interesting. Please share it with a friend and drop us a rating until next time. Thank you for joining.

In this episode of the CrossLead podcast, host David Silverman speaks with Charlie Herrin, President of the Technology, Product, Xperience organization within Comcast Cable. They focus on the leader’s role in creating a compelling vision and building a narrative in support of it. Charlie talks about his obsession with the customer and how technology can meaningfully improve a customer’s life. He also discusses his personal routines and leadership development philosophy as well as his approach to leading change at scale and how you measure progress.

“For me, innovation is not feature matching. Innovation is making someone’s life better.” – Charlie Herrin [14:26]

“People need to have purpose in what they’re doing and it’s not just a job. It’s not just working on technology. It’s not just writing code or creating a design. You’re doing it for an end goal.” – Charlie Herrin [18:59]

“The role of the leader is to lead and to model the behavior they want to see.” – Charlie Herrin [22:47]

• A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins
• Center For Creative Leadership
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell

The Outsiders : Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Want to discuss some of these topics directly with Dave? Join the CrossLead LinkedIn Group.

DaveWelcome to the CrossLead podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman at CrossLead. We exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimum performance. In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Charlie Herrin. Charlie serves as the president of the Technology Product Experience Organization within Comcast Cable.

When I first met Charlie in 2015, he had just transitioned to the role of leading the customer experience division. He knew the team tasked with the largest NPS implementation in North America at the time. In today’s episode, we focus on the leader’s role in creating a compelling vision and building a narrative in support of it. We talk about his obsession with a customer and how technology can meaningfully improve a customer’s life. Charlie discusses his personal routines and leadership development philosophy. We talk about his approach to leading change at scale and how you measure progress. A proud father, husband, outdoorsman, an amateur photographer. Charlie’s humility and empathetic leadership style makes him a truly world class leader. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoy the conversation that I have with my friend and mentor Charlie Herrin.

Good morning, good afternoon, welcome to the CrossLead podcast. Today, we’re joined with Charlie Herrin, who serves as the president of technology product experience for Comcast Cable. Today we’re going to talk about leadership and we’re going to go back and talk about the leadership development from Charlie’s perspective over his career. So, Charlie, thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate you being here now.

CharlieThank you. David, it’s good to be here and appreciate it.

DaveSo let’s, let’s go through your life journey and example of leadership, but take me back to where you grew up in, and some of those are formative early experiences in your life.

CharlieI grew up in a town called Ponca City, Oklahoma. My dad was a chemist and Conoco had their big R&D facility there. So it was a good town to grow up in a lot of opportunities for kids. Oklahoma was, you know, like most kids, I was sort of bored of where I grew up. I was really, really focused on backpacking and camping.

I had read a book called Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, and it really, I just woke me up to the idea of outdoors because my dad is not an outdoorsman.

DaveHow old were you when you read that book?

CharlieI was 13 and 13. It’s actually I read the National Geographic articles. That he wrote first and then. And then read the book. But you know, that got me into scouting, which I joined largely because they were going backpacking. In New Mexico, and I wanted to do that. And my other passion was soccer. I play a lot of soccer. I was I’m old enough to remember it was actually the first time they had. Started in my city. So I was like on the first team.

But I spent a lot of time doing that. And so I was always outside. And when I went to college, which was at the University of Washington, it was largely to go to the Pacific Northwest again. I had this kind of bug for being in the outdoors, and I just wanted to to be someplace where I could experience a lot of adventure that way. Toyed with soccer at the University of Washington, but they’re far better than I am. So I did not go down that path.

DaveSo when you got to when you got to Washington University. Talk about, you know, what was your major? I know you were an economics major, but talk about how that sort of shaped you from a from a leadership perspective.

CharlieYeah, I went in to college thinking I’d be a history major and kind of pre-law kind of thing and was a pretty good writer. And that’s sort of what I was drawn to. But I ended up taking some economics classes and microeconomics classes. And I was just fascinated by the idea of. Evaluating how consumers make decisions, which is essentially what the, you know, that’s essentially what microeconomics is. Again, I just loved it. And so I kind of really leaned in. But I think from an early point in my life, I was fascinated with the idea of what consumers wanted and how they evaluated their options. And and I think that has served me well. I actually think as I got into the product game. And and consumer experience game and things like that. Is give me a lens that I think a lot of people just don’t use or maybe think about as a first lens. And that’s always my first lens is, you know, how would this benefit me as. A consumer and how would this benefit my family as a consumer? How would this benefit, you know, consumers in my community? And so it was a really formative for me.

DaveYeah, it’s amazing that your college major actually was relevant to your job. So I was an oceanography major in college and other than the fact that I like to surf and I was a navy seal. There wasn’t a lot of overlap there.So the fact that you actually took core lessons from that and were able to apply it to to your to your world is pretty remarkable. You come out of university. And what was your first job out of college?

CharlieWell, my first job, actually, I thought I was still going to do pre-law. I had taken the LSAT and done extremely well and kind of was off to going to go to law school. Just on a whim I interviewed at Andersen within was Andersen Consulting, its Accenture now. I remember that I took the interview because I was really tired of eating 19 cent boxes of macaroni. I was really, really living on the edge in terms of finances, and I thought, Well, you know, my assets are good for five years and I’ll just go to this interview. But I didn’t really care because I’ve been accepted to law school. And so I just. Sort of answered. However, I wanted to answer.

It was a little bit like that Seinfeld episode where George Costanza sort of says the opposite of everything he thinks he should say. And it works for him, and it worked for me. They call me back and said, You hired the guy we hired. And so I went into Accenture Anderson at the time as a developer because that’s how they started everyone.

You know, it’s interesting to me, but I found out pretty. Quickly I was in a great developer, but when I was really good. At was requirements and interfacing with with the clients. And again, I think that sensitivity to what they really wanted and needed and being able to add value there. That’s really what drove me. And so I was there for the typical two years and then hired on at McCaw Cellular. Which was the client I was working at. It was exciting. It was an exciting time.

DaveAnd when was this, roughly?

CharlieWell, this would have been about 94, I heard. OK. Yeah, yeah. What I loved about it was, I don’t know if you guys remember, but you know, in the early, early days of mobile. It was seen as a huge luxury and car phones and the big Motorola brick phones and the average consumer was sort of on to it yet.

But I remember in employee orientation there, they showed a video where they told the story about what people really want. And how important communication is and how how important mobility is. Sort of the nomad. They kind of pinned it into, you. Know, we love travel, we love kind of moving around. It got me to really think about an inspiring vision about what you’re doing and how you’re sort of aligning to Age-Old truths about what people have always wanted. It opened up for me the idea of narratives. I mean, I could keep going. I mean, AT&T ended up buying us that I again was able to start to craft why that was good for them, how that can bring mobility really to the mainstream and got to work on some really interesting projects to to do that.

It also showed me some things I didn’t. Want to ever do, which is like gigantic meetings. I remember going with b four of us and like 50 others. At the end of the introduction, the introductions alone would take half an hour. But but that got me to really start to understand teamwork and bringing together lots of different disciplines.And I was there for a few years and then I then I came to Comcast.

DaveThen you came to Comcast. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Why did you come to Comcast? What brought you there?

CharlieWell, I mean, like, like a lot of people that have been fortunate in their career, I had some great mentors. And one of the mentors I had was a guy named David, and he had come from a McCaw cellular at AT&T and had come over to what at the time was Comcast Cellular business. They ended up selling part of that off. And he went to had the broadband business, and he called me up and he said, You know, you should come over here. It’s just like mobile. You know, mobile was in the beginning seen as a luxury, but.

I really think this can can impact people’s lives. And so that’s that’s what really. Got me over again. Just this notion of technology. Improving people’s lives. It’s really been a constant theme in my career.

DaveYeah, you’ve been at sort of the vanguard for that in some massive spaces, so what year was it that you went over to Comcast that like late nineties, early 2000?

CharlieYeah, it was a 96.

DaveAnd so broadband internet was it was just sort of appearing on the yeah, on the landscape.

CharlieYeah, it really was. And, you know, we didn’t have it at the time. There was no self install option we had was one of the people on the team that were that were driving that project. It was early, early days. No retail to speak of certainly wasn’t mainstream. So again, a lot of that playbook that we had in mobile could be applied to to to this technology and this value proposition for customers.

DaveSo you get to Comcast, what’s your first job when you, once you’re there?

CharlieBut my first job was business development, I think director of business development you know, at the time, the cable companies had a venture with together. With this group called. At Home, and it was in the heyday of the internet. The first heyday of the. Internet, I should say. And so it was a lot about you know, establishing relationships and things like that but when at home faced financial difficulties and ultimately disbanded.

I was given the task of trying to figure out what our portal was going to be. Email, all of that because I’d had some coding background at Accenture, you know, as a business development that you do a lot of those kinds of things. So we decided to go it alone and stood up our own portal and email, and it was really hard. But that’s ultimately what became. The seed for what became a lot of our interactive properties and and ultimately our product development teams and approach was that interactive group.

DaveAwesome. So who is your competition then when you were going to what was it? That was it the Microsoft and Google of the world?

CharlieOr, you know, it was AOL, you know, they were huge.

I remember, I remember, you know. You know, why are we trying to do this? Let’s just do a deal with AOL and be done and I’m like, you know, look, we’re installing this stuff. It’s a great touchpoint for our customers. Let’s, let’s hold on to it and see what we can do, and sure enough. You know, we could compete there and we won by focusing on what we were trying to do, which was connect up homes and connect people to a vastly bigger world through broadband internet. And it was a little less about, you know, being the portal. It was, it was, you know.Sure, we had one, and we made money on it and things like that. But the real focus. Was just connecting this home, and then we started to put services on top of our portal like. Video and flash players and things like that that were really exciting. That gave us a lot of confidence to go kind of further into the interactive space.

DaveAnd then from Biz Dev, what was your next stop in your career?

CharlieLet me think. Well, I mean, it became product, essentially. You know, I was running the product. Yeah, it was, you know, running Comcast portal and interactive properties. And, you know, the features that went along with them, which at that time were things like email and personal web pages and stuff like that. And then that evolved into. You know, are you working on the TV products and working on the Infinity Home products and things like that? But it was it was definitely start to run product teams and user experience teams.

DaveI think when I met you, you just come out of having run the Xfinity program, which at the time was the most successful product that Comcast had launched, both from an experience standpoint and just from a technology innovation standpoint. Maybe maybe talk about that experience and how that sort of shaped everything you’ve done since.

CharlieYeah, I think, you know, when we decided to redefine television and really put the experience and delivery up in the cloud, which we call our X1 experience.

I did not start that. That was already started by some really smart folks. But what I did do as I was brought in, we put a new UI on it and we spent a lot of time trying to solve, you know, the discovery and content and put that in quotes that customers have, which is there’s so much on how do I really kind of get to it quickly? How do we make it really welcome and an advanced sort of experience versus what existed before? And so I did run that product team and to your point, that was really successful. You know, I still think it’s one of the better UIs out there, and we really did it by focusing on the content itself and our Mission. Our mission was, A: to put a TV in every pocket, so we focused a lot on the streaming and, and mobile pieces.

It was B: to get you to your content that you want faster. And so we spent time on search and discovery and different ways to do that. Whether it’s, you know, rotten tomato listings or whether it’s we had some really cool ways of searching, and then adding things like the voice remote ultimately was sort of the last thing that I was I was involved with.And also looking at that screen as kind of more than what’s on TV like, you can use that screen to, you know, see your security cameras, you can use that screen to interact with customer care, and that’s still something I believe strongly in. We’ll keep, we’ll keep doing that.But the focus and the mission that I gave the team was literally and we headed it at the beginning of every meeting. This slide was like, we’re here to change people’s lives and we’re here to to implement our version of innovation. And for me, innovation is not feature matching. Innovation is making someone’s life better. It can be complex technology that does that. Or it could be something as simple as, you know, sticky coats. But the focus is, you know, making life better and that the job of a good product person.I used to tell this story. My youngest bet you’ve met, Mave.She was four or five and she was opening this present, you know, excited like a kid always is. And she said, I never knew I always wanted this. And I thought it was proof that that’s exactly what a good product person should be doing. And so this idea that we’re constantly trying to figure out ways of making someone excited about what they’re using and have them to start to think like. I can’t imagine my life without this, like, what did I do before? It’s just such a… it was such a, It still gets me super excited just thinking about it. And so and so that is my passion and spent a lot of time there and, nd based on that success. They said, Hey, we have another problem for you, which is the customer experience piece that we’ve been trying to turn around for a while. Could you come in and and Focus on that? And I remember when I first got that gig, lots of things. First of all, that’s where I met CrossLead and you. But I remember getting a lot of questions like, Well, look, you’re not the customer care guy. Like, you don’t have customer service experience. Why are you in this role, right? And my point of view was. Well, customer service is what happens when the experience breaks. So we’re going to go fix the experience which is in the product. It’s in the sales journey, it’s in all of those things. And how do we make those things better so that customer service is reserved for this truly important times when you need it?

And look, we’ve got a lot. We’ve got a lot to go for sure. But we made good progress. And what attracted me to that opportunity with Neil Smith, who brought it to me was it was really the chance to change our influencer culture. I wouldn’t say change because I think that the Comcast has always been really focused on customers and wanting to to do right by them. But it was a chance to influence a culture so that you could put some of the metrics around customer experience a little more, you know, in the decision making, in the business. And so that was really, I view that as sort of my experience with sort of culture and bringing people along together, like how do you bring, you know, tens of thousands of people along on this journey and get them to think about it similarly and value the same things? And then recently, I’ve been back in the product world looking back in the product.

DaveYeah, yeah, yeah, it’s a remarkable story I remember. I remember the first time I came downstairs on a weekend when I told my kids they could go watch a show and I just sort of marveled at how they navigate it to a show and I’m like, My son can’t read into that voice remote. Was like, I think I was hacking the system by just talking into it. And he was like, Yep, that got me to the the picture. I wanted and then was able to click and much to my horror. I was like, Wow, you know, he’s now fully exposed to the whole world pretty quickly. So to the extent that you want your product to work for a five year old like mission accomplished, that was pretty, pretty remarkable.

Go back to the vision statement. I think that’s really I think that’s a really interesting point to dig out on a lot of times, you know? You know, part of the role of the leader is to inspire people towards a new vision. The fact I’d love to hear more how you think about the repetitiveness, how often you to do that, to sort of actually unlock that capability set for an organization?

CharlieYeah, I think what I learned was a lot of us, I think, make the mistake we put. We we put effort into these mission statements. Maybe you see them once or twice a year. You know, you couldn’t walk around the halls of those companies and ask them with what the mission statement is, what they’re there to do. Why are they there? And here’s similar things you’d hear very, very different things. I don’t know if you always hear the exact same thing. But I learned that pretty early on, Jim Barksdale was the president at McCaw Cellular, and he brought a lot of things from his time at FedEx. In terms of how you shape culture. And I just remember being struck by how everyone embraced it because they used it all the time because they saw it was in front of them all the time.

And so when I was really trying to build out a product culture at Comcast. The idea that people need to have purpose in what they’re doing and it’s not just a job, it’s not just working on technology, it’s not just writing code or creating a design. You’re doing it for an end goal, and having an inspirational end goal is A: important so that everyone’s excited about what they’re doing. And B: is something I learned from from you guys. Having a common mission. And a common understanding allows you to make better decisions down in the trenches and within the teams. And so that to me, was was was really important. And what I found is you just can’t do it once in a while. You literally have to repeat it all the time, which is like all my own hands. Yeah, all the time. You can’t say it enough. And so I’ve taken that to heart and really think if you’re going to try to build a different culture, really get people to live up to your mission, they have to see it constantly. It can’t just be at the budget time or on a poster in the break room. You really need to sort of reinforce it and show that you’re living it and show that you’re excited about it.

DaveYeah, no. 100%. If you think about the probably the most influential leadership lesson from from these last couple of experiences at Comcast, maybe tell a story around it that really helps, helps, helps the audience personalize it. If you could.

CharlieI probably should have thought about this a little more. I mean, there’s so many. I’m the kind of person that thinks about these moments, and I just dwell on them all the time. I will say one thing I learned about what two things one is I was in my early forties because before I really am in my early fifties now, before I really realized that leadership was a discipline, you could practice and try different hats on. I assumed prior to that the people were either natural leaders or they weren’t.

