How To Master All The Stages Of Your Career

[MUSIC] In times of rapid acceleration, high pressure, and general uncertainty, the reality is clear. Professionals are struggling. They have become more mentally and emotionally exhausted, less curious, more stressed, and less giving. Adding to this is the complexity around solutions with the overabundance of protocols, supplements, and so-called performance hacks. The end result is leaders are more distracted and have less mental agility, poorer performance, and struggle to be the belief builder and energy multiplier for their teams. We don't want to accept that. Our passion is to help professionals be more. These conversations help illuminate your thinking into sustainable human performance, learning real solutions to improve your energy, focus, and ultimately increase your impact. This is the TIGNUM Thought Cast. [MUSIC] Today's episode, how to master all the stages of your career with special guest Fabian Kousha. Fabian is an independent animal health consultant and board member who has spent his career mentoring leaders in various industries. We hope you enjoy it. [MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome to our Bold Round Table. Today at our table we have all of you of course and a great guest, Dr. Fabian Kousha. Fabian is an honorary member of the Bold Kitchen and a fascinating leader who has lived a full career, then retired, kind of, where he supported his wife to become a member of the Georgia House representatives. And then recently we started his career by taking a leadership position in Nairobi. Yeah, those are dots that are not going to be easy to connect, but we will connect them today for you. Fabian has led a fascinating career that I couldn't in a million years give justice to by just reading his long biography. But I will just say in recognition of his lifelong impact in the animal health industry, Dr. Kousha was awarded the 2023 Iron Paul Award. And we all know how important our pets are and their health are to us impacts us every day. So we appreciate that impact. Fabian has several decades of senior executive experience in both the animal and human health industries and both the biological and pharmaceutical research and development area. But really most importantly, the reason we have Fabian with us today is this passion for mentoring people at all levels who have an aspiration to be bold. And to make a lasting impact. And this is why Fabian, you are the perfect person to have today. So welcome and thank you for joining us. Thanks God. Thanks for having me and I'm glad we don't have video because I'm blushing when I hear you talk to me. Talk about me like that. Doesn't feel like that exception. What I did and what I'm doing. That's funny. That's awesome. So Fabian, your background is so fascinating. And it just feels like you've tackled one bold project after another. I know you've worked in research and development. You've worked in all different commercial areas. So maybe a great place to start is for you to share a little bit of your story and how you got to where you are today. Yeah, so you can hear from my accent. I grew up in Germany. I always like to travel and try out and so even in high school. I started doing things like hitchhiking across Europe. But I really liked animals. So I decided to go and try to get into animal health and get a little bit of a feature because of the difficulties in Europe as well in the US to get accepted into college. But ended up in veterinary medicine. And while I was in college, I decided to travel through the US when I was visiting a friend in Mexico. And we like US campuses and like the colleges, the campuses here that I saw applied for scholarship came to the US. And really like what I saw. And so my career really started by trying out new things and trying to figure out whether I wanted to do and practice on in the research and development environment. And eventually, literally, I fell into a job. Somebody shoot me an ad for a job that I had no idea about in the product development area and started there. What I think the important part in all of this story, I'm not going to go through all the different steps is that I tried new things when they came along. I tried adventure when it came along. I tried things that were outside my comfort zone, whether it meant moving from one country to another or going from research and development into sales from animal health to human health. From one company to another. Those were all challenges I had. And in hindsight, it looks like a well-planned career, like a really great progression through different levels of executive steps in the end. But while I was doing it, it was scary and chaotic. So I think Scott, the key message here is that when you look at these careers, and I did the same with people that were more senior to me, "Oh, they have this great career." They started as a student and then they went into industry and then they became managers and directors and executives. In hindsight, a lot of it was challenged, willing to take a risk and felt incredibly scary. It's interesting because you mentioned these scary moments. So what was it about the scary moments that didn't defeat you, but actually inspired you to keep moving on, keep trying new things, keep taking bigger positions? What comes to mind immediately is there's old sense that takes a village. I always, literally from high school on, had mentors and people that I could go to and say, "Now what?" I had sponsors in my career, people that were willing to risk pieces of their reputation to give me opportunities. And I have a very, very supportive family and wife. So it's a very basic thing. You work through the challenges, you literally get scared. I think I told you in a preparation here. I had a moment in my several moments in my sales career where I literally felt like curling up on the fetal position in the corner of my office because I did not know what to do. But I found somebody to call and say, "Now what? What would you