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In many ways, communication is like baseball.
You take some swings.
Sometimes you hit it out of the park, and sometimes you strike out.
But regardless, you learn something from that experience.
My name's Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Today we're doing something a little different.
I'm partnering with my Stanford GSB colleague, Jeffrey Pfeffer, to interview the athlete turned entrepreneur Alex Rodriguez, A -Rod.
Jeff was a guest on ThinkFastTalk Smart in Episode 34.
He teaches the super popular course The Paths to Power.
And he's the author of many books, including his latest which is called Seven Rules of Power.
Today we'll be taking turns interviewing Alex. And you'll get to learn about him and from him from our two perspectives.
Let's meet Alex. Alex Rodriguez is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of A -Rod Corp.
He is best known as one of the world's greatest athletes, a 14 time Major League Baseball All -Star, and a 2009 World Series Champion with the New York Yankees.
Alex is now an owner of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx, and leads a team of experts building high growth businesses.
Welcome Alex. Thank you for joining both Jeff and me for this tag -team interview.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you, I'm very excited.
A little intimidated by both of you.
We are not very intimidating.
Before we get started, I wanted to thank all of you for listening and supporting Think Fast, Talk Smart.
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We see it in your LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube posts.
It takes a lot of work to bring the show to you and I invite you to consider joining Think Fast, Talk Smart Premium to help us continue creating useful content and to reach more listeners.
check out fastersmarter .io slash premium.
Should we get started?
Sure. Okay, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what brings you to Stanford, what brings you to campus.
I know among your many jobs, you co -teach a class at the GSV.
Can you tell us a little bit about the class and what you hope the students learn from you?
Yeah, the class is called Strategic Pivoting.
I co -teach it with Allison Kluger.
Believe it or not, it is our seventh year.
And usually, we have 25 to 30 students.
and it's just been a marvelous experience and like me I'm sure, like both of you, you've had some type of pivot and we just try to make it strategic and we use the framework of planting, scanning and piloting which I've done pretty much my whole life before coming to this class, so the fact that now I'm in class teaching our students and helping our students, it's been a lot of fun.
I think when you think about planting, you start thinking about what are your competitive advantages, What can you offer this particular space?
How would my competitive powers or my even circle of competence be influenced in this particular place?
And then you start scanning for opportunities.
How scalable is it?
Is this a good place for me to find the right people to collaborate with?
And then pilots. I always feel pilots should be done small at the beginning.
That way if you falter or if you struggle you can always lean back and try again.
Edit, cut and then move forward. But that framework has been very popular with our students.
Excellent. Thank you for giving us insight into what happens in the class.
And I want to give a shout -out to Allison.
Both Jeff and I are friends with Allison.
And those of you listening, Allison did a great episode with us on reputation and reputation management.
So, one of the things I try to teach in my past power class is to get ready for what's next.
Because I always tell my students, if you're flying in an airplane, you need to know where the emergency exits are before you need them.
You need to know where the oxygen masks are before you need them.
One of the things that I really admire about you is that, in fact, you did get yourself ready.
It's interesting. Some people will be fired unexpectedly but if you're a professional athlete you know that sooner or later the athletic prowess will wane and you'll have to do something else.
So talk to me about how you got ready for what came after your athletic career.
Yeah, thank you and maybe start at the end.
I mentor and spend a lot of time with tens and tens of athletes and former athletes and they say that athletes die twice when you retire and real death and I find that to be true and I find a lot of athletes go through major depression, they go through divorces and you can only play golf and fish so much. I think luckily for me ever since I was 10 years old I always thought about my two Bs which were baseball and business and I've always had a passion for baseball and a passion for numbers.
So I've been thinking about life after baseball before my rookie year and because of that you were able to see opportunities probably way before you were ready or others were thinking about it too.
I think I was fortunate that because I was thinking about it so early on and I had a great passion for it that I came at it from a prism of looking at opportunities different than perhaps other athletes.
What did you do to get yourself ready?
