Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

Yeah, we were down in New Orleans now. My oldest daughter was down here with her boyfriend and my youngest daughter was in Nashville. I said, "I'm moving to New Orleans, too." So with both our daughters here, we said, "We want to be close to you guys." So we bought a townhouse down. You're still getting some art up on the walls behind me. But that's where we are. And 2020 has been a year of change for all of us in so many ways. This was one of ours. So completely unexpected. But it's been a lot of fun.

Yeah, it really was. It was a kind of big inflection point. And it was based on a very simple What-If question that I asked and just comes down to what if I sat down with CEOs and never asked them a single question about their company or their strategy and instead interviewed them as leaders first and only and lessons they learned throughout their career early influences how they think about culture teams, how they hire, career advice to new college grads.

Part of the context for that was that I was a business reporter at the Times for about ten years and covered a lot of different companies and industries, interviewed a lot of CEOs. During those interviews, I asked traditional questions about strategy and industry dynamics and how they would wind that environment. The more time I spent with them, the more I found myself just wanting to set aside those questions and say, how do you do what you do?

So just that simple what-if question and that led to 525 interviews. I learned so much, not only just from the patterns that have emerged about how to lead, but just a tremendous amount of wisdom and insight. And I know CEOs often get a bad rap. They're overpaid, and some of them kind of blow up in the headlines and do things they shouldn't. But most of them are very wise. They've got the CEO position. You've got a tremendous feedback loop of experience and just a vantage point to see what works, what doesn't work. There's a lot of wisdom to share. So I feel like I've benefited from that. And now, with these LinkedIn series I'm doing, I'm continuing those interviews with CEOs and board directors and seeing Carlos.

I do. And in many ways, I think this is true in journalism, but also for entrepreneurs. At The New York Times, we would sometimes talk about the art of the good in question. Right. And a lot of great stories in journalism. Start with somebody going to like what could maybe sound like a dumb question, but it's a great question. That's why we call it the good dumb question. And, in many ways, that's what led to the start of the Corner Office. Just that simple. What if I sat down with CEOs and never asked about their companies? Because that's not the way CEOs traditionally have been interviewed. I mean, for the most part, CEOs are interviewed almost like football coaches. Right. Like, how are you going to win on Sunday? Nobody ever asks football coaches how they lead. I think CEOs have been treated the same way. And I think ultimately it's a lot of what entrepreneurs do, their experience, life as a consumer. They just see kind of a break-in or a seam or something go like, what if we did this differently? So I think the art of the good dumb question helps you in many different aspects of life.

Mostly, but I tried to embrace diversity in every sense of the word when I started the series. I've interviewed famous chefs and musicians and Broadway production managers and tried to get a kind of 360 view of leadership. I mean, kind of like the goal that's been driving. I think my interest in leadership is twofold. One is that I want to kind of democratize leadership because, when I was a reporter at the Times and writing a lot about CEOs, if you wanted to understand what CEOs think, you had to go to an intermediary, whether it's consultants or academics. And I just thought, well, no, I can talk to them myself and hear their stories. I want to get away from the approach of just interviewing like the Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 CEOs and looking for four leadership lessons in all places. Another part of my focus early on was interviewing many women and people of color. But at the time, I decided I was not going to ask them any race or gender-specific questions. That's changed. Now, in light of this year's events, I've got an interview series going on LinkedIn with black executives where we are having the conversation about race. But a decade ago, I made that decision because I, I found too often when women, people of color were interviewed and their leadership positions, the interviewer always started off on a wrong note, like so your wife, your mother, and your CEO, how do you do it all? And I think many of the people being interviewed got tired of that conversation. So what if I said for myself was just what if I interviewed everybody the same way as leaders first and only and not ask those questions? And so there's a couple of guiding principles early on.