do in this role?" And they would help me and I would move forward. And then at some point you develop strategies around colored resilience, whether it's going for a walk or just shutting everything down and thinking for a while about what to do next or figuring out what your mental self-talk is in situations like that. That was the hardest part. Many, many different steps. I don't think there's an easy one. I think the most important one is to go to the support system that helps you, that helped me when the going got really tough. Still does. Yeah, and I think it's so powerful because so often we feel like we're on this journey alone. We're taking on this bold project and we don't really realize how much that people around us would love to help us. And if we would ask and if we would reach out, if we would ask people to mentor us how powerful that can be. Where did you learn that? Or is that something that you just stumbled upon? I was very, very lucky to have mentors from very early on in my life, not just Korea. And at some point I realized exactly as you said, Scott, that it's humbling to ask. But I don't think I've ever had somebody who said, "No, I've had people where I realized there wasn't much chemistry when I asked them for advice or sometimes I just said, "Can we have lunch together?" I want to understand what you do. But nobody ever said, "No, I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to help." You learn that you built something like, "I would call it the Board of Directors." So I really had an individual, as a mentor, I almost always had a group of individuals. One person that helped me with, "How do you balance work and life?" One person that helped me with, "What should I ask for from a salary person?" One person that said, "How do you deal with portfolio development or specific challenges on the job?" And that together then created this network of people that I felt comfortable to ask, even in moments when I really doubted myself. Yeah, but it still sounds like you had to develop an amazing amount of vulnerability because to even have this Board of Directors that you created, and then to acknowledge, "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here. Can you help me?" That sounds like that's a really great skill that you developed early. When you would meet with them, would you find yourself, because you mentioned the word "curiosity," which I think is so important, that you were actually learning from them, interested in them? Would you ever ask them, "Tell me why I'm wrong?" or, "Where you always trying to align people to support that you were right?" No, it was very often, actually, two things, one to my first, I was very often, "How on earth do I get out of this situation?" Or, "How do you solve for a specific challenge?" And I want to go into the vulnerability in a minute because I learned something really, really important about mid-career. I want to tell you a quick story because I thought it's really important. Where I was lucky and had really, really supportive leaders. When I was a project leader, we decided to develop a project and do a step from a very small eight-liter container to a 800-liter container. Usually, you do a lot of steps in between to save money, but we decided to go and put a quarter million dollars worth of product into that big container and save all the intermediate steps to go be faster. Well, that big thing didn't work. They tried to build this product over the weekend on Monday morning. morning, I got a call and said, didn't work. So I had to go into the VPs office and tell them that you just wasted $250,000 worth of product plus a lot of time and all of that stuff. When people came to me, on Monday morning and my office and said, you will be fired today, this company does not tolerate failure. And I can tell you, it wasn't fun to walk into this guy's office. But instead of firing me, he said, you just saved me three months because we would have found the same thing if we would have used the normal approach. So I congratulate you for making that mistake. It wasn't a fun Monday. We want a worst Monday, say, head. But it was an incredible experience and leadership, because I noticed that when you have an example of somebody failing and you support them, that the whole organization changes. You're so often here about how important failure is, because it makes people want to try something, not be afraid to try something. And also, it's in those failures that we often learn the most. But that's the first example I got to tell you, where I heard of a leader actually rewarding or encouraging someone or thanking someone for failing. So it's a great story. So how did you take that and turn that into how you decided to become a leader? So I basically-- I think, again, let me back up and apologize for starting. Leadership journey is taking experiences that you have, that often you read about stuff, but stuff that you experience yourself and try to build that into how you lead and guide your team and lead as an example for your team. So of course, what I did is, in my next team meeting, first off, they were all surprised that I showed back up on Tuesday morning. And then we discussed what was the reason why we failed? What was the impact of the failure? But also, what was the success of the failure? Because again, we saved a lot of time with stuff that we would have found out. And this goes into a lot of physics and formulation sciences and stuff like that. Why it was the right decision, even though it looked like a big failure. And that changed the whole dynamic of the team. I literally had people that would leave the team because I said, I don't want to deal with this type of environment. But I had way more people that said, I want to be part of your team because this is cool. It's such a great example. We use athletes all the time. An athlete in baseball goes up to an at bat. And someone is throwing a baseball at them at 95 to 100 miles an hour. And they don't get on base. They don't get a hit, or