Our Best Of: Authentic Leaders Leading from True North

Text sounds presents the Conscious Capitalists. Hello and welcome to the Conscious Capitalists, hosted by two of the co-founders of the Conscious Capitalism movement and co-authors of the Conscious Capitalism field guide from Harvard Business Press, Rajsasodia and Timothy Henry. Each week, this podcast covers current events and business news and Raj and Timothy's latest thinking on what it takes to build a conscious business. For more information and notes from the show, go to www.theconsciouscapitalists.com and now Raj and Timothy. Hello everyone and welcome to our most recent episode of the Conscious Capitalists with myself, Timothy Henry and my partner in making the world a better place through business Rajsasodia. Hi there Raj. Hi Timothy. Good to see you again. Good to see you. And before we just get into our guest, there's one quick shout out to you and your new book, which came out last week, Awakened, we'll talk about that in another episode, but congratulations on that. Thank you. Well, today it's an honor and a pleasure to have our guest today and I'm going to steal a bit from his new book. In the intro to his new book, there's a description that says, you know, there was this guy, Peter Drucker, who was maybe the first big business guru and then Peter passed and then we had Warren Benis out at USC who wrote wonderful books on leadership and we have the honor today of having somebody who's nominated as the successor to that trio, Bill George. Bill, welcome to our show today. Timothy, thank you, thank you, I'm honored to be on your amazing show, you have thoughts to honor and I'll probably be here and I want to be clear to your listeners. That wasn't I who said that that was my close colleague who wrote the four David Gurgens, so I. Yes indeed. Yes indeed. Now, Bill is both a practitioner and a deep thinker on the subject of leadership. The practitioner in the sense that Bill was the former chairman and chief executive of Medtronic, he joined Medtronic, the medical device business in 1989 as a president, chief operating officer and then was CEO for 10 years from 1991 to 2001 and board chair from 96 to 2002. He is current lifter, a 10 year now of 20 years at Harvard Business School. He is an executive fellow at the Business School where he's taught leadership since 2004. He is the man who put the word authentic leadership on the map by writing a book about it and has then written an amazing series of books which we're going to dive into a little bit today that begin with the idea of your true North, discovering your true North and the tools that go with that as if he doesn't have any time for anything else. He's also served on the boards of a few companies. You may have Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil, Novartis Target, and Mayo Clinic. Bill, again, just a wonderful privilege to have you today. Welcome. Thank you, Timothy. Now, I think the highest praise I can give to your new book is that I have two emergent leaders in my life, a 23 year old and a 26 year old and it was my gift to them as I've read through your book. I gave them the audio version because, hey, after all, they're Gen Z guys who has time to read these days, but they will listen to it and I think it's just an outstanding book for young people and not even young people to be looking at and thinking about what it really means to be a leader today. So I guess my first question in writing true North, a guide for emergent leaders, what shifted in your thinking, what shifted from the first book which was written in 2007, 2008 to now, 2023? Why now? Why this book? Well, you know, actually wrote an earlier book, 2003 called Authentic Leadership and I really think we're going through a massive change in leadership from the baby boomers leadership and what I would call the era of Jack Welch back in the 90s when I was CEO that kind of carried over for the next 10 years or so of command and control and where everything goes to the power, all powerful person on top, I almost said white male because most of them were white American males and there's this massive change going on in leadership and today's your son's is Gen Zers or if they're barely con Gen Zers millennials are not going to accept just power driven leaders that are out for themselves that want to make a lot of money for themselves and our only can have a big ego is it's a very different world and I think we need to go rapidly through this and my book is intended, the emerging leader district, turn it a clarion call for younger leaders to step up and take charge. I've got a lot of baby boomers features, there are really four runners of the new generation of leaders and Brian knows a lot of those people, they're really the four runners of the new generation but I think we need people who are deeply committed to empowering people and to a mission and a purpose and clarity of values. We see the media giving a lot of attention to deviants from that to Mark Zuckerberg Elon Musk and there's a big article in the New York Times this week about all the people going to jail, the Sang Bangman freeds and Elizabeth Holmes and the woman named Charlie Jevett. These are frauds, you know, no one ever thought of these people as real leaders but they should have a lot of money and attention and I think our society needs to have really strong looks about who are committed to the organization, the enterprise and I'm a believer in longevity and I think it's a tragedy when a company like General Electric disappears or somebody like Boeing gets in trouble. I really believe in companies that can sustain themselves but they can't do that unless they have the right leaders not just at the top throughout the organization and an organization has very strong leaders can actually survive a mediocre lever on top but if you put the wrong person in charge you can destroy the enterprise and like Charlie Fearina did the Ulyt Packard, I was going to one of the early executives at Ulyt Packard desi is now a private equity expert and he was telling me about how great the early days were or with Dave and Bill and that Charlie comes in and bye bye Ulyt Packard is who was known so I really believe it's all about the leaders and we need to have the next generation but the other thing that's really changed Timothy is we need leaders at all levels it's not that percentile and we need people who don't even have any direct reports to step up and lead in their own way maybe they lead