And yeah, and so I went through some leadership courses and Center for Creative Leadership was one. And I realized, you know, it’s. It’s it’s a lot about what you’re saying to the team, how you’re listening to the team. It’s a lot about communications and you should try some things.

And so I forced myself in these all hands to try to be a better speaker to try to, you know, I tried a lot of different things. And so that’s one: one is that, you know, I came to realize that leadership was something that you could practice and you should look to others, read books about it and etc. I just it wasn’t in my sort of DNA at that time. It is now. And one of the there’ve been so many great leaders that I’ve worked for, but one that stuck with me because he was very different was Neil Smith, and what I remember from him was sort of just an unwavering courage and optimism about the mission and just extreme focus.But done in a way that was very friendly and collegial and collaborative. I remember when he offered me this role. He said, I think this is going to be a lot of fun. It’s also going to be really hard. And so, you know, I’m thinking to myself, OK, Neal. He’s a seal, former seal. So if he says something’s going to be hard, it’s going to be really hard. But that got me excited. And I remember that.

DaveWhat do you mean by hard Neal? I wonder if we have the same scale for what that means.

CharlieExactly. But I remember the look in his eyes that he’s genuinely jazzed about it, and that was the moment I flipped as like, OK, I’m all it. And so.

DaveThat’s great.

CharlieLeadership vision or leadership principle, I learned from that and, there were others, obviously great, great mentors. I’ve had the fortune to work for. But I just took that to heart and said you know what? The role of a leader is to lead and to model the behavior they want to see. And I think he did that really well. And so it doesn’t serve a leader. Well to sort of get down or get exasperated or, you know, they really got to show that. They are excited about what they’re doing and confident that it can be done. And so that’s one lesson I’ve definitely taken, I take it to heart.

DaveTalk to me about your personal habits, like how you sort of set yourself up for your day, for a week, for your month, for your for your year. Are there specific things that you do that are so unique to you that may be perceived as quirky?

CharlieNo, I would say, yeah, I do have a bit of a habit of it’s quirky now, but it’s it’s what I don’t have is, I think, what I aspire or aspire to.\Which is sort of you probably wake up early and work out really hard and get your day going. I do that in spurts. And actually during this pandemic, I’ve been pretty good. So my day typically starts at five or earlier. I sleep less as I get older. But and I’m not a kind of guy that can get up right away at work. I’m just not. And so the one habit that I do have, which my wife teases me about, she calls it puttering around. But you know, I get my coffee. I read some email and I always I always read the news or watch the news, BBC or something like that or NBC.

For me, it’s just having an hour and a half of quiet time to kind of think about the day. And actually a lot of the stuff I think about. I process emails and stuff like that but a lot of this stuff I think about is what we’ve talked about a little here today, which is like, how am I going to sort of. You know, support the narrative I’m telling in the meetings that I have today? You know, where where are there opportunities to influence, you know, towards the mission of what we’re trying to do?It’s a bit of a reminder of really what I’m all about and what I’m here to do I love that. And then, you know, it’s awesome. And then, you know, I have during, especially during Kovner, because I’m not an early morning workout person. I did start blocking seven to eight to work out, and so I’ve been pretty good about that, but other than that, I do have a lot of like quirky habits or. I find a lot of quirky habits, but not on a daily basis But now and then, I’m a big fan. Like, I’ve got four kids and in the evening, you know, try to get as much done. During the day so that I can have some time with them. You know, we’re big, big family dinner, people.

DaveOh, that’s great. That’s great. If you go back to your early days as a as a scout and I know, I know you’re very successful, you went on to to to get your Eagle Eagle Scout badge. Maybe talk about what was like one of the core takeaways that you still live today from from those experiences is as a child.

CharlieYou know, I would think, well, first of all, I was again very focused on the camping aspects of being a scout. So to me, it was it was about getting a bunch of skills that I wasn’t going to be able to get from from my dad. And know I would say. And I went on. My son is an Eagle Scout. I went on to help with his troop. I would say what I took from it was a notion of civic responsibility and just just the idea of. You know, doing things for your community I did not. And we’ve talked a lot about it. I did not go on to serve in the forces or anything like that, which has been a minor regret of mine but I do. Feel like as a, as a person in society, we we owe something to the community.

And I think that scouting experience fostered that and then I would say as an adult leader in the scouts when my son was in it, when I was amazed by is just how accomplished and. Thoughtful these young men and women can be. And the potential is so much greater than I. Think we give kids credit for. And so I was I was.Truly inspired by the accomplishments of some of these, you know, 16, 17, 15 year olds in terms of what they knew about.

DaveYou know.

CharlieEverything you know, they just attacked it and with such a curious mind. And so that was that was really inspiring to me.

DaveYeah, it’s awesome. I mean, obviously, the hope he prepared peace plays and it sounds like he’d do that every morning. I love the fact that you connect. You take the time to be thoughtful about your day in looking at the various interactions you’re going to have and saying, All right, how do I take that, that vision and weave that into these meetings? That’s that’s that’s that’s extremely thoughtful, makes a ton of sense and probably a practice that everybody could probably apply.

CharlieI think you can take that into sort of your your your goals, too. Again, I’m a big believer in keeping track and keeping score. And so every quarter when it I say my goals were how my grading myself and I, you know, send that to my boss. And one, it helps the scope creep. It helps to remind your boss. What you said you were going to do. And two, it keeps you honest and it makes you a person of your word and transparency. Look, I’m not. I’m not getting this a goal done.

CharlieAnd for these reasons, but I think it’s important to constantly revisit what you’re where you’re trying to do.

DaveYou talked earlier or we’ve talked earlier about, you know, the importance of teams and sort of your your sort of development around those concepts specifically in this role because I think it was it was interesting. I think to be good for the audience to hear kind of unique is that position because you weren’t really in charge of anything, right? But you had influence over sort of everything. And so you really had to work in that distributed almost team of teams and time. Maybe maybe talk a bit more about, you know, some of the key things you took away from trying to drive a transformation from a centralized resource with a very strong incumbency in that, you know, and the respective silos and disciplines of the organization?

CharlieYeah. And to me, that was a really fun moment, actually. And I’m not. Saying that’s just because I’m on a CrossLead podcast. But as you know, the story was you guys had given me the. Galleys of team of teams to read, and I was always away on a vacation and so I had this role and I had some ideas of things I wanted to do the piece that I hadn’t figured out as like, how am I really going to get all of these different disciplines to to chase the same vision and figure out how to do that?

And in reading that book. I was so excited, like I wanted to leave vacation right away because for me, it unlocked the idea. That you can create a shared consciousness in greater context around a mission with some pretty simple communication tools.

Some simple sort of team decision making tools and so that was an, you know, you were there. As we launched. You know what we called the forum, which was our sort of our company once a week meeting where we invited everyone to participate. And what it taught me was the context is so critical to the teams making decisions and it can turn things from adversarial. Into sort of pure alignment with just understanding a little more context and that’s that’s something I’m really driving.

As I focus on teamwork now. Very smart folks on the team are very focused on their area of the business, not coming together regularly to understand other people’s parts of the business. This notion of a quarterly business reviews where everyone sits in and again, I pull those lessons from from CSX that. If you really want to give people the license to do what you want them to ultimately do, you need to give them full context and a very clear mission that we all agree on. And once that happens, magic because, you know, it just starts running itself. That’s what I learned. You know, one of the things that I chose, why I chose. The NPS system to implement was not sure. The score is important and the question is important. But to me, there were two. Factors that were the most important that I wanted to kind of get into the culture one was the idea of.

Following up with customers calling them, you know, getting more feedback from them and using that rich, rich data to wine solve their problems, but then start to really look at it at a.

DaveIt initiated their own priorities.

CharlieYeah, I mean, I think it’s really easy to to look at machine data and believe your own data. You can’t argue. People’s perception because that’s what they have, you know, and so that’s important to have their perception is as a measure or marker of where they are with your brand. The other component and the most. Exciting component was this notion of Ian, the employee NPS about what you’re doing. And what you do in that process. You use. Surface, you have them surface at a very local level issues that are keeping. Them from accomplishing the mission. When you address them. And what I liked about NPS is it put everyone at a senior leadership team. On notice and accountable for solving those problems.

They have to to, you know, because we elevate them, we track them we make sure everyone knows them.And it’s basically an insurance policy to make sure you’re listening to your to your employees because they know what to do. They want to do right and they know how to solve the problem, and you’ve got to sort of listen to them. Yeah.And so that was that was really important. And I think the whole stakes. Journey also taught me just the importance of, you know, your frontline workers in terms of listening to their ideas and trying to make their job easier so they can do the job that you want them to do, which is take care of the customer. And that, to me, is. More important than any kind of score is. That we have a system now and when I walk I guess I haven’t walked through the halls in a while, but when I used to walk through the halls. The things that made me the most proud about that. Whole period of my career was hearing. People in meetings talking about in peace as part of their decision making or product feature or whatever, and it’s in every single meeting, in every single function, you know, legal, finance. Billing and that to me was OK. It’s part of our DNA, is part of our culture. That’s the most proud thing I have of that whole period.

DaveYeah, that’s a great example of culture change right there. You know, being on a sort of management and it’s hard to quantify culture, oftentimes it’s sort of like oxygen. You don’t really notice it until it’s missing, right? When you get that, when you get those insights just by walking around. We used to call it troop in the line, right? You go out and they’re in their foxholes, in the front lines and just sort of hear what the men and women are talking about. And and when you hear them repeating back narratives that you’re trying to push at the top, you feel you feel great.

CharlieYeah.

DaveWho say it’s not important who I am and what you’re saying. And that’s great. It’s awesome. OK? As you think about. So I mean, that’s a good segue way into the last year and a half have been incredibly challenging for a lot of people. And I know, you know, specifically the work environment I’d love to hear, you know, specifically how you guys have sort of dealt with the pandemic and and how you’re thinking about your team and Asia as it sort of return to work opportunities, startups and how you’re thinking about best practice coming out of that?

CharlieWell, the first thing is we’ve always placed. Employee safety as a as a super high priority. So that is guided everything for us. And so early on, you know, it was like, All right, how do we keep our employees. Safe and. Still try to. Accomplish the things we want to do as a business and get customers hooked up to, you know, because now they’re even more focused on on staying connected. So one of the things I’m really proud of is we moved, you know. Tens of thousands of employees to work from home within 60 days. And we did it in a secure way with a scalable VPN and a lot of creative technologists and just hard elbow grease to get that done. And with with the idea that we can make them productive and happy at home.And not place them in harm’s way by having them come in to sort of open floor plan call centers and things like that. So that I think going in, we didn’t know how easy or hard. Well, we knew it’s gonna be hard. We didn’t know how successful we were going to be, but we were very successful. And I think the employees reflected. That terms. We love that you’re focused on us, that you’re focused on our safety and health. And then talking about doing.Doing a good job and as a as an employee. And I just think that that was. Such a proud moment for us to be able to do that. The other the other one was, you know, again, some the network performed really well amidst a huge surge in traffic, and we were able to deploy some really smart technology and AI into our network to to make sure that it continued to do that.And so I think it showed us that preparing your core. Assets and applying technology in a smart way, you know, for these unexpected moments is just so critical. So we learned that about ourselves as we think about. Coming back to the office. You know, first of all, working remotely. And using the software we use as Microsoft Teams. Just I think it surprised everyone. We how good it was in terms of being able to. Accomplish our goals, launch products remotely, you know, gather as a team to to make decisions, and it’s just really positive experience.And so as we come back into the office because we do feel like, you know. The collaboration and co-location and things like that are very important will be. Will understand how to be more flexible. But I think what it’s. Taught us is the importance of distributed locations. How do you include, you know, your, your development centers. In. India or Israel or Denver and really bring the teams together? That’s been a lesson we’ve learned. But I think as we go back, we are looking forward to getting. Back and being together and driving those that teamwork. But we’ll have some tools, some extra tools. To be even more connected and even more flexible, and we need to be.

DaveAwesome. Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I was having this conversation with some, some other executives recently as they think about navigating this. And I think a lot of a lot of people, specifically, they’re in a position to make decisions around this are sort of wrestling with, is it back to five days or is it only going to be a hybrid or whatever else? And you know, my my thought is once people learn a new skill and learn new muscle like they’re never going to go back to exactly the way it was just going to have an expanded toolkit to do stuff. And I still think the most effective form of communication is in person face to face. Yeah. So for those you know, those really, you know, high, impactful sessions that are needed, just they’re still going to be a requirement to do that. But I think we’ve all learned that there’s the ability to sort of operate, like you said, in a distributed manner, be effective going back to, you know, the team, a team story for a second. You know, we we set up our physical infrastructure around the globe realizing that the majority of the people that need to be involved in the night’s operation. We’re not going to be physically present, not because of some pandemic, just because of. Right, right. The laws of physics and distribute. So we actually designed our spaces with that in mind, meaning like we knew that most of our conversation was going to be have to be in a virtual setting and the people in the room were important, but you know, it was trying to. Index to make sure they were inclusive was what I love about what I love about how teams and when you go to fully virtual is not everybody has the same experience because they’re through a common platform coming back to some hybrid model where you’re going to, you’re probably going to have a scenario where. You got some people in the room and other people out of the room, but you still got to get the same thing done. It’ll be interesting to see how people people sort of navigate that, but that was like, you know, a critical insight because it was just a constraint that existed for us. So it wasn’t an option to get it the other way.

CharlieYeah, I think two things. one is we’re also sort of retooling our rooms for this notion of a more inclusive environment with remote workers, whether they’re individually promoting or. Or, as I mentioned, one of our dev locations that. The key one of the things that we’re doing, which. Is the key thing that I think everyone feels like they really missed was especially on engineering side, it was this kind of whiteboarding. I think that virtual whiteboard. Is just as hard. As you get your whiteboard there. So one of the things we’re doing is. Setting up cameras on the whiteboards and we’ll see. How we’re going to how that goes. And we’re going to we’re going to start going In some of us just to test it out here and a little bit.

But I do think I think the second thing is, I think all of. The participants of a meeting are going to be a lot more in tune with the fact that there are remote folks. Prior to COVID, we had have all these sort. Of we try to have these rules of, Hey. If you’ve got someone remote, don’t forget to ask them their opinion. You know, we had these, you know, don’t close that meeting without asking anyone on the phone, you know, their thoughts. That kind of thing, because we were trying to reinforce this notion of, don’t forget. And I think. That will be a problem anymore. So I’m looking forward to.

That better, better team cohesion. But it is going to be, you know, we don’t know yet. We’re going to learn. Our way through it. Like, think most like most of your companies?

DaveAwesome. So to last question. first of all, what are you guys working on now? Like, what are your top, you know, key priorities and you know, on your own leadership development, like what do you what do you kind of like focusing on are finding the time to read or think about now?

CharlieWell, as I as I set up the structure, it’s really trying to figure out how do I drive more contextual, better alignment with the teams, including some of our stakeholder partners? That’s like not a new problem, but it’s I’m sure that we are persistent or that you’ve always got to work on and you can always get better at. And I think it doesn’t get better without a very. sIntentional way of doing it. So I’m looking at some training to help with that.

You know, I think, you know, a lot of that. We did a lot. Of listening sessions with our DNI efforts. Listening sessions are actually part of NPS. We call them huddles. So some of the training I’m looking at. Is how to have conversations. How do you have really honest, hard conversations, but not in an adversarial way? And there’s. There’s some good. Material out there, so I’m going to be kind of focused on that. And then the second thing we’re focused on is how do we really set our. Ourselves up for the future of what the home is going to be and spending a lot of time really looking at really, really where customers are going to want home? How are they going to?

What kinds of entertainment are they going to want and getting. Back to some some strategies? One of the things I’m interested in doing.

Is is driving sort of a ten year strategy cycle within the group. A lot of companies will do five year plans or three year plans. And how do you sort of have a rolling ten year kind of plan on on again?

Less about the finances, but more about where.

Consumer trends are going to be and how do we really make sure that we’re applying our innovation and our resources in a smart way to make sure that those are seen and worked into our products in a real way?

So those are sort of the two big.

Sort of new cultural things I’m working on.

And then other than that, we’re going to keep driving.

