Join MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty for Part 2 of a very special two-part conversation with global thought leader and best-selling author Dr. Raj Sisodia, and Kelly Lockwood Primus, an expert on inclusive leadership and cultural dynamics, and a thought leader and contributor to Forbes, as they explore the role that leaders and leadership play in these new constructs.
Join MINDWORKS host Daniel Serfaty for Part 2 of a very special two-part conversation with global thought leader and best-selling author Dr. Raj Sisodia, and Kelly Lockwood Primus, an expert on inclusive leadership and cultural dynamics, and a thought leader and contributor to Forbes, as they explore the role that leaders and leadership play in these new constructs.
Daniel Serfaty: Welcome to MINDWORKS. This is your host, Daniel Serfaty. Welcome back to the special two-part episode on how Leadership today goes beyond just setting a vision for the road ahead and a business plan to execute against, but also builds a culture and a mindset that makes business success possible. In part two of my conversation with global thought leaders, Dr. Raj Sisodia and Ms. Kelly Lockwood Primus, we continue our examination of inclusion, consciousness, diversity, and empathy, and how great leaders put these very lofty, but very feasible and even necessary goals into practice. Dr. Raj Sisodia is a distinguished university professor of Conscious Enterprise and chairman of the Conscious Enterprise Center at the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico.
He's also a co-founder of Conscious Capitalism Inc, and has published 15 books, many of them best sellers, including the New York Time Bestseller, Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, the Wall Street Journal bestseller, Everybody Matters, and his last book, the Healing Organization: Awakening the Conscience of Business To Help Save the World. Dr. Sisodia has consulted with and taught at numerous companies, such as AT&T Verizon, Kraft Food, Whole Foods, Tata, Siemens, Spring, Volvo, Walmart, McDonald's, and IMB. His work is an inspiration to many business leaders around the world today, including yours truly.
Kelly Lockwood Primus is chief executive officer of Leading NOW, a global consultancy that guides current and future leaders in creating more equitable organizations. As an expert on inclusive leadership and cultural dynamics, Kelly has worked with CEOs and executive leadership from Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies to identify barriers and develop solution that help change behaviors and company culture. Kelly also shares her knowledge around the world about diversity and inclusion and leadership and how these topics intersect with her own experience as a business person. She doesn't just consult, she actually practices. A thought leader and contributor to Forbes, Kelly harnesses her passion, knowledge, and expertise and finds it exciting and personally fulfilling to be guiding businesses on the right course to achieve their culture and diversity goals.
Raj and Kelly, welcome back to MINDWORKS. Every MBA student has been trained to manage by catering to the shareholder, shareholder wealth, or by delighting the customer. Which stakeholders the enterprise should be mostly concerned about these days, the shareholders as this traditionally the industrial kind of era, the customer or the employees themselves, the members of the enterprise? Is there a balance we can achieve? Has this perspective changed in the past 25 years? Who wants to take that off? Raj?
Raj Sisodia: The answer really is all of the above and more. I don't think it makes sense to say we predominantly focus on this stakeholder or that. They all are part of an interconnected interdependent system of value creation. And if you ignore any of them, the system collapses over time. So not only employees and customers who we often liken to the two wings of a bird. You don't need to emphasize one over the other. They're both equally vital. Of course, investors matter, but I would expand that circle to include of course suppliers who are key in most industries today. Suppliers actually represent about 80% of the value that you are providing to your customers. You're acquiring from others. And then we cannot forget the planet. We cannot forget other life forms and society or communities. All of those are important stakeholders and I think we need to start putting all of them together into this interconnected system.
If I had to start with an emphasis, I would say we put life at the center of everything that we do, and life includes people plus planet plus other life forms that we share the planet with, and everything has to serve that. And the people include our customers, it includes our employees, it includes our suppliers, communities, everybody. Ultimately, it's about putting people at the center and life at the center, whereas in the past we've put profit at the center. People and communities and other species and the planet and all of them were further down the list and seen as a means to that end. I don't think that mindset is acceptable or even viable anymore.