So I've been a lifelong student even though I didn't go the traditional college route because I was in the major leagues from Miami, drafted by Seattle in 1993 as the number one pick overall.
And I was in the major leagues at 18.
And I've always thought about opportunities to invest, opportunities to learn, to surround myself with much smarter people.
I always thought as an opportunity it was exciting, and I think a lot of athletes looked that opportunity as fear and they ran the other way.
And I think the best way you can do is educate yourself as much as possible, learn it, understand it, and start small.
I didn't want to come out of the gates investing millions of dollars, A, I didn't have it, and B, I just thought it was imprudent.
Many of your roles have found you in really high pressure, high stake situations in a boardroom, in a baseball field.
How do you work to stay calm and collected and communicate clearly when you're under that high stress?
I've been lucky because I played almost 25 years of major league baseball.
I played seven in Seattle, three in Texas and then finally landed in New York for about 12 or 13 years, and I've had over 10 ,000 at bats and I'm a big believer in experience and pattern recognition.
And what I've learned from watching a lot of athletes, they said when you come play for the Yankees, the pinstripes are heavy.
And what they mean by that is the kitchen sometimes is too hot.
And what I sensed was that a lot of people when the kitchen got hot, so did their temperature, and they weren't able to control their emotions and they weren't able to stay calm.
And therefore, they would make a lot of silly mistakes in what we call clutch time, the most important part of the game.
And those who were great, like Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettit, and many others.
They have this rare ability to keep a very slow heartbeat when the stakes are highest. And I found the same thing is true with the Bob Iger's of the world, or the Warren Buffett's, or the Jamie Dimons.
They have the same ability, they're just not wearing pinstripes, they're wearing suits.
Do you consciously do deep breathing or something to help slow that heart rate so you can be very present?
Is there something physical you do or do you just you're just in a place where you can think it and it happens.
Yeah, you know, post the pandemic, I came out of it and I lost my ways.
Like I got a little bit out of shape.
I was working around the clock.
So coming out of it, I focused basically from eight o 'clock in the morning.
I changed my routine from eight to noon.
I was going to say this might be time.
That's a time where I train, I meditate, I do yoga.
I may read a book, do some podcasting.
And then I'm in the office every day from 12 to six when I'm home in Miami.
And that's been a really wonderful formula.
The reason why? It's allowed me to focus on the most important things at our company.
And then it allowed me to delegate to the five senior members that report to me and really trust my team, exactly what I wanted to do with the Yankees.
We call it pass the Baton to the next guy.
I'm doing the same thing as the leader of our company today.
So one of the things that I've noticed about you and I noticed about some other athletes in football as well is that you have built an enormous and very effective presence on media, both TV, but also social media.
How have you thought about doing that?
What have you done strategically to make sure that everybody knows who Alex Rodriguez is?
I think it's important to be consistent with whatever you're doing.
I also think it's important to be genuine and authentic.
If you look at whether it's Joe Rogan or whoever platforms are winning today, they're ones that they're taking the broker out of the way, meaning the news, the media, they're going direct to the consumer so I think that's really important that you can control your own message.
And then two, I also think it allows you I recently posted a young lady who was out of a job and won a Grammy the other day and it was a beautiful story so you're able to highlight others that are doing beautiful things in the community whether it's business, sport, or entertainment.
What did you do to make sure that you got you're on a bunch of baseball talk shows and all.
How early did you begin and what did you do to make sure that people would give you that kind of visibility?
I never really thought about life after baseball in media.
That was one thing that I never thought about.
But the one thing that I did have was I basically felt like I had my PhD in baseball, because I've been watching three, four games per night ever since I was like 10 years old.
So I've been playing or watching or studying of some sort.
And then the question becomes okay, you have the knowledge, but can you actually articulate it in a platform and say it in a concise, understandable, digestible, entertainment way where you're speaking to, I always think, my target audience is a 4th or 5th grader that has never played baseball, and just make it very simple.
And that's so far so good.
