The key to making hard decisions at the top, you have to be in the black with your emotional bank account with the culture.
As a leader, you have to build that bank account.
You have to be making deposits every day into that account to build trust and to build credibility with the people that work there, knowing that there are days where you're going to make some giant withdrawal because you're going to screw up, because you will.
And the companies that are doing well in today's challenging times are the ones that are building trust with their associates.
It's going to help them navigate the challenges of the day.
We have challenges today.
We had challenges yesterday.
We'll have more challenges tomorrow.
Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast.
I'm your host, Shane Parrish.
This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best to what other people have already figured out.
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Doug Kanad is here today.
Doug was the CEO of Campbell Soup and worked at Nabisco during the toxic leveraged bio culture that prompted the book Barbarians at the Gate.
Doug is full of leadership advice and lessons.
We talk about why you can't win in the marketplace if you haven't won in the workplace.
The first 100 days as CEO of Campbell Soup, adjusting to shifting consumer preferences, how to know when you have the right people and the wrong people and so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.
Set the scene for me in the 80s and not only like how did you end up in Nabisco, what was it like working for the LBO largest in history at the time and the pressure that you must have felt internally and the employees as well and then how you applied some of this learning from Covey inside?
Well, there were two guys that just they say when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
I was ready for two people that really had a profound influence on me more than others.
One was Stephen Covey and the other one was Jim Collins and they both became very good friends.
When I was wrestling with my life, I had gone into Nabisco and it was at Nabisco that the magnitude of the challenge was overwhelming and I was realizing without knowing it that I needed to step up my game.
Stuff was coming at me as part of the world's largest LBO and KKR, the poster child for barbarians at the gate.
You're young for this but it was a huge deal at the time in the corporate world.
We were being challenged to do things that just were more substantial than I'd ever been challenged before and I realized I needed to get better anchored in what I believed in so that I could have the courage of my convictions to deal with all of it in a way that where I would survive because it was challenging.
I was searching for help not knowing I was searching for help but I was searching for help and I discovered Stephen's book and I read it on a trip with my wife and totally neglected her and I ultimately she said what are you reading?
I said this amazing book and she said why is it so amazing?
Because he thinks just like I do and it was The Seven Habits by Stephen Covey and I wrote a whole book on it in the blueprint but I believe you've got to tend to your own foundation so that when you get put in the thick of thick things and having to make tough decisions about people and performance
and every day where you're pushed to the edge you have to be incredibly well anchored and have the courage of your convictions.
It's hard to have the courage of your convictions if you don't know what your convictions are and most people are flying by the seat of their pants especially all the people that were listening to you on wall street.
They're doing life by the seat of their pants, they're reacting to what comes at them which I do too 70 % of the time but when you're in these tight tight situations you got to know where to draw the line and where you stand on things and I wasn't confident enough so I needed to do some inside work to
say well what do I want to stand for here and how do I want to make this work so that I can not only contribute and perform but I can do it in a way where I you know I can look at myself in the mirror every day and nobody can do that work for you and I'll tell you you can't reading the books about all
these great leaders and how they did it has nothing to do with you so I did my homework and I lifted my game.
Talk to me about being inside and the pressures that you felt and learning on the fly going through that.
I mean it must have been you know you turned around multiple divisions, you rose up the ranks, it didn't always seem clear that was going to happen.
Oh no I had been fired earlier in my career and it wasn't that I did anything particularly wrong I just don't think I did enough right and but you know every time I do a Myers -Briggs test I'm an introvert and that's hard you know if you're trying to be a leader and influence the direction and you're
uncomfortable in the spotlight I discovered that I needed to really get anchored and what I stood for it was even extra hard for me because I had to overcome my introversion and my shyness and my reserved nature and so the only way I could do that was to get really firmly grounded in what mattered most
to me and when I was firmly grounded I was able to step outside of myself and express it and so I spent a lot of time working in this territory more than most because I felt like I needed to you know there's a great Brene Brown quote you can either walk inside your story and own it or you can stand outside
your story and hustle for your worthiness every day and you know as a shy introverted oldest child I was going through and I was walking inside my parents story for me, my teacher's story for me, my coach's story for me, my boss's story for me, my organization's story, I was walking inside everybody
else's story and I sort of began to realize when I lost my job in my early 30s like this isn't working I need to figure out what my story is and in fact when I when I got let go from my job the first thing my outplacement counselor did for me he said look I want you to sit down and write your entire
life story for me hand write it and I want every detail in there and I want it back in two weeks but I hand wrote 50 pages front and back 100 pages small handwriting I wish I had that I don't know where it ever happened to it and I as I got into my life story it was like wow look at all this stuff and I
haven't really reflected on any of this I've just been going from you know one step at a time here to there boom boom boom yet I had this incredible story being exposed to people who had profound influences on me but I just sort of left that in the dust and moved on although I carried their lessons
with me below the surface but as I wrote it all down I realized wow this is really rich stuff and I started to ruminate on it and manage it and then shortly thereafter I met Stephen Covey.