Daniel Serfaty: Raj, you just made the job of the leader in the case of the business, the job of the CEO, very complicated, much more complex than the one you read in traditional leadership books. Kelly, how do we do that? How do we form these super women and super men to lead the enterprise of tomorrow, if life itself should be the focus?
Kelly Primus: I had written down some notes to this question earlier and thought about some great leaders and those who I admire, and I know that we'll get to those a little bit later, but when I was jotting down my notes about what I thought was important today versus what was in the past, I didn't take it as far as Raj. So Raj, thank you. Every time we have our conversations, I feel like I learn so much more from you and you make me think differently and I really appreciate that. But the one statement that I wrote down was "This is a tough place to be a CEO." These expectations with all of the things that are going on in the world, with all of the challenges, man, I am so glad I'm not a Fortune 500 CEO right now. I would not want that job.
Daniel Serfaty: But you are a CEO.
Kelly Primus: Yes, I am. I am a CEO. I do admit that, but the organization is privately owned. I do not have shareholders that I have to answer to. That makes a big difference. It's not a publicly traded stuff we do. People don't know about it on a daily basis. Nobody's tweeting about us if we make a mistake somewhere. And frankly we, as public as we are with our commentary with the articles we write, all of that, it's not the same. It's not the same level of stress that you see Fortune 500 and pretty much anybody running a public company.
The challenge for them, I think, is really recognizing that you have to make a commitment and you have to stick to it, and you have to be willing to take the heat that you're going to get from activist shareholders. You're going to have to be willing to take the heat that you're going to get from media who may or may not like the positions you take.
But I think, Raj, if Raj's concept could be implemented across all business, then ultimately what you would say as that CEO is that this is what's best for all of us. And if it's best for all of us and we're treating everybody with that in mind, how can I be wrong? How am I not paying attention to the best interests of this business if I do this? So it's kind of like really stepping up in a way that there are so few and far between CEOs who've made that step and I would love to see it, but-
Raj Sisodia: Well, a wonderful illustration of that right now is what Satya Nadella has done at Microsoft. It's an incredible story of taking a company that has been around and has been such an established figure in our world of business and technology and pervading all of our lives, and dramatically transforming that culture, bringing in a new purpose when the old purpose had become obsolete, in a was, when Bill Gates said, "We want to put a computer on every desk, running some kind of Microsoft software." Well, that kind of happened in the developed world.
And there was Steve Ballmer for the next 14 years. There was no purpose. It was only profits and revenues and the culture became even more toxic and the company dramatically underperformed and became increasingly irrelevant. People described it as a threatened kingdom that's kind of on its way out. Nadella comes along and completely rejuvenates the company by focusing on the purpose and creating a new purpose, developing a much better strategy. Those are all essential elements, whether you're a conscience business or not. But then, very importantly, focusing on culture and leadership and bringing in a culture of empathy and a growth mindset, which were the opposite of what the company had before. It was an arrogant, kind of a hyper competitive internal culture with a bunch of experts, with an expert mindset.
Only vulnerability and authenticity and his own leadership and transforming the whole mode of what leadership means, is to model, to coach and to care for people. And if you look at the impact of all of this, first of all, it's astounding to me that 180,000-person company can be changed so significantly in literally a matter of two or three years. There was a fundamental shift that happened in that culture. And then if you look at how the company has done, those 300 billion in market cap when he started in 2014, it reached about 2.7 trillion a few months ago, before this recent downturn.
I mean, he created over $2.5 trillion of incremental market value in less than eight years. That record has never been achieved, but at the same time, employee engagement is in the nineties, the approval of the CEOs is in 99%. They lead in terms of sustainability, in terms of diversity and inclusion, in terms of the future of work. On every dimension and every stakeholder, they're [inaudible 00:10:34] at an extremely high level. So you see the magic of all of these things coming together in a profound way, I think, in that live case study that's going on before us.