they strike out. And they forget. They realize that that's easy to see as a failure. But in reality, they might have done 10 things perfect and just one thing was off. I mean, you're trying to put a round bat on a round ball at 95 miles an hour. It's not easy to do. You just did that with this project, which I think is great, or with any project, which is to break it down and analyze it. What did we actually do well? What did we learn? What can we take forward? And at Tignan, we often say that one of the biggest mindset killers for people is when they work hard on something but feel like it was a waste of their time or a waste of their energy and effort. And what you just proved is that no failure is a waste of time because there's so many great learnings. Did you carry that forward and apply that other places you've gone through your career? Yes. I literally have a slide where I tell people how I work. And that slide has a line in it that says, I look for-- I want people to be comfortable to try stuff and fail, just not twice, but the same error. And then I look in every organization, I am, I look for something that went wrong to celebrate and say, you guys took a risk. You guys went fast with something or you guys did something that made scientific sense, but it didn't work. Let's celebrate that it didn't work because that's an outcome we can live with. And the first time you do that, the organization changes. Yeah, that's amazing. I'm curious, I mentioned that you were in animal health. What was it about animal health that grabbed you and inspired you and that you ignited such a passion for you? We're taking a sharp right hand. I want to do-- I would love to talk about this vulnerability piece as well. But the reason why I liked animal health is I found animals in their variety absolutely fascinating. And I love the fact that I felt an animal health more than in human health, you could have a broad, broad-based medical scientific approach to the animal. In human health, you're very quickly specialized in one area for the most part. Oh, you become a generalist. In animal health, I found it fascinating that I could be fine on a literally muscular cell level, what caused a cow to have issues when she went into milk and would get the cow paralyzed. I could be fine that from the molecule level all the way up to that 800 pound cow that would sit next to me. That I found fascinating. So I found the whole element around the breadth of animal health really fascinating. And I really-- I like animals. I don't want to say I love animals in the sense that I'm never willing to kill on because as of it near and you have to be willing to do that. But I love the animals as both production animals and as pets. So would I find fascinating why I asked you that question? Is that attention to detail that you just described, that little nuance, is what I have also found so fascinating about you as I've gotten to know you over the years as a leader, is that you also look at human beings with all this nuance and each person is slightly different. And this idea of how you can get the most out of that person, as you're mentoring young people and you're looking through-- you know, imagining that you're helping people at all different stages of their career. Let's go back to how you mentor people at the beginning of their career to develop some of this nuance. How do you do that? Yeah. So again, I want to-- at the risk of pivoting a little bit, I want to come back to something around that first line that we went down with the mistake, the error that we made. One thing I also learned earlier-- and it's part of how I mentor as well-- is that when you're in a-- even without a leadership position, any position people observe and watch, your team observe, your colleagues observe you. And we all look through what people tell us and see how they behave, how they show up. And I had this incredible experience when I flew into a meeting in Geneva in a pretty difficult environment. And I was incredibly jet lagged. And I decided to just power through. And I had a time meeting, went in front of the group, and powered through this town hall, and was just feeling like walking and honey. I was really, really exhausted. And after the meeting, two people came to me-- three actually-- came to me and said, what's wrong? Are we being sold? Is the company going bankrupt? What's wrong? And I said, guys, I'm jet lagged. And they looked at me and said, why on earth didn't you tell us? You have an entire room of people worried, because you didn't want to tell us what's really going on. And it was an incredible, humbling learning experience. Because by the next time, I would basically say, guys, I'm going to do this town hall today, but please understand, I'm not feeling great. So don't misinterpret my sluggishness today, because it's jet lagged. It's not anything bad. So when I mentor people, I try to show them that nobody is a superman, that we're all constantly learning. We're all struggling at some point with something. You have a challenge at home. You kid cried all night. You're a dog threw up on your bed, on next to your bed. Your wife or husband is having a challenge in their job, and you have a crisis because of that. Or your boss has a bad day. Or you just got into a really bad discussion about budget or something like that. That carries over into what you do every day. And being willing to be transparent around that is to me the essence of how you deal with people openly. That was a long statement, hopefully, in a sense. No, no, no. But in essence, you're teaching people the power of vulnerability from the beginning and authenticity, I think. You know what I mean? But also, hopefully-- and I know you've done this. You're trying to teach them how to show up at their best more often. Because that's also equally as important. There's nothing worse than someone who becomes a victim of their own, not feeling well all the time. Because none of us are at our best all the time. That you also taught