Marvin Boakye, CHRO, Cummins

Marvin Boakye is the Chief Human Resources Officer of Cummins, where he oversees all aspects of recruitment, people operations, learning and development, culture, and the employee experience.

Cummins is a manufacturer and distributor of engines, power sources, and components for vehicles and industrial use. The firm has nearly 75,000 employees across 190 countries, and ranks #146 in the Fortune 500 with 2023 sales of $34 billion. It consistently outperforms industry peers on returns on investment capital. 

Cummins’ core values include integrity, diversity and inclusion, caring, and teamwork. Many companies have similar official values. The difference is that Cummins lives up to them, with employees on Glassdoor speaking more significantly more favorably about these topics than industry peers: up to four standard deviations more favorably. Of more than 500 companies in our large study of culture in 2020, Cummins ranked number one for diversity and inclusion, and has maintained its strength in that area since then, boasting similarly impressive scores for collaboration, integrity, and employee support, among many other dimensions of culture. 

In this episode, Marvin discusses how Cummins was able to build a culture that lives up to its core values so successfully and works well for both employees and shareholders. 

Link to Cummins 2024 Human Capital Management Report

Transcript

1. Hello, I'm Don. I'm a professor of the practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and cofounder of Culturex. I'm delighted to be joined today by my cofounder, Charlie for a culture champions webinar that we have been looking forward to for literally years. And our guest today is Marvin Boachi, who's the chief human resources officer of Cummins. Now, we're going to tell you a little bit more about Cummins for those who aren't familiar with the company, super interesting company and why we're so passionate about learning, learning more about what Marvin has done there and about Cummins. But just to orient you, Marvin in his role is basically responsible for all things people, culture, recruitment, learning and development, employee experience. So overseeing kind of all the interesting elements that influence culture in Cummins. And again, we'll talk a little bit about why we're so excited about Cummins in a bit. And before joining Cummins immediate job, before he had joining Cummins, Marvin was the chief people and diversity officer at Papa Johns, where he led, as he's doing at Cummins, a transformation. And by the end of the story, Papa Johns was listed by Forbes as a best employer for diversity. So first off, Marvin, welcome and thank you so much for joining us.
2. Marvin Boakye
   Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
3. Robert Carlyle (He/Him/His)
   Terrific.
4. Don Sull
   So let me just give folks a little bit of introduction to Cummins. So, Charlie, if we go to the next slide. Terrific. So Cummins is just over 100 years old, industrial company founded in Columbus, Indiana. And they basically invented the diesel engine and for a century were best known for the diesel engine. Today they've diversified in a couple of dimensions. So the first dimension is now they're not just in automotive applications, they're in data centers and agriculture and construction, lots of different applications. It's not just diesel engines anymore. It's not just engines in general anymore. There are other components that are related, drivetrain and so forth in automotives. And then the third dimension is really exciting, and that we'll talk about some more, is they've moved beyond diesel. So of course, diesel still is part of their portfolio to alternative energy sources. So today, very diversified in terms of product, in terms of application, and in terms of energy source. A really big company in top 150 on the Fortune 500. And last year booked sales of over $30 billion. So, Charlie, if we could go to the next slide, truly global workforce. So nearly 75,000 employees spread out all over the world. So the sun never sets on Marvin's empire. There's always someone, I'm sure, calling him all time zones, all times of day and night. And Cummins also done a really good job of. We'll talk about the cultural side and how well it works for employees, but also from an investor perspective. So if we look at return on invested capital, which is a measure that we often use in finance to kind of gauge how well a company is doing in returning cash on its investments. So it's basically for every dollar you put in, how much return are you providing to investors? And if we compare Cummins over a one year period, at a three year period, or a five year period, their return on invested capital is better than their industry peers. So it's not just that the culture is working for employees, the culture is working for investors as well. So with that, I'll turn it over to Charlie to give a little sense of how and why we got so excited about Cummins.
5. Charlie Sull
   Thanks, Don. So we've known that Cummins was a remarkable culture for a while now. A couple of years ago, we did a very large study of about 1.3 million Glassdoor views, looking at the 600 or so large employers in America. And from those 600 or so employers, we took the top three percentile of cultures based on both how employees speak about the employee experience, so cultural topics like respect and integrity, and also how employees speak about what we call direct value creation. So things like innovation and agility. And Cummins is in very good company. It was one of these 21 culture champions that we selected, so they've been on our radar for a while. But recently, in preparation for this webinar, Don and I have had the good fortune of looking into this culture more closely. And whenever we research a culture, one of the first things we do is look at what their core values are. They're officially espoused values. And in Cummins' case, these are integrity, diversity and inclusion, caring, excellence, and teamwork. So these are great. It's great to aspire to this. However, we have to say, whenever we look at any core value statement, it doesn't matter what company it's from. We are a little bit skeptical because we did a study of nearly 700 of the largest companies in the world looking at which core values they aspire to and also how the culture lived in the eyes of employees based on what employees say on the internet. And the punchline is we found zero correlation between whether a company has a core value like diversity and inclusion, integrity or teamwork, and whether employees actually say it's going well. So we were a little bit skeptical. But then again, we also knew that Cummins had a remarkable culture. So one of the second things we did when we were researching this culture is we looked at how employees speak about Cummins on the internet. So we looked at one of the internet's largest employee review websites and we took Cummins compared to a benchmark sample of industrial sector companies. And when you do this exercise it's actually a pretty large sample size. So for this we're looking at over 2000 Cummins employees, over 1000 Dow employees, over 1300 Emerson employees, basically tens of thousands of employees in the industrial sector over the past year or two. And you can see how employees speak about any topic. So in this case we're looking at diversity which is one of Commons core values. And the horizontal axis here is the percentage of employees who mentioned diversity in the free text of their employee review on this large internet platform that does employee reviews. And the vertical axis is when employees mentioned