When I was at Nabisco to get get directly to your question I was doing this Covey stuff and these guys were talking about me doing all this lovey -dovey Covey stuff and our mission for the LBO was E cubed earnings earnings earnings and it had nothing to do with people it had nothing to do with organization you
know you were just expected to manage all that but I need my quarterly earnings you got to hit our targets I just felt that was short -sighted but I knew I had to deliver the earnings but I also knew we had to create a roadmap for prosperity that was going to allow me to make the earnings a year from then
when I had a lap that quarter and deliver again as I was being challenged with all that I sort of landed on this philosophy that said look there are two things that matter here in all the corporate world it's a performance in people it's not just performance it's performance in people in fact you take
care of the people and they'll take care of the performance you know I'm this guy from the midwest who shows up on the east coast polyanish kind of perspective that you take care of the people they take care of the work and and the more I care about them the more they'll care about our agenda and the better
we'll do I mean logical to me but it wasn't the language of of the day the heyday of the 1990s and it was countercultural at the time both within Nabisco and in the broader world I just became wildly committed to assembling a world -class team and then to give them all the tools they needed to fight
the fight and to give them air cover when I could because nobody else agreed with me and so we started doing that and I started paying attention to them ultimately we performed well one year we performed yet well the next year and the next year I was made president of Nabisco Foods and for five years
we outperformed any other food company in the United States which is how I ultimately ended up getting the Campbell job before we get to the the Campbell job I want to hone in on two parts of that story that stick out for me one is where did you get the courage in an organization to do something different
that goes against what everybody else in the organization is doing right after you were fired from your previous job well I had time in between I had one other job before then I had gone to craft and I got my sea legs again okay and I worked for some pretty tough guys there and I learned I could do
it I mean it wasn't an incidental amount of time it was seven years but it was this it was seven years I needed to sort of mature and you know I talk about the importance my language again of being tough -minded on standards of performance and tender -hearted with people I was inclined to be tender -hearted
with people and I need to I needed to kind of get more comfortable with being tough minded on performance and I did that at craft and I learned you can do both the culture I grew up in was either you're you know either you're Vince Lombardi tough or you're lovey -dovey -covey and what I found is in my
opinion the best leaders that create enduring value have tough standards and care about people they're not mutually exclusive and I learned that at craft I applied it at Nabisco and then I really brought it to life when I got to Campbell so that that's where that came from.
Is there a particular story that comes to mind when you think of a great example of being tough on standards and kind with people?
Sure I got to Campbell I thought I'd seen everything when I got to the wild west of the world's largest LBO and I was there for a decade I thought I'd seen everything after after barbarians at the gate and then I got to Campbell and it was there was a whole new world and it turned out to be a very very
toxic culture and I was bringing my same philosophy in fact day one when I talked to the employees at Campbell I said you know we cannot expect you to value our agenda until we tangibly demonstrate that we value yours it just to me it just doesn't make any sense so my commitment is you're going to see
that we care about you and we're going to trust that in the fullness of time you're going to care about our agenda and help us lift this company up and we were in bad shape.
We started in the 19th century and we were still selling the same products.
Kansu the leading analyst in the sector was comparing us to a buggy whip and we were headquartered in the poorest most dangerous city in the United States, Camden, New Jersey, where we had a city of 75 ,000 people and 70 murders a year and we had razor wire all around our facilities with guard towers.
It looked like a minimum security prison.
The razor wire and the guard towers were there to make sure people felt safe when they got inside and they had been through several years of poor performance, a lot of layoffs, no trust, over promising, under delivering, churn at the top, investigations by regulators, you name it it was happening.