Daniel Serfaty: That's a good example. That's a superb example, actually. I wish we had more of those, of doing good by doing well, basically, or doing well by doing good. I'm glad you brought one personality, like Nadella that, as much as I want to give him credit, I think probably the terrain was already primed to have such a leader. In a sense, perhaps he found a fertile terrain to start making those changes, perhaps because of the toxic culture that preexisted his leadership.
Raj Sisodia: Well, yeah it's one way to look at it. I mean, it was a toxic culture and therefore the opportunity to do something. But by the same token, a deeply entrenched toxic culture can be very hard to change. It was not an easy thing. It was him and the chief people officer, Kathleen Logan, who really partnered. And I've seen that increasingly now, that partnership between the CEO and the chief people officer, is the critical one.
Kelly Primus: Absolutely.
Raj Sisodia: Because that's what helps to shape the culture. And the CEO takes ownership of the culture, in partnership with the people organization. It's really astounding, that whole transformation that has happened.
Daniel Serfaty: So Raj shared with us one example of a leader. You say that you thought about it, Kelly. Perhaps you can share maybe another example, different from Nadella at Microsoft, that to you admire, either from the past or from another domain.
Kelly Primus: It was a toss up. That question you had asked, success versus failures of leadership, and I struggled with which one I wanted to use as an example. So I'm going to give you three and I'm going to make it really fast. The first one, success, is Marriott, and his name is escaping me because I didn't write it down, so I'm sorry about that. But he always said, "Put your employees first and they'll take care of the business." And Marriott, when COVID hit and all of the hotels went through all kinds of crazy, he was one of the first ones to step up and say, "This is what we're going to do, this is how we're going to do it, and we're going to take care of our people." And as a result, their business rebounded faster, I think, than pretty much any other hospitality chain post-COVID, because of how he treated his people.
So I believe he follows the same mindset, Raj, that you were talking about. But then there's two other massive failures of organizations and it wasn't necessarily because of current events. They were failures that happened in the past because they were too busy chasing profits and being less concerned with what was happening in their industry. And as a result, they were so afraid of risk, risking their profits, making their shareholders unhappy, that they drove their companies right into the ground. And the very simply examples, Polaroid and Blockbuster.
Polaroid, in 1989, had 42% of their R&D budget in digital imaging. And they were afraid to pull the trigger because they felt that no one would be comfortable not touching the photography. The business tanked. And yet they were the leader in digital imaging, but they were so risk averse to cannibalizing their profits by going and including and incorporating digital that they absolutely drove the company into the ground within just a couple of years.
And then the second one, Blockbuster, we all remember because we are that age generation, of going to Blockbuster to get a video and rent it for the weekend or whatever, and the whole idea of Netflix and no one's going to want to stream and everybody's going to want to do it this way and they all have these machines in their house and blah blah blah. And it was short windows. We're talking three years of their term where the company's doing this and it just nose dives. So chasing profits along, I think there's probably hundreds of examples of organizations that only focused on shareholders and focused on profitability and focused on the almighty dollar and quarterly results as opposed to long term, and ended up in this place.
So Raj, I really think that you've hit it on the head, that as challenging as boards of directors can be and as demanding as shareholders can be for profits and so forth, CEOs have got to help drive change. And I think the boards of public companies have got to step back and say, "Okay, you know what? Maybe isn't only about this small group of people who are making millions off this company."
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you for those examples on both sides of the fence, actually, for both of you. I wonder whether or not great leaders, like in politics when sometime we say great leaders in war time become terrible leaders in peace time, and vice versa. In a sense, it's the same. It's similar for enterprises where CEOs that are in touch with zeitgeist, the mindset of the current moment, succeed much more than those that are still operating in optimizing something that got them successful, like profit, like shareholder wealth.