on behalf of an innovation on behalf of a customer maybe they're kind of not only in charge of a project team but they get things done but they are real leaders and they're committed to the mission and purpose of their enterprise. Well it's a lot and I think the book is wonderfully organized I think there are four main sections of it one is around discovering yourself one is around developing yourself then there's leading people moving from the eye to the we and then the last section is a really interesting one on today's challenges and really there's a discussion of moral leadership so you know playing on the riff you just made about you know the people that are in the headlines maybe talk a little bit more about that the importance of that idea of moral leadership and why that's one of the four pillars of the book well you know we I believe we came up with the idea of the term true north in 2007 but really that is your moral compass and it's Jim Burke the famous CEO of J&J who recalled Tyler and all said came to Harvard Business School six months later and he said you know without a moral compass you'll swim in chaos and I see a lot of organizations swimming in chaos right a couple of our major social media organizations Twitter and Facebook are swimming in chaos because there's no moral compass there and that needs to start early in your life it's not like oh I did a lot of nefarious things in my 20s and 30s and I kind of discovered my moral compass my 40s no I think it's important you mentioned your sons they need to have a moral compass now it make they may have a lot of experience yet to gain and to learn a lot of wisdom but they need that clarity of their values and so that's what I mean and you know we can get into this Timothy but I think you know Raj wrote a brilliant book along with John Mackie about conscious capitalism but that's really the stakeholder model thinking you got to think about all the people you serve and think of yourself as a servant leader not just of the almighty shareholder of the last five minutes that activist investor but think of yourself as serving your customers your employees even the regulatory regulators that that you have to work with you may not think of them as part of your stakeholders but they got to stake in you and how well you do and we've seen that you know with various drugs it's getting thrown on after we recall well Bill you mentioned conscious capitalism so that book came out 10 years ago and we were privileged to have you write the forward of that book and I know your first line was this is the book that I wanted to write yeah and and essentially you said that is real capitalism right what we talked about this is how it's meant to be right it's about us meeting each other's needs in a in a caring and compassionate way so looking at this evolution over the last 10 years you know our movement has grown conscious capitalism is in about 30 U.S. cities about 15 other countries the ideas that we do talk about, which are not unique to us. Of course, there's B Corpse and B Team and just capital and inclusive capitalism and various other parallel movements. We made a lot of progress with the business roundtable in 2019, reflecting some of that language, et cetera. And yet, I feel very in a moment right now where there's a bit of a backlash. And we're seeing the phrase woke capitalism being bandied about and sort of a convenient cudgel to hit any idea that you don't want to embrace and keep the status quo going a little bit longer. So what are your thoughts on this whole? I don't want to call it a critique, because I don't think it's a legitimate critique, but it's really kind of just a backlash around woke capitalism. Well, unfortunately, it's gotten into the political areas. And I think that's the sad thing. Your book was really the forerunner of what the business roundtable did in 2019 with the stakeholder model. But we're realizing it's got a lot of complexity, too. It's not like you've got to pay out as sort of all these stakeholders, it's not just satisfying your shareholders. And so you've got to do that well, including your employees. The employees have agency today, Raj, and they want somebody to represent them. And that means CEO is speaking out. We have new CEOs coming to our program at Harvard. We've got about 335 over the last 18, 19 years. I can tell you, their number one fear is when do I speak out? And I just this morning, Governor DeSantis, the Florida is attacking Disney. It's largest employers, largest investor in the state. And Brett need to put up prudence and other things right on the border of Disney and a lot of crazy things. And they employ a lot of people. And frankly, it brings more tourists dollars to Florida than any other single thing, maybe in the country. And so you see this, but the term woke has been totally misused. That's actually an African-American term. Martin Luther King used it to say, stay awake. Be aware when you're driving, who may be stopped. And it was really a warning to black Americans. And frankly, it's now been expropriated to say, the liberal whites got a hold of it and used it for everything. And now it's been become this backlash. And the other one's surprising me the backlash against ESG, which stands for environmental social and governance. Well, they're saying, if you're really concerned about climate change, you're woke. No, frankly, I think most younger generations are more concerned about climate change in the older, because they realize they're going to have to live with it. And we see this winter, we see the effects of climate change in Florida and California where they had a drought. And they had 870 inches of snow up at mammoth and huge floods. And so we're in a different era. And I don't know how you can attack companies that are concerned about that, or how you can not be concerned about companies that have good governance, or concerned about all aspects of their employees. And frankly, your employees expect that. So I think I'm sad to see this getting a political sector in my book. I very intentionally not got into politics trying to stay away from that. I do think the ideas in the book would apply well to government employees, military, medical employees, as well as business people and non-profits as well. I don't know if they'd apply if you were running for office. I'm not a politician. I could never get a Lexi because I'm too blunt. But I don't know if they'd apply there. But I hate to see the politician stelving into this