So I got there and I said you know here we go new day we're going to value you we're going to trust you're going to value us and it's going to take a while it's going to take us three years to get to get to a place where we can really lift our heads up because we're not going to over promise and under deliver.
We are not going to be able to talk our way out of something we behaved our way into.
It took us years to get into this mess it's going to take us years to get out and I'm convinced all the leaders were saying yeah we'll see how long this works you know you know here here comes Mr.
Lovey Dovey Covey again and he's not tough enough.
We turned over 300 of the top 350 leaders in the company six out of seven we gave them a year and a half or so to get with the program but if it wasn't working they knew because I was very upfront we're going to have to make some tough calls here and we're either going to find a job that you can do
as an individual contributor or reporting to something we're going to try and make it work or else we're going to help you find another job somewhere but we got to be tough -minded on standards here we've got to perform and in terms of performance we said there are two things it's the what and the how.
The what was we have these standards that we want to hit in terms of our business performance and the how which was more important quite frankly is and here's how we're going to comport ourselves as leaders and if you can't sign up for the what and the how you're probably in the wrong place and I think
people were saying oh yeah yeah we've heard this before we'll see how long you last we turned over 300 of the top 350 you talk about tough that was tougher than anything we did at Nabisco we promoted 150 from within but we had to go outside and find 150 more blue chip young Turks to come in and transform
the company into a 21st century fighting machine that was probably the single toughest thing I ever had to do because some of these people were not poor performers they were just in the wrong place and at the wrong time from their career perspective but I had a greater good to look after I had 20 to
24 000 people counting on me to get it right a footnote to this conversation is we started tracking employee engagement every year with Gallup and when we first did it the year one uh Gallup said this is the worst we've ever seen in a fortune 500 company this is horrible we had an engagement ratio of which is how
many people are engaged compared to how many people are not of two to one the average for fortune 500 was four people wildly engaged for every one who wasn't we were two to one so basically we had two people doing the job of three everywhere in the world and uh we tracked it every year for the decade
and while I was making all these changes uh I wasn't quite sure how it was going to turn out you know we'd made all the changes and then I didn't know how employee engagement was going to come out but I couldn't imagine doing it any other way so we the chips were going to fall where they fell when we
measured it turns out every year we made the changes employee engagement went up because all the employees knew what needed to be done they were just waiting to see if there was a leader who was going to be tough -minded enough to do it and we weren't perfect but we tried to be wildly supportive of everybody
we'd moved out uh I had been fired in a tough way that wasn't particularly caring and I said I don't ever want to do this to anybody else again I won't be associated with it so we tried to be really compassionate with the people we turned over they didn't all agree with it but I know we did the best
we could at the time that's an example of where you you know you declare you're going to commit to building this kind of culture you damn well better do it and and if you're going to build a culture that's going to be tough -minded on standards and caring about people either you as Jim Collins would say
either you get on the bus or you don't you got to get the right people on the bus I wonder to what extent hard decisions at the top make for easy decisions at the bottom you know the the key to making hard decisions at the top you have to be in the black with your emotional bank account with the culture
as a leader you have to build that bank account you have to be making deposits every day into that account to build trust and to build credibility with the people that work there knowing that there are days where you're going to make some giant withdrawal because you're going to screw up because you
will it's just too complicated but you know that when you have that big withdrawal you're still going to be in the black then it makes it much easier to make those decisions at the top because you're not running on empty with the employees but the key is how do you build that a bank account before you
need it and before you have to make those tough calls I had three years to demonstrate to all the employees that we cared about and that we were going to upgrade the facilities and that we cared about their work environment and we cared about how their supervisors treated them the number one expectation of a leader
at campbell was that you had to inspire trust if you couldn't inspire trust how could you inspire performance and if you weren't inspiring trust you were at risk you'd lose your job so you declare that you live it you work it every day and then if people aren't able to get with the program you kindly
and gently but firmly move them out and you do it in a way wherever possible that honors the individual who's been affected it's not that they're bad people it's just that they're not in the right place at the right time and they ought to be honored everything I do emanates from a commitment to honoring
people that that and that's where it all starts and so all of the stuff we're talking about right now at this time right now and do it in a way that acknowledges whatever has brought them here what we have to do in the present and also sets the table for a more prosperous future conversation as a leader