I think leadership is tremendously hard. I mean, if it were easier, we'd see more group leaders. And honestly, I mean, the more I study it, the more I think it's frankly, one of the hardest things to do on the planet is to lead effectively and. As a result of that, I think many people try to simplify leadership, providing the three things you need to focus on. Here's the one thing that you need to focus on. You see headlines on the Internet about this kind of stuff all the time. It's tempting to click on them because this is a really hard problem. It looks like somebody has simplified it. But I think you sort of have to acknowledge the complexity of leadership at the end of the day. It's always best to me based on three ever-shifting variables. In any leadership situation, there are three variables. One is you as the leader in your personality and skills. There's the collective personality of the people you're leading individually and as a group. And then there's the context in which you're leading. That is a big company. A small company is in a turnaround situation. Is it hyper-growth? With those three things, like those three sides of a triangle, if you will, I mean, you get an infinite number of variables.

I think a lot of that's overwhelming to a lot of people. And so, to me, one of the most valuable frameworks, I think it's vital to separate discussions of leadership into two categories. There are things that you do as a leader, tactically, strategically. And then, I think the second category is how you should be as a leader. I think those are two very different discussions. But on the topic of how to be a leader, one of the things that has been very helpful for the people we work with in my consulting role now is to sort of understand leadership as a series of paradoxes or contradictions or balancing acts that this idea of like, yes, you need to be compassionate, but you also have to hold people accountable. There are times you need to be demanding. You have to have confidence as a leader. Otherwise, people won't follow you. But you also have to be humble, and you can sort of click down almost every aspect of leadership and set them up as those pairs of opposing forces. Then you have to understand the balance point in the middle of them.

I think the conversations that I've had with aspiring leaders that that's been a useful framework for them because we need to get away from the three bullet points. Here's a Venn diagram of three circles on a whiteboard that somehow magically explains leadership because it doesn't work that way. There is a big difference between simplifying and oversimplifying. And I think there's too much oversimplification of leadership right now.

Exactly. And a lot of that, frankly, is based on gut. I mean, there are some moments where you need to pound the table, and there are other moments where you need to say, "What does everybody think?" I've seen some leaders thrive in those moments to the point where I say, "How to do that?" Like, it's just an instinct thing, right? When do you push, when do you hold back? When you're running a meeting, at some point, you need input from everybody, but at some point, you have to make a decision. As much as it'd be great to have sort of a playbook for that, it is based on gut, and gut is ultimately developed through experience. Part of growing as a leader and being an effective leader is being incredibly self-aware and observant about looking for patterns. I took this approach in this situation. It didn't work as well as I expected. Why not? And then just sort of constantly kind of wringing every moment of expense. And for wisdom and insight and, look, my firm does executive mentoring at the C Suite level, I think we are very helpful to the people we work with. But I also think we all have to be our own mentors. The way we do that is just by spending a lot of time reflecting and processing the experiences we've had. The image that comes to mind is sort of like a wet towel that you keep wringing for every drop of like I just went through this experience. What can I learn from it? What worked? Well, why not? What can I try differently next time? To me, that's part of the art of it.

Certainly. And, it makes me think of something that I've noticed because I've done it before this year where everything is virtual. But all those 525 interviews I did for the corner office, I always did it in person. I didn't do any of them over the phone. I came to appreciate that you can look in somebody's eyes and tell from that whether they are comfortable in their own skin. And do they know themselves? Do they know their strengths and weaknesses? There's this peace that I see in their eyes. You ask yourself, like, where does that come from? What has struck me about all the leaders, not all of them, but certainly most of them, is that they have a framework in their head for not only their approach to leadership but every aspect of leadership. Ask them, like, what's your approach to culture? And they say, "Well, these are the three things that I find are the biggest drivers." It's not like there's a right answer. Most people's answers are different, but they've created this model where all the pieces kind of fit together. Like these are what I think is important about leading individuals, leading groups. And they've got frameworks. But then I think that framework ties into a level of self-knowledge and self-awareness about their values. Early influences when they were a child. I mean, I always start my interview like, tell me about when you were a kid. Tell me about your parents and how they influenced your leadership style. The CEOs and the interview leaders seem most calm, like everything ties in. I grew up in this kind of family, and these were the values that were made explicitly important to us. And those are important to me now. This is how that plays out in the workplace and what I look for in people. So, all of that adds up to these kinds of X-Factor qualities we talk a lot about, like authenticity and trustworthiness.