them, hey, you can perform at the highest levels, even when you're not 100% your best. If you use the right mindset, if you use the right approach, what types of tips or maybe strategies have you shared with them around that? And I think this is an incredibly important one. I think it's the corollary to what we just discussed is that the first step to me is to actually listen to yourself. As a young manager, I always felt that you have to be, I don't know, the James Bond type, drink all night, and the next morning be perfect in what you do. And at some point, you realize that's not how life works. And so you figure out, and that's where I honestly Scott-- Tignum team helped me tremendously. You figure out to realize that what you eat for breakfast has an impact. If and what you eat for lunch have an impact. How you recover at night, whether it is through exercise, sleep, with people or without people, depending on your personality, all of those are things that you have to learn and understand. It's a very small bit. So when I talk with whether it's direct reports or mentees, we're trying to discuss what is it what you need to show up the best way for those critical moments and critical situations. And depending on how critical it is, I sometimes literally spend a week or more preparing for it, not just with the power point slides or what have you, but also how I prepare myself with nutrition and movement and mindset and recovery to make sure that on the day, I am there at the strongest I can be. - Yeah, I like that. It's very much like an athlete knowing that you have a peak performance or a critical moment coming in the way that you're approaching that. I'm gonna change gears just a little bit, Fabian, when you're working with people that you're mentoring and you reflect back on your career, do you notice like certain developmental stages? Like at this stage of my career, this is what I focused on. And then at this stage of my career, this is what I focused on. Or do you break that up in any way or how do you approach that? - Yeah, I think a great question. I think I just somebody told me, literally yesterday about an interview with Jane Fonda with where she said, you have three parts of your life that are sections of roughly 30 years. The first 30 years you learn basically a trait. The next 30 years you refine that trait and the last 30 years you hopefully use that to pass it on. And I'm paraphrasing, I haven't listened to the interview, but I think it's a good way to describe it. In your business career, the first 30-hour gear so you're really building a database. I think learning a lot of stuff, whether it is the technical bits of what you do or how to work on a team, how to deal in a business environment, whether it's your own company or a large corporation, you always learn. The second 30 years I think is where you really produce and the learning is more around how do you build a team? How do you help people to become successful and optimize what they're doing? And you use what you've learned in the first part of your career to produce, to generate, whether it's widgets or data or success for people around you. That's what you do in the second third. And then in the last third, which I feel I've made that transition to a little bit, it's about using that acquired knowledge and information to try to foster the next generation to impart what you learned on two people around you so they can become the next level of leaders. Very theoretical, but hopefully makes a reasonable sense. - Well, I remember you sharing a great article with me in the Atlantic by Arthur Brooks. I think it was titled, Your Professional Decline is Coming Much Sooner Than You Think, which is a funny title. But, and in the article, Brooks talks about two types of intelligence. He says, "In your younger years, you have a high level of what he called fluid intelligence and I think the research substantiated that, where you're taking in tons of new information you're learning every day. But as you get older, you develop more and more of what he called crystallized intelligence, which is the ability to connect dots from the wisdom that you've accumulated over the years. And you turn me on to this article and it really made me appreciate some of the benefits that we all bring to the table at different stages of our career. As you've worked with many different like teams and companies, have you seen any great examples of, or maybe you have some ideas of how we could do a better job, kind of tapping into the collective intelligence that exists within our workforce of people at all stages of their career?" - I think that's a very simple response to your question. And that is that when you create an environment where people are willing to mentor each other and what's what discuss with authenticity, whatever comes up, you create that positive force field, whatever you wanna call it. So when I talk and work with my mentees, I guarantee you I learn at least as much as they do. And again, a key example I had was decades ago before we had any type of real equality with the LBTQ community. I had a mentee who had come out, who was openly gay. And I had a discussion with him at some point about how it is to work in a very heterosexual environment as a gay question. And he gave me feedback on simple questions that you would ask on a Monday morning that felt very different from them than they did for me as a family father. And that authenticity in that exchange is something that stuck with me for decades. Hopefully made me a little bit more sensitive as a leader, but created a relationship and friendship that lasts to this day. So to me, your question is very simple. When you create an environment where people are willing to have that type of exchange where people are willing to go beyond the technical work stuff. I need this task done by Monday and you will do it this way. And I want it on a green piece of paper in 10 points. That's not how you work as a team successful. - Yeah, it's one of the things that I