Connecting homes, you know, and people, whether it’s some of the mobile products we’re launching now.

Or.

We’re going all broadband and some of our new forms of entertainment, you know, it’s just it’s a busy, busy world as you as, you know, lots of product changes. But it’s.Exciting. And so, you know, continuing.To focus on what we want to do and not kind of chasing what others are doing is always about.Also making sure that you’re staying true to what you think you can build as is key to me.

DaveThat’s great. That’s great. What’s the most recent like book you’ve read or the movie you’ve seen or show you’ve watched or something? That’s that you found interesting that maybe the audience could benefit from?

CharlieYou know, I was trying to look at I was trying to look up the title of this book I read, I will get it to you. But it was really about.Successful leaders and CEOs.

And how they thought about.

Capital allocation.

Again, I apologize. I can’t think of the title I need to look at because.

DaveThe main theme in a couple of months. The main thing was, look here eight CEOs. And they were some of the most successful CEOs in history. And they may not have been the high flying ones you’ve heard of. But they really return shareholder value because they thought constantly about how they were allocating capital and just sort of the thought process that they went through and I think that is increasingly. Something that I’m certainly spending more time thinking about as well because you do, you have to shut down. Some things to start new with new things, and that’s hard. But you know, the people that either through instinct or. In this case, you know, just really good studying of where things are going. They’ve been able to make those those choices. So I apologize. I don’t have the name of the book, but all I know.

Is we’ll make sure we capture it in there and in the of notes. That’s awesome, though. It’s awesome, and I think it makes a ton of sense, you know, thinking about prioritization and how you make some decisions about, you know, at the local level.

But then at the more strategic level where you’re at, it really comes down to where are you going to make that capital wise and in bringing out the right process that’s actually driving that ten year vision you’re talking about is is. Really important. Try. Thanks so much for taking time with us today. We really appreciate it was awesome having you on the CrossLead podcast. Any final thoughts or comments?

CharlieNo. Again, I appreciate and honored that you asked me to participate. I’ve learned so much from listening to others. Talk about their experiences. Certainly learned a lot from you.Just how hopeful can be helpful to someone again. The notion of high performing teams and how you organize that is is, to your point, it’s a persistent problem. So I think you’re doing good work and it’s critical.

DaveIf the listeners want to learn more about you or follow you. Is there even a way to do that given your own position? Yeah, people are going to love this question.

CharlieYeah. And honestly, you know, I’m not active on the social media platforms, so I think you probably just need to look for. I know that, you know, I’ve got some some of my keynotes out there. You can watch them. And, you know, once COVID kind of gets better and we’re traveling more, I’m sure I’ll be. I’ll be doing some conferences and things like that.

DaveAwesome. All right. Well, thank you, Charli.e. I really appreciate you spending time with us today.

CharlieLikewise. Thank you.

Daveone more thing before we finish the episode, the CrossLead podcast is produced by the team at Truth Work Media. I want to make this the best leadership podcast available, so I would love to get your feedback. Our goal this season is to have authentic conversations with special operators, business leaders and thought leaders on the topics of leadership and agility. If you have any feedback, suggested topics or leaders that you want to hear from these, email me at [email protected]. If you found this episode interesting. Please share it with a friend and drop us a rating until next time. Thank you for joining.

In this episode of the CrossLead podcast, host David Silverman speaks with Peter Chung, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Summit Partners. They focus on what defines cultures of excellence in teams and portfolio companies he looks to invest in, the leadership traits that differentiate the best from the rest, what he looks for in leaders  — from their motivations, how they respond to adversity, willingness to build teams, and tell great stories. Finally, they discuss the evolution of private equity investing and the latest trends in business — such as investment fundamentals in the “meme stock” environment.

“You can’t confuse a bull market for brains” – Peter Chung

Want to discuss some of these topics directly with Dave? Join the CrossLead LinkedIn Group.

The Indifferent Stars Above by Daniel James Brown

Dave

Welcome to the CrossLead podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman at CrossLead, we exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimum performance. In today’s episode, I have the pleasure of speaking with Peter Chung. Peter is the managing director and chief executive officer of Summit Partners.

When I first met Peter seven years ago, he was already an incredibly successful private equity investor, but was about to become the firm’s first CEO over 30 plus year career. He has been in the Forbes Midas less multiple times, having invested in more than 30 companies, including 18 current or formerly publicly traded companies.

Today we talk about what defines a culture of excellence and teams, leadership traits that differentiate the best from the rest, and what he looks for in leaders that he invests in. We talk about the evolution of private equity investing in the latest trends in business.

Thank you for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed the conversation with my friend and mentor Peter Chung. But Peter, thanks for joining us today, I really appreciate it. I’d love to just to get a chance to get to know you better today. Maybe start take us back to where you’re from and talk a little bit about your upbringing, if you would.

Peter

Yeah, sure. Well, it’s a pleasure to be here and really, really looking forward to this conversation. But I’m the child of immigrants. I guess that’s sort of the first the genesis story of my life. My parents are came here from Korea and in the mid-sixties, like a lot of immigrants at that time, my father came here.

He had just left the Air Force in Korea and he came over to pursue a graduate degree. He was going to go to Carnegie Mellon, but he got off the plane in Chicago and was waiting for my mom to come over.

And so instead of just how he had to what, he had to pay his bills. So he took a job as a draftsman at an engineering firm and in the loop in Chicago and just never left.

Dave

So did he have like a background in an art, in drafting?

Peter

Or he was. He studied engineering in college. He had a he was a pilot and then an engineer in the air in the Korean Air Force. And he he he loved America because at the time, you probably familiar with the state, but they had officer exchange programs. And so, you know, he knows every Air Force base in America because he has been to most of them anyway. So he came he came to the U.S. to study to get his PHD in engineering instead of going to Carnegie Mellon. He decided to study at the University of Illinois and and I was born and raised in Chicago.

In the Chicago area, grew up in a town called Hinsdale, which is which was a wonderful place to grow up in the seventies and eighties. Because of my father’s history, and my grandfather was also a pilot. I was fascinated with aviation.

You know, again, I was a little kid. I’d had a dream of going to the Air Force Academy and becoming a fighter pilot.

Dave

Oh, wow.

Peter

And that was that. It was like layers in life, you know, not necessarily stages, but that was like this foundational layer. And I still have a lot of that in my makeup. You know, I still love aviation. I have deep reverence for the military, not uncommon among children of parents who were, you know, my parents were refugees during the Korean War. So it was sort of a reverence for MacArthur and the Marine Corps. And you know what, the 50,000 young American boys who who were killed or wounded in Korea?

Dave

Yeah, I don’t think I appreciated that until I spent time over in Asia as a young officer in the Navy, and you and you go over there, you would just see the appreciation that people had for, you know, what the U.S. had done all the way from Australia up to, you know, Japan. I mean, it was it was pretty remarkable. And like you, my my father was a pilot, so I know what it’s like to want to be a pilot growing up. And so I found out my eyesight wasn’t that great and then there was like, All right, well, I guess you figured out the alternative.

Peter

Well, he’s almost exactly the same thing happened to me. I think is, you know this, Dave. But you know, I guess if you’re thinking about the next layer of life like you, it was it was as a student athlete that began probably in middle school, you know, growing up in a town like Hinsdale, where sports are really important, get pulled into sports at an early age and did the Midwestern sports. I played football. I was a wrestler. I played baseball. Over time, I probably midway through high school, dropped baseball and stuck with football and wrestling. But, you know, I just had the opportunity to compete with guys who remained to this day, some of my best friends. You know, I still I really wanted to be a college athlete, but I was still had this dream of going to the Air Force Academy and flying an F16 and that that ended suddenly. I think in like January of my senior year when I didn’t get a vision waiver. I got an appointment getting recruited to play football, but didn’t didn’t get the vision waiver. So wow, that kind of ended suddenly. But you know, when one door closes, another opens oftentimes that. Tough to tell that to a 16 or 17 year old boy who’s been dreaming of this for, you know, on the doorstep of his childhood dream, but the door that opened don’t mean this kind of a funny way to say this as sort of a fallback consolation prize was Harvard. Yes.

Very fortunate to have the chance to go to Harvard and play football, and that was a terrific experience. You know, it was a humbling experience and it was a transitional one because I wasn’t as as I wasn’t as good as I thought. I was put it that way when it’s when I went there and.

Dave

What position were you playing in?

Peter

Football was running back.

Dave

But, you know, back.

Peter

Then you played both ways as a running back and a defensive back in high school and. But I like I loved carrying football and went off to Harvard and was was probably in over my head in terms of talent.

Even back then in the eighties, but that kind of it, it was a period of tremendous personal growth and I’m in so many different ways. There’s sort of this story of a boy becoming a man and that that’s that doesn’t come easily or smoothly.

And the same was true for me during my college days. But that that I guess the student athlete, the at least the active participant, the competitive athlete part of it started to change and kind of came to an end.

After my senior year, I actually went on a athletes in action wrestling tour of Central America. For some reason, they just they I don’t know why, but they took me on this team because I was a decent high school wrestler.

But these guys were really good wrestlers. So we were.

Dave

You wrestling at Harvard as well?

Peter

Now, now you know, it’s wrestling. It’s kind of like water polo. It’s a pretty miserable sport.

Dave

Oh, it’s for a slight weight.

Peter

Yeah, a lot of life lessons, a lot of life lessons. But you know, I fractured my collarbone before my senior season, so I didn’t miss my whole senior season and sort of felt unfulfilled. So I did this. Athletes in action tour as a way to close the book on that sort, a competitive part of my student athlete

layer of my life. Now that continues out, you know, it kind of manifested itself in different ways. Can’t play football or wrestle when you get in your thirties and forties. So, you know, I took up mountaineering and rock and ice climbing and surfing and a big fly fisherman.

Do you know I like to hunt with you and and all your buddies? And then I saw pass it on to coaching my three boys in a variety of sports.

Dave

Yeah, you’re very active, right? As a coach in the in your local community?

Peter

I was. Yeah.

Dave

Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Yeah. You know, I find it going from a student athlete. That’s sort of all, you know, you know, all the way through college in your whole life sort of revolves around that. When you when you finally made that, maybe talk a bit more about that transition. You know, when you start to realize, right, what’s the next phase of my life going to look like, you know, I’ve got a friend who actually coaches former Olympians and she’s, you know, these people, these people deal with depression. Their entire life was focused on ten, 15, 20 seconds worth of glory. And then they come home and they’re like, All right. Well, now what?

Peter

Yeah, you know, it’s your identity is wrapped around whatever it is, you’re doing, right? So if you’re a good athlete, you’re you see yourself as an athlete. And I think I was probably a little bit more well-rounded. I was obviously a fairly good student and had other interests and hobbies. But I would say by and large, my identity was as a student athlete. And when that comes to an end, it’s you have to almost redefine yourself and that that can be a challenge at any stage in life. But for me, frankly, I was let down slowly, as I said, I wasn’t that great an athlete in college, and so that let me begin a relatively gradual transition into becoming the next thing. And for me, that was becoming a finance professional.

You know, I didn’t know anything about Wall Street or investing or the financial world when I went to college. My father was an entrepreneur. Would he had started a steel fabrication business and built pressure vessels and storage tanks, sort of his the practical application of his engineering education. But you know, when I was a junior and senior in college, but at the time this was late eighties, all the smart guys that I knew were going down to Wall Street.

Peter

So I thought, Well, you know, sounds like a pretty interesting thing to do.

Dave

What did you study? What did you study at Harvard was or was your major on economics? OK, so that’s a nice that’s a nice Segway into financing.

Peter

Yeah, yeah. So I went went to work at Goldman Sachs in New York in what was then the merger department, the M&A Advisory Group. I just picked that firm in that group because I like the people the best. There wasn’t any scientific reason for doing it other than I really like. The people thought they were terrific. What I didn’t realize that I hated in New York, so moved to New York, had a great first few months. You know, for the first time in your life, you have money in your pocket, but you’re you’re working, you know, are just brutal hours.

Dave

Yeah, the investment banking world is known for that, right? It’s like almost like a crucible for, yeah, college graduates.

Peter

Yeah, some recent blowback, which I find amusing back then.

Dave

Yes, the softer generation these days.

Peter

Yeah, they’re less sympathetic to the plight of the young analysts, but the extraordinary learning experience. But again, I didn’t like New York, so I was looking to make a change. I volunteered to transfer to the Los Angeles office, which was again a pivotal and transformational decision in the arc of my career. I spent two years in L.A. working primarily with a partner named Gene Sykes, who is still a very active partner at Goldman Sachs, from whom I learned a tremendous amount about how to think about businesses, how to conduct yourself in a meeting, how to negotiate, how to value businesses really, really important.

Dave

Can you maybe share some of those key like takeaways or key lessons from that you learned?

Peter

one of the biggest lessons I learned from Gene was to be don’t shortcut your preparation for meetings, especially when you’re young. I was 22 or 23 years old. We were advising boards and executive teams of publicly traded companies on the biggest decision they could ever make, right, which was potentially to sell their company. And it I learned early that it didn’t necessarily matter how old you were. It mattered a lot. How well prepared, how thoughtful, how articulate, how intelligent you were. Just matter how good you were. And I thought that that was different than my impression of what work was like. And I think some of that I attribute to Gene, he just put me in positions where, you know, sort of sent me to meetings alone and figure it out, you know, and I just learned a tremendous amount from him in terms of that way of thinking about rendering advice, giving your opinion, thinking about strategy and then communicating all that in a compelling way.

Dave

Yeah, great. Great. And if you if you go back for a second and Peter to like you know, your childhood and even college, is there a key takeaway or lesson from you about being a part of teams that you know you still sort of carry on today or think about or try to instill in your into your into your boys?

Peter

You know, Dave, there’s perhaps a common denominator under a lot of very, very successful organizations is that that is that they have a culture of excellence in their organizations, comprised of people who have very high standards. They have tremendously high expectations of themselves, and that translates into a group of people who can perform.

In a relatively selfless way and produced extraordinary results over a long period of time, I think the, you know, the the opposite what I’ve seen in many places is the opposite of a culture of excellence is a culture of entitlement and that can be very difficult to reverse.

It also leads to hierarchy, bureaucracy, all the things that you point at and say that that’s the root cause of inefficiency or poor performance in an organization. So, you know, it’s it’s easy to sit to to to talk about in a relatively small organization like our firm.

I can understand how it’s difficult in a much, much larger organization, global organization. But it’s one of the things that we look for when we hire people. You know, if they have very high expectations of themselves higher than I might have of them, that’s probably going to work out pretty well.

But if my expectations for somebody are low are higher than their expectations of themselves, it’s just a matter of time before it does work.

Dave

Now I’m looking forward to the day that that flips over for my children where I have higher. They have higher expectations themselves than I do of them. We’re not. We’re not quite there yet at seven and ten, but we’re working on it.

Peter

Yeah. Well, it’s another one of, you know, I’m currently in the 20 years into it now, husband and father stage. But you know, I think I’ve got to be careful about applying those professional lessons to my personal life.

Dave

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Got to figure out that balance. Yeah, no, I’ve been I’ve been pretty reflective myself around my time as an athlete, mainly because my coach, my my high school coach just passed away sort of suddenly a couple of weeks ago. And a lot of us have been we’re sort of taken aback and surprised, and I was sort of surprised it. So the outpouring of emotion and and the reconnection you had with old teammates and even people that were familiar with the program over years, just because the guy was, you know, pretty legendary coach.

Dave

But I look back and say, you know, there’s a lot of lessons there that really helped me navigate through it. You know, I would say adversity, a life that really I can tie back to that pulled back in high school where, yeah, you know, to your point, he sets a very high standard. And the other thing I liked about it was it was a meritocracy to one extent, and he didn’t care who you are, didn’t care, you know, if your parents had means or not, or you know what, your background, if you showed up and and you put out every day, you could be on the team, and if you didn’t, you know you were gone.

Peter

Yeah, if I think there’s something about this in our in our nature right there, obviously in sports, there’s all the tried and true learnings that that apply to participating in team sport. You learn the value of hard work, you learn how to handle adversity, you learn how to handle success and failure so and so forth.