area. I am a-- like you, Raj, I'm a fervent capitalist. It's capitalism that pervaded all the wealth in our society, but capitalism without boundaries can get into trouble, too. And we've seen that in this era of what I call free money with interest rates close to zero, it's caused a lot of people to chase bad opportunities and to do a lot of unethical things to get rich. And I'm very much opposed to that. So that does not fit into what I call conscious capitalism, at all. Yeah, so you do have a section of your book called "Stakeholder Capitalism." And in that, you highlight what you call short term traitorism, so to speak, versus long-term investorism, shall we call it, you know? Looking at how you create sustainable long-term value in an organization and in society. And you know, this was not only is the book 10 years old, but the movement's 15 years old. You know, we kicked this thing off in February of 2008 with our treat at John Mackey's Ranch. And you know, it's 15 years later. And at least now people are talking about purpose and stakeholders, and they weren't then. But boy, the arguments about trying to get people to focus on long-term value creation, when we have so many studies that now start to show that, you know, purpose-driven, great places to work, good jobs, all of these things. Create opportunities for higher long-term performance and yet, and yet, even in your book, the example you give a Salesforce, now under its own pressure from short-term activism, the short-term casino capitalists, Bill, what are we missing? We've been battling at this door for a while. And, you know, we're obviously, you know, not making a lot of progress at some level. So I'm curious, what have we missed that isn't turning the mindsets of people to sort of this longer-term perspective? If you want a business to thrive, you've got to give it some runway to do it. Yes, you do, and coming from Medtronic, it was all about innovation. That was Medtronic's superpower. And that's what we focused on, and that's allowed us to create a tremendous amount of long-term, shorter value. But it's never short-term. I know when Ken Frazier went to Merck, he found a drug failing in the lab and brought it out called Catrutas. I'll become the best-selling drug-keeping president, Jimmy Carter alive, even though he's gone into hospice now. I think that maybe you're not missing anything, except the fact that I hate to admit that greed is real. And if people think they make money under short-term, now a lot of these people will make money one day like Bill Ackman, and next thing they destroy it all the next day. And we've seen that with a lot of these short-term players. And these activists that tell you over into long-term, and, you know, they get you to want to break up the company. I talk in the book about Indonui, warding off Nelson Peltz who wanted to break up PepsiCo. And PepsiCo's flourishing under her successor, flourishing under her, flourishing under her, it's a long-term player. It's a company that's been with us for a very long time. Hopefully it's going to be with us. And they focus on developing great leaders. That's their secret sauce. In fact, the new CEO, Starbucks, locks him in our simon, comes from PepsiCo. The new CEO of Albertson, Vivek Sankara in PepsiCo. There's a whole series of people. And they're great people. They just chose Ramon Lagarta as a great CEO to replace Indra who had done a fabulous job. But she had the tenacity to hang in there and say that's not best for long-term shareholders. And I think boards need to stiffen their backs and take these people on. It's a game. And you got to take on the game and say, what's in the best interest of our long-term shareholders? I'm very pro-shareholder. But what's the best interest of our customers? What's in the best interest of our employees? What's in the best interest of society? We're making a contribution. We can't solve all spiral problems. Indra is trying to solve the problems of obesity with having more nutritious food, good for her. And so we need examples like that. That's why I held her up because here's someone that would not back down from that goal in all this shareholder pressure. And she had the tenacity. And so when I work with CEOs and boards, I say, you've got to realize what businesses is company and you've got to be in it for the long-term. That's all. Today, he'll back it on Enrique Larus is trying to come back to the original he'll back it. But they lost a couple of decades in the meantime. And so I'm certainly not proud of General Electric going out of business because this is a company, the greatest company supposedly of the 19th century, or 20th century, but it's gone. And yeah, there are a couple of divisions left, but that's not GE, as we know it. And they played that game. And I tell you, if you play the game that the short-term shareholder wants, they can leave you tomorrow, but you'll be left holding the back. So Metronica has strongly resisted that. And I just think I'm trying to stiffen the back of leaders at all levels to say, no, we got to do the right thing for the long-term. And if we do the right thing for our customers, by the way, we're going to create shareholder value. You never create shareholder value just by cutting costs. You can do a short-term. We see that going on at Meta right now. They're getting their stocked bonds back by laying off a lot of people, same at Twitter, all that's privately helped. But I can tell you, you only create shareholder value by creating value of your customers. And I tell executives in my courses at Harvard, look, you only only are going to survive for the long term by creating greater value for your customers than your competitors can. And if you fail to do that, let's take whole foods under John Mackey and Walter Rupp. Now they have new leadership. If they fail to create value, they surely charge high price. If they create great value for their customers, if they fail to do that, they'll be gone too. So I think that's our job. And that's how you create sustainable shareholder value. And that's to get your employees excited. And I can't go to the employees of Meta trying to say, you know, guys, we got to come to the stock market to make $3.19 a share of this share. Really need your help in that. They'll look at me like, what do you talk about? I don't know. I say to them, that heart valve has to be perfect. And you're going to make 500 vows this year if one of them is fails. someone's going to die and you boy, that