I think there is this quality of like some people are more comfortable in their own skin than others, which comes from self-awareness. So in those moments where the leader is on the stage at an all-hands meeting and people looking at them, thinking whether they can respect the CEO? And there, too, is a paradox because being a CEO, being a leader is an overwhelming job. Right? Like, you've got one hundred inputs coming at you from every direction at every moment and two in the middle of that be sort of calm and centered. I think the way you do that is by having these frameworks in your head of how things work and that example of, like, paradoxes that I mentioned before, that's another framework, because at no point are they saying, like, I don't know what to do in this situation. I think it's more that they go quickly, too. All right. This is a situation where I need to either be compassionate or demanding. So they have this kind of branching network, and that's why they can appear calm in that situation.

Sure. And it is this. The skill that I came through is a key theme and trait of successful leaders, which is the ability to simplify complexity. Almost any size of the company, there's a lot of different avenues you can take. But I believe it's the leader's job to stand up at an all-hands meeting and just answer the kind of questions that little kids ask in the back seat, which is like, where are we going and how are we going to get there? I have seen too many strategy decks from leadership teams that have got 10 bullet points, and they'll be a colored tier pyramid with corkscrew arrows and all that. It's just too complicated. We know from neuroscience and just kind of everyday living that most people can't remember more than three or four things. So there's the sweet spot of simplifying complexity but not oversimplifying it. I think a great example is somebody like Bob Iger, who took over at Disney. He was an insider, but he was promoting himself as a change agent, which is a tricky move to pull off. But when he was campaigning for the job with the board, and I read the story in his book, somebody gave him advice. It's like you've got to come up with three things, Bob. And so from what he said we're going to focus on three things, which is great content, we're going to embrace technology and platforms. We're going to be agnostic about it, but we're going to embrace technology, and we're going to expand globally into other countries in other markets. And literally, since that day before he got hired, he has repeated those three things to the point where it's the second sentence of his bio on the corporate website. I mean, the joke inside Disney, if you ask him anything like how is your vacation, Bob? He will say great content. He just sort of understands the importance of repetition. It's interesting how this idea has played out, especially in our work with leadership teams, because we often push people to get to this idea of simplicity.

It's easy to look at somebody like Bob Iger and what he did, this model he constructed. It's easy to look at that and say, "Well, of course, that's kind of obvious." But the thing is, it's not only obvious in hindsight because those three pillars have played out in his tenure at Disney, and that's how the company has grown and expanded. So it worked. So, again, there is this sweet spot. If you can look at these things and say, well, of course, but if it works, if it helps everybody understand their role in the organization and what they should be doing, that's a beautiful thing. When it works, you see some examples like that, like McDonald's from the earliest days, quality, service, cleanliness, and value. And you go, well, of course, what else would it be? But that was their strategy, and it led to this global expansion. So.

I just want to agree with you just what 2020 has been and will mean long term. I mean, I sometimes like to go through the exercise of 50 years from now. Somebody writes a book about the history of leadership in corporate America. I think 2020 is probably going to deserve three chapters on its own probably. One of the inflection points is I think 2020 marks the end of command and control leadership. And just this idea, people have been talking about the ability to embrace ambiguity for a long time. But now that that has become real, I think it's important to step back and look at the context before 2020. The last crisis that people in companies faced was the financial crisis of 2008. So many leaders grew up in a world that was pretty stable and pretty predictable. You could do long-term planning and take the spreadsheets out for many columns predicting the future. But we are now living in this world and I don't think it will change. I mean, whether it's yes, we're getting vaccines, but I think everybody's waking up to the fact that, like disruption, just the sheer level of disruption is going to be constant. So what separates people in that environment? What's been interesting to hear Hitendra from a lot of my interviews with CEOs this year is there's a very consistent theme. So pre crisis US CEOs, and they will say, I had this view of my leadership team, maybe there are 10 people on it. I would have ranked them one to ten in this order pre crisis. But in the crisis almost everybody is surprised by how that plays out, that some people really step up in those moments and find their voice and their leadership voice in those moments of crisis and other people you would expect to be rock stars actually kind of fade into the background. So what is that quality? It is being comfortable, comfortable in the unknown.