you got to live in three time zones simultaneously the past the present the future everything you do has got to honor the past deliver in the present set the table for more prosperous future and as you think that way that's why trust building becomes mission critical and that the companies that are doing
well in today's challenging times the ones that are doing well are the ones that are are building trust with their associates that's going to help them navigate the challenges of the day we have challenges today we had challenges yesterday we'll have more challenges tomorrow walk me through the first
hundred days at campbell you i think you mentioned in a previous interview you felt like you had three years to turn it around what was the first hundred days like what steps did you take look as a leader at a senior level at the outside you've got three years the first year it's the other guy's fault
the second year it's our fault but we're learning the third year you own it so in that spirit the first year i had to declare myself with the organization who i was and what i stood for and i had to bring that to life with tangible actions first hundred days you you establish a principle centered framework
for leading and then you listen a lot first hundred days you'd lead by listening to the point where everybody says my god you've listened enough what are we going to do they're exhausted they don't want to talk anymore yeah i you understand you clearly want to understand great by uh the second hundred
days you've got a plan together and i'll use campbell as an example i started january first i declared myself we started to set the organization up made some early hires that started to set the tone that i was serious about it and we committed to having a plan by july so the first hundred days was doing
a situation assessment and listening the next hundred days was building a plan in a collaborative fashion with the leadership and by july we had launched our revitalization plan for campbell and and then we were off to the races implementing the plan my experience you've got 100 days to figure it out
100 days to operationalize it and get going knowing that it's not going to be perfect you're going to have to course correct along the way that's how i see managing turnarounds which i've done everywhere i've been there are some people would say that's too slow for a turnaround i find if you go a little
slow at first you can go fast later on because everybody's felt heard and been part of the process if you go real fast out of the gate it's your idea nobody owns it and you're you're off leading the team only to turn around and see the team is back at the starting line so there's an art to this you've
got to bring people along with you and i think the first 200 days are the most critical with that you declare yourself and then you then you create a plan to bring it to life how do you think about the mismatch timelines between sort of what you do in the first year is probably going to affect the profits
in the second year but a ceo you're probably wanting to invest for a decade or two decades in the future and yet also knowing that the average tenure of a ceo in the smp 500 is probably what three to four years how do you how do you address these mismatch timelines between immediate results and long
-term performance i think there are a couple things first of all you've got to be you've got to know what you want to stand for uh when i took this job i i at campbell i had said you know this is a heavy lift and uh we can't talk our way out of something we behave going into we're going to have to build
something that's an enduring proposition it's going to take time and we've got to be willing to live with the results uh but we have to have clear gates of performance and we have to constantly be getting better they're asked there can be no question that we're getting better in the workplace and in the marketplace
every year no question and then you have to perform and meet or exceed those expectations today it's easier because when i first started it was how what were your earnings this quarter now they we don't even report most people aren't reporting quarterly earnings they're doing annual they provide guidance
but they're looking more long -term in nature which is appropriate i was willing to not have my job if i had to do it the wrong way this is where you have to be incredibly well anchored we talked earlier about if you're not well anchored in the leader you want to be and how you want to lead you're going
to be whipsawed by analysts and wall street and boards and activists and we were going to build a better company brick by brick and we were going to make sure we served all of our stakeholders not just our shareholders and we said that at the beginning and i basically said it at the end 10 years later
and i think if you're clear about what you intend to do and and then you do it and you put points on the board every year you get the opportunity to do it again but if you're worried about saving your job you're in trouble before you start you mentioned the board i'm wondering maybe there's a particular
story that comes to mind but what makes for a board member versus an unhelpful board member it's not individual members it's it's the culture of the board because you know we had 15 directors which is a large board but they represented all kinds of points of view so we could we could deliberate on anything
and look at it in a 360 degree way that i thought was incredibly healthy i found it to be a blessing we also had members of the founding family on the board who were tethered to the long -term interests of the company which i also found enormously helpful i think it's not one board member another i think
the key is to create a culture where all points of view can be heard and where people are comfortable enough to share them and that's what we had at campbell when i was there we had people that we would go toe -to -toe and we disagreed on some things but you know those points of view i was better to have it
in the board room than it was to have it out with with wall street or or the analyst or any activists lurking out there to critique what we were doing so i i loved having a very candid a large candid arguably unwieldy board everything that mattered came up in those board meetings and so we were able