I love hearing a few things that you've shared about you target an audience specifically.
You think about that.
You think about your message.
Going back to your previous answer about how you calmed down, I like that you have routine and there's a practice, and you also talked about delegating, and it seems to me that you have a really interesting perspective on teaming and building teams. What advice would you have to a young leader or somebody who's new to the leadership role about what to look for and how to build a team, how to communicate within that team?
We have a great partnership right here.
The three of us would be great partners, because A, you guys are way smarter than me, you have a lot more experience than me, but we all bring something a little bit different into the party, and we can all learn from each other.
I just think sometimes it's a mistake if you get two scientists and there's only two in the room, they're only going to think one way.
That's why I do believe that diversity is so important in how we select teams or board of advisors or the board of governors.
And that's why I think Alice and Kluger and I are such great partners, because, again, we come from, in a weird way, similar backgrounds from media.
We're both bridge builders.
We both like to inspire, teach and learn.
It's just wonderful.
when you can surround yourself with great people there is no better gift. But one of the things you have to do if you're gonna be able to do that is you have to let go of some of your ego, because one of the things that I've seen among people is they think that they're better than anybody else at everything.
And in order to do what you just described which I think is amazing, you have to be willing to let go and to say, there are other people who know things that I don't know.
And I'm sure you've seen some of your colleagues and baseball and outside of baseball who aren't able to do that.
So what has permitted you to have what I would call appropriate modesty?
Well, Jeffrey, it would be silly for me to have you and Matt come to Yankee Stadium and teach me how to hit a breaking ball.
As smart as you guys are and athletic as you guys are, and it would be silly for me to come to GSB and try to teach you guys something so I lead with a lot of listening, and I mean very intentional listening.
There's a lot of great talkers.
There's a lot of great starters and not a lot of great listeners or closers.
And if you're a real intentional listener, I think you become a better communicator and the conversation becomes more fun when that person that's delivering an important message, that he has a captive audience.
So I think one, you say ego, I think is more insecurity.
Right. So I actually love throwing myself in a room where everyone else is smarter, and I just get to go out and have great conversations and continue to in my educational journey.
I think intellectual curiosity is a key to success, and you seem to have a lot of intellectual curiosity.
Is that fair? Very much. As a matter of fact, I have two prayers I say every morning.
Before my feet hit the ground, I say a prayer and usually about 30 seconds and it revolves around two things.
One is diminishing your ego and enhancing self -awareness.
So you want the ego to come down and self -awareness to go up.
What I found is when you win the World Series in 2009, like we did with the Yankees and we beat the Phillies, those two kind of work backwards, right?
If self -awareness goes down, ego goes up, that's a formula for failure.
So as a reminder, just really important to check the self -awareness and the ego.
I love that you're talking about self -awareness and that you lead with listening.
And I think that's really powerful.
I can imagine you're in situations, either in the mentoring you do with athletes or the entrepreneurial businesses you run, that you have to give feedback and you have to give sometimes constructive, critical feedback.
Do you have a philosophy or approach that you see working for you when you give that kind of feedback?
I think first, Matt, you have to have the trust. Because if you don't have trust, forget what the message you're saying.
It doesn't matter how good the message is.
If I feel like you're going to do it in a demeaning matter or not coming from love or a place to really help me Then the message is lost no matter how great the message is.
I actually introduced this in my early days I called it green yellow red and we do this with all our team members at ARod Corp and we do this either weekly or once per month monthly and Basically what it is you gamify the feedback which means greens are all the things you're doing well yellow are the things you've got to watch are not quite red but they're not quite green be careful and then red is things you should stop immediately and what's fascinating is when members now almost to every person you know what they start with give me the red it's more of a game and you do it in from love you gamify
it a little bit and when you can shift the paradigm on that where people are actually looking forward to the constructive feedback that's a winning formula.
Let me do a follow -up do you set an environment where they can give you that type of feedback as well?
Oh my gosh all the time.
How does that look?