gets their attention. That's what they think about. That's what they live. Or someone in the lab is kind of a breakthrough idea that they're going to bring for Parkinson's disease. And we finally bring it to market and transport people's lives with Parkinson's. That's fantastic. And that's what people, that's what employees get to say. And see, we have, we have kind of distr, we disrespected our first line employees, whether they're people who work on a restaurant, they're back in the kitchen, whether they're people on the front line of a grocery store, on the front line of an airline, or they're people in the labs in mid-try, they're doing the breakthrough innovation, or the people on production line making quality. Those are people, and we've undercompensated them, we've underappreciated these people, that all the money go up to the top so people can make a lot of money on top, mostly through the stock price going up, and people on the front line are not making an adequate enough money to put bread on the table. Some of them have a lot of them have two jobs. This is not right. Well, you wrote a wonderful article in December, I think it was in her business review about the front line worker and the importance of that. And I think in the article, if I recall, you were reflected on the 30, 30, 30, 10 rule that you had as a CEO. Maybe talk a little bit about how you got to that point where you said, "Yeah, that's the right way I should be doing it." And I need to be spending more time talking to customers, 30% and talking to front line workers, 30%, 60% of a CEO's time talking to the people who actually do the work. What were you thinking? Well, I came from a Honeywell, and I thought I was going to be CEO, global CEO of Honeywell, great company, many office Honeywell and great too. And I was on that track, but it wasn't happy. And I had been called back from President Europe to take a series to turn around since this one after number. And frankly, I spent all my time chasing numbers, short-term numbers for all the divisions. I had nine divisions, three groups. And I wouldn't really have to have two of you to be out there as much as I liked with customers and employees. I went to a much smaller company in Metronik. It was very mission driven, very much driven by trying to help people be restored to full life and help. That's its mission. And I realized that's the actual experience. But I also knew you got to be a learner, and I didn't know anything about medicine. I knew a lot about high tech, nothing about medicine. So I learned the doctor, I learned the medical business to the eyes of the doctor. So when I was there, I saw between 700 and 1,000 procedures where I meet a doctor at 630, 7 o'clock in the morning, gown up, put on the greens, go to his locker, and just, I didn't contribute anything. I just stood there and watched. That's where I learned it. Medicine was all about that last three feet, that life and death with that doctor. And it's the whole support team. The nurses, the radiologists, all the people that had to help make that surgery go. My son and Donna are both surgeons. So I know a little bit about that procedure. But I also found that I learned more about quality from talking to people in production lines than I ever did from looking at quality reports or quality department. That's the people that knew what the problem was. They knew the root cause. That machine down there at the end of the place well doesn't enable us to make quality products. And so that's, I try to urge all of our people, you know how into the business and I tell CEOs, how can if you don't love your business, if you're not walking store floors, if you're not in the medical rooms, if you're not out talking to your customers, how can you do the job? If you're sitting back remotely in office looking at numbers, you're never going to get there. And so yeah, we did a study at Harvard, it found 72% of the time executives in C-suite spend at a time in meetings in the ivory tower, so to speak, and 5% of their time with employees, 3% with customers. This is a disaster. So if you don't love the business, then you ought to quit and go out and beach. But you really love the business, not by figuring out clever schemes and you're off, figuring out what's going on. Bill, that reminds me of a quote from Senator Warnock, where he said, to lead the people you have to love the people, and to love the people you have to know the people, and to know the people you have to walk among the people. And I think what you just talked about there was such a beautiful illustration of that, you know, it's just how can you lead people you don't care about? And that's rather the predominant way that most people, you know, they view people just as interchangeable objects. And I think that is fundamentally what is missing the humanity and the genuine care that leaders have. And it's always interesting to me how does a leader become the leader they are, and your journey to being that kind of a leader. I'm sure it had a lot to do with your upbringing, your parents, and other factors, you don't talk a little bit about what shaped you into the kind of leader that you became, and now the kind of leaders that you're helping others to become. Well, that really hits on the idea of understanding who you are and your life's story, and who are the influences that influence you along the way. The parents, the coaches, the teachers, the mentors that helped you. And I had a lot of those. I confess that I, my parents, my father definitely wanted me to make up for his failures. My mother said, son, I don't care if you get A's or C's. I just want you to be a good person, follow your values. It had a big impact on me trying to live my whole life by following my values, whether I succeeded or failed. That was what's important to me. So that was a huge influence. And, but I had some, you know, I thought I wanted to be a leader, and I lost seven elections in the row and high school and college. So I had a kind of rude awakening. I said, walk, buck at a water in your face. And so, but then in my 20s, I learned a lot about life. My mother died when I was 24 very suddenly of a heart attack. She'd had cancer, but died suddenly of a heart attack. And after that, I fell in love. I was very close to my mother because my father traveled all the time and played golf on the weekends. But my, I fell in love with a woman from Georgia. I was living in Washington. We were living a few blocks apart. And again, gave me