But you know, it’s funny they talk about millennials now want having a lot of motivations, one of which is to be a part of something bigger than themselves, part of a cause. All that stuff. Well, that was no different than playing on a team is right in your right for you and I, when you know, 20 or And yeah, I don’t I don’t. I think what we’re talking about today with millennials and Gen Z and Gen Z is not that much different. You know? Yeah. Manifests itself, perhaps in a different way.

Dave

All right. So take me back to L.A. You’re in L.A., you’re learning from this legendary partner at Goldman Sachs. You learning as you’re being thrown into meetings at a very young age where you’re advising, you know, probably pretty senior executives on their most important decisions around whether to sell their business or not.

And then what’s next? Where do you where do you go? How long you in L.A. and where do you go next to Stanford next?

Peter

Yeah, it was, you know, again, I love New York, but to be clear, I didn’t want to live there. So I been offered the chance to skip business school and continue on career track at Goldman. But it required a move back to New York.

And so, you know, I was 24 years old at the time living in Manhattan Beach, and I just couldn’t bring myself to to do that. I really did enjoy California, so almost I applied to business school and decided to go to Stanford there again.

Somewhat of a I would have never predicted that I would go to Stanford Business School when I graduated from college. Why? Well, you know, I’d grown up in the Midwest and had been educated on the East Coast and lived in New York at a very eastern half of the U.S. centric point of view.

But moving and moving around and beach and then, you know, doing business in Northern California, Silicon Valley, I really like the area like people. I like the innovation, the energy. And so I decided to go to the GSB.

And again, just an extraordinary piece of good fortune, not just to be in the class in which I’m from which I graduated. Just a terrific group of people with whom I’m very close today, but also had the opportunity to study investing under the legendary Jack McDonnell.

Jack taught investing in Stanford Business School for five. Years, undoubtedly, the best teacher I ever had. But more importantly, because he’d been such a legendary figure already by the time I became one of his students. You know, he he had this larger than life aura, although he was an extraordinarily humble and low key, thoughtful person.

He would pick two or three students to work for him as case writers every year, and for some reason he decided he picked me. And as I sort of progressed through that second year business school, I realized that, gosh, you know, if Jack picked me as one of his case writers, you must think I could be a

pretty good investor. And that that started my exploration of a career in investing. And you know, that’s that was again, one of the more influential experiences. Clearly, the most, the most impactful person in my thinking about my, my not just my career, but also my life and and how to conduct yourself in a personal professional situation.

Just an extraordinary person. In so many ways that would have happened if if I hadn’t decided to go to Stanford Business School.

Dave

This low key comment keeps coming back. I mean, maybe, maybe talk a little about it because I know you’re a student of it now, like leadership. Like, you know, what are your takeaways that sort of differentiates leaders in the environment?

I know, I know you’re you sort of referenced in previous conversations. We’ve had Jim Collins and some of the work he had done. I’d love to hear more on some of your thoughts. Well.

Peter

Again, I’ll confess that oftentimes, you know, you tend to gravitate to theories which probably reinforce your own point of view or reinforce your own strengths and weaknesses, right?

Dave

Sure, of course.

Peter

But well, there’s a perhaps somewhat of a difference between being an entrepreneur and being a leader. Many of the best entrepreneurs again, I’m saying this from the perspective of someone who lives in Silicon Valley and well known for having a certain entrepreneurial culture.

But a lot of entrepreneurs became entrepreneurs as a response to some trauma or some difficulty in their in their earlier lives. I think.

Dave

That’s interesting. Is that true? I didn’t realize that, well.

Peter

It’s the Steve Jobs phenomenon. You know, we we see this all. And I heard a saying that about about bad fathers in Silicon Valley said, thank goodness for bad fathers because without them, there wouldn’t be so many entrepreneurs.

Dave

Oh wow.

Peter

I think that’s a little extreme, but there is a common thread in many entrepreneurs that they become somewhat nonconformist because because of some past history. That’s that’s again, a gross stereotype. But there is there is some commonality among that personality type.

They tend not to do well in big companies that want to do something different, unique. They see the world differently, and that can create an extraordinary vision, a different differentiated vision on opportunities. Again, many of those entrepreneurs that can be great leaders, but not necessarily because of again, what makes them a great entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily make them

a great leader of a company. There are always exceptions to that rule, but that’s not an uncommon pattern to see here. I think when you talk to leaders again, leaders who can sustain great performance over some period of time, there is also another, you know, simple aphorism that a people hire other people and B people hire C  people.

So what’s a great characteristic of a leader? They can attract outstanding people to come work with them, not for them, but with them. They want to be a part of again going back to this concept of teams. They want to be a part of an extraordinary organization that does great things.

I think one of the commonalities of some of these great leaders who can attract extraordinary people is they’re relatively selfless right there. They’re driven by what’s best for the team, what’s best for the company and not neces. Of course, everybody to some extent, they’re capitalists right there.

They’re motivated by, you know, they embrace the profit motive, but it’s more than that. And it’s not at the expense of a of of the success of their teams.

Dave

Yeah, yeah. And that’s the definitely reconciles with some of my thoughts, for sure and some of my own experiences. And it’s interesting you say you say that about entrepreneurs because you’re right. You know, I think I grew up my high school years in the Bay Area, and you would see a lot of these companies and you look at the leaders, you know, like, why not? I don’t know why those are people are considering what to follow, but they do have a compelling idea or product. You know, they’re going. But there’s now, but at some point that has to transition.

I mean, as organization gets some degree of scale and, you know, leadership management starts to take a more critical role and that the the sustainability success in it and at summit, you guys tend to invest a little later stage when you’re not dealing, you know, typically with like brand new start ups or you’re doing something has a

Dave

little journey.

Peter

We are growth equity investors, but much of what we’ve done for almost 40 years is invest in companies that are still owned by the founder, CEO and founder.

Dave

Of.

Peter

The farm family or a close group of non-institutional shareholders.

Dave

OK. And out the time those event was that it was like roughly the percentage of the time that the founders had to stay on and and keep kind of driving the business versus, you know, they’re looking at this is their opportunity to sort of make a material change in their in their career progression.

Peter

You know, Dave we’ve looked at our data recently on on realizations over the last six or seven years and what we’ve discovered is that about 70% of the time we back the same CEO leader from start to finish of our whole of our investment during our holding period.

Dave

Out, it’s impressive.

Peter

And when we do, our realized results are significantly better than when we don’t. If we have a CEO, if we have a CEO change for any reason, it tends to extend your holding period because that new CEO typically rebuilds the team. And there’s a new CEO, oftentimes because there was a performance issue, right? So that it takes time to rebuild the executive team. They will, on occasion, reset strategy or just strategy.

Dave

And make sense.

Peter

Of that. That extends your holding period, which has an impact on IRR.

Dave

So my imagine then when you’re when you’re going through the process of trying to determine whether you want to invest in one of these companies, you must spend a lot of time on the diligence of the actual leader themselves. Considering that the stats you just you just articulated.

Peter

That’s become one of our primary emphases in recent years is to really go deep on the human capital underwriting component of this. It’s a that that is significantly more art and science.

Dave

Right? Right.

Peter

But part of it is, again, to sort of go back to Polonius, speaking to Laertes, to that on be self, be true. Just be objective, be intellectually honest. Don’t hear what you want to hear. And that’s a challenge, right? That’s difficult. That’s it’s not easy in human nature, but really step back and try to be as objective as possible about what you see and hear about the person you’re about to back.

Dave

Shakespeare so relevant 500 years later. Very impressive. So you graduate Stanford, you moved to summit. Maybe take take us through the arc of your career as an investor. You know, what was it like in the early stages and how has that evolved over the years?

Peter

Yeah. When I joined some in 1994, the investing business, private equity and venture capital or growth equity, as we call it today in our part of the market was a fraction, a tiny fraction of the size it is today, and the firms were by and large, artisanal in nature.

It was a bit of an apprenticeship business. They were partnerships, true partnerships, and it was now again, it was more of a craft as opposed to an industry. That’s all changed today, the industry. But the business has become much more industrialized and and institutionalized.

And I think generally that’s been a positive evolution with all of the capital in the growth in the industry. The businesses that had to mature and that’s that’s been the case both at our firm as well as across the industry.

But we were, I think, around 800 million of assets under management. Today, we’re almost 30 billion and we had probably grown from four fold five fold in that period of time.

Dave

Now in your entire time you’ve been you, you’ve always you’ve always lived in the Bay Area and have you been focused predominately in the technology space? Is that was the discipline that you followed up?

Peter

And yep. And again, sort of talking about layers of your life that built on top of each other, you know, going all the way back to my my origin story. You know, this latest layers as a tech investor at some and I still am responsible for subject matter expertise and thought leadership in a subset of of the technology sector in which I’ve been investing for most of my career. But over time, I’ve added additional responsibilities. I was a member of our executive committee for nine years and that was a group of partners that ran the firm.

And then even though I was never really a proponent of moving to the CEO model 2014, my my partners asked me to become a CEO. And that became my role beginning in January first, 2015.

Dave

Talk about that. That’s interesting. So you’re in a partnership model. What was the impetus to change, to transition to having a CEO?

Peter

You know, I think we’re going to first observation I always make is that being the CEO of partnership is very different than being CEO of a company. You’re still a partner, right? I’m I’m a managing director of the firm and although I’m invested with certain additional responsibilities and authority, but I’m still a partner.

And so that requires, to some extent building some consensus. And again, I think to some extent, everybody has a boss, right? I think that’s one of my … Another leadership lesson I would add it’s good to have a boss. It’s good to be accountable to somebody. So I’m accountable to everybody at the firm. I view my role as not just being a leader, but also working for everybody in the firm. And of course, we all work for our investors, our limited partners, are the group of people to whom we are ultimately accountable.

But I think that’s the first observation I’d make, Dave. But the impetus to move to a partnership, to move to a CEO model, I think, was fairly straightforward. Any multi-person decision making apparatus is inefficient by definition, right? It can sometimes lead to the right outcomes.

But our I think our our experience was that the cost in terms of inefficiency outweighed the benefit in terms of consensus building. So we took the decision to consolidate the leadership group of the firm to have a single voice speaking for strategy and sort of establish the lexicon of the firm and all the norms and processes and all the things that are necessary to run a business, but to do so in a more efficient way, right, as opposed to four or five or up to seven people making that decision, it’s now one or two.

Dave

Got it. Makes sense. Makes a lot of sense. If we go back to, you know, kind of what you look for in a leader and you said it’s more art and science. I’d be curious, what is your what is like your internal sort of pattern recognitions and process you go to to sort of like suss out whether a leader is somebody that you think is somebody want to partner with versus not.

Peter

I think the first thing, Dave, is to really understand their motivation, what’s causing them to engage in a conversation, what would allow them to build the company? How will they respond to challenges? How will they respond adversity? Right? And I think to some extent, it goes back to their willingness to really build teams and and and attract and empower outstanding people. Some leaders are uncomfortable with that delegating authority. I think in order to build companies again talked about being CEO of a company.

That’s that’s necessary. It’s a it’s a risk management consideration for investors as well. Key man risk has been a risk that you know that we’ve considered deeply over my time at the firm. And it remains something that we consider in every in every investment. one way to control invest in key man risk is to key person risk is to broaden the group of key people again to to have a larger group of people on whom we were depending as opposed to just one key person.

Dave

Sure. Yeah.

Peter

That’s that’s that’s one thing. I think the other thing Davis, you know, having having a vision and a passion for what they’re doing. And so again, over time, if you’re successful, everybody is motivated by money at some level. But over time, the motivational effect of additional wealth reaches a point of diminishing returns. So in order to keep going at that at that stage of one’s career, you have to be motivated by something different. And it’s one of the things that we look for when we hire people. We’re looking for people who want to be the best. They want to be the absolute best of what they do and they want to play on the best team. And if we can, if we can continue to do those things that you know, you saw for a lot of your problems.

But that’s that’s another marker of long term success in great leaders vision, passion, motivation, all those things are really important. And then, you know, I think CEOs also have to be very good salesmen. That doesn’t mean they have to be the the pitch person or the the used car salesman or what have you.

But they’ve got to be able to to tell the story of their company in a very, very compelling way that gets in. That message has to be compelling both internally and externally. You have to be able to convince the people inside your company that what you’re doing is really important is going to be great.

And likewise, you have to convince your customers and or your partners or whomever that your entity, your organization is uniquely capable of creating value for and for everyone in the in the in the partnership.

Dave

Yeah, I love that. I love that idea. You know, if you can inspire people, it’s amazing. You know, the additional gears you can get out of that and then how they can really make the team. Be productive as a reminder, this recently, this weekend, I was with a company who was just starting up and we were running sort of a strategy session for them. They were talking about their mission, which honestly, this isn’t a joke was like to cure cancer. And you’re like, Well, that’s compelling. And then they started talking about their approach to it.

And you know, you wanted it. You want to take the helm at the end of the document. You’re like, All right, I’m in like, I don’t even know we’re doing, but I’m doing it. Yes, it is really compelling, and it was fun to be just in a room of really smart people all sort of like, you know, didn’t need to be there that were sort of aligning around this common goal. I mean, you had like molecular biologist from from Harvard who, you know, basically won the equivalent Nobel Peace Prize of like 16 names in there go, Wow, I’m really out of my league here, in this room.

But now it was it was really, really compelling. As you think about how things have evolved, especially, you know, we just, you know, oftentimes when I when I’ve dealt with people in finance, they don’t they tend to like look at like events to be like these things that sort of drive, you know, dislocation or opportunity in the marketplace. And obviously, we’ve just been through a pretty, pretty significant event with, you know with COVID and the effects. I’d love to hear how you’re seeing the current trends and what are you seeing as far as what’s next?

Peter

You know, Dave, we’ve been I’ve been using this analogy again. I just tend to borrow liberally from great teachers from my past. But when I was in college, I took a class taught by the famous scientist, Stephen Jay Gould.

He taught one of his famous theories was punctuated equilibrium. It was his own theory of evolution which said, Hey, listen, instead of the gradualist, the traditional view of Darwinian evolution. What I see in the fossil record is that we see periods of very, very rapid evolution in species in response to sudden environmental change.

So things are very, very, very stable for a long time. Then you have a big environmental change and you see rapid evolution in species. The natural selection process occurs in a compressed timeframe, and what comes out as the environment settles down looks very different than it than the world when it entered.

And I think that’s a useful analogy to think about what’s going, what’s going on, right? So again, we we’re seeing a lot of that in some of the industries in which we invest. And I think COVID has served to accelerate a lot of the secular trends that were emerging before the pandemic, and those trends could have been upwards or downwards. Right. So in some cases, it’s accelerating the sunsetting or demise of certain secular themes, and it’s accelerating the emergence of others. And those are the things that we spent a lot of time last year really trying to understand.

We had lots of conversations about what’s the shape of the curve? How much of this is just pulling forward demand, which will then go through some period or mean reversion in the sinusoidal pattern around the long term trend?

And how much of this is a pulling forward and then continued acceleration from that point forward?

Dave

And what is your analysis? Leave you on that? I’m curious, what are those trends that you think are going to revert back to the mean? And what do you think those things that are established a new sort of plateau owner can occur?

Peter

Yeah, I think I think, you know, you can you can. The answer to that is just in a simple examination of your own behavior over the course of the last year. Are you consuming as much streaming video or are you ordering as much delivery?

Are you writing your Peloton as much as or going to the gym? I mean, all those things that that were were moments in time where we really change behavior. We’re forced to change behavior in a very sudden sudden manner or how much of those changes in your personal behavior are continuing on now that you’re vaccinated and traveling again and going back to work? Right. Those are just some simple analogies that I use. I, you know, I’m I. The answer to all of those questions in my own personal observation is that I’m doing less of all those things than I did in June of 2020. Because, you know, we’re we are in some ways going back to work and getting back to normal.

Dave

And you talk. This is interesting because I’ve been sort of trying to figure this out like just my own self of travel. And you know, you know, probably like you, I spent most of my life on the road, whether I was in the military, I was just deployed or, you know, and then back home, even when we’re home, we were training really with very little training actually in San Diego is usually some other facilities around around the country. And then when I got out and, you know, started working, I’m in, I’m naturally in the services business. And so I was always sort of out trying to service clients somewhere. But, you know, the last year and a half, you’ve been home a lot and that’s different. But the thing I like about it is I like the extra time with my children, like, I sort of, you know, I think I think my son is going to look at this period of his life because he was, you know, seven, eight years old and say, Wow, your mom and dad are around a lot. And that was cool. Like, he loved the fact that he had to go to school.