Kelly Lefurio from my team was my chief business officer she spent a long time at Disney and ESPN she's a wonderful woman went to Georgetown she did a little audio where she teed off on me the other day was like five minutes of just like really tough love and I loved it for it and I said you forgot green and maybe the yellow and she was like no the yellow is that part and that part I'm like okay but absolutely I think that's one of the main things I bring from sports.
I've had some great managers, Joe Torre.
Many won four or five championships, Lou Panella.
These guys are great communicators but they're also they have an ability to inspire and motivate and their words are very powerful.
And nobody actually needs to know what they're doing right.
You actually need to know what you're doing wrong.
So that's a good kind of feedback.
Yeah, and by the way Jeffrey, I disagree with that a little bit.
I do think that especially with highly talented people, they also need to know what they're doing right sometimes.
I always say a player needs a pat, you know, on the back sometimes.
They say, hey, come on, keep it moving.
Because it can't always be red or yellow.
Sometimes you got to tell them that something really good is jumping off the page and to keep that up.
So you of course had a setback with the banned substances scandal.
Well, it's interesting, I tell my students all the time that in almost every career, bad things happen and the issue is not are bad things going to happen, because of course they will.
The question is, how do you recover, how do you build resilience?
So talk about that, how you came through that, how you built resilience to survive setbacks, not only in that, but in your business career, et cetera.
I think resilience is really the key to success.
Before I get into my low point, which was my darkest hour for sure an incredible learning experience for me.
A little bit on failing because one of the great advantages of being a former baseball player is that I live in an industry that if you fail 70 % of the time you end up going to Cooperstown, which is the Hall of Fame.
It's remarkable Imagine if out of every 7, 10 classes you guys teach, 3 of them are good.
You guys would be fired, right?
But for us, it's celebrated.
So what I mean by that, I always tell people that I'm fifth all time in the history of the game, fifth in the history of strikeouts.
That means there's only four people in the history of mankind that have ever failed more than me.
So I always tell my daughters that Daddy has a Ph .D. in failing, but I have a master's in getting back up.
And I think that's the key to remember is how you get back up with the same energy and enthusiasm.
So if you put that framework with my suspension, my PEDs which I served the longest suspension in Major League Baseball history for PDUs.
It took me a while to get here but I think it was three things that I really I'm thankful for.
Number one is you got to take full accountability and this falls in the self -awareness for accountability and there's no excuses there's no one to blame.
There's only one person and you're looking at him in the mirror and that's me.
That's number one. I think number two is that led me to over the last 10, 11 years being in therapy and therapy is really important because it allowed me to turn the lens inward and you got to understand it ever since I was 15 years old when they said Alex is the best 15 year old in the country and it's gonna be the number one pick and two or three years to the time I got suspended almost 40 I never heard the word no so you build very little self -awareness and the ego gets pretty inflated so I think therapy has been an incredible byproduct ironically of my great mistake and then messaging and this is what we
do in strategic pivoting but the messaging without the first two means very little.
It's hollow so I do think you got to take accountability.
You have to have whatever work you have to do yourself.
I did it via therapy through a great therapist it saved my life and lessons learned have been unbelievable which has not put me in a position here where I'm to talk to the next generation of young man and women about my mistakes and hopefully they can avoid my mistakes.
And then communication about what's next and but you have to lead with the mistakes and just address it right off the bat.
Thank you by the way for opening up and being so candid and authentic.
I'd like to talk a little bit about authenticity.
You come off in a very authentic way, I believe it's very genuine.
How do you think about authenticity in terms of the value it brings and it requires self -awareness as you've mentioned.
I'm just curious your perspective on authenticity.
You know it's ironic Matt that you're asking me about this because this is something that I really struggled for the first, I would say 25, 30 years of my life before therapy.
Because I came across as very slippery.
And not to make any excuses, but I grew up with a bunch of slippery people.
You know in the Latin culture we say fake it till you make it.
And my great mom who's one of my heroes who's almost 90.