married. And three weeks of the day before the wedding, she'd gone back home for prayer for the wedding. Her parents called to say she died when Malignant brain tumor. And these two incidents back to back really caused me to take stock of what's life all about. And, you know, it's really about our relationships and people. And I love that quote, I hadn't heard it for a ride from Senator Warnock. Yeah, walk among the people. And that's what really is life is all about. So, you know, no matter how much money you make, you can't take it with you. I don't care what your religion is. You're not taking it with you. But beyond that, you know, what life is all about relationship. And it's about whether you care about people. And if you don't care about people, you work with, you shouldn't work there because it really is about caring. And so that had a big influence on me. And I think, yeah, my father wanted me so much to be CEO of a major company that I, I, you know, it's hard to leave Honeywell, but I want you to be trying. I've learned to lead with my heart. And I think today, you have to lead with your head as well as your heart. What's that? It's almost the heart side. And that gets to walking among the people. Well, I think you mentioned your mother and her influence on you. And, you know, I think this idea of heart and head coming together is the integration of the masculine and the feminine. And I think in our world of business and government, we've had predominantly men and predominantly masculine energy of a certain kind in the absence of the feminine that can often become unhealthy. But I know one of the things about you, and I think you've written a book about this as well, is your experience with men's groups. And you've been part of a men's group for how long now? It's dead. Forty-devin years. Wow. And so please talk about that a little bit because, you know, what has that done for you? What has that taught you that you would not have otherwise had? Is there a crisis of masculinity? I believe a lot of people are talking about that in the world. And how do those groups help? And is that something you recommend? And how can other people find their way towards that? Well, we all need people who are close to a life to talk about difficult times. Where do you go when those things happen? Who did I talk to? And I was thinking about making the change from Honeywilder Medtronic. That was more of a psychological change for me than anything else. And so I talked to my men's group extensively about that. And they gave me encouragement. We've had a guy, we've had two people in our men's group pass away. And we worked with them through their dying stages, if you will. We had one person whose wife died. Another one got fired from his job. And so these are the important things in life. But people need somebody to talk to. I do a lot of phone calls, counseling, mentoring, whatever you want to call it with CEOs, they have no one to talk to Raj. They can't talk to the board of directors about someone on the board is giving them a hard time. Or maybe they can't talk to their management team about certain issues. They need to know what they call and talk to. And so I think it's having a group like that in your life, which I found is invaluable. Yes, for meeting tomorrow morning, Wednesday, 715 to 835 is having breakfast earlier this morning with one of my mentees who heard this idea when I'm not far in his own group. It's been transformed. He's 47 former soccer player of mine, like coach soccer. Yeah, it's having a big impact on his life. My son is former men's group. There are a lot of women's group. I think having people with whom you can speak intimately. And that's what we try to do in our classroom session. Everything is counted as you can talk about those tough issues. You know, it's, and back to the fact of the family, I'm glad you brought that up. My wife is off. She's a PhD in technology. So we talk about this a lot. And I think a lot of men. In my era growing up, we're really afraid of homosexuality. And so by talking about the feminine, they don't want to be seen as effeminate. And there was a fear of that. And I think, unfortunately, that allowed us not to develop those qualities. If you will, the feminine qualities, so you have a well-balanced, see-in, and the yang in your life, and you develop those qualities that are so important to be a whole person. So our things like, and I'm seeing now, like, compassion, passion, empathy, courage, are those, their matters of the heart, are those feminine qualities? We're calling whatever you like. And I think, frankly, one of the great things this amy-day is having a lot more women and executive roles and a lot more female CEOs, and this is changing the workplace. And in a very positive way, we've kind of shut the door to women, and I used to say about women, you don't have to do anything special, just open the door and let them walk through the talents there. Give them the opportunity. Don't create that glass ceiling. So I think this is a much better balance to the workplace, and I think many of the women I feature in my book, like Ursula Burns and Animo Kei, former CEO of Xerox, and I mentioned Indra and Mary Barra, General Motors. These are just great leaders. And they're also very strong, the idea that the man is strong, and the woman is weak. That's nonsense. They're very strong in the appropriate way, not by being overpowering, but by being a real and by holding their values, their true North, and not deviating from that. And we have a lot of younger leaders that have gone through a really tough time, many young women, they're featured in the book because it's important people see role models among the millennial generation of leaders who have really stepped up and done the right thing on Jolly Suit. Another one is Jen Heimann, who had rent the runway, a fabulous idea. I guess what? It shut down with COVID. We talked about that. She had to read your old business model. So yeah, I think that's one of the strengths of the workplace, and by the way, I don't think you can have a strong organization day unless you have a lot of diversity in it. And as I talk one chapter about the inclusive leadership, it's not about diversity, it's about inclusion and belonging. Do I feel like I really belong here? Not just, you know, I love the art, I love it because I feel apart. And we used to put people who were born outside the United States in a different category. Well, look how many of those people are