It’s like, this is great. Now, I don’t think he learned anything in a year and a half, but but it was great. And so I’m sort of. I know I’m going to start traveling again, to your point more about.

I am trying to recalibrate how much and like, you know, are there things that I can do virtual that you know, there are ROI from just a time standpoint, you know, make sense and then one of those things that are really impactful.

I mean, how are you thinking about that just because I know you have lots of different? Constituencies that you’ve got to keep happy, you know, between LP’s and probably team that you work with and probably the companies that you partner with.

Peter

Yeah, there’s a I think there’s a tradeoff, perhaps or at least a consideration between efficiency and and competitive excellence. I had this conversation with a friend of mine who runs tech investment banking at a major Wall Street firm, said, Listen, the conversation he’s having with his senior colleagues is that they’ve just had a record year in terms

of fee generation and transaction volume. While most of their senior guys are sitting in their Hamptons homes now, he’s asking them to commute back to Midtown Manhattan and get on airplanes and basic, right? Well, while that the statement may indeed be true that they’ve never been more productive than they were sitting in the Hamptons, if their competitors are going to see clients in person, they will eventually lose that that productivity right the world will force them to. That’s a great point. Back to some semblance of normal. Now that’s not to say that there is not there aren’t opportunities for efficiency, but for us.

I think like many organizations, the relationships you build, which are the foundation of trust and confidence and all the things that are necessary for well-functioning teams, those things can’t really be built purely virtually. Eventually, you have to spend money together.

Dave

And I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. How have you thought about that with your own team? You know, bringing them back together, you know? You know, now that, you know, conditions have sort of materially improved how you think about reinvesting a culture?

Peter

Yeah, we had hours of conversation about this, but we eventually just said and we said this in April, actually that on August second, we’ll all be back in the office. And again, it was it was a consistent statement that we cannot and will not be a virtual firm. In my view. That’s not, at least for us, that’s not the it the way to run our business in large part because, you know, if you go back to what our culture and our values are, one of our guiding principles is teamwork, and I think teamwork is difficult to to optimize when you’re just interacting with each other in 2D. You know, and I see you on a flat screen, that’s one thing. But sure, I can spend a lot of time with you in this format. But you know, when you and I go hunting every year, our our relationship gets deeper, right? And that’s just that’s for sure. It’s a simple analogy, and it’s since we’ve made that announcement, I think there’s quite a bit of enthusiasm for going back the office. I think people are ready to interact with each other. We’ve onboarded sort of like 50 people virtually. And I’m very interested in just meeting all of them in person. Right.

Dave

So have you got any pushback from that from some of the employees?

Peter

Yeah, I think some people enjoy the flexibility, I think. Listen, I lived in San Francisco for seven years and drove to Palo Alto, so I understand that then this was before cell phones and Teslas, but I understand the personal cost of time to commute. But the office was never in San Francisco, was always in Menlo Park when we hired folks or was always in the back bay in Boston or in Mayfair in London, so the office hasn’t moved. So we again, we think that the benefit, the long term benefit in terms of mentorship, development, trust, relationships, culture, all those things really outweigh, I think, the friction of of making the commute. And yeah, the same is true for me. I drive to the office and it’s not always, not always easy or fun, but I think some of that will be all of it will be outweighed by the benefit of being together in person.

Dave

So going back to your own self-reflection, Peter, is you look at those those maybe those habits or those those that you think will be enduring coming out of this, like, you know, like you said, you’re not running as much, Peloton, you’re not as home as you were as much before, but not worrying as much take.

What are some? What are some new patterns or new muscles that you’ve built that you think you’re going to be leveraging now, you know, coming out of this pandemic?

Peter

You know, those really good question, Dave, I think the friction of having meetings is has just gone down so much in a virtual setting, you know, you can have 15 meetings in a in a twelve hour day if you want. Right. I think we’ve all learned to to increase the the pace at which we can work now. I think that’s to some extent sustainable. We trained our brains to process information very, very quickly to digest it and consume it and actually to produce it in formats that are more than have by necessity have become more efficient. You can you can’t work 25 hours in a day. So, you know, if you if there’s a natural time constraint on how much you can work, your your work product will. But by definition, has become more efficiently produced.

So I think there’s been some added benefit in that context. I think we’ve learned to make decisions more efficiently and more deliberately. Right. There will be pattern recognition. It’s not just pattern recognition, because that can get a little dangerous if you rely too much on pattern recognition.

But I think it as an organization, we’ve learned to filter all the information you receive and distill it into four or five or six key threads which allow us to make a decision. And I think our internal processes to drive that decision making have improved because of the pace and the frequency that’s been forced by a virtual work environment.

Dave

Yeah, it sounds like you’re describing like the equivalent of like a baseball player just getting more reps, write more pitches, you see that you’re seeing more. And so you know your ability to sort of, you know, consistently hit at a higher levels, you know, improve that.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. That makes sense. I had this belief, sort of. I’m not nearly as eloquent as you in talking about your professor at Stanford, but I have a similar thesis that you know, you go through these moments of dislocation and you build new muscle and you know, or add new tools to your toolkit. And then, you know, there’ll be there’ll be that you’ll be able to apply those kind of going forward consistently and will make you sort of reimagine how you can solve problems. And you know, if you’re committed to continuous improvement and how you do your point like constantly perform at a high level, you have some additional tools now that you can leverage. And so I’m trying to figure out ascertain what those are exactly. But certainly, as I’ve talked to other leaders, but even especially in finance, they what they like about the… To your point, they can do 20 meetings in a day, and that’s something that would’ve been really hard to do when they weren’t spending a lot of time on a plane or whatever else. And so they’re like, Look, that that’s great. But you’re right. You know, to the extent that you know, relationships, is the fund foundational part of your business, you can’t really develop those virtually.

You just can’t. And especially if you’re if your competition is doing an in-person right. So that’s going to yeah, it’s going to require you make it, you know, a reinvestment in that that makes a ton of sense. Well, awesome. So maybe as we start to wrap up here, Peter, maybe talk a little bit about, you know, some books or or some things that you’re you’re personally doing to, you know, getting your own development as a leader. Like, what are those things that you invest time in or make time for?

Peter

Well, I think again, it’s there’s a sort of a is like to try to keep things simple because there’s just less to remember. But all the things that I say to our people, I apply to myself. So how am I improving continuously and am I? Am I better today than I was yesterday or a year ago? Am I innovating? Am I? Am I introducing new ideas without, you know, going off, you know, 50 million directions? Am I finding ways to do certain things differently or better and more efficiently?

Or am I spurring the organization to think about our business in a in a different way while remaining? It’s it’s, you know, of course, that innovation is an important thing in everything we do. It’s kind of sounds funny to talk about innovation in a in a private equity firm, but it’s incredibly important, and I think having an innovation mindset is really the the key to this thinking. How do we think constantly about doing things differently or better? And then finally, a culture of excellence, am I upholding that standard? You know, my pushing myself to be better? Am I encouraging everyone to achieve to their potential? And are we recognizing opportunities to help people improve if they’re not doing that? And, you know, I think the other thing this is specific to our business, but it’s always just it’s just really important to remember that you can’t, as the saying goes, you can’t confuse a bull market for brains. Right. We’ve had a tailwind. There has been a tailwind in the investing business and that’s been in place since 2008 or nine, right since the GFC. It’s the longest, broadest, deepest asset bubble in the history of organized commerce, and it’s very different than the tech bubble. Very different than other periods of time. I think I, you know, given up trying to predict when, when and how it will, it will change. But. I think it’s one of the things I worry about is there are a lot of people in the business, including in our own firm, who’ve never really lived through a period of time, like the GFC where nothing is working right, where everything you even great decisions make you look like an idiot. Right? Because of exigent circumstances, we will probably see that environment at some point in the in in the future. Well, there will be a correction at some point, but, you know, hasn’t been one for a very long time. And the investing business is not this easy. It’s just not, right to produce the kinds of returns that that a lot of investors have produced. I think we have to appreciate that there’s a tremendous amount of macro tailwind behind that, those that performance. Yes, people have made great decisions. Yes, there are a lot of really, really smart people. But eventually we in the industry will be tested when there’s another seismic shock to the system.

Dave

How do you get that message across to some of those newer investment professionals at your firm, you know, who have never really seen a cycle because this is a common this is a common thing I hear from more experienced investors when they’re talking about trying to relate to maybe the people that haven’t been through one of these cycles. What do you do to sort of mentally prepare them or get them to be at least have some contingency in place to think through this?

Peter

Yeah. So we talk constantly about investing fundamentals. I think there are periods of time where you can illustrate the fact that investing fundamentals remain timeless, right? So in our strategy meeting in March, this was right after there had been a spike in the ten year Treasury. And as sure as night follows day, all the highest multiple names have traded off 20 or 30%. Why? Fairly simple interest rates. Are there a price to the price of time? So if the price of time goes up, you’re less willing to wait for future cash flows that has an impact on valuations.

All these things are, you know. Graham and Dodd type stuff, right? These are these are teachings that are. A century old. But they remain fairly timeless lessons and eventually investing fundamentals will have their say. But in the meantime, you know, I think you’ve got to relate the lessons that we’ve learned as an organization and imbue the organization with those lessons as soon as you can, because there’s a great temptation to chase things. Just extraordinary. Right? Remaining disciplined remaining focused. Those are the things that make any investment firm or any organization great or any.

Dave

You know, one of the other things I’ve heard a lot of debate around is like, it’s hard for me to tell because you’d probably be better for finances. But this modern day retail investment trend, commercial trend, that’s like causing massive disruption to markets. How much of that you think is is truly just like a fad and how much do you think this is just like a new way of working a new reality the business has to be factored in. You know, do people need to be monitoring Reddit boards in the future?

Peter

You know, I have a lot of my hedge fund friends say that they’ve got to be very careful with their short book because if one of them shows up on in that Reddit forum.

Dave

It’s going to be a bad couple of days.

Peter

Yes, it’s going to be a bad day. You know, it’s I think that’s just another form of external influence, right? There were corporate raiders. There were activist investors. Now there’s these, you know, meme stocks. I mean, all that stuff is just that’s that’s reality. And I think that that has to go into your into your calculus of in your assessment of risk when you when you make an investment of short of stock or what have you. Yeah, I don’t know if the SEC may have something to say about this, right?

Because there’s some sure there’ll be some investigation of it. But you know, if you look at some of these, these trading apps, I mean, they’re they look like games, right? It’s, you know, if people are making money doing it, then you can expect there will be more of it. But it’s not investing, right? It’s not investing. It really looks like entertainment, which can be a very expensive form of entertainment if you get it wrong.

Dave

Yeah, I know it’s what’s fascinating for me. Just taking it back to my military experience is when you go overseas and you’re you’re in combat and you’re you see some adaptation in the battlefield about how the enemy is reacting and you try to understand like, OK, well, this is fundamentally different than. You know of what we were trained for, what we expected. It seems it might even seem irrational. You know, one of the things is, would you just stick to the base fundamentals or do you have to actually evolve or adapt? You know how you’re approaching this situation based on this, you know, this is something you to be more pervasive. And you know, the end of the day, it’s about winning, right? And so you have to adapt to win. And you know, if you know, if you don’t, then you you’re going to lose. And, you know, in sports analogies that that sort of the person that can anticipate having the fastest first half step has a huge advantage, right? And so always trying to stay at that cutting edge is, you know, sort of fundamental of how we operate as I think about this and in terms of like some people that I’ve, you know, I’ve spoken to recently on the portfolio management side is, you know, they’re sort of struggling with this idea that the fundamentals don’t matter right now. Like, you can know what’s going to happen or predict what’s going to happen perfectly. And yet you’d still, you know, lose money on the trade or fail and egos goes. That seems disorienting. And then you couple that with what’s causing this.

And they said, Well, it’s it’s something that’s like to you. It’s feels like more like a game that you know, people made than our professionals are playing. They go, Well, do I want to be doing this anymore? So it’s, you know, it’s interesting is is a sort of Russell through this.

I didn’t know if you had any thoughts.

Peter

Well, you don’t get if you’re if your performance is assessed on an hourly or a daily or weekly basis. I think you can’t ignore what’s going on with point the the fractional high velocity share trading in the meme stocks and so forth.

You know, fortunately, our businesses evaluated more and over longer periods of time. And so, you know, the vintages, if you will, of funds, the 2016 vintage of the 2018 vintage of the 2012 vintage, the performance of those funds takes time to develop and the test of your strategies.

How can that how does your strategy produce over much longer period of time? In our case, 38 years. Right. That’s I think that’s a subtle but important difference in our business versus the hedge fund or public equities business.

Dave

Hence, why you you’re always stressing the fundamentals to lead your team. Yeah. So over time, your confidence will play out. Well, Peter, look, I really appreciate you spend the time today. Before you go, is there any books you’re reading now that you’re finding, you know, particularly compelling and they don’t need to be about this, they could just be something of interest. You know, people listening to this always. We’re trying to figure out how to hide how to be better. So I’d be curious if there’s anything right now that you’re watching or listening to or reading that is, you know, sort of pique your interest.

Peter

It’s called the indifferent stars above just a fascinating and gripping tale of the story of the Donner Party. So I’ve been recommending that book recently.

Dave

Which and why why so fascinating to you?

Peter

It’s a real object lesson in handling adversity and what the compromises many people had to make in that party in order to survive. And then what the aftermath of some of those decisions were in the years and decades following that, that extraordinarily traumatic story. But it’s also an interesting lesson in leadership. Some of the decisions that were made that led the donor party into this very, very unfortunate and frankly unnecessary trial. And I thought, I thought it was. It’s an extraordinary, well-written, a fascinating story. But there are some leadership lessons to be drawn from that as well.

Dave

Very cool. Awesome. Peter, thanks so much for your time today. We really appreciate you joining us. My great pleasure, Dave. one more thing before we finish the episode, the CrossLead podcast is produced by the team at Truth Work Media. I want to make this the best leadership podcast available, so I would love to get your feedback. Our goal this season is to have authentic conversations with special operators, business leaders and thought leaders on the topics of leadership and agility. If you have any feedback, suggested topics or leaders that you want to hear from, please email me at [email protected]. If you found this episode interesting. Please share it with a friend and drop us a rating until next time. Thank you for joining.

In this episode of the CrossLead podcast, host David Silverman speaks with William England, Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Walleye Capital Partners, and world-champion rower who raced for Princeton, Oxford, and the US national team.

They focus on lessons Will learned in crew teams and how those lessons translate to managing a high-growth investment firm. William talks about Walleye Capital’s operating model, structure, and culture and how they have managed through the last 18 months. He also discusses personal leadership philosophies, his weaknesses, and thoughts on personal development as a senior executive.

“Greatest enlightenment comes after peak suffering.”

Want to discuss some of these topics directly with Dave? Join the CrossLead LinkedIn Group.