I remember that the famous book, probably one of the most successful business books ever, In Search of Excellence, which was published, must have been '82, '83, something like that, and became an amazing bestseller, giving a list of all those companies that were doing wonders and somebody did an analysis 15 years later about what happened to those companies and it was not a pretty picture. What got those companies into that very elite list, the leadership not changing, not understanding that the environment has changed, drove those companies into the ground or worse.
So perhaps, as a way to look at this notion of the adaptive leader, the leader that is in touch with not only what is but what will be in their environment and their larger environment, not just their company environment but the larger societal environment, looking back after two and a half years of leadership during the COVID pandemic, have some leadership competencies or dimensions been emerging as being more important than others? From what you have witnessed, what you've read, what you see, did that particular global traumatic event change the way we look at leadership? What is one or two dimension that you think should or have been emphasized?
Raj Sisodia: I would say that agility, the ability to pivot quickly, the ability to set aside plans that we had made before and adapt rapidly. I think that is certainly something that has come to the forefront during the pandemic. Many companies have accomplished within weeks or they thought might normally take years. And so we've shown that ability, and I think that agility is going to serve us well in the future because there'll be only more of these kinds of situations.
I think the other side of it really is genuine empathy and caring for people. As Kelly pointed out, the Marriott example. I mean, all the companies that I have seen during the pandemic that have really emerged, in a way, stronger culturally are the ones that stood by their people. And a lot of companies did, I would have to say. It was quite a widespread story, in that sense. So I think empathy and agility and empathy for all the lives that are impacted by these kinds of things, customers, employees, of course, communities, et cetera. I think those things really mattered a great deal in this time and they will continue to matter.
Daniel Serfaty: Kelly, this is an important question and I'm sure our audience is really curious about. You want to add, to reinforce and to add to what Raj said?
Kelly Primus: I absolutely agree. Empathy, adaptability, flexibility, agility, resilience, all of that critical, critical skill sets that leaders needed to be demonstrating, instantly. What I found really interesting was the amount of changes that companies were able to implement in such a short window of time when people had been talking about flexible working for years. Richard Branson was a big advocate of this years before COVID, but everybody was so risk averse, totally risk averse for doing anything that changed the way we worked with our employees.
And yet when that happened and they didn't have a choice, it was amazing how quickly they were able to implement change. So I absolutely agree, the agility, the ability to lessen your aversion of risk, to allow yourself to make some hard decisions, that was absolutely critical at the very beginning. But what I think is also really important to note from leadership competencies was those leaders that were successful engaged in conversation and ideas and different opinions and perspectives that they wouldn't necessarily have done prior.
"I don't have an answer. We've never faced this before. What do you think? What do you know? What is your idea?" By being open to and expanding who you ask those questions of, to get more ideas, because we needed to move quickly. I think this entire notion of inclusivity by leaders, not just of that circle of trust, those people that you normally would go after, not just your C-suite team, but really digging in and getting perspectives across the organization that they didn't do before, and then weighing those perspectives and saying, "Hey, that's something we're not even thinking about," it was critical to success and I think that it's something that we see continuing because it allowed for rapid response, many organizations actually doing better during insanity.
I used the CEO of Best Buy as a fabulous example because she created the idea of curbside service, from a retail perspective, that didn't exist before COVID, and Best Buys profits during COVID, you would've thought, like most retailers, would've dropped significantly, but because they thought about it a different way and embraced the different opinions and ideas and sought out the thoughts of others, allowed them to pivot and come up with this idea. Brilliant. And her company, it's taken off since then. So I really think inclusive leadership on top of empathy and so forth, but really honing in on and getting the perspectives of others has really made a difference. And I hope it will drive more towards the Microsoft example that you led with earlier.
Daniel Serfaty: It's interesting, this notion of inclusion and inclusivity. People usually misunderstand that by having more diverse demographics into the company, but in that particular case you say you tap onto the opinions and expertise of others. Do you think this is a quality that's going to remain? It's almost like we discovered that we can ask our employees or our suppliers for how to run the business better? Is that something that is going to continue?