loved about the fire service is that on a fire truck, you would have four people, all different life experiences. Some would have maybe had some experience in construction. Some came from somewhere doctors that left the medical field and wanted to become a firefighter. Some were car-practors, some were kids at a college. It was just incredible that when you learned how to tap into what everyone brought and everyone felt comfortable to contribute, how your problem-solving capability just exponentially got better. And so everything that I'm listening to you around the way that you even mentor people around being vulnerable, but also being bold in the way that they share what they can bring to the table, I think is remarkable. So as you, we've talked a little bit about you as you mentor people, but now you've gone through your career and then you find yourself, and I mentioned this in the intro, kind of retiring or semi-retiring and now being a support of husband, a complete change in roles. For your wife Angelica, while she went on to a political aspiration, explaining me maybe how you applied some of these same tools and strategies to this phase of your life that I don't even know on your career path you would have ever seen coming. Yeah, I have no idea how that happened. So my wife became political active, got elected and literally at the same time and we found out that she was elected. I decided through some different situations that I would retire from my company. So December 31st was my last day as senior vice president and January 1st, January 6th, is when the legislative career started for her. So it was a complete change of roles and during the campaign, I had stayed out of the political field, it's just, I'm just not made for that. So my role was really barista for her team, which was a great training because all these students, helpers, young old middle age people came and we had this routine that they could send me a text message and tell me what kind of coffee they wanted. And what I really learned in that transition was that these job titles, the perks that come with these very senior jobs, whether it is two executive assistants, one here, one in Europe, whether it is that you're met, sometimes plain side by somebody who would take you through customs, whether it is the black limos that would pick you up everywhere or the nicest hotel rooms when you're somewhere with a team. That all is a job, it's not you. And it was a really, really good experience to see that it doesn't diminish who I am and hopefully the impact I have on people, whether I have a big job title and a big office or whether I am trying to sit on a board as somebody who shows up occasionally or work with people that face challenges in their job or help my wife figure out how it is to go from a neighbor to somebody that people will greet in the supermarket and ask to, I don't know, sit in the front row on every civic thing that's happening in the city. - Yeah, how crazy, huh? Now you're mentoring a politician, which is also kind of cool that you got an experience, maybe an insight as a German into United States politics, which probably was not as enlightening as you would wish it would be, unfortunately, but it is interesting how they call it. - What's that? Once you know how sausage it's made, it tastes very different. It's the metaphor we use for politics. - So true. So true. But the thing that you just hit on, I think is really, really, really important, which is this idea that through your life you've had all these different roles. But one of the things it sounds like you came to the conclusion, you are not the role. You're something big or something broad or something more than that. And then we do these things, we have these roles. Does that make sense? Is that something that you've identified and something that you've really tried to make sense out of for yourself? - Yeah, I would, the only difference between what you said and how I would say it is, sometimes you're also smaller than the role. So I think you used to work bigger than the role in the sense of that you're beyond the role in as a personality. But I've also seen situations where, again, if you're a senior VP and you have an impact on the lives of a lot of people, they will treat you with reverence, it's probably the right word. But that's not me as a person. It's the role that I represent. And so I better do my best to represent that role. But I don't feel that, how shall I put it, that I deserve that treatment or respect or the galadinas or the, as I said, the limos, whatever these perks are, it's the role that I represent. And so to me, yes, I'm bigger than the role in the sense that my personality will come through independent of the role, but I'm also smaller than the role because I better not meet that first class seat in the plane every time in the limo, every time everywhere to feel whole. - Yeah, so true. I experience the same, you know, when people treat you a certain way when you're a firefighter and you're a uniform and you're on a fire truck, but you have to always remind yourself that that's because I'm in the fire service in the fire truck. When I'm away from here, that's not who I am. That's just what I do for a job. And I think that that's super important for people as they go through their career to realize that they can take all different types of roles and they can bring their best to those roles, but don't let that role define who you are as a human being. You can always be more, hence the title of our book, Be More, was the whole idea of that, like that you can create your to-be vision, create your self-image and actually broaden your impact than just that role. So, and maybe you could share a little bit with this new bold project that you're working on. This next kind of phase, I mentioned, you know, moving to Nairobi, where does that come from and what does that look like for you? - So, I wanna look back for one second to what you just did. Think about also when you work with leaders, do you