I saw her working two jobs getting up at 3 o 'clock in the morning, working at General Motors in New York City, and then serving tables at night.
And I saw his incredible work ethic.
But that was the good.
The bad is is like you never got a lot of the truth from anybody.
Once I got through my therapy, I started developing an ear for saying, boy that person is really full of it.
I was never able to hear that before.
It's like a watershed moment for me that I'm like, oh this is an incredible thing.
It's like not being able to see and now I can see, not being able to hear when somebody is full of it and now you hear it, which also includes self awareness of how I sounded.
So one of the things I do with a lot of my close friends is like watch me here Matt, I could become, I can be slippery here, so watch me, make sure that I'm good here.
And that type of back and forth coaching and mentoring has been a great tool for me.
I think that's wonderful that you actually, one, are aware, but you also ask others to I want to give you that feedback so you can make those changes in the future.
And the fact that you have a sensitivity to this might be a situation where I might have some inauthenticity.
I think all of us can take a lesson from that to one, raise our awareness, but two, enlist the help of others to help us be better.
Before we end, I ask all my guests three questions.
One, I make up for you and the rest are similar across everybody.
You mentioned that you mentor athletes.
I'm curious, what's the number one thing you tend to focus with them on to help them post playing?
I think the number one thing is to have a plan.
I think second is take your time.
You may be old for an athlete.
Maybe you're in your early 30's or mid -30's, but you're a child in business.
And I always refer to two of my heroes, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.
Charlie almost went to a hundred and Warren is well on his way.
And to think about a guy like Warren Buffett that he's made 99 .5 % of his net worth after his 50th birthday, it's never too late.
Your age is never a limit, but your mindset's the limit.
So I always encourage athletes to take your time, surround yourself with great people.
If you're playing basketball, if you had a wand, who would be your top three?
you probably say Steph Curry, Michael Jordan, LeBron James.
Well, think about business the same exact way.
Go find the best people in the world.
And because you're an athlete, that's one of your competitive advantages, go out there and ask questions and there's never a dumb question.
Take a bunch of notes, review, follow up, and get your reps in.
So it's about mindset, really, in that focus.
Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?
A few in the business world I would say I really enjoy the way Bob Iger communicates.
Obviously Warren's a legend.
He's the smartest in every room he walks into but yet you never hear him talking over anybody.
Everyone's really understandable.
Both my daughters can understand Warren really well.
That's a testament to him and his simplicity.
And then Mary Erdos who's the CEO at JP Morgan reports up to Jamie Dimon. She's the asset wealth management leader there.
She's another wonderful communicator who is a superstar, but is also very genuine, and likeable, and believable in her communicating skills.
So I hear you saying that being relatable and being connected are what things you admire in leaders.
My final question for you is what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
I think someone that, I would say, has their 10 ,000 hours in whatever they're talking about.
Right? Because you can't replace credibility.
Someone who can speak passionately and clearly and don't speak in too many jargons and too many acronyms. Like really give it to me like as simple as possible.
And someone who can actually lead me to my next question.
So there's a little bit of a revolver.
Monologues are never fun.
I much more have a dialogue.
It's more dynamic, it's more commercial, it's more sellable, it's better for television, keeping it tight, I also think is really important.
I think a lot of communicators sometimes think about, what do I have to do to be a great communicator to sound smart?
I think you should be asking, who am I talking to, who am I communicating with, and what nuggets and value can I bring them, because it's really about them.
It's an unselfish act.
It's not a selfish act, and that's a big difference.
Seeing communication as an unselfish act focused on others, absolutely the bottom line.
Yes. I appreciate you joining us and sharing those nuggets, as well as all of the other information you've shared.
Thank you. Thank you for joining us for this special Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast episode with my colleague Jeffrey Pfeffer of Pfeffer on Power.
Be sure to check it out.
To learn more from famous athletes and coaches, please listen to episode 166 with Andrew Luck and episode 153 with Tara VandeHeer.
here. This episode was produced by Ryan Campos and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
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