Kelly Primus: I certainly hope so. I think that when you can continue to show success from leaders who act this way, I think it's something that will continue to grow as a mindset. When you see activist shareholders saying things like, "We want more diversity and inclusion within our boards. We are looking for more perspectives and different things." Because the models are all there. The research is all there, that says when you do this, you will have better performance. And I think nothing could have been stronger than sort of this microscope we were all under during COVID because everything that possibly could have hit us, hit us all at once and those organizations that were successful demonstrated that inclusivity was important to them.
And so yes, I want to say during times of crisis, that is something that happens. But I think most organizations are recognizing somewhere along the way that if they want to continue that success, they can't ignore it. There can't be this, what they call it a DEI recession. That's something that's being touted out there right now is how much energy, when and if whatever happens economically to business in the next six months, will there be a recession of this?
And I think that that's probably the wrong thing to do. What you really need to do is go all in because all in's going to get you Microsoft and Best Buy and Marriott and all the rest of them. So personally, that's my opinion. I think that inclusive leadership absolutely is here to stay. And if it isn't, then you're going to find yourself on the losing end of business success.
Daniel Serfaty: Yes, that's good. And I wonder the degree to which, if you look at it upside down, in a sense, future employees that are entering, that are changing jobs, are expecting that now. It's part of expectation. I will be asked by the leaders about my opinion about which market should we go after, or what do we do about the product or how do we treat that customer? There is that mutual expectation that it will be fascinating to watch over the next few years whether or not the leaders of tomorrow will be able to sustain that even in times of no crisis.
Kelly Primus: Right. Exactly. And it is a challenging situation. There are entire generations in the workforce who are basically saying, "If I'm not being included and you're not asking for me to be a part of these conversations, I'm going elsewhere." And I jotted down a thought that I read this morning, which also made me have a hiccup. 11 million new jobs were added in July and four million people quit in the United States in July. Those four million made it clear what they value.
I don't know how this is going to end up in a recession. I don't know what any of this is going to look like, but if we keep adding millions and millions of jobs every month and people feel comfortable quitting the job they have because they don't like the environment or the culture of the company, it's toxic, it's not treating me fairly.
Daniel Serfaty: As if we didn't make the job of the leader hard enough, that's that challenge. Raj, what do you think of that? One of the consequences, basically, maybe it's an alignment of the star, COVID, work from home, a new demographics entering the workspace, new expectation, new values, as such that lateral moves, basically, or what people call the great resignation, or the example that Kelly just gave us of people changing jobs at a pace that is faster than it has been so far, to what degree does it change the very nature of how we lead our workforce?
Raj Sisodia: Well, I think it's a very positive trend. If you look at the data over the last 40 years, we've seen that worker pay has been flat. Executive pay has gone up 1,000%. So our system is not creating widespread prosperity, nor is it giving meaning and purpose to people. And when you have neither of those two things, you're kind of stuck in a rut for a while. But this pandemic kind of shook you out of that and say, "My God, what am I doing with this life?" So I think it's high time that companies have to focus on those things. And of course, like all of these things, when you do the right thing and provide people meaning and purpose and dignity and not just a living wage but a thriving wage, ideally, then what you find is that the business benefits are enormous.
So it's not just a net cost that's going to go up. You're actually going to have more engaged people that are more innovative, more creative, more caring. All of those things happen when people feel that sense of belonging, that sense of purpose, that sense of psychological safety, et cetera. I think that is a positive thing. We have to, in a way treat our employees like customers. And interesting, I was just listening to a podcast from somebody at Amazon. Amazon is famous for their customer obsession. The world's most customer-friendly company. It is extraordinary, as a customer, know much convenience they have brought to our lives.