like to work with leaders who take the trappings of their role as their own and out there as these big men or women that show up with an entourage and you can never get to them. Or do you prefer to work with somebody who says, the role is what I do, the person I am is who I am in front of you. That to me is a big chunk of this, what we just discussed as well. So, this thing in Nairobi came up with, it's many of the things I do through connections and I would again call it luck. I'm on the board of a charity in the UK that develops, the goal for them is to develop products for smaller farmers. So, for farmers that have two cows, five goats, 12 chickens that are really not served by the big pharmaceutical companies, it makes no sense profit sense for these big guys. So, this charity develops these products and it's a really, really interesting, very, very global board. Again, fun people to learn from and work with. And I met the Director General of the Research Institute, one of the larger research institute in Nairobi through that group. And we became good business friends. And at some point he said, you wanna come here and help me rebuild the institute and use what you've learned in the industry in an NGO environment. And at this point in my career, I think it's a really, really cool, how should I put it, cool way of rounding out what I've done? I've learned in the large corporations how to run a business, how to lead large groups of people, how to deal with everything from HR to budget through portfolio management. I've run small startup companies as a member of the board. I'm a member of the board for publicly traded companies, but I've never worked in an NGO environment and definitely never worked in the developing country. So, the opportunity to see whether what I've learned in other areas can help and sustain a research organization that can have a huge impact on literally millions of people was an incredible opportunity. It comes with huge challenges. I have no idea whether I'll be successful or not, but it's worth the try. - But it seems so big, like, you know, when you're kind of touched on retirement, you didn't really retire, but because you're also on all these board positions and you're mentoring many people. But now you see this opportunity for impact. And I think when you talked about kind of the stages of life and whether you break them down by 30 years or however many, how cool is that in this stage of your life where you could have been retired and maybe you don't need this work, you certainly don't need to move to Nairobi, which I imagine will not be in the same level of comfort as you have in Georgia, that impact for you was more important than anything. And I think that's really remarkable. So what scares you the most about this next role? - What scares me the most? - A whole bunch of things. First thing is that I'm leaving a very comfortable, very low risk life. We have a nice house, we have great healthcare, we have have an old dog that I really like. And my day is very comfortable. And that's fun, that's also where you kind of wonder is that really what you want to do? And I'm giving that up for a, I've seen a picture of the place I'm going to live in, a UN compound in a developing country where I'm one of the very, very few white people in a very African environment. That's a huge change and that by itself, I haven't figured out yet where I get groceries over there. So we have to figure out those elements. Equally, I felt pretty good in leading large R&D organizations in an industry environment. This is a non-government environment. Again, in a country where if I tell somebody they're no longer have a job, I don't know how easy it is for them to find another one. So the impact of decisions that you can make very easy and quick in a Western pharmaceutical company, are very different when you're in a country where there aren't many jobs who wear people's livelihood depends on the job that they have with you. And then I grew up in Germany, which is a fairly direct culture, very direct culture. Move to the US, which is also not quite as direct as Germany, work in a French environment, which is more indirect, worked in a Swiss environment, which is quite direct. Now I'm going to a culture that is a mix of a lot of international bits with a lot of indirect communication. So you take all of that together, it becomes a big unknown, and hey, we've got to try this out, versus I can't solve all these unknowns. - Very cool to see how you're embracing a little bit of the self-doubt and seeing you at such a great learning opportunity. I think that's a great example of that. So, Ant, I'm sure that our members have tons of questions. So I'm going to turn it over to you and see what the members are asking. - No, sure, we do have a lot. So this one is from Sarah. She starts with saying thank you so much for the insightful conversation, Fabian. As someone in my career, I find, as someone early in my career, I find myself seeking guidance, much like you, I've explored various paths which I thoroughly enjoy. It keeps my work fresh and engaging. However, I feel disheartened because I haven't specialized deeply in any one area. And many employers seem to undervalue the wide amount of experience, which leads me to doubt my skills and my potential for career enhancement. What is your advice on how to navigate that? - I think that's a really, really good point. Fundamentally, you have to make choices throughout your career, whether it's breadth or depth, whether it's one specific area of specialization, even one country or one industry, or whether you're willing to go broad. And every element comes with a, every decision comes with a risk and potential downside. The short answer I would give to something like that is what I would call, but a friend of mine, one of my early mentors said to me, that the simple sentence, was build a track record. And what I mean by that is two things. One is if you can show success in the breadth and in whatever you do, however