This idea of embracing ambiguity and I think from a leadership point of view comes down to that simple moment, if you're leading a meeting, just to say, I don't have the answers, what do we all think? Anybody, any leader who these days thinks that they have the answers or can predict the future, I think they're going to lose their credibility pretty quickly. So, I had this great expression years ago from a CEO who said the smartest person in the room is the room. Just this idea of collectively, we will figure this out together. And that's not comfortable for everybody. You've got to be, as I said, you've got to be pretty grounded and at peace with yourself to be able to lead those discussions and go on saying that you don't know the answer. What do we all think? And this brings us into the conversation about diversity, which, another way to think of it as a kind of frame, is almost like a physics challenge as much as anything else because the point of diversity is to see a problem from as many different angles as you can. If you just hire people who are like you and see the same problem from the same specific angle, you're not going to get that kind of surprising breakthrough insight. So to me, that's ultimately what it's about. Like, just how comfortable are you in that ambiguity?

Another way to think about it. It used to be if you were in business when the world was more stable as an employee, you kind of handed the playbook, right. This is how you do your job. But we are now in a world where everybody has to write the playbook for their job, whether you're a CEO or on the C Suite team. It ties back to something we talked about earlier, just being kind of an entrepreneurial thinker, like what does that be? How does that play out? The way it plays out is like you have to kind of create your job rather than waiting for somebody to tell you what to do.

I think there are so many different avenues for communication right now. And I think leaders may have an assumption that, like, I'm really visible, I'm in touch with people a lot. But generally, there's a gap between how much they think they are and how they're perceived. And in this context, perception is reality. I like the expression that there's no such thing as overcommunication. One CEO I interviewed said, "Communication is leadership." And I think it's just important to focus on the core messages and not be afraid to repeat them. Another great expression I heard was this idea of never leaving a void of communication because people will think something's wrong. I've seen this play out in my own life and in the context that when there is silence, people start making up narratives, and they start making up challenges or scenarios. Interestingly, the smarter the person usually gets, the more creative the negative scenario they come up with. So, as a leader, I've heard many leaders say that part of their learning curve about communication is, early on, they say, why do I need to repeat this? I just said that at the last all-hands meeting. But the answer is you need to repeat it because, in effect, you are battling the void. Right? Because if you leave the void of communication, people will fill it with stuff and rumors and conjectures. I've heard so many stories that kind of bring that theme to life. So I think now, too, with that resume and virtual, there are just so many modes of communication. And just being out there reminding people of what the strategy is, the company's core values, how those are brought to life, I think that keeps people focused on the work because that's the goal. Right? You want people to be focusing on how to help customers and clients and products and services rather than being focused internally around politics and what's going on. A big way to do that is to be reminding people and understand that the higher you go in a leadership position, the more your job is communication, even though you're repeating what you said.

It's such a rich and timely issue. And I think, again, just for the context, we kind of go back a few years and even a couple of decades ago, I mean, companies had kind of a singular purpose, right? It's the whole shareholder versus stakeholder debate. And companies used to exist to return profits to shareholders, but especially what we saw in 2020, is in many ways that companies have become like governments and many societies. Broader problems have kind of rolled past the door of government agencies and rolled up to the front door of companies to address this one CEO might be such an Adele, but somebody you talked about like the outside is now in all of society's challenges are now inside companies. And I've had several conversations because I've been curious myself, like, how do you lead when that's happening? If you imagine that all-hands meeting and people are putting up their hands and in some ways, CEOs have to be like politicians and be ready to answer a question on literally anything like what's our policy on this? What's our policy on that? Now, how do you feel about Trump versus Biden? So then the question becomes, well, how is it as an organization, and how as a leader do you deal with that? Because, as somebody pointed out, if you try to take on every single one of those issues, you're going to polarize your entire workforce. So I think the best strategy that I've heard from several leaders in this idea is that you have to be more proactive and essentially say, "Look, a lot is going on in our society, and there's a lot of important questions in the world. But we are going to proactively take a stance on these two or three issues beyond returning profits and growth as a company. That's who we are." And it ties back into our story as an organization to kind of tell that story and then to, in effect, have sort of a tough conversation and say, like, this is who we are. This is what's important to us. This is what we're doing about it. If that works for you, then we'd love to have you as part of their company if you believe in what we're doing at work. But if you don't believe in it, then there's plenty of other places you can find a job. As an example, I mean Levi Strauss, the immigration policy was big for them from the start. And they've also been quite vocal on gun control. Part of this stemmed from these sorts of mass shootings. But they had an incident where a customer was in one of their stores and his gun went off, and fortunately, an employee wasn't hit. But that's when the company said enough. One of our employees could be killed here. So if you've got a gun, you're not bringing in our store. And they became more vocal about it. So there's this idea of proactively taking a stance and saying why this is important to us, but then being able to say, "Look, we may not be for everybody." I mean, Satya Nadella said, "Look, we are going to work with the Defense Department. And if you're not comfortable with that, we understand that's fine." You're right. And this idea is like picking a few things, societal issues, and then making them real rather than just talking about them, because I think everybody is a little skeptical now of the sort of empty talk. They want to see action.