But they recently said that they have identified the new customer group is employees. They are going to treat their employees like customers. And if you think about it, it's really true. I wrote about this in an academic paper years ago, but we should treat our employees like customers, in a sense that they have a choice. There is a value exchange that is happening. They can go elsewhere, same as customers. And by the same token, we should think about treating our customers to some degree like employees, in the sense of having loyal customers stick around for a long time. We invest in them. They serve as our sort of informal ambassadors and sales people, when they're happy customers with word of mouth, et cetera.
So anyway, these boundaries are blurring. Everybody wants to be treated as though they matter and their wellbeing matters. And I think when we do that in companies, there are many positive things that flow from that. The phrase we use is, "Everybody matters and everybody needs to win in the business, the way in which we're running our business." And that means down to the part-time person in the front line, all the way up the line, everybody should be doing when and have an opportunity to evolve and progress through the organization. And that's not the norm, by any means, in most companies. There's a lot of dead end and meaningless work that is still out there.
Daniel Serfaty: It is. And people have been talking about quiet quitting. I've been seeing more and more of those words in the literature over the past couple of months about basically employees not leaving the company but redesigning their job locally while continue to work there doing the-
Raj Sisodia: The smart companies are getting ahead of it. Unilever is a great example, where they're innovating tremendously in terms of the future of work. They are enabling people, First of all, they're offering a purpose workshop to every one of their 160,000 employees.
Daniel Serfaty: What is that?
Raj Sisodia: A workshop to discover your own unique purpose and your core values. And then, once they come out of that workshop, they're helping those employees align what they do and their own personal purpose with the company's purpose and re-craft their work to some extent. And you're seeing the data coming out of the employees who have been through that program, I think 60,000 have gone through that workshop already. Their numbers in terms of their innovation, their productivity, their loyalty, turnover going down, et cetera, all of those things are tremendous. Unilever is also enabling people to create a portfolio of work. So you can say, I'll spend 50% of my time in the job and then the rest of the time I'll be like a gig employee. I'll do 20% over here. Because I also enjoy, I don't want to be an accountant 40 hours a week. I'll do that for 20 hours but then I also want to do these other kinds of things which I enjoy and I think I'm good at.
So they're enabling all of that at scale, while committing to a living wage. They've been doing a living wage for the last eight years, seven, eight years worldwide in 180 countries. And now they're requiring all of their suppliers to do that by 2030 and they're helping them get there. So that's the kind of forward looking, human centered approach that these kinds of companies are taking that really makes a difference, not only financially, all these companies out perform their industries, but also finding, even more importantly, I think in terms of the wellbeing of people.
Daniel Serfaty: I wonder, a lot of the examples we just heard about, both from you, Raj, and Kelly, are large companies and are companies 150,000 employees. I wonder the degree to which most people don't work in those companies. Most people work in small to medium-size businesses. And I wonder the degree to which those lessons of leadership can be applied for small businesses, whether they are in the advanced technology area or just regular service businesses. Are those lessons applicable on a smaller scale?
Raj Sisodia: Absolutely. Average, here in the organization, 25 stories. Many of them are very small companies. So we have small and we have mid-size, and then we have the large examples like I gave you. So mid-size would be a company like FIFCO in Costa Rica, which produces soft drinks and beer and has some hotels. They have undergone a dramatic transformation on every dimension of the business under their CEO Ramón Mendiola, and he came in 2002, so it's been about 20 years. So the company has grown about tenfold. They have become the most admired company in Costa Rica. They are the most environmentally sustainable. They have the world's first carbon positive, or rather water positive beer. They're moving towards carbon positive and solid waste on all of those dimensions. But not only are they doing less harm, they're actually doing good. They're very purposeful. They have some of the highest levels of employee engagement.
They have reduced drunk driving in the country. They have reduced obesity by cutting sugar 50% in their soft drinks. So they've done all of these things. Again, purpose, taking care of all stakeholders, aligning with society, changing the definition of leadership and creating a compelling culture. In terms of small companies, one of the companies I wrote about is Ram Construction, which is a small construction company in Bellingham, Washington, started by two guys who were working in construction and there's a very kind of brutal culture that exists within construction, people are treated very roughly and there's no caring, et cetera, and they decided to quit and start their own construction company. The only two criteria in that company, two values, kindness and safety. We are to keep each other safe and you have to treat each other with kindness. And if you don't, then that will get you fired.