Welcome to the CrossLead podcast. I’m your host, Dave Silverman at CrossLead, we exist to help teams, individuals achieve and sustain optimal performance. In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Will England, who was a partner and the chief investment officer of Walleye Capital as chief investment officer, Will England oversees internal and external strategy allocations and is responsible for risk management. He earned a Bachelor of Science and Operations Research and Financial Engineering from Princeton and a master’s degree in mathematics and computational finance from Oxford. Throughout his time at Princeton, Oxford Will England was an accomplished rower appearing in multiple world championships for the United States national team and winning the Oxford, Cambridge poses  Today we talk about lessons we’ll learn as a world and collegiate champion rower and how he’s applied those lessons to life in business. We talk about why capitals operating model and why decentralization is critical for their success. We talk about the impact of meme stocks encoded on their investment fundamentals and how they’ve adapted in the face of change. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoy the conversation about. All right, well, thanks so much for making time today. I’d love to introduce you to the audience and maybe just have you talk about your background a little bit if you’d be comfortable  Sure  Like starting from the beginning  Yeah, yeah, take take us back, you know, through your life, sort of where you’re from and how you got to the position you’re at today  So I like to say I grew up in a town that time forgot a little town called. Marblehead, Massachusetts, north of Boston, and it was the 10th largest town in the first census in 1790, and I don’t think it’s changed very much since then  It’s kind of one of those places where if you don’t wear boat shoes, you’re kind of shunned. So, like, not in the normal world at all. But yeah  That’s where I started. And I sort of break my life down into four stages and not all of which are necessarily obviously connected, but there is a sort of a logic to it and a flow in hindsight  So as I said, I grew up in this little town where. It’s very sheltered upbringing. I wasn’t like flying around on jets, but you know, I had pretty much an idealistic way to grow up, frankly  And sort of the first part of my life, which I’d say up until the end of eighth grade, I  I wouldn’t describe myself as employed as it was now. Frankly, I I didn’t work very hard  I was fairly lazy, a little bit fat. I had a lot of raw talent  Unrealistically, realistically  Both in regards to academics and athletics, but just really didn’t ever have to work that hard because of, you know, that sort of situation  And that sort of seemed fine. And something happened in eighth grade. It wasn’t like  This one died. It wasn’t any terrible like that, but for me, very formative time in my life. So in that, in my world, in that frankly part of the part of the country and how I grew up, everyone, you know, it goes to turn not everyone, but a lot of people will go to boarding school and that’s sort of what my whole family died. My sister, you know, it’s very much like playing college is a very difficult school to get into and you just sort of apply. And it just sort of what I what I assume would happen  And what happened in eighth grade is because  I never really worked hard and frankly, wasn’t that special  I actually didn’t like the first time  When I didn’t achieve a goal that I had, and it was really embarrassing and it sucked. And in hindsight, it’s like, Okay, it’s not the end of the world, but for me, being in eighth grade, it was just sort of terrible  And so something in me kind of really snapped, and I never wanted to feel that way again. And that was really  When I said, OK, I’m never going to not be absolutely dedicated to what I’m trying to achieve, as you know, a 14 year old kid. And so the rest that year and next year, I got basically an AA or an A-plus in every single class I took  I started to work out and learn about fitness and sort of develop some of the core traits that still define me today and everything sort of  Worked out. And the next year I applied and come to exactly where we wanted to go and  See NF going there as as a sophomore instead of as a freshman .

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And again, there’s sort of everything else that I went to Andover  Which is a, you know, very, very old elite status school  Yeah  But really interesting too, because it is very difficult  To get into and or there are exceptions to this. Generally speaking, it is really just around very smart people and pushed very, very, very hard and then actually end over from an academic sense is much more challenging there  I went to college or grad school  But yeah, I went there as a sophomore and sort of went a little bit of  My shoulder because I hadn’t gone in the previous year. And it’s not typical for somebody on as a sophomore. And I was just  Like, You know, that next phase of my life, I’d say  Was, you know, when I went from south in your nice gold’s all the way through the grad school or sort of transition from I was in my growing up had been this sort of lazy, not cool. Like I said, Well, the fat kid, you know, like this was very successful growing  I did super well in school. It’s kind of this combination of like a, you know, a jock and a super nerd and was just really successful in all sorts of various different things, probably  To my  Detriment at certain points, because I was probably a bit of a dick after  Some things. But that’s sort of the very formative time in my life  I did start rowing in high school  What drew you to rowing? What brought you to rowing? Just like to suffer?

Yeah, no. So actually, I resisted doing it for a while  Because my sister wrote, as well as just a couple years older, me or very competitive with each other, among other things, and I was like, I don’t I’m not doing the stupid fucking sport. You just said  That’s just really dumb. I finally was like, Well, you might actually be really good at it, so why don’t  You just sit down?

So I actually didn’t start  Until my junior year  In high school, which is, you know, relatively late  For any sport because I was six years old by then. Yeah. And there’s  This thing called the ERG  Which is like this stationary torture device where you sit. Down and you just pull on something until you pass out. I mean  That’s basically if you’re super  Good at that with a little bit of coaching over the years, you’re just going to be really good at rowing. And then as you get higher and higher like genetics matter and all sorts of things like that  But rowing is this amazing sport because probably more so than any other sport that I can think of, how well you do is directly correlated to what  You put into it. You know, maybe weightlifting is like that to some extent  Yeah, but but very much correlated. So I just fell in love with it immediately, and I went from never having tried the sport  To three or four months later, had the best scores on the team and made the top boat and and really just kind of got obsessed. So I don’t know, I had a natural affinity for for rowing. I still wasn’t that good because it does take a little bit of time to to be very, you know, competitive on that level  But when I got  To college, especially my freshman year of the summer before my freshman year, I spent some time and really thinking about how to how to train on my own, which is a huge part of being successful as sort of a sport is that, you know, a lot of people could sit down over coaches yelling at you and saying, you know, just pulling the fucking handles hard as you can do that, but actually being able to do it by yourself and be intelligent about how to design your own training program. That’s, you know, at some point really separates people  Oh, interesting. Yeah, it’s very thoughtful  Yeah. So I I spent some time doing that  Before I went to college. And then, you know, my freshman year, I got a lot better, you know, and that wasn’t just one better than the guys. Most of the guys around me on my team, but it sort of, you know, very competitive on a national level  You had gotten a lot better  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, again, just very good for learning about work ethic. And I mean, there’s all I  Could talk for a long time about rowing. I talked to the people at work now, but all my stories and rowing  But it’s certainly not the only thing that provides sailing lessons for  Life, but, you know, very sort of obvious and transferable images from from rowing that apply to a lot of what we do. So  So anyway, so I it does go back to  What I saying before as far as figuring out just the benefits, frankly, of of. I would say extreme discipline, but being as disciplined as possible. That’s definitely true in academics as I’ve went through in rowing. So I was fortunate to be able to find and then have the opportunity to to really focus on those activities and was

successful to hang out and had a great time. Just really identifying and sort of both of those domains. So when I was  And it was somewhat  Extreme when I say it was like the super nerdy jock or like in in college, I was an engineering major as a particular major to where we went sort of combining engineering, mathematics, economics. But, you know, pretty, pretty intense academically, very different group of people than those that I was sort of spending their time on the river

with. And then when I went to grad school, I went to Oxford for grad school and originally to do a Ph.D. in math, which is like, really weird for someone that like sports, but very true to me at the same time  one of the reasons why I also went there and was around this thing called the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race, which is one of the oldest  Legendary race right in the world  Yeah, and  It attracts people that, like me, had wrote for their national teams and went to the Olympics and World Championships and all that. So it’s very, very elite level, which is just amazing experience. The first thing worked out well, so  You know, through that basically  So you represented Oxford in that in that match?

Yeah, I was  I rode for Oxford. I was the start of of of our trip and we were we won by a lot  Which was just  That  This was an amazing experience in all the ways  I mean, maybe I’ll come back to that as I can  But that’s sort of how to define that, that chapter of my life. And then after grad school and when I said, I’m going to  Stop rowing at that point, I’d I’d done everything except go to the Olympics. I didn’t want to just row and sort of timelines. And as far as when I was in the Olympic cycle, it wasn’t very conducive. Obviously, I just four years is doing that, which is not resistant  There was wasn’t something  I want to do. So I went out to the real world and got my ass kicked. And that’s sort of  You know, what I’d say is the third sort of wilderness phase of my life. Frankly  I don’t know how to  Explain to, you know, people in their early twenties when they’re finishing college or grad school or whatever it is, when they’re coming out of the cocoon  If you know what I mean, the like you’re 20 fucking suck. Like you’re at the bottom again. You really don’t know shit, no matter how smart you  Are, like, you just don’t have the experience and the judgment  And there’s all sorts of  Examples of this sort of in the business world, someone from from your background where  Basically you do just  Need to be humbled  I certainly did  It was very useful in hindsight. And so the story there is, you know, I work for a big firm and in finance, you know, my background as a mathematician academically. So work for, you know, big. Hedge fund  Which is interesting intellectually  But frankly, pretty fucking boring. And then I also worked in a private equity venture capital for for a period of time and just to get some sort of broad experience. And you know, that was super interesting, but I was like, Oh my God, I’m like, I have a lot to learn, basically  And then also in those periods, you know, there was sort of the process of sort of iterating towards my career, my current life and as far as, you know, figuring out exactly what I wanted to do in my career, throwing out what I thought that I was necessarily uniquely qualified to do  But so where some of my relative strengths lie, which is super important? And I just sort of other aspects of life, like being my wife and figure out where going you live. You know, for me, that was effectively in my my late twenties  That’s sort of what I sort of define as the third phase of my life  And the fourth is where I am now  I’m only 36 and so not not super old by any means, although my, my parents and my wife basically say that I’ve been like a 50 year old trapped in a younger man’s life  You know? And so now, you know  I’m sort various different labels that I think are appropriate. You know, whether it’s a husband, father of two kids, two little boys that you know, the most important thing in my life, you know, but also leading leading a company and investment company to which is slightly different than leading a quote unquote normal company  So, you know, you know, investor and and we’re very much in search of what we do about sort of the center of the hedge fund world and by design, we sort of even our business itself as a hub and spoke model  So I’m at the at the center of that. So  So those are  Kind of where I am now and all the experiences that have before that have sort of sort of coalesced into all the things that that make me me  So I want to go back to to one point on the the humbling experience. I think that’s interesting and relevant. And then and then spend a little time, if you would, talking about like, what is walleye capital, you know, you know, how are you different than other hedge funds?

I’d be curious about. But before that, if you think about in your twenties, you’re coming out. You’ve been uber successful at this point. And I mean, you’ve gone to Andover and Princeton and now Oxford, and you’re rowing at the national level, competing, you know, world championships  And now you come into business when you say, kick your ass, go back at that and spend a little more time with that. If you what they work for civically was like the eye opening experience for you  Well, that’s a couple of points. Number one, no one gives a shit, and I think that’s really important. That’s great  It opens the door, right? It gets you to be realistic  Like, Yes, absolutely  Those experiences were  Helpful. And yes, I was  Sort of surrounded in a very  Very privileged way, which initially appeared at the time. You know, that initially, like, oh, saying  I have this brand association of being at those places, which is really what they are in a lot of ways. But, you know, also just having a network be exposed people, some of the most important people in my life were those that I met through through those experiences  But then you get out in the real world and you know, you start to say, OK, instead of people giving me credit for my potential abilities, they’re going to start to  Evaluate me on what I can do right now. So what’s the difference between kinetic and potential energy?

And also in a way in which you don’t necessarily think of? Because if you’re in an academic environment, you’ve got teachers, you’ve got parents, which are very much your cheerleaders and they’re rooting for you to do well, literally  And so  Yeah, yeah  And then you get into the real world and people like, I fucking hate you do. Do you think you’re just like privilege asshole that went to all these good schools? Like, in a way, subconsciously they’re actually rooting for you to fail  So if you aren’t super good, if you aren’t  Super  Competent, in some ways, you get less leeway. That’s not to say it’s like this is negative by any means, but just actually being totally realistic. And that’s sort of a big part  Of who I am now. It’s just like  Being real and objective and really evaluating things for what they  Are and not telling yourself a story is a big part of that. And then so what I found, it’s like, OK  It’s not about what have you done  In your past? It’s about What can you do now? What can you do well for the environment? Yeah, sure. The fact that you might have been super successful in an athletic endeavor does speak to pride characteristics about discipline and work ethic and all that sort of stuff, but you still need to translate it into another area, which

can actually be helpful  You know, I know lots of people with gold medals that frankly are pretty fucking useless  The rest of their life because knows it  And so does actually having a bit of an experience of doing that. You know, not fun. Not sort of painful, but like like anything like greatest enlightenment comes after peak suffering, and that’s true in sports. And so that’s why query, isn’t it?

And I think  That’s, you know, it’s very much sort of true, true in life  So so did you have a mentor when he got there or just found it was really like, you know, doggy dog  So I do have a mentor  He’s actually my son’s godfather now, who? He was also a 20 years older me who’s basically like my big brother and has sort of been a guiding voice of influence of, you know  Basically saying all these things, which I didn’t even  I believe at the time it’s like, OK  Like you kind of need to go and get  Your ass kicked for a couple of years and then you’ll you’ll start to figure out some stuff. I remember hearing that and not believing that  But yeah, just having  Someone to sort of provide  Perspective on the way has been super helpful for me. And then over the years, I’ve  Had other other mentors, even in my current business. You know, others are senior partners who’s much older and I, you know, very much has aspects of, you know, wisdom which are helpful. And I do think that’s really important  I mean, one of the things that I’ve certainly found over the years going through various different phases of a business as far as the world is really hard to figure out on your own. Having partners or other people that you can talk to is really helpful, even if you are individually very impressive, very much more want to

do, you know, have have partners line along for the ride and to be able to come in each other as opposed to doing your own  So that’s probably a good transition to a while. I may maybe spend some time talking about like what is while I capital, how are you different? And then what? I’d love you to use and tie those two themes together, which is, you know, you guys are in a high growth environment now you’re bringing on board  How do you think about taking some of that young potential talent and turning it into kinetic I for you guys?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, I like to say a general like we’re a hedge fund, right?

So people have a lot of connotations around what that might mean, like, oh, you guys are evil  I mean, first of all, I’d say we’re trying  To be the non evil hedge fund. I don’t think those those are the concepts are synonymous, but  It’s just structurally there’s only about TED  Hedge funds in the world that are structured the way we are for various different reasons. one is just that in order to have our structure, we need a lot of energy, extremely competent and have a lot of trust from your investor group because of, you know, effectively how how Costco sort of shared across the group  But our model is a distributed network  It’s not like we focus on one particular area. It’s sound like they’re saying, Oh, we’re really great at picking tech stocks long and short or biotechs or something like that. We have all these different strategy pods. There’s actually about 100  And almost anything that  You can do in public and in some cases, private markets. So we’ll have people that are, you know, focusing on one for equity and various different sectors all over the world. Well, I think doing quantitative strategies will have, you know, people doing, you know, various different forms of ops and strategies focused on trading all these weird dimensions early to fall and sort of higher or higher order characteristics and various different types of funding trends. As I said, there’s about 100 different across the group  And stitching them all together  Is extremely complex. But if done well, can, you know, can work extremely well. And there’s, as I said, there’s only about ten hedge funds that are structured like this, and they’re they’re the most successful hedge funds other  So my role is is basically  Sitting at the center of all that and very how to tie it together and have been a driving force, not the only running force, but if the driving force in sort of constructing that hub and spoke model over the past couple of years given given sort of the history of of of our firm  And so the way  You know, as I said, it’s it’s a distributed network we have  We’re not trying  To sit at the center and control what everyone is  Is doing. We hire very competent people and then  They largely run their own businesses and are given the freedom to to do that  But at the same time, like that  Center group as well, it needs to needs to think about stitching everything, everything together to make it work better  And this is you asked about  The analogies from from rolling to our business works. I mean, there’s  There’s a ton, I think the most, most salient line from from rowing is it  Sort of regards to creating a team and sort of stitching very complimentary people and and talents together is like  Just the process of making a  Boat in and of itself. So you know, the way what rowing works and every team that  You’ve been on, there’s  There’s a selection process  Where like you’re literally sitting  Down and it  Fit better than the next guy, even  Though he’s going to be on your team. Is that a very competitive in a productive way?