to deal with them before we took it outside a good board member constructively engages in the dialogue i guess the other observation about a good board in my opinion a good board member is that they they understand their role in the process and it's one of oversight it's not one of execution and management
you know their job is to is to make sure the organization is properly governed and that that the enterprise is living up to the standards that have been set for it not to make sure you've done the right job with your marketing that quarter or that year before we get to leadership i want to ask you how
you went about making decisions did you have a particular process of routine was for for decisions that matter i'm thinking high stakes decisions you know first of all this conversation makes all this stuff sound simple it's not it's messy every day and you're anguishing over every every decision about a person every
decision about a board meeting i'll just use a ceo life but it could be any life i spent more of my time not being a ceo than i did being a ceo i was basically in that world in that lane of work for 40 years i was only a ceo for 10 the other 30 i was a entry -level marketing person to a lead to a manager
to a leader so uh for me the decision making got easy if i if we created a framework for what mattered most if people knew what mattered it made it easy to decide if you know all stakeholders matter and you know that you're expected to do better tomorrow than you did today and you know that your enterprise
is committing to what committed to winning in the workplace before you win in the marketplace you create this framework everybody knows what's expected you know the gallup survey they ask 12 questions which get at the hygiene of an organization it's called the q12 survey and one of those 12 questions
is i know what is expected of me and the more you know what is expected of you the easier it is to do your job so as a leader the key is make sure the expectations are crystal clear and make sure that if it push comes to shove that if it if you've got to pick performance over people then you better
get somebody else in the boat with you because that's that's something that's taken very seriously in our in my organizations and when it came to process we would do a strategic process where we would assess the situation every year and revisit our strategy for the next three years we would then say
what are the implications for the coming year we would then do an annual plan we would then break that annual plan down into quarterly expectations and as we did that in a in a collaborative way with every leader it was another example of where slow is you start slow you can finish fast because everybody's
on the same page and they all execute against it then you're just doing modest course corrections the other thing so there's a planning process you put in place and then there's a process for interventions where you you you find out what's working what's not and what's needed in the in the here and now
and between the planning process and a simple intervention process what's working what's not what's needed you can find your way through almost anything what have you learned about leadership that most people miss it's all about the people you know what we tend to do and i'm guilty of it you know you
tend to have these huge jobs and you got all this list of stuff that has to get done and you get all caught up in the tasks and you forget about the people because i got to get this done now it's due by the end of the month and they're not getting it done and and all of a sudden you're compromising
the relationships with the people that work for you and with you i found that leaders get so caught up in the delivery of performance that they lose sight of uh taking care of the development of the people that's the thing i have to constantly remind myself of because you still have to perform you've
got to perform and take care of the people but typically where you end up compromising is you you just say well i i don't have time to deal with him or her right now i'm just gonna take over this project and get it done because it's got to be done by friday sometimes you got to do that i mean that's
reality most of the leaders i encounter they lead by the seat of their pants they create great business plans you know and and financial plans and and then you say what's your leadership plan i have no idea and it's like wait a minute leading your people is the most important thing you do and you have no plan well
yeah i just kind of work my way through it well that's bullshit from my point of view you know i would i i tell people that leading your people you're on sacred ground you're having a profound influence on these people's lives and you're doing it by the seat of your pants give me a break you know these
people are working all day then they're having dinner with their kids and what are they doing after dinner they're getting back on email working at night falling asleep thinking about what they did do and what they didn't do and what they got to do tomorrow they get up thinking about what they have to
do that day squeeze some time in with the kids or the dog and they do it all over again and you want them to be wildly engaged in what you're doing and you're not thinking about it hello and what i find is most leaders do it by the seat of their pants and some of them are better at it than others but largely
that's not good enough leaders can be born but they are most certainly all made better you know i think leadership works off a mastery model i think the world works off a mastery model in terms all the way from darwin and the species mastering their environment to leading and i believe you apprentice
at it you learn from it you study it you study the craft and then you get better at it i can't imagine the first podcast you did was as good as the podcast you do now you get better you work at it and these leaders they just think by virtue of making decisions by the seat of their pants today they're