Other mistakes will not get you fired, but not being kind will. And it's a small company, but now they're winning so many contracts from the City of Bellingham, et cetera. Everybody wants to come and work for these guys and not for the traditional. Because people are people, regardless of whether you're in a large company or small company. And regardless of even where you are geographically in the world, these are universal human desires and aspirations. And if we can meet that, it will make a difference, because ultimately it is people who make a difference in any business.
Daniel Serfaty: Kelly, do you agree? I am interested. I mean, you advise leaders of all kind of companies, small and large, and a lot of the insight you provided over the past hour regarding those new qualities of the leaders. Do leaders of small enterprises, can they afford basically to change in those directions, or can they afford not to?
Kelly Primus: They can't afford not to. They cannot afford not to. Some of the things that larger companies or mid-range and larger companies are attempting to do, if they aren't Microsoft, if they haven't created that culture that engages employees, they're using all of the tactical things. They're looking at raising salaries, they're looking at adding more time off, which I always laugh at because no one ever gets to take it. All of these things, all of these benefits that they keep saying are the things that are going to hold on to and retain their employees.
Okay, living wages, completely understand. But for most organizations, there is a point at which you can no longer add more things, and you have to be that empathetic leader. You have to attach to your culture, the values that you bring, and you have to start learning how to make it so people want to work with you, create the cultures that you want. Because ultimately, as a small or medium business owner, public or private, you aren't going to be able to do what the Googles and the Facebooks and the Microsofts are able to do, from an employee compensation package. You just can't do it.
So then the question becomes, if you value the people that you have and you want to keep them, what are you going to do differently? And really the only thing you can do is create a culture that makes them want to work there. And to have stated values that, as this company in Costa Rica or the one that Raj mentioned out in Washington said, there are only two things that are important here: treat everybody with kindness and keep everybody safe. That's what they've built. Now, people have become more open to valuing that, post-COVID. And I think that that, to me, means that small and medium businesses have actually a better opportunity than some of the really large ones because, where Microsoft may have been able to change their culture rapidly for something of that size, most of the really large companies aren't getting there.
And so places people can go and feel welcome and included need to have the cultures that are important to them. So I think that small and medium businesses have a delightful opportunity right now to bring on some really amazing people because of what they can do differently, more rapidly, than some of the larger organizations who can't get out of their own way. It's going to take them a really long time, unless they have a CEO like Microsoft does.
Raj Sisodia: And I think that that's a key point because, if you try to change the culture in an environment where the CEO has a persona and a way of being that is the opposite of that culture that they're saying we should have, it's not going to work. So the macrocosm is a reflection of the microcosm and the CEO has to be a living embodiment of what we're talking about. When those two are not in harmony, it just feels like a tactical thing that you're doing and it's not authentic and people-
Kelly Primus: Oh, totally.
Raj Sisodia: When it's coming from your very being, this is who you are, everybody can see that. Two things happen. When Bill Gates was CEO, everybody wanted to be a mini Bill. He would yell and scream and say, "Oh, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard." But down the chain, everybody would be saying that to other people. "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard." That becomes a culture. But when you see Satya Nadella acting with kindness and vulnerability and empathy and openness and all of that, that kind of became the way that company started operating in many ways, too. So there has to be alignment between those two things.
Kelly Primus: You're absolutely right, Raj, and I will share, I just published another article with Forbes. It was about all of the pledges that CEOs of major organizations made during the summer of 2020, about all of the things that they wanted to do with regard to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and how most of those organizations have done zero changes within them. Because they made the statement because they were told that was the optical thing to do, and then they either tossed it over to HR to deal with or didn't toss it to anybody and just said, "No, we as an organization, we're going to do this." It's so inauthentic. And it's absolutely going to be their downfall. I absolutely agree.