And the thing that’s so great about rowing is  Not the only sport like this, but  There’s no like storytelling, right? Like in some other sport, someone can say like, Yeah, you know  I’m super good soccer player or basketball or in football like  I’m the best ever in rowing. It’s just like, OK, sit down both I can score like it’s either going to be better or not or, you know, getting a seat race and then the seat races literally pull two boats together  Is which two guys? And you see, if it went faster than in the  Previous race, and this is very objective  So there’s a whole process in  Rowing about like just making the boat  And and by that, you know, in  Order to sort of be on the boat, especially as you go to higher levels. There’s just this  This baseline  Level of competency involved and sort of this sort of shared  Shared desire and acceptance that, yeah, we’ve all been through suffering again, not not the only there in the world in which this applies, but what  Rowing is certainly one of them where, you know, in order to, you know, be at the highest levels, you know, each person individually has to be very good  At the same time  I mean, there’s a reason why people use the analogy of like making the boat roll faster  Like, you literally have to do that  You have, you know, various different people that sit in the boat and you can’t just be doing your own, your own. Saying and especially if you really want to optimize it, you know, it’s it’s about getting on the same page and  Very severe levels and also respecting that  It’s not just that everyone is the same  You can’t just take a  Bunch of guys that are six, ten and big dumb animals that are ridiculously strong, but maybe don’t have a good feel for rhythm or things like that and put them in a boat and expect that that’s going to do as well  The stroke, as I mentioned, that was sort of my seat as a slightly different role than the people in the middle of the boat at a slightly different role than people. Do you know about the boat? So just actually  Saying, OK, there’s a baseline level of confidence that you  Get into that type of organization, but then in the same  Time, once you’re there, there’s no additional  Selection. So then you really got to go back and be on the same page to to make it go faster. You know, there are there very much analogs to to that in our business, not necessarily  Perfect analogs  But sort of the concept of, you know, our business model, you know, we’re hiring senior people. We’re not really a training organization. We’re giving them a lot of trust. We start with an opening bit of trust. You know, I didn’t make it up that quote, but I think it’s a great quote where we trust that people are. That’s from Jim Collins, by the way. So don’t give it to me  But, you know, just say you’re going to run your  Business here and doing your own thing. But at the same time, there’s this notion of  Why we’ve been successful in growing  In our world in recent years is  We’re not going out and  Saying that the organization is is evil, right where we’re respected at the center for four, applying common sense of situations, not necessarily saying in order to be successful in the fight in the finance industry, you need to be in a time of time that is not respectful of people and developing people and sort of all the aspects that go into being, you know, having individuals that are very good at what  They do and not  Treating them like trading cards as well, which in our case and in some other businesses. one of the things that called the operators really don’t like is that for reasons that are outside of their control, all of a sudden there can be kind of arbitrary decisions about, you know, for whatever reason, they no longer have a job so that those are just some concepts that I  Apply that to do very much go back to kind of throwing ideas. And I think again, the most salient one is there’s  Baseline level of selection. And then  You know, once you’re there is figuring out how we’re all in the same team.

Let’s just go really fucking fast  Yeah, super, super interesting. If you go to let’s let’s pivot, send yourself and make your own leadership thoughts, if we could. If you if you think about like, maybe some of these critical lessons that you’ve learned that shaped the current phase of your life you’re in, I mean, you sort of alluded to some of this, you know, based on some of the rowing analogies. But I’d be interested if there’s something you think that’s like really topical top of mind for you, better some you’ve read or so you’ve been thinking about, you know, as you guys, you’re leading as a chief investment officer for a while  I I guess sort of one of the things that I become more  Cognizant of this is not by design is that  To the extent I  Have  A superpower, it’s that I’m extremely disciplined without like trying to be disciplined. It just sort of seems natural to me  You know, I can get into my daily routine if you want, but like, I eat the same thing every day. Very structure and what I do. Big believer in routines, you know, physically, I’m somewhat imposing. I can lift lots of crazy heavy weights and that’s just what’s interesting to me  And I have lots of broad interests of our books. I mean, these are just things that I  Do, and what I’ve learned over time is  Like, that’s not necessarily normal  And there is going back to rowing. This sort of idea like to be super successful in anything. You have to  Trick yourself  That that’s possible. Like saying you’re going to be really good at a sport is statistically irrational  Saying that you’re going to be very successful. Business is statistically irrational or they’re going to have lots of money  It’s just like if you just run the numbers and I’m saying this is a data person, like you said, No, I’m not, I’m going to conclude, that’s just nonsense. And yeah. And so what I remember from from rowing and  What time was helpful, and I think there’s very much from a leadership perspective in  Business is just almost saying like, guys, yeah, we’re going to do this, you know, we’re going to train. And then in the analog of businesses, we’re going to think about strategy  We’re going to see better strategy, the tactics we’re going to, you know, think over the in the context of not just days or weeks, but months and sometimes year actually achieve what we  What we want and just having an underlying level of like belief that you can do that and enthusiasm and optimism for that is is very helpful. And so I guess one of the things  That I’ve just been thinking about recently, partly because I was that I devoured books and podcasts and heard lots of people talking about this is like, Oh yeah, that’s just something that  Is just the concept of of optimism. I’m not like going out and saying I’m going to be inspiring  Today, but just sort of a belief  Of, yeah, like I I think we’re going to achieve X, Y and  Z and optimistic about that. But it’s realistic because effectively, you know what you put  In the training. I mean, when you show up on the  Starting line and rowing, and I imagine that there’s  Probably lots of analogs like this for you. It’s like if you know that you’ve put in years and years  Of practice to get there  Like you just. There’s this calmness, it’s like, yeah, I’m just I’m going to win  The match, takes care of itself. It’s OK, you it  And I think that there’s absolutely an analog for that in our world, especially in investing. It’s like there’s a lot of a lot of things that we can’t control  In our world  There’s there is short  Term luck involved  But if you have a good process across all the various different  Areas of your business  And you’ve been very diligent in putting that place over the years  And  The first principles themselves make make sense and you believe in what you’re doing and can  Inspire other people to  You know, follow what you’re doing and why. Like, it’s going to work and just, you know, all those  Lessons together about, you know, being dedicated and being confident because of, you know, you know, that you put the work in. And for us, that’s been very helpful. And we, you know, a few years ago, five or six years ago, if you looked at where we were relative to where we are today, I don’t think it would have been a stretch to a lot of people to predict that. But you know, here we were. We very much thought that was that was possible. So I don’t know if that  You know, that’s super, super interesting. I mean, what what would I think about, you know, because you’re right, the parallel for me, like with combat experience, is pretty similar seal teams. You hammer the fundamentals over and over again  So when you get on the objective, you’ve got a lot of confidence that regardless of how the objective unfolds, you know, the basics of shooting me, communicate, communicate. You know, you’re going to be better than your adversary and that that Wednesday  The second thing is, if you’re assuming you’re operating in a chaotic or complex, you know, conditions where there are a lot of variables that are moving or changing. The fact that the fundamentals are in place lowers that overall cognitive load and allows you sort of space and time to sort of assess the other opportunities or threats  And and then be it’d be adaptive. Which to me was always the differentiator in a in a in a market. Because really, what equates to speed, right? If you’re faster than your adversary becomes? I’d be curious. Like, what does that parallel for you guys meeting about?

Like, so what part of the process was like, Hey, make sure your fundamentals are sound? And then and then, as you know, various factors or conditions are changing rapidly. How do you sort of get into your team? Yeah, it is very much the right parallel  You know, our our business model is sort of predicated on the concept of dynamism being able to sort of pivot literally our exposures to areas that we think are going to be more profitable or interesting or really responding to the world  It’s like a homogeneous blob in a positive sense  And so, you know, the fundamentals that we have in place are, you know  Do we have someone specific to our world? Do we have, you know, infrastructure that’s appropriate to be able to do that from a technology standpoint, from operational standpoint? Do we have risk management systems in place?

Do we have the right decision making process? We certainly  Spent time over the years actually  Moving away from  Anything that resembles  Management by committee because it’s just like slow and it  Doesn’t add a lot of value in sort of a cover your ass thing  So you know the reason I’m biased  But but I love her business one, and I do think that as I said, that the most successful groups in our world is structured as in this platform concept is  Have the fundamentals in place, literally have the  Platform in place and then being able to respond and pivot as like, I don’t know, the analog to like  Guys are shooting at you like you need to herd and fucking cannons because now guys are shooting at you from the right instead of the left. But you still need to have that, like, you know, grounded  On the platform. That’s very much the way we operate  So there are things that we do that we’re doing now that six months ago, I just I wouldn’t have thought  Of but intervals throughout our process of identifying opportunities  And it’s like, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Let’s let’s go and do that  And we don’t have to like retrain  Or pivot all  These various different, highly specialized people because there’s a there’s a generalist aspect to me also to go in that category  And so I do  That’s why is are very bullish on our type of approach. And again, this isn’t something we invented. And in general, I think our industry is sort of moving more towards towards this concept of having a fewer number of firms that are more generalist in nature that can respond and pivot as opportunity sees itself in sort of very structural advantage, advantageous ways  I know walleyes been you guys have been thinking a lot about culture recently and about values and principles, and I know I’d be curious, you know, if you want to share some of your your more recent thoughts about how you how you deliberately set a culture for your firm  We’ve just in terms of headcount, we’ve kind of crossed that  Tribal number that historically just  Empirically pops  Up as like, you know, past a certain point people units divide into into sub units. So, you know, we’re now about 170  People, not that huge by any means relative to the  Scope of organizations, but 170, you know, very high performing people. And because we’re geographically distributed  And give a sense where if you were two years ago, how big were you? About 100, about 100. So you almost doubled in in two years during a pandemic, no less  Yeah. So there’s a lot of people we’ve hired that I’ve never met  In-person one still feels feels weird to  Me, so what we’ve been thinking about is like the so our friends that are around since 2005. And one of  The sort of defining  That there was literally  Talked about when we started it  It’s like we’re not going to hire high maintenance people. Well, trust me, there’s a lot of  Hype is people in finance and  It’s just not the viewers. It’s just not worth hiring someone  Even if you know they might be able to make you a lot of money or a high performance if they’re if they’re high maintenance. And obviously, that’s somewhat subjective because I mean, it’s been from people, but you kind of know what you see it  So. So that was a defining characteristic. But as we’ve grown, we’ve just noticed that it’s  Sort of become harder for people to  Understand like, OK, what are what are these guys about? Who are these white people? It’s like  This  Not small hedge fund that’s based in Minnesota. Like, who the hell is based in Minnesota? All the sort of aspects. So we actually recently took the time to write down some phrases that resonate with  Us  And intentionally did it in a way it’s like literally the first thing says is we hate our documents. Unfortunately, this sounds  Like an H.R. document, but there’s  Some, some momentary forgiveness, all of which is very true. So I remember we talked about it. I’d be remiss if I didn’t have at least one  Thing in there about that involves Rawlings. one of them is like row in unison. Just kind of obvious thing, like being seen with your teammates if you want both to fly. But  But the first thing in is statement is  I asterix out certain parts of this, but  It’s lets be fucking real  And so you don’t attempt to fit  A preconceived notion of what someone says you should be. Yeah, this one is really important  That’s her first statement. And I do think in finance, it’s just the world  In general  Like just being objective  About seeing things for what they are and stop trying to  Put on a costume or tell a story. Again, just like in wrestling, you sit down and urge the number doesn’t lie. You win the race for you as a race that doesn’t lie and finance. The other day you make or lose money  And so, you know, fortunately, we’re we’re in an industry where  There is sort of an objective measuring stick. And what we’ve seen, what I’ve seen and you know, some of the other my other partners here seeing is just people  The better that someone is at doing that  They are, the more successful there there will be  You know, other things that  Just are important to us sort of around, though, like don’t  Don’t have how many people, you know, be  Real, you know, work together, you know, being able to  At times go very, very  Fast, but at times also just just have patience or that that balance, I think think is important. You talk a lot about the speed of iteration today, which is which is super important, but you can’t just be running around like anxious all the time and changing shit for for no reason  So kind of finding that balance between the two other things that are sort of relevant or is this or talking about general concepts of just being humble, like remembering something no  Matter what you do? There’s always someone better, whatever, whatever better might mean  And then also being able to take responsibility, step up to the plate when you need to know things that are super important to us  They are the last one that we sort of ended on. You know, this is a little bit more particular  To to our business and how we’re structured, but  Basically just longevity in our community  And investment community, no matter. I think what you’re doing, whether you’re guessing in sort of the hedge fund world’s economy or, you know, public markets or private markets or venture capital is, it’s just the notion of consistency. And that’s somewhat of a mental thing where, you know, people that are taking huge swings and betting the farm are really the ones that last. So we do just like to sort of remind people that and there’s sort of macroscopic areas of sort of how they can manifest itself, as well as microscopic areas to them or the notion of a long term thinking  Again, these are just. Concepts that resonate with us that I do think they  Transcend  Characteristics of individual people like we don’t want  Everyone to copy what what someone else is doing actually. By design, we very much want sort of different sorts of skill sets, but these are pretty uniform across. You know  When we intuitively have  Been screening people to try and walk away and fit into, quote unquote, the wall way over the years, is there just some some threads that have come up?

So we’re very much thinking about how to  Inculcate that into our environment because because yes, we want to continue growing to the extent to which we can do so in an enormously honest fashion. We want people to sort of understands what really matters to the, you know, the leaders of the firm, even if they’re not interacting with us as much on a day to day basis, just as we’ve grown out of necessity, that that’s harder and harder to do  And thinking about to do that thoughtfully and in a genuine way, like just blasting out an email and saying, Hey, these are our values, you should read them and then it will be great. Like, that’s not  Going to work. Yeah  So, you know, that’s that’s certainly 11 area for a culture cultural development that I think is  It’s super important in general to get broad statements. But financial businesses, investing businesses  Obviously need to very much focus on  Investing  You know, how they effectively generate revenue for their, for their investors and for the firm  As far as how those businesses actually operate as businesses, you know how they do things like even think about culture in some ways can be secondary  Whereas in other industries, those are sort of the most important aspects. So we very much are trying to be more deliberate about thinking about both simultaneously  Yeah, no. I love that. I love that you guys have always struck me as different. I mean, the fact just the fact that you’re in Minnesota and you’re sort of approach to the type of people you hire just does seem a bit unique compared to what I’ve seen and the more traditional financial hubs and firms and approaches. So, you know, it’s pretty remarkable. And I think that sort of speaks in your guys retention and you  Know, when your growth over the years, which has been remarkable  As you think about, you know, like over the last year of COVID, I’d be curious to see like what if what it’s been while capital’s approach to the pandemic, but from just a human capital management standpoint and then also like anything you’ve seen from a, you know, fundamentals of of your investing strategy  I mean, I think it generally in like society, there are  Actually a lot of benefits from  COVID, not the  Experience in and of itself, because it was, you know, terrible and also sorts various different ways  But but arguably there could  Be this sort of long run  Benefit of people asking, like, why? Why don’t we do things this way? Like, Why do I sit in a car for two hours a day to commute into an office every day  As well as sort of other types of analogs there?

And just the concept of what looks from a systems perspective, like a really high level systems perspective. I think a lot more people are thinking like, how are we structured, how we structured politically, you know, on a national level, on an international level, those types of conversations probably just did occur to people are in our world more of the Microscopic level in terms of, you know, our business because of this idea that we are distributed network, that we have a lot of people kind of doing their own things already and frankly are geographically dispersed  I mean, we’re headquartered in Minnesota, which it turns out is not the center  Of the hedge fund world  And always have good offices all over the  Place  Literally in pods. There really wasn’t that disruptive to us. So what we did and what we still do is we say and this works because of the sort of that concept of like, we have super competent  People that have already pre-qualified themselves to get into our boat, quote unquote  That we said, you guys are adults, just figure out what you want to do when you want to come in the office, the offices open if you don’t come to the office or ship you a computer and like 20 monitors  To your house  Just you’re an adult, let us know and we trust that you’re sensible in that and we obviously can monitor for productivity and in our role  Too, especially when you have people that are, you know, generating revenue, you can say like, OK, like how is that impacting what from what you’ve done historically  Which is a big machine, right? That that works for us because just where we were business comprised of largely senior people where we’re not an apprenticeship organization, so I can understand why, you know, other other types of businesses  You know, banks probably as most salient  Example that you know, they’re training huge  Portions of their workforce, and  That’s very  Difficult to do remotely  Like this. Just you can’t do that. So, you know, I guess where I feel that for us is it hasn’t  Really had an impact  Overall. All things being equal. I just personally like seeing people in person. I think  That’s helpful. I think that humans, you know, very much a wall to communicate  In person and get more  Out of an in-person meeting than the don’t. And so our offices across the country are sort of full to varying degrees, some very fulsome, not full at all. But certainly, I very much still enjoy seeing people, people in person  So I kind of end up as like, I think, complete work at home almost for any organization. And that sounds very intentional from the start. I think that’s just idiotic  I don’t think culture can be maintained long term, let alone develops through through Zoom. It just doesn’t make sense  To me at the same time again, just saying to someone you like, I used to live in Boston, sitting in traffic in Boston is like way worse than  Walking barefoot on glass at times  And so I do that every day. Does that make sense? I don’t know. So I think our companies, just going back to what you’re saying is like, let’s just evaluate some of the why and how some of these questions and they are all just figuring out what that looks  Like moving forward  Which is which is very healthy  I mean, is there a good match to what we talked about as far as, you know, being dynamic and doing things that that overall make sense and perhaps some of the artificial restraints that frankly existed because of industrial area society that was sort of developed long before some of the modern sort of technological age that we have came into being. So  Yeah, I know I love that. I love that. I think you’re right. I think the pandemic has been, you know, almost a forcing function for those types of questions usually leads to like significant leaps and creativity innovation, which is great  You’ve seen probably a number of cycles in your in your professional career at this point. You know, I’d be curious to get your perspective on what you consider to be the latest cycle or evolution and specifically what I hear a lot talking to people on that on the buy side, as is, you know, the retail investor and you know, these these Robinhood’s that they’re they’re fundamentally sort of altering the game. So my question is, is it is it it made? Is it a fundamental shift or do you think this is just sort of like a a fad?