CEO, it's like some of you like Sachin Adele, it's Transform Micros, it comes from India, amazing what he's done. So I think creating that inclusive environment, everyone feels included in a sense of belonging that their opinions are equally important to anyone else's. That's how the workplace is changing, I think for the better. I love that word belonging. I think that really changes the whole debate from diversity to belonging. We want to be inclusive, and we want people to feel like they belong, and they feel comfortable. Now, I want to play on that riff about the feminine leader a little bit as a father of a daughter, you know, it's humbling to reflect on my 26 year old daughter in, you know, suddenly promoted up a couple levels and coming to me and say, Dad, what are the things that I need to pay attention to in this leadership role where I'm suddenly managing people older than me and a lot of them are men. And I'm curious, Bill, as you reflect on the book and, you know, what is the letter you write to a 26 year old woman who's, you know, that's different than what you would write to your son to sort of say, Hey, here's some of the things that you, you know, two or three things that are really important for you to think about as an emerging leader and as a woman. What would you, what would you write about? What would you tell them? Be yourself, be who you are, don't think you have to emulate the men. That was the problem with the, when in the 90s with the Jack Welch call, I'm not picking on Jack, but how would you like to be your daughter working at GE and say, you got to be like Jack said, Dad, I can be like that. No, be yourself, be who you are and build those relationships and yeah, let the, let the head and the heart both flow. So continue developing both of those. And when you're doing with older people, be a learner. What are you learning from them? You got to continue to be a learner. When I came to mint running, like I say, I had to be a learner because I didn't know the medical business. I've never had a job in my life where I knew as much as people working for me. So I had to always be a constant learner. Now I'm long out of the full-time business role and still teaching and I learned from my students, I never go into a classroom where I don't figure I'm going to learn more from them. They'll learn from me. They don't believe me when I tell them that. That's true. I learn more from them. They learn from me. And so you have to be a continual learner throughout life and you can learn a lot from the wisdom people that have gone before you and avoid some of those mistakes. So she can avoid those things. And I think that's the key thing. And then create a diverse organization around you. She may have the benefit of age diversity, which a lot of organizations don't. But bring those voices in of experience. Look at people who really can bring knowledge to your team and experience feels different than yours. They're afraid of having people who know more than you do on the team. You don't have to be the smartest person in the room. You just have to be able to pull out the gifts from everyone there. And bring your team together to operate as a team. And people that don't want to be team players, maybe they have to move on. Robert, thank you. Thank you, Bill. Bill, you mentioned a couple of leaders and I think it's an interesting contrast to talk about Jack Welch and now Satyana Della, both leading iconic companies. I think when Jack Welch, a general electric was the most valuable company in the world. And Microsoft was number two. And under Satyana Della, he took a company that was becoming fast irrelevant, it seemed in the chair and even in the technology space. And in a way, refounded them and had just an extraordinary eight year track record so far of not only creating extraordinary financial wealth, almost two trillion at one point of incremental market value, but also leading in all the other dimensions of diversity and environmental and social and the future of work and all of those things. So a new sense of purpose, brilliant strategy and then focusing on all of the other elements as well and never talking about maximizing shareholder value and yet having an extraordinary record there. So that's kind of a model I think we're looking at today and you're a great student of leadership in addition to being a great exemplar. We're looking at that and then you look at what Jack Welch stood for and for those 20 years that he was CEO and then all the people who came out of the Welsh school in a way and went on to run many other iconic American companies with that exact same formula. And what that did. So if you could contrast those two approaches and are we in danger of going back to the Welsh way and how do we prevent that or what do we need to do to think about that differently? Well, Jack was actually a great leader for his time in the 80s, had great admiration probably made GE competitive when it wasn't as bureaucratic as a lot of other companies like Siemens, Mitsubishi and others. He did a lot of good things. He stayed too long, 20 years was way too long and became more of a let's build the cult of Jack Welch and let's build GE. And frankly, a successor Jeff Emil could have changed all that and he didn't and he failed. And so I lay the blame for the failure of GE at his feet, not at the, you know, and not just to Jack. It's easy to pick on people in the past who are deceased. But such to, you know, as interesting, Steve Bommer was more like Jack Welch for 14 years from 2000, 2014, do you know that the share value of general, excuse me, of Microsoft actually went down. I wrote an article saying, they're liable to go the route that IBM did in the 80s before Lugerson saved them if we don't watch out. And because he was milking office in Windows, he missed every little individual. Satya comes in and he brings empathy and it's interesting, here's a computer engineer that the empathy of Satya Nadella comes from maybe more form his son, Zane, who sadly passed away a year ago, who was born in a cerebral palsy and Satya really learned and he brought this idea. You have to be empathetic. And you also have to be growth oriented, personal growth as well as the company's growth. And he changed everything and you, you know, they've done LinkedIn, they've done all kinds of things since then in Microsoft, now they just acquired Jack's UPT. But I think the more important thing Satya does, he changed that culture. It's hard to change an established