Yeah. Chip Bergh, the CEO of Levi's, said, look, if you stand for everything, you stand for nothing. And another way to think about that, I mean, a Harvard business professor who said the strategy is what you don't do. Make hard decisions. You can't do everything, and you can't be everything to everybody.

I was so sad to read the news about his passing. And, it was kind of a mystery when it first happened. Just some of the early news stories didn't make a lot of sense. There's a pretty detailed article in The Wall Street Journal that kind of chronicled his slow descent with substance abuse and maybe the people around him who should have been looking out for him didn't necessarily have his best interests at heart. So that's the limit of my knowledge. I interviewed Tony for Corner Office, and it was truly memorable. I mean, such a provocative thinker. And my favorite memories from that interview include I always ask leaders, how do you hire? And one of his questions that he always asks people is like on a scale of one to 10, how weird are you? Not what you generally hear in a job interview question, but the other one he did. I was playing with the CEO. It's like, how would you interview me if I was a candidate in your office? And one of those questions is what is the biggest misperception that people have about you? And so it turns out that's a slightly tricky question, because once you answer, then he looks at you as only kind of Tony can with his eyes burning through you and says, "Well, what's the difference between perception and misperception?" And his point is that in this context, how people perceive you is reality. There's no such thing as misperception. So you can't say, "Everybody thinks I'm a jerk, but I'm actually a nice guy, right?" Like, if everybody thinks you're a jerk. So but to your broader question, I mean, I love is impulsive, like flattening organizations and giving people ownership. And I think that is the long-term trend. I mean, this whole idea of command and control leadership is dead. You've got a right to play. But now we're not going to hand you the playbook. But I think to make that work, it puts even more pressure on the leaders to be clear about what they expect of people, not in terms like micromanaging. But I like this expression about leadership. Your job is to provide the compass and let people build the roadmap. And I think in this environment we're in now, virtually, I think a lot of companies, it's either going to be permanent or flexible. This whole idea of just a full parking lot being a proxy or full office being a proxy for productivity, we're sort of realizing that doesn't make sense. So if you want to create a flat organization, if you want to empower people, then it puts more responsibility on the managers and leaders to say, "Look, this is what we need to accomplish, and this is your role, and this is what I'm expecting for you"—and again, not micromanaging it. Again, you have employees write the playbook not to execute the playbook but to be much more thoughtful around that so that people can kind of manage their own time. I mean, that's one of the big insights. Like flexible work weeks, people working at home. We used to be goofing off if you were working at home. Right. We know that's not true anymore because many people are working harder than ever. But for this to work long term, just managers and leaders need to raise their game even more about articulating what needs to be done and a sense of the timeline and check-ins. There is an art form to that, and it's not natural for a lot of people. But again, like I know, leadership was hard to begin with, but it's getting harder folks.