broad it is, that you made a difference somewhere. You solved the problem. You fixed something, you built something, whatever it is, but you build a track record that will follow you independent of whether you go deep or broad. And the corollary to that is this, I think it's so trivially, but this build a brand. If people see you as somebody who can fix something, build something, lead teams solve really big challenges for the organization, again that will follow you. But I think the key message is when you describe you've gone wide, what I haven't heard in your question Sarah is what is your unique selling proposition? What are you bringing to the table that only you can or that you can do better than people around you? And once you figure that out, it will make it that much easier to explain why you've gone wide. Happy to go deeper if I've grown in the wrong direction. I'm going to add a question to that Fabian. Knowing your USP, how do you help people kind of define that USP? I'm sitting here smiling because I think this is fun stuff to talk about. There's two things that we usually ask. And I have a couple of my current informanties on the call and they can probably chime in as well. The first thing I usually ask is, is a question that is really usually coming out of left field. Most phones have cell phones and office phones have call ID. And when you see somebody's name pop up on your screen, you have an immediate microsecond reaction. And that in a work environment, it's usually a microsecond reaction where you either go, oh great, I've got to look forward to this call, or oh crap, I rather not talk to this person but I have to. And everything in between and so when I talk with people about the USP, I say, what do you want people to think about? That microsecond, what do they see your name? And what do you think they think today? And that usually gets us to a discussion about what they are passionate about. And then the second question that I ask very, very regularly is, when you think about a work day or better even a work week, what is the stuff that gives you energy and what is the stuff that drains your energy? And what I mean by that is, there are things in a work day or work week where time just doesn't move. If you do something and you look up, it's just 10 minutes later and you work and work and work and it's 10 minutes later. And there's other stuff where you sit down and do it and you look up and two hours of class, you say, holy crap, what happened? And stuff that energizes you and stuff that sucks your energy. And if you take those two elements together, you usually get pretty close to what is it really what people enjoy, a good at and what they want to stand for. That's great. So this next one is from Fattu, who I think you know. She says, thanks Fabian for sharing your journey, highlighting the highs and lows that you've learned and leverage to take forward for yourself. Looking back, what would you have done differently if anything? What comes to mind first is I would have loved to have less self-doubt and less negative self-talk early in my career. But that's nothing I don't think you can control that. And so I've had many, many days in my many times in my career where I was convinced that my year, my mid-year year end review would be horrific and that I never make it in any way, shape or form going forward when every data point around me pointed in a different direction. And so I don't think I would have done different, made a lot of different career decisions. I've been incredibly lucky in getting opportunities that were just beyond what I ever thought I would. But I wish I would have had less stress than the crossings. And she continues with the question, were there any instances where you didn't follow your gut feeling and instead followed someone else's advice? Absolutely. I would say absolutely and in good parts, their advice turned into helping my gut feeling. If that's the right way to put it. So basically, we had it. We had a merger situation and the CEO of our part of the company came to me. I was a project leader, came to me and said I want you to lead this integration team and don't look over your shoulder, I have your back. I would have never volunteered for that. It was way scarier than I thought. I suddenly had 105 people for who I had to find a job and the so things started with they will all be fired and we don't need them and it ended with 104 getting a job. And it was incredibly stressful. I would have never done that. But my manager had, sorry, my manager's manager had more trust in my abilities than I had. So my gut feeling developed. But I also have the counter story where somebody said to me, give me the exact number of dollars you can sell between now and here and when I was in sales. And my gut feeling was to be honest and I gave them exactly what I discussed with my team we could do and they said great, I need more and we couldn't deliver that. And I learned that don't trust the gut feeling when it comes to budgets. This one from Connie again saying thank you so much, super interesting journey. She asks what has motivated your decision to transition into semi retirement instead of full retirement and how have you adjusted to this new phase of your life? So it was a, the decision to go into this, to leave the corporate job was a semi voluntary decision. My company decided to move my job to Germany and what they offered me had a great title but wasn't really that interesting for me personally. So we decided in a very, very positive and professional way that I would exit. And I was at this age bracket where I was wondering, do I want to do this again? So I basically said I want to regroup. But what I learned very quickly is that I coming back to what Scott said about crystal intelligence I didn't want to, I'm not somebody who can just play goal for a cycle all day. I need some intellectual stimulation, like that interaction with people. And so I started trying to do a little bit of consulting. I had enough of a