If you can't get the leaders of the large organizations who are making these random statements about how much they care and they do absolutely nothing to change that, then how inauthentic is that? And so when you look at transparency and the willingness to take a position and then act on it. So there's sort of like three pieces in there. You've got to be willing to open your mouth and say what you believe, then you have got to take action on it and then you'll get the results. But if you don't and you make some statement that's this CEO persona, nobody's going to believe you.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you so much, both of you, for these extremely valuable insights. And I think this notion of authenticity really encapsulates quite a bit of what we've seen during the past three years or two and a half years. The premium on authenticity that allows you not only to know yourself as a leader, to express yourself as a leader, to make promises or commitments, but also to execute that. Anything short of that, everybody can see through it and you suffer the results.
So I'm going to ask you, as a way to conclude, for one minute each, a piece of advice. There are people in our audience. Imagine a young professional, maybe a 25-year-old computer scientist, and she is listening to us and say, "One day I want to become a leader," or a young accountant who himself would like to become the head of his firm one day. What is your one-minute advice? And I am sorry to limit that to one minute because I know you have much more that you will give to that person, either one of those two people, so that they can prepare themselves to be one day the leader of the kind that you have described over the past hour. One minute each.
Raj Sisodia: I can start if you like. I think the first question I would ask myself is, why do I aspire to be a leader? Is it because of the perks and the power that goes along with leadership, in our mind? Or is it because I want to serve at a higher level, I want to have a positive impact on the lives of other people? A leader who looks at other people as a way of achieving personal goals is not a leader; that's a tyrant. A true leader is there to take people to a better place. So understand why you want to be a leader and then recognize that, in order to be that leader, you have to actually go within, you have to look within yourself and understand who you are, so self-awareness, cultivating your emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, understanding meaning and purpose in your life and systems intelligence, how everything works together, how everything is part of us interconnected, interdependent system is very critical.
And so then you have to, say, awaken yourself beyond that journey. Awakening to your purpose to becoming whole, integrating the masculine and feminine sides that all of us have and healing yourself. If you are carrying wounds and traumas, and every one of us is, and if you don't actually try to identify those and work on those and heal those, you will inflict suffering on the people you lead. But the more you heal yourself, the more you will be a positive, loving, healing influence on the lives of the people you lead.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you, Raj. Kelly?
Kelly Primus: I'm not sure I can follow that up with anything that would be nearly as impressive, so thank you for that. I would take just one small thought along the way. Watch the leaders in the organizations that you admire and watch those that you do not, and recognize the actions that they're taking, the behaviors that they have, the decisions that they make for those that you admire and figure out how to make sure you are thinking of them in every decision that you make. Because we've all had crappy bosses through our career. There's always been at least one or two bosses that we are like, I never want to be like that person. Both will frame who you become, but try to emulate those that you admire the most for how they treat others.
Daniel Serfaty: Kelly Primus, Raj Sisodia, thank you so much for those two sessions that were so illuminating. I learned a lot personally from it, and I'm a student of leadership. You gave me a lot of insight and ideas, and I'm sure it is the same for our audience. I hope to see you maybe in a couple of years to revise again our insight into what makes great leaders. Thank you again and we'll see you soon.
Kelly Primus: Thank you so much, Raj.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you [inaudible 00:43:32].
Kelly Primus: Thank you, Daniel, for inviting me.
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you for listening to MINDWORKS. This is Daniel Serfaty. Please join me again for the next episode. We welcome your comments and feedback as well as your suggestions for future topics and guests. We love to hear from you. You can tweet us at MINDWORKS podcast or email us at mindworkspodcast@gmail.com. MINDWORKS is a production of Aptima Incorporated. My executive producer is Ms. Deborah McNeely, and my audio editor is Ms. Lindsay Holland. To learn more and to find links mentioned in this episode, please visit aptima.com/mindworks. Thank you.