going to be better at making decisions by this seat of their pants tomorrow that may be true but i i just contend it's inadequate so most leaders i see haven't been intentional enough and haven't really thought about it that's where i challenged them to do better and to be clear 75 of my day when i'm
leading is by the seat of my pants you know that's just life we got a lot of crap coming at us every day right we're overwhelmed by data by stuff coming at us but i'm saying 25 of the time you ought to know what matters most and you ought to really be attentive to it every day most leaders haven't done
that enough in that territory in terms of reflection and study to be world -class to be world -class leaders what does a leadership blueprint look like a leadership plan what's the blueprint for that i think a blueprint has to be for your leadership has to be anchored in how do you want to lead it has nothing
to do with anybody else yet all right it's uh the process we take people through is envision the leader you want to be do some reflection of your life because i contend your life story is your leadership story and then study the world around you and see what other people are doing that might relate
to what you the way you want to be you know and i've got lots of mentors like steven covey jim collins but the people i've worked for who i've learned from so take that reflection and study and then actually build a what i call a leadership model i believe models can be incredibly useful you create
a metal model for how you want to show up as a leader and then as you do that you build practices into your life that bring that metal to model to life in a very tangible way so it's not just talk and and leadership mumbo jumbo it's here's how i show up and then you commit to a continuous improvement
process of doing a little better with that model regularly so that's what a leadership model is but that is not enough because then you've got to take that model which is all about you and how you want to walk in the world and then you've got to actually go into the real world and think about it in terms
of the venn diagrams you had in school you have your leadership approach here and then over here you have another circle that is the leadership approach that is expected of you in the world at large or in your organization in the middle hopefully is a cross -hatched area where there is stuff that you
value in how you want to show up and there is stuff that the enterprise values on how they want you to show up and the process we take you through is it's putting those two things together so you can show up in a way that's effective for the enterprise and fulfilling for you and every enterprise i've
been in i've been in some crazy ones there are some things they all want and that everybody wants in most of their leadership work certainly uh in virtually every sector but in corporate i can say look there are two things performance in people that you're expected to perform if you're a leader you
want to perform and the enterprise wants you to perform and they also want you to perform through people because you're they're having you manage people so typically a blueprint for success is thinking about how you want to lead figuring out what's expected of you and then creating a re -entry approach
that says okay here's how i'm going to lead in a way that meets the needs of my organization and we see just wild success with this as people are really tethered to what matters to them and they're doing it in a practical way that matters to the enterprise and you can do both that's my belief and what i
where i struggle with is and i have lots of friends who study leadership and write about it but arguably have never really done it but they've studied people and done it they add a lot of value you've got to be able to do this in in the real world and you've got to be able to work on lifting your leadership
in the middle of your kaka meimi life and who has time for this stuff nobody has time for it so the process that i'm talking about was built so that it could fit in when you do it it nests perfectly in your kaka meimi life and you can do it in a way that speaks to you and meets the needs of the enterprise
you can do all of that as long as you do it in small chunks with a continuous improvement mindset that's the concept of a blueprint being true to yourself is is at the heart of it but then you have to walk in the world with others so you've got to take that into account while you're being true to yourself
and that's the bridge we try and help people build when we work with them one or the other just won't do if you're just trying to meet the needs of others you're hustling for your worthiness and brenette brown language you're not walking inside your story we want you to walk inside your story and be
effective inside your enterprise i have yet to find somebody that can't do both if they are intentional about it and not just doing it by the seat of their pants talk to me about the things that people who teach or write but haven't done mess when you're reading that or you're thinking about it is there
something that you're like oh how do you think about that well first of all i don't i think it's it's more important to realize what they hit because they're able to step outside of it they bring perspective and objectivity that i think enhances understanding big time yeah so i think there's a lot more
value addition than i think there is what they quote unquote miss totally but you never know until you're in until you're trying to you're dealing with these people shoulder to shoulder day in day out grinding away trying to make it all work amidst all of its complexity and ambiguity and he said she
said what do we do there's no substitute for living it you know it's just like my friends who are professors i can't understand their life either i haven't walked in their shoes to the extent that they have so uh what they miss is i think the visceral understanding of what it's like to be on that side
of the table and walking in those shoes that's what they miss but they add so much more value because i've learned so much steven covey never ran anything and he and when he did he didn't do it particularly well but his thinking enlarged my world jim collins i mean he sees a lot of stuff but he doesn't