culture. And he brought humanity as a culture as well. And but he also insists that people had to be self-aware. So I give Satya, I think he's probably the finest leader in the world today in the business world. So I give him a huge amount of credit. And like you said, the shareholder value has gone up eight times. So that makes the point, I think that I try to make, I think Raju, you and John try to make it that when you just, you only sustain lasting value for your shareholders by creating lasting value for your customers and creating an environment for your employees where they want to work there and they want to come to work and create a culture where everyone has a chance to contribute. And where we're in feels included and belong to that culture. I mean, before I was a hugely political thing and he got rid of that. Alan Malali did some of the things that forced, unfortunately, a successful witness successful. So. Hmm. Well, Bill, you probably don't recall. But I was involved with some of the work you were doing at Unilever and then layered at AstraZeneca at Harvard Business School. And I bring up those two names because you know, you talk about culture change, you talk about changing the trajectory of a business. And my big takeaway from both those efforts, and you could say they were both incredibly successful in their own way, was that they started with leadership at both places. I mean, I remember sitting around at Harvard Business School with the top leadership from AstraZeneca, top 120 leaders, you put them through that program. It was all about changing mindset. It was all about getting people to think differently as leaders and then go out and unleashing those people in the organization to lead change and do things differently. And you know, I'm waiting for you to write that book. It says, you know, hey, if we really want to make more conscious capitalist companies, Raja and I say all the time, you know, a company can't be more conscious than the level of the consciousness of the leadership and the leadership team. And these were, to my mind, two great examples where, you know, authentic leadership finding your true north was critical to them changing the culture and change directory of the organization. Your thoughts on that. I mean, what, you know, it's it's it's at one level sort of obvious in another level, not everybody's doing it or even really, and I think that was part of what Microsoft did as well was they made a big effort on leadership development to really change the types of leaders they were. Developing and promoting your thoughts on that in terms of trying to change an organization and the role of leadership. Let's talk about Unilever, particularly because it's thrilling and sad story. Paul Poman was recruited from the outside, people told him he didn't belong there. They used to have a they had almost CEO's going back between the Dutch and the Brits and all that to unify the company totally transformed the culture over his 10 years there. I thought he did just a great job and he put the emphasis on sustainability. And I did a seminar for once I said, you know, sustainability is Unilever true north. And this is where you're making your mark and it wasn't just about ESG. It was more about we have sustainable products like detergents laundry detergents and things like that you make think is mundane, but he tied the purpose and giving them a competitive advantages in our soups are tied to creating more sustainable foods and healthier foods and north North food soups so I thought he did a great job. Sadly, Alan Jupe, his successor wasn't able to carry that on and then allowed himself to bring an activist on his board Nelson Peltz who pushed out Alan and now they've just pointed a new CEO who was the third tier manager at Hines who was not a successful company. So I hope in prey that Unilever do well, but not optimistic and much of the culture that Paul created is kind of going back and going back to that short termism. So I'm sad about that and because I still think Paul is a great leader a great guy work with him closely now. But I'm very sad to see what's happening there and that the CEO wasn't strong enough to stand in the face of the activists and sometimes you have to do that. So I use the end of a new example earlier Tim. These are two situations and you've got to be strong and willing to take it on. I reached out to Alan and I said, can I help him and said no, I don't need a help. I got more help than I need, but that's fine. I don't look at very money for many of these saying to just, you know, but if he wasn't willing to realize the risk of getting in bed so to speak with the short term and act of its investor and what the risk to his long term company is the company's been around for a long time. And, you know, but this short termism is extremely dangerous. I wrote two cases on the failure of the Boeing 737 Max 100 and after the first crash 100 and after the second crash and she later came in there at all level and ran the company and they weren't not willing to make long term decisions. The guy should have been CEO is Alan Malali. He loves Boeing, but then he went to court. He should have been CEO, but they had a series of short term people and they decided and think about this, Roger. I want to challenge you think about this. That instead of spending money on developing new planes, they're going to buy back stock. You know, so they buy back about twice as much stock. They use their cash to buy back stock twice as much as they do develop new planes. So they never developed these older planes, like a 737 goes back 1968. They didn't develop successors to them and then they came into a problem and they got a deep trouble. But think about that short termism and how much shareholder value was lost by those two crashes. And I've talked to the people of Boeing. It's a very sad story. By the way, that's a good example. Timothy of knowing what your front line people are doing, the engineers know what's wrong with the planes instead they management blame it on the pilots and they were for their customers and there was a little bit of so I say, I don't know. These pilots for Ethiopian and Indonesians, say whatever else you want, but they said, the pilots are not like our American pilots. Well, no other pilots went out the problem. It was the planes that they made some total engineering class, the engineers knew and shame on them. The engineers, they told you, they did a metronome, we had a problem, they tell