network that I had some engagements in areas like that. And then these board roles showed up that are incredibly fun because you work with really, really smart people. And as a friend of mine said, it's fantastic because we have all the good ideas and somebody else has to do all the work. So it becomes a common, an alt seriousness, it becomes a combination of what you've experienced and learned in your, I don't know, productive career. And now you advise other people, but you get direct feedback whether it works or not. And so that then developed into this, this summary time and in the sense of that I don't have an 9 to 5 job, I don't have a corporate environment. I had to get used to not getting a regular paycheck. That's a very different feeling when you had that for 30 odd years. But it became a really fulfilling area because I could completely focus on the things that I enjoy, the things that give me energy and not do the things that I no longer do the things that I didn't enjoy. And out of that developed this self, what do you call that? The flywheel of getting more work, more people to work with, more companies to work with. And suddenly I had a reputation in this really small industry and I can pick what I want to do. And then this opportunity in East Africa came up and I said, you know what, I think that's an incredible opportunity again to learn and grow and have fun at the same time. So it's a really long one with Anson. I don't think there is an easy answer to that transition, but it's a transition from fluid intelligence to crystalline plants, from collecting data, producing to trying to advise mentor, teach people. Yeah. And on that topic of mentors, this question from Anna, you've talked a lot about having great mentors has been crucial for your success and confidence. For those without, currently without mentors, what are strategies you can suggest to acquire similar wisdom and guidance? And what quality should they look for in a mentor? So to me, there's two different questions. The first one, to acquire wisdom and guidance, if you don't have a mentor today, is that I feel quite strong and did throughout my career that my week wasn't complete if I didn't set aside a specific amount of time. I usually literally said one hour. So as a young manager, it easily worked 40, 50, 60 hours a week. So one hour rear isn't that much, but I would spend one hour on reading or learning something that was outside my core. So whether it was something very simple, we had access online access to the Harvard Business Review magazine and I would find one or two articles a week to read in there. There was a lot of stuff I really didn't find interesting, but you know what, there was, I don't know, we had the end reviews. So I would find what did Harvard Business Review say about how to do good reviews and what's the benefit and disadvantages of reviews. Or it was time management or it was something like that. So every week I would find something to learn and then I would ask people for what's a good book I should read. What's a piece of information that's interesting like the article I shared with Scott. So but by doing that every week, you know, over a year, you spend at least 40, 50 hours. That's a whole work week on learning something that is not part of your job. And then I would, quite, I'm an introvert. I think this is not easy, but I would quite actively ask senior people if I could have a lunch with them or if I could have an hour of their time. And I would spend that lunch all that time with sometimes really, initially really basic questions. I remember I had lunch with the vice president of marketing. This guy was running a big marketing department. And I remember asking him, so how do you decide on the on the trade dress, how the package looks and what's on the package and what's the name. The guy gave me this kind of tilted head stare and then started explaining to me how brand names are designed, how packages are designed. And all of that, it was incredibly helpful. And I've learned a lot. I've stayed in touch with him for many years. But to me, that's how we built that network. And then eventually you find somebody that says, "Yeah, you can come back. I want to meet with you every month." And suddenly you have a mentor. - This one from JD. How do you deal with leaders that do not subscribe to the belief that failure is okay? - I want to give a very broad answer to that. Maybe it's too much. But Quoting Martha was a king who said, "The arc of justice is long." And paraphrasing that to people that don't subscribe to a positive corporate culture, usually at some point flame out. Sometimes the culture is so bad that you have to leave. But so to deal with people like that in my experience is they would realize they can't we succeed in an environment that we were building in all the organizations where I was, where failure was, not repeat failure with the same problem. If you can't fear yourself to success, you got to learn from your failures. Let me be very clear about that. But people that felt that if you try something and fail you should lose your job, they usually try to get away very quickly from an environment where they realize that people are open, that they're collaborating, that they want to do good stuff and try out new things. - So, Anne, let me take it back and just wrap up a little bit. Those great questions from our members. - Yeah, a little. - Thank you very much, Fabian. I really appreciate your time, your thoughtfulness, and also the contributions that you've made to all of our lives. So thank you so much. - Thanks for having me. - This was a lot of fun. (upbeat music) - Thank you for listening to the TIGNUM Thoughtcast. If you've enjoyed this or any of our other Thoughtcast episodes, please subscribe so you don't miss out on future releases. If you'd like to get in touch with TIGNUM, please email us at [email protected]. Until next time, be bold, be more, and keep ruling your impact. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)