Sure. So I think going back to a couple of big influences when I was a kid. One is I, I played a lot of sports and I played probably every sport there was. And I just loved the experience of the team. And when people are pulling together, it's incredible what you can do. Then I got into work life, and I saw that. A lot of that sort of sensibility doesn't exist, and a lot of the time it's the management leader's fault. So also, when I was younger and playing a lot of sports, I was weirdly interested in different coaching styles. When I watched football, I was like studying, why is this football coach, like yelling on the sidelines and the other person just standing there very quietly. And what effect does that have? So teams have always been important to me. And I think another important thing, you gave me a magic wand that could accomplish three things. I'd probably get rid of inequality, racism, and bad bosses because I think we all know there are many bad bosses and the surveys show that. But I sometimes think people don't fully appreciate the toll they have on people's lives and the stress they create.

We've seen bad leaders destroy good companies. We've seen great leaders build up companies. And so that's another one of the sort of key pillars for me in terms of my wiring. I mean, my parents were a big influence on me. My father especially was a kind of world-class listener. He was an editor in journalism for many years, and I was as well. But I watched him with people and he had this magical ability to bring out the best in people. And I watched him get them talking. I tried to put that in practice for myself. I mean, I am interested in people. I think everybody has lessons, wisdom, and insights to share. I've learned the art of interviewing over the years. But I love hearing great stories and insights and how to lead more effectively and then kind of take the next step and say, okay, because by now, I've interviewed more than 600 leaders kind of in-depth about how they lead in their approach. So then, I try to spot the patterns frankly and then bring those to life in books and articles. But ultimately, what's driving me is that if I can make a good boss even better or maybe turn a struggling boss into a better boss like that has a ripple effect, because as leaders, we all have these very big wakes of people behind us. And if you're a good leader, you can really improve the lives and lift the trajectory of the arc of people's careers and their lives. And so that's kind of what fires me up, thinking that I can make a small impact in some way.

Thank you. I always enjoy our conversations. I appreciate this very much.

To me, I'm always looking for areas where enlightening conversations, illuminating conversations can be had where there is a need to be explored, and this year I started this interview series on LinkedIn called Leading in the B Suite. It's, after all, horrific racial events of this year. I started with Rhonda Morris, Chevron's chief human resource officer, whom I became friends with a year ago. We are interviewing very prominent black leaders and having a conversation about race in corporate America, which is a difficult conversation and what can and should be done to increase the representation of black leaders in the C Suite because companies can make all these pledges and commitments. But until we start seeing more representation of people of color in the C Suite, it will look like empty talk. So that's an example for me. That's an area where, as a white male, I'm the first to acknowledge what I don't know. But I also feel like I'm a bit of a proxy. If I can help bring these conversations to life and share people's stories and insights, that will lead to a greater understanding. I think race in this country is an area with infinite room for improvement and just this idea of diversity. There's just something about our wiring as human beings that we seem to be uncomfortable with people who don't look like us. We are all human beings. And I think the more that I can help create connection points through sharing people's stories. I'll feel like I'm making a contribution.

Yeah, and I think it requires some courage to have a tough conversation, because as I think about what you're saying in the way that can play out, if the company says, "We're going to be committed to promoting more black executives and building that pipeline," then some white employees are going to say, "Well, that's not fair." And when I talk to black leaders about that situation, they said, look, we're pretty upfront about like we're doing this and there have been four hundred years of unfairness, and the numbers show that things have been unfair. We're going to take steps to correct it. There's a little bit of tough love. They're just tough talk if you will. Like this is a clear problem that has not been dealt with and we're going to take the steps to deal with it. I mean, it goes back a bit to what I was saying before. Like, you've got to have the courage as a leader to take a kind of proactive stance on stuff and say this is the way we're going to work here. And if you really don't like it when you have the right to work somewhere else, yeah, it's great.

Well, just on the topic of listening, I mean, I sometimes say this to your students when you invite me in to talk about listening. I mean, just go through your life like you were in charge of a podcast. And when you meet people, just ask them questions. If you're generally interested, people will open up. I promise you'll learn things, and that's the way I approach life. I just assume I can learn a tremendous amount from everybody I talk to. And to me, it's an efficient way to learn things. I mean, sometimes you got to plow through a thousand-page book to find the nuggets, but when you're talking to somebody, you can get to the nuggets pretty quickly.

Thanks a lot for joining us today. Thanks so much. It's a pleasure.