I don’t know and someone I don’t mean just able to keep it take a cop out answer, but  Partly know we don’t. We don’t know opine  I don’t know opine on sort of these these broad themes because  I could see it happening  You know, both ways  You know, the retail. This whole concept  Of democratization of access to the markets, I think, is is ludicrous  It hasn’t been that difficult in order to  For for individuals even going back to, you know, certainly the nineties to get access to trading stocks. And just sort of the hype and mania around the internet bubble in the late nineties  When it’s real to say that  People are sort of suffering from from access and  What some of the apps  Have done  Recently is they’ve just obviously hated  The costs of trading  I can tell you, just based on the bids for the  Order flow from these, these retail brokerages, that you’re  Still  Losing money, you’re just not not seeing  It. So there is this sense, a charlatan nature to the whole business model, but it’s really no different. I do think there are some some differences now  Than maybe in the past, you the biggest one just as relates to  Availability of capital  And just how some of the structures for you, particularly call options, are being positioned to individuals. And there’s effectively people are saying  You know, I’m going to because I don’t really care if I lose money and because it’s kind of fun  So it was like gamified  Well, yeah, I mean, it’s absolutely gamified. And there’s there’s just I don’t think that’s contentious at all. I think that’s actually one of the things that’s celebrated about  The whole business model. I mean, you have fucking confetti when you make a trade. OK. But I am not trying to be overly philosophical about it, but it’s like there’s a reason why like, you want bankers and doctors to be boring, like, this is just not an exciting part of the world  You want competency and consistency and you don’t want, you know, confetti. So, yeah, I but I don’t necessarily think this is a new phenomenon in society. To what extent  Is does it lead to structural change in the markets?

I don’t know. I can’t say. The one thing that is definitely new is because of technology. I mean, you’ve talked about this in the book, but sort of the ability to network now because of  Tech, which is not it is to just directly to enable coordination  I mean, like humans, main thing in the animal kingdom is that we can coordinate, right? And so now you can have forums by which you can have mass coordination of of individuals. Now everyone that looks at that says, like, yeah, that’s that’s collusion  Of course, that’s collusion. Like, that’s not really saying it’s illegal. But but realistically, yeah, like you’ve got, you know, how many thousands or tens of thousands or 1,000,000 people all doing the same thing, coordinating our activities because of technology that will have an impact  That’s not to say it’s going to get out loud, but I just don’t think that’s even a contentious statement. And so I do think that  Professionals like us, like again  This is not saying this is good or bad  Or right or wrong or anything, but just being cognizant  That that can happen. And objectively, if I’m a retail investors  Or the hive mind or retail investors and I see a stock with high short interest and you have an understanding for  Essentially how the game works. Of course, they’re going to play that game and say, Yeah, I’m going to squeeze the hell out of some hedge fund. That’s not being cognizant of that. It’s kind of like, OK, if you didn’t lock your car in a bad part of the town and someone comes in and, you know, breaks breaks into it, like, whose fault is that obviously that, you know, that’s just the reality of the game that we’re in. So. So I do think, I guess to  Summarize, because of the technology and some of the mechanisms which are more readily accessible  That’s certainly different. Is that systemically different in terms of impact on the overall market? I’m not sure I’d go that far, but just the  General sort of driving force behind, you know, people wanting to participate and, you know, getting a thrill out of sort of, again, not just a negative or positive. They saw it as sort of the negative connotation, but to me, that was just sort of the the idea of  Gambling that that’s not new at all. Yeah  So yeah, if you think about, you know, some of your your notes today at the firm and the decisions they’re making, how do you coach somebody from the center who’s going through a draw in their own business? How do you help them get out of that chair?

As I said, I’m a fortunately, unfortunately  A pretty big math nerd historically  And just the general. I just can’t even begin  To explain how much I encourage people to have baseline understanding of statistics  So what I do in those situations is  Say, OK  Why are we here? Why are you here? Is this because you did something really dumb? Or is it just  That this is a natural evolution of of the business that we’re in? It’s like the  You know, the quote from Godfather to like this is the business we’ve chosen in finance. If you are right, 55% of the time on a daily basis, you’re printing money over the long period, but that feels like you’re wrong half the time  Yeah, there’s a sort of a psychological toughness that you need to have. And so I I do think for whatever reason, I just it’s a being  Objective of being able to remind people that, yes, these things happen. You know, let’s let’s understand why. Let’s understand whether something’s changed  And really sort of assessing is that is the process  Itself broken? You know, our our business model and the way I think about where it is very, very process driven. I do have a bad process  Or is it just that basis, a randomness? This is this is not a good period for. For what  You’re doing, that’s not to say we’re  Patting people on the back and saying like, Oh, it’s OK, like, you’ll be fine because it sucks  But at the same time, just being objective about it again, going  Back to the notion of like what is real and removing some of the human psychological biases  And that’s more in the sense  Of people that run fundamental strategies where they have discretion than in what they’re doing. But that’s not to say that even for someone running a content strategy, which is very rules based, that the ones that have had some of those same psychological pressures because at the end of the day, humans are the ones that are designing quantitative algorithms  But just again, applying common sense being objective  You know, looking at sort of statistical distributions and having an appreciation for what can happen. You don’t freak out and when something inherently goes wrong because it is  And because I said that to sit at the center and because of our business model, I said, we have 100 strategies, you know, something always sucks  So it’s like I’m constantly in  That world where it’s like, Yeah, I’m telling you, like, there’s always something that’s not working and  Just having a bit of perspective there to to pass down to people that are kind of, you know, one that monitors points of thing  We’ll going back to you just as we sort of wrap this up here. These are we talked about your strengths. I love to know like, you know, what are some of those like, you know, you see perceived weaknesses for yourself and how you how do you approach how you approach those in life?

Sure. Well, you know, I’ve I’ve got a bunch and I don’t. one of the things I don’t shy  Away from it. Sometimes people affectionately call me a cyborg because  Externally, it might seem that way. But I actually very much talk about  You know, hear your things and really sort of working  On a pretty salient example. That’s just it’s somewhat funny, but  But I very actively mention this to people to sort of humanize myself is I really pass out at the sight of blood or the discussion  Of blood. I mean, that’s it’s actually a medical thing. It’s hyperactive  Vagal nerve  You know, everyone has is to some extent, you know  They get a little  Queasy. In my case, it’s like really fucking embarrassing. So I passed out every single time I’ve ever given blood. You know, there’s there is one dinner, a work dinner, whereas actually, I hadn’t really eaten that much. And so my blood sugar was little low and I was actually telling it was  A potential investor and I was  Telling them about this. I was like, Oh my God. By explaining that I have this issue, I’ve actually caused this issue to manifest itself. So I actually passed out at dinner, hit my head in the floor as the ambulance came and people were like, What the hell is wrong with you?

The next day I walked to the office and people are like, Are you OK? Like, what the hell? And that’s like, Yeah, you know, it happens. And the last one, again, is that it’s just funny. But again, it’s like, So I was sitting on a plane on pre-COVID  I travel a lot  And it was like one of those flights where I was rushing, you know, got like I moved when I just got a middle seat  It sucked, whatever. I hate sitting in aisle seats. I’m not. I’m a small dude  And I was like, This just sucks. I’m going to watch some mindless movie to get  Through the next two and a half hours, and then I’m going to be home and see my  Wife. So I turn on this movie and it was, is John Wick two, which I want to think about is like, OK, action movie, whatever. But my God, like within 30 seconds, they’re like stabbing people in the Vatican, just white everywhere  And I was like, Holy shit, I’m going to pass the bill. And the play’s about to take off. This is a serious problem  And I did actually it. It was a bit of a problem  But I tell people about it because I a it’s kind of funny, but also it’s just just important. Like humility is a strength and, you know, like making fun of yourself as a drank, particularly if in some other areas  It might seem like  Slightly abnormal. Like, I  Get up at 4:30 every day and do the same thing every day. Like I said, that’s just not normal being  Like, Yeah, well, the same time, like you can look at John Wick and not pass out and I can’t. So yeah  That’s that’s a good one  It’s really it’s really I love that those. If you were going to leave sort of the listeners today of like some something that sort of been focused on recently, is there something like leadership wise that’s really you found impactful?

What would that be like? Where would you sort of point someone to if they’re looking for their own personal professional development? Yeah  So one of the things I’ve been thinking about recently and the sounds, I put it in context. So generally speaking, like my  Priorities are in no particular order, but in four main areas, there’s sort of myself from the intellectual and physical sense my family, my business and the world and the percentages that a time that I spent on all those those differ in their so obvious cases  In each one  The last category is the world at large, frankly, something I hadn’t spent  A lot of time thinking about until recently. Like our system in and of itself, policy in and of itself, and have been spending more time just to. King, about that. I mean, I do police have a pretty decent understanding of history  I was very it’s not a chore to go and read history books or first principle sources and have done that for years  And that is something that I  You know, encouraging within myself, encourage you in the sort of other people that are, you know, successful in achieving whatever it is they want to do have sort of achieved some level of influence and responsibility, especially at a younger age  To actually just think about ways to get involved in a  More impactful  Way in policy, not in sort of a superficial  I’m going to do some microscopic charity to make myself feel good enough not to judge any wrong with that  But actually thinking realistically about policy because I do  Think more people like me need to  Think about that and  Figure out ways to get involved. I don’t have an answer to that  But that is  one area  That I’m certainly thinking about and  And I encourage other other leaders to think about, as well as is not just in your own backyard, in your own world and for you on how to sort of optimize your business. But there’s some pretty serious issues in the world and in actually thinking about ways to ways to get involved  More broadly speaking, I do think is very important. And again, particularly at those that are have achieved success and are in their thirties, it’s sort of our generation that is going to be left with the really crazy shit house  So that that is one thing that I was just I was just think of it, I’ve been thinking about it how to apply. Some of the the principles that I have personally, you know, have had some success in developing a business context  How does that  Or to what extent  Is that relevant as much in an in a broader sense? Or what are what are some effective ways to think more about policy involvement?

Other areas are like, Where are you? What are your sources of content for this? Like, is there civic books or like blogs?

So yeah, I first of all, I don’t do social media at all. And when I say that, like I, I haven’t used Facebook  And Twitter in ten years, but really?

And so it’s it’s the ways that I consume material  Ah, well, I I go  For a walk  For 45 minutes every single morning before I work out and I was not. He works on three X speed  So if you do that consistently every day you can read a lot of material  And so that’s it’s a combination of what I It’s just interesting to me from, you know  Audio  Books, typically biographies or descriptions, a certain area of history. I mean, the first principle sources like, you know  Go back and read Milton Friedman’s original  Stuff from the sixties  It’s super interesting as well as podcasts  I was kind of why  I did this. I do listen to a lot of podcast, very fairly eclectic. I like the interviews. You know, I like interviews with people  Just having them actually in long format, actually talking about themselves a little bit and their world. And that’s sort of super interesting to me. It’s not sort of consuming someone’s Twitter feed or or anything like that. It’s it’s it’s just I don’t personally find that sort of very effective  So, you know, I just encourage people just to  Start and then meandered, you know, read five books at a time. And if you’re or listen to a bunch of podcasts at a time and  Just just do what’s interesting, like what’s  Interesting to you and not what anyone says, but but do consume because there’s a lot of there’s a lot of information you need to actually have your own triage process for what’s actually going to be informative  And helpful. And also reading outside of the scope of whatever it is that you that you do like I don’t just go around and read about business people or finance people or sports people, all sort of all sorts of different things and look for sort connections across across them. And there are, I think, some kind of universal personal truth  And the closer you can get to first principles, by the way, the the better Like actually reading the the principal sources, as I said, like if you care about  Called libertarian economics, I go and read, Don’t  Treatment, don’t don’t read some textbook. Those rain in the nineties or even last year actually go and read the first verses of and listen to people talking in their own voice again, for sources I think is so interesting  So good. Well, thanks so much for your time today has been. I’m super appreciative and I know I know the audiences.

Yeah,  cool. Well, thanks, guys  one more thing before we finish the episode across this podcast is produced by the team at Truth Work Media, I want to make this the best leadership podcast available, so I would love to get your feedback. Our goal this season is to have authentic conversations with special operators, business leaders and thought leaders on the topics of leadership and agility. If you have any feedback, suggested topics or leaders that you want to hear from, please email me at [email protected]. If you found this episode interesting. Please share it with a friend. Drop us a rating until next time  Thank you for joining  

How do elite teams achieve and sustain optimal performance?

The CrossLead Podcast is here to help teams and individuals achieve and sustain optimal performance — with lessons from Special Operations, Business, Professional Sports and Academia. 

Our goal with this podcast is to engage with our community of partners and thought leaders to discuss the themes we come across most frequently to the public domain that our broader community can benefit from. In our conversations we will explore the fundamentals of elite teams — Common Purpose, Shared Consciousness, Trust, and Empowered Execution.  

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Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell

Here’s a question how do you define high performance in today’s rapidly changing environment? Now more than ever. Uncertainty rules a day and constant adaptation is mission critical to success. But change is hard, and there’s temptation for all of us to blame failure on factors outside our control.

I don’t have the information I need to do my job. We weren’t treated fairly. I have too many priorities and not enough time. We’re understaffed. It was an impossible task to begin with. But feeling comfortable or dodging criticism should not be our measure of success.

There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding. If that requires you to change, that’s your mission. My name is David Silverman. I’m a former Navy SEAL coauthor of Team of Teams and founder of CrossLead.

At CrossLead we partner with teams and individuals to help them achieve and sustain optimum performance from small start ups to high growth unicorns, from elite hedge funds to global five thousand companies crossly offers a leading framework for scaling agile practices across the enterprise.

From my experience, there’s no quick fix or silver bullet to achieving sustaining performance. The fundamentals are easy to understand the hard to do continuously, like staying in shape. It requires a level of commitment and discipline that most unwilling to make.

People need to have purpose in what they’re doing. It’s not just a job. It’s not just working on technology. It’s just writing code or creating a design. You’re doing it for an end goal. Having an inspirational end goal is a important so that everyone’s excited about what they’re doing and B. having a common mission.

And a common understanding allows you to make better decisions down in the trenches and within the teams.

To the extent I have a superpower, it’s that I’m extremely disciplined. I eat the same thing every day. I’m very structured in what I do to be super successful in anything. You have to trick yourself that that’s possible.

What I remember from rowing and I think was very much from a leadership perspective in business, it’s just almost saying like, guys, yeah, we’re going to do this. You know, we’re going to train, we’re going to think about strategy, we’re going to be about strategy as it related to tactics, just having underlying level like belief that you can do that. And enthusiasm and optimism for that is very helpful.

There’s perhaps a common denominator under a lot of very, very successful organizations, and that is that they have a culture of excellence, their organizations comprised of people who have very high standards, high expectations of themselves. And that translates into a group of people who can perform in a relatively selfless way and produce extraordinary results over a long period of time.

An organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill to what it must be stopped pushing, and it doesn’t continue or even rest in place and it rolls backwards. This podcast is for people that are on the same journey of constant, never ending improvement.

In each episode, I meet with leaders from special operations, business and academia who share their personal experiences on leading in both good times and bad. We’re going to explore the entire set of capabilities that makes teams elite, building trust and aligning a team to a common purpose. How to build shared consciousness to rapidly increase the rate of learning. And finally, how to empower your talent to solve problems and maximize opportunities at speed. The CrossLead podcast is coming soon. So subscribe on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast app.