want to go run something of any scale yeah his his his perspective was it's just beautiful because he studied the world and really invested time and energy and research and work and understanding it and that adds a ton of value but you got to walk a mile in their shoes too are there common patterns
that you see that keep people with high potential from achieving their goals or realizing their potential patience is one you know we're conditioned now to want change faster and faster and and there's no substitute for cultivating wisdom through experience i talked to you when i'm out on the west coast
or i'm talking to folks in silicon valley it's like my perspective is discounted which is annoying but understandable and because i'm almost 70 years old and how could i possibly understand what this 30 euro person is going through and we get in this conversation and i say well how much wisdom have you
accumulated in the last decade since from 20 to 30 a lot you know i've learned a lot well how much more do you think you'll accumulate from 30 to 40 or 40 to 50 or 50 to 60 there's and there's no substitute for it and there's no way to go faster with it the demands of society are such that you got to
do more better faster now and the leaders today sort of hunger for the quick fix just like the wall street hungers for the good quarter yeah and we're saying well you know you got to look at this on longer term time horizon if you want corporate responsibility we got to create room for people to create
corporate enduring corporate enterprises that can serve society better and not live quarter to quarter the same thing is true about young leaders you don't live quarter to quarter you've created room for yourself to grow over time and to have patience and to just focus on how can i help the enterprise
do better today than we did yesterday and how can i grow and be a little better today than i was yesterday and and get into a continuous improvement mindset as opposed to a quick fix mindset that's the tough piece and i was just like him i wanted more better faster too and i kept track of when i was going
to get my next promotion and did was i going to get promoted before this person to that person but ultimately uh that's where i've landed on i want to switch gears and ask you a few personal questions before we wrap up um when i was doing some research it came up that you wake up between four and five
every morning pretty much yeah i'm a morning person i actually cultivated that habit in an intentional way interestingly um because as i was a company president and then a chair and then a ceo and then a chairman my evening life got crazy but my morning life i realized that if i wanted to sort of get
centered for my day and everything i just needed to get up earlier and i was early morning anyway but i started getting up an hour earlier and gathering myself i'd sit up in my garden in jersey at the time where i lived for most of this time 25 years of my work and uh would have a cup of coffee as the sun
came up and reflect on what was expected that day and and gather myself a bit before all hell broke loose and then i would go into the inside shower shave and shine and i i remember putting on my suits every day and it was like i was putting on my armor and i was getting ready to go into battle i found
it to be a real important part of my life to give myself some space and quiet time to get anchored in what mattered most the other thing i did was one of the things that mattered most was my kids and uh and my family and so i would be up with them for breakfast and then i would always try and find a way
to take one of them to school before i would go to work so i tried to be available in the early mornings knowing that the afternoons and nights were at were risky i i moved my wake up time up and it worked and to this day i i mean i was up today it i actually i slept in today i slept until five today
but uh i got a ton of work done you sort of need to figure out what matters most in my life and my work was part of it my family was another part of it and my own personal well -being those are three of my five cylinders the other two were my community and uh my faith so i have five cylinders that i
work off of and three of those cylinders with the practice of getting up early and reflecting i was able to center myself and sort of help manage those three cylinders and in a in a in a way that served me well gosh now for almost 30 years well you're the ceo uh of campbells you wrote over 30 000 thank
you notes i'm or gratitude notes of gratitude or thank you notes i'm curious as to you what what started that practice and what have you learned about writing good ones when i was fired from my job and my place and i was shy my outplacement counselor said you're never going to get a job you're too shy
you only answer the questions that you're being asked you're not selling yourself you're not you know i i've read your 50 pages of handwritten life story you you're committed you're wildly committed to contributing and excelling yet you show up in such a shy reserved way and he said you've got to figure
out a way to make your job search distinctive and as try as i could i i i was just horrible at interviewing at least i felt i was so i said i gotta do something here so what i did was when i would go if i came to your building in ottawa and i was interviewing for a job there and there were i'd meet
six people and i'd meet the receptionist who opened the door for me at the building i would get all their names when i was done i would walk next door to the coffee shop and i would hand write each one a note and i would walk it back over to the receptionist before i left and ask them to deliver it
that day to the people that i had just met and i would make sure to to thank them for something specific maybe two or three sentences that they did for me as a way of being distinctive i gotta tell you it was transformational the key to making hard decisions at the top you have to be in the black with your