me. Well, barely brought up the share buybacks. You know, I think that's just been one of the most corrosive things that we've seen in the last 15 or so years where companies, I think S&P 500 average about 93% of profits going to share buybacks and dividends. In some years, over 100%. So borrowing money to buyback shares and creating not only weak balance sheets, but also under investing, as you said. And so you have any further thoughts on that whole epidemic of share buybacks and what that reflects to me, sort of an absence of commitment to the long term, lack of creativity of thinking we have no use for this money. We can't really invest in invested well within the business. All right, let's just give it back. And is it the right way to even give money back? You know, why not more dividends instead of share buybacks? I don't quite understand that if you want to talk about that a little bit. Well, the market shifted now from your growth, which was a metronome, I guess we had price turning ratio in the 40s because we were growing at 18% a year to how fast can I get my cash back? And so a lot of investors are preshing people to do that. And it can lead to a very bad decision. That's all I can say is, is because you know, and I remember on the board of exxon, exxon was very much a long term company, which they invest more renewables. But I remember when the price of oil dropped from $100 a barrel down to in the high 60s, we asked the CEO, what are your priorities? Because they've been buying back stock as they were making so much money that excess cash and met all their needs. And he said, no, we're first thing we are going to make our dividends no matter what because we've got a lot of people who's livelihood with their retirees or small investors depends upon the dividend. Second, we will then make the capital until we have to build the company 30, 40 years from now. And we're shutting down, we're stopping our share buybacks. So I look at that. I had another CEO that I was counseling with just last month, and he said to me, I'm under tremendous pressure my board, my board, and I've held out because I will not take out billions in debt to back back stock. And I said, you're doing the right thing. Why would you leverage yourself off? Okay, that's fine in a good time. You see, it goes out of business in bad times. There are people that have too much debt. You know, why does the bank fail leverage and liquidity? If they don't, you know, if they have a good balance sheet, so I think it's a very short term thing, and it's a thing of the moment. And I think people as leaders can not get caught up in doing whatever the thing in the moment, when you're talking about investing in a long term in a company, that's not some of the moment. That's something to do decade after decade after decade. But in that game caught up in the short term schemes, and there are a lot of financial schemes so-called financial innovation. I mean, a big string string of that and technological innovation. A lot of the short term innovation is just taking risks and letting your company get in trouble. And that's the activists who they load you up at debt. They don't even worry if the company goes to private money after clarifying because they've already sucked all the cash out of the company. And so I'm very much opposed to these financial schemes. I believe in a sound balance sheet, but I also believe the compensation should flow much more heavily to the people doing the work. Well, Bill, it is an interesting challenge, which is ultimately the buck stops with the board at some level, and you've been on boards. And I know you've said, yeah, we've got to buck it up at the word level. But having said that, clearly these boards have voted for share buybacks. And they've decided that there isn't enough creativity. There isn't enough opportunity in the business that they are perceiving. And they're going to choose to spend the money on these share buybacks. And you've been on some really big boards. And what's wrong with our boards that they're thinking this way? I mean, holding the CEO's aside, this is to me a board issue. And the board is not stepping up for a long term stewardship of the business. They themselves are falling victim. That's their job. There's no reason for us to spend time at quarterly earnings. They can't influence the ordering. they it's the long-term stewardship of the business. Timothy, that's exactly 100% correct. I think boards need to do that, but a lot of board members, too influenced by outside things, they're watching the stock price arena, there's analysts reports, they're going with the thing of the moment. That's why I don't necessarily, I was telling somebody who had been bored of a major renewables company. I was with him this weekend, he's been under for 12 years, he's thinking about getting off, I said, you might not want to get off because this is the game, skies in the solar business. I said, you may want to keep going, this may be the golden era for solar. They need your wisdom, he's brought new members on the board, diversify the board, but they need you, he's former CEO, they need your wisdom. Well, thank you so much today for sharing the wisdom, the thoughts, and you know, we've just been incredibly fortunate to have you, you have a unique perspective as both a practitioner and a deep thinker on this, so thank you so much for your time today. Well, thank you, Timothy, thank you, Raj, I appreciate the work you're doing. We're like fellow travelers, we're going down on the same path, we intersect from time to time, but we need a lot of us to carry these longer term messages and offset some of the short termers out there, and I think you're doing the right things. I hope you keep going because this is so important and conscious capitalism got it right. Well, thank you, thank you Bill, and I'm really glad that you're out there doing the work that you're doing and advising leaders and helping us move in this, in this direction that is so vital for all of us. So thank you so much for sharing your time and your wisdom with us today. Thank you. Thank you to our listeners, and if you enjoyed today's podcast on whatever channel you're listening to, please feel free to hit the subscribe button, or if you have any feedback for Raj and I for the Apple and on the Apple podcast channel, you can leave us a comment or your thoughts, and thank you to tech sounds and technology, demand array, tech for sponsoring, and making this possible. Thank you.