emotional bank account with the culture as a leader you have to build that bank account you have to be making deposits every day into that account to build trust and to build credibility with the people that work there knowing that there are days where you're going to make some giant withdrawal because you're
going to screw up because you will and the the companies that are doing well in today's challenging times are the ones that are are building trust with their associates that's going to help them navigate the challenges of the day we have challenges today we had challenges yesterday we'll have more challenges
tomorrow so welcome to the knowledge project podcast i'm your host shane perish this podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best what other people have already figured out if you're listening to this you're not currently a supporting member if you'd like special member only episodes access
before anyone else transcripts and other member only content you can join at fs .blog podcast check out the show notes for a link doug canad is here today doug was the ceo of campbell soup and worked at nevisco during the toxic leveraged bio culture that prompted the book barbarians at the gate doug
is full of leadership advice and lessons we talk about why you can't win in the marketplace if you haven't won in the workplace the first 100 days as ceo of campbell soup adjusting to shifting consumer preferences how to know when you have the right people and the wrong people and so much more it's
time to listen and learn the knowledge project is sponsored by metalab for a decade metalab has helped some of the world's top companies and entrepreneurs build products that millions of people use every day you probably didn't realize that at the time but odds are you've used an app that they've helped
design or build apps like slack coinbase facebook messenger oculus lonely planet and many more metalab wants to bring their unique design philosophy to your project let them take your brainstorm and turn it into the next billion dollar app from ideas sketched on the back of a napkin to a final ship
product check them out at metalab .co that's metalab .co and when you get in touch tell them shane sent you the knowledge project is sponsored by greyhawk successful families know that wealth can create a curious dilemma it creates benefits it secures the future and creates opportunities but it also presents
challenges how do you stay true to your values and ensure that future generations use their wealth wisely greyhawk is about helping you solve that dilemma by working with your family on both the financial and human elements that build long -term well -being if you value independence transparency and authenticity
and want to learn more connect with them at greyhawkwealth .com the knowledge project is sponsored by admired leadership there are lots of good leaders out there but how many truly great ones the kind of leaders who are deeply admired admired at work admired at home as partners as parents the kind of leaders
who make other people better for 30 years admired leadership has been uncovering the habits routines and behaviors of the very best leaders how they give feedback make decisions build relationships how they motivate and inspire behaviors any serious leader can learn and master better leaders make people
better find out more at admiredleadership .com set the scene for me in the 80s and not only like how did you end up at Nabisco what was it like working for the LBO largest in history at the time and the pressure that you must have felt internally and the employees as well and then how you applied some
of this learning from Covey inside well there were two guys that just they say when the when the student is ready the teacher appears i was ready for two people that really had a profound influence on me more than others one was Stephen Covey and the other one was Jim Collins and they both became very
good friends i was wrestling with my life i had gone into Nabisco and it was at Nabisco that you know the the magnitude of the challenge was overwhelming and i i was realizing without knowing it that i needed to step up my game stuff was coming at me as part of the world's largest LBO and KKR the poster
child for barbarians at the gate you're young for this but it was a huge deal at the time in the corporate world we were being challenged to do things that just were more substantial than i'd ever been challenged before and i realized i needed to get better anchored in what i believed in it so that i
could have the courage of my convictions to deal with all of it in a way that where i would survive because it was it was challenging so that's where i and i was searching for help not knowing i was searching for help but i was searching for help and i discovered Stephen's book and i read it on a trip
with my wife and totally neglected her and i ultimately she said what are you reading i said this amazing book and she said why is it so amazing because he thinks just like i do and it was The Seven Habits by Stephen Covey and i wrote a whole book on it in the blueprint but i believe you got to tend
to your own foundation so that when you get put in the thick of thick things and having to make tough decisions about people and performance and every day where you're pushed to the edge you have to be incredibly well anchored and have the courage of your convictions it's hard to have the courage of your
convictions if you don't know what your convictions are and and most people are flying by the seat of their pants especially all the people that were listening to you on wall street they're they're doing life by the seat of their pants they're reacting to what comes at them which i do too uh 70 of the time
but when you're in these tight tight situations you got to know where to draw the line and where you stand on things and i wasn't confident enough so i needed to do some inside work to say well what do i want to stand for here and how do i want to make this work so that i can not only contribute and perform
but i can do it in a way where i you know i can look at myself in the mirror every day and nobody can do that work for you and i'll tell you you can't reading the books about all these great leaders on how they did it has nothing to do with you so i