diversity, what percentage of mentions are favorable? Okay, so you can see in this industrial sector maybe diversity isn't going too well, at least according to how employees speak about it. So when employees speak about diversity in this sector, they're only saying it's going well about 30% of the time and about 70% of the time they're saying it's not going well. Okay. And then there are a couple of outliers like Bosch, Snyder Electric, Dow, Stanley, Black and Decker who when they speak about diversity they say it's going significantly better. So they say it's going well about 60% of the time. And then you have one and only one outlier among outliers which is Cummins which looks like it's from another dataset entirely. So a Cummins, when employees speak about diversity, they're speaking about it positively, more than 80% of the time. And they're also about three times as likely to speak about diversity as the sector wide average. So Cummins according to employees on the internet is truly walking the talk when it comes to diversity. And you can see how it's going for some of its other core values. We can look at, well we can look at a lot of topics but let's look at integrity, see how employees speak about that. Do employees say that Cummins is a high integrity company? Yes they do. So again, across this sector, when employees speak about integrity, they speak about it positively about 20% of the time. So that's, that's maybe another issue. But in any case, Cummins really bucks that trend and they're about three times as likely to speak positively about integrity as, as the sector wide average. So it really walks the talk there and then we can look at care about employees. This is kind of an interesting one. So on the internet, employees pretty often speak about just basically, does their company care about them or not? And when they broach this topic again in this industry, they're saying their company cares about them about 33% of the time, and they're saying their company does not care about them about 67% of the time. So that's the sector wide norm. But once again, Cummins completely bucks this trend. And in more than 70% of the cases, when employees speak about this topic, employees at Cummins are saying that Cummins does care about them, and that's a caring environment, and we can do this for other topics. We've looked into a lot of Cummins' cultural dimensions, and the punchline is, it really lives up to its core values, and it has a truly remarkable culture. Um, so, uh, Marvin, thank you so much for taking the time to, to speak to us. We're so excited to learn more about this culture, and congratulations on your cultural success. I guess our first question is, what is the secret to walking the talk? What is the secret not to just having these, these aspirational values that sound good, but actually living up to them in practice?
6. Marvin Boakye
   Charlie, thanks so much for that. I would say to you, look, I. We get asked that question, and we talk a lot about that, trying to figure out the secret sauce. I still think we're putting some more ingredients into it, is what I would start by saying, because this is an never ending journey for us. But there's a few things that I would say have been fundamental to the approach that we have decided to take. We have a very long time tenured board member who said to me, every company has a culture, whether they know it or not. Very, very few companies have an intentional culture. And it really made me stop to think about the idea of what you are doing. Are you doing it with intentionality? That was the first thing that's fundamental to how we think about our culture, making it intentional. The second thing that's important is how you see culture in relation to your work. Is it something else to what you do? And in a Cummins, we have a strong belief that our culture is a strategic differentiator to our business strategy. And so just thinking about that for a second, we think very clearly that we have to achieve these goals like many organizations do. But we believe the differentiator is, by the way, we demonstrate our culture that enables us to do that. And then third, and you brought that up when you talked about our work, is that if we believe that, what are the components of our culture? And for us, our components include our mission, our vision, our values and our leadership behaviors and we try to keep it as simple as that. But those are the pieces that are all there. So if you believe one, that it's intentional. Second, you believe that it has to be a strategic differentiator to how you operate your business. You're clear about what are the components of your culture. It enables us to make this work a priority. And so our work on core values, as you've asked, gets embedded in so many of the things that we do. Our work on our leadership behaviors gets embedded in a lot of the work, whether it is our onboarding activities. And I can speak as a person who, I'm one of the newest executive team members. Having come into the organization like you, I always have a healthy sense of skepticism because my experience has told me normally when I'm coming in, it's because we want to try something different. We're looking to transform something in its work. So I had that healthy sense of skepticism. And my first day at orientation, through the fourth day, we were spending our time talking about the aspects of our culture, what makes us unique, what makes us different. And I remember that so well because it not just rang there, but then it rang into my first meeting with the Cummins leadership team. And I remember that so well because in our first day, our CEO's there and they're saying, hey, Marvin, welcome to the team. Just Marvin, we want you to know how we start our meetings. A very specific way. We go through a process and people talk about what's going on for themselves and they talk about various aspects of that and they're very emotive. And I remember the first leader doing there and I said, that's a lot of information to share. The second leader did the same. By the time the fifth leader was talking, I was asking myself, am I getting punked? Because there's just, this is really deep what we're talking about. And then they got to me and I'm talking, I share my stuff and I say, you know, I'm feeling pretty good to be here. And they said, Marv, that was a very good first attempt. But just to let you know, good is, is not a feeling for us. So we'd love for you to share with us what's going on for you. And I tell you this because when you start with that, how you think as a culture, so if you believe that caring is important, if you believe that integrity is important, starting with the leadership and how they talk through this, coaching each other through those experiences feeds its way through the rest of the organization. And so from the initial day of onboarding to how we do our training work, we are constantly and intentionally taking aspects of our culture and embedding them into the way we behave. And finally, we recognize people when they demonstrate parts of our values. And so when we see people demonstrating opportunities to drive caring, when we see people demonstrating opportunities to drive excellence or teamwork, or diversity and inclusion, we make sure that we note that. We make sure that we speak about it and recognize it.
7. Don Sull
   That's great. I like if we could just dig a little bit deeper into this, Marvin, because I think in a lot of organizations, even if there is a recognition that they would like to have an intentional culture, as you're saying, leaders are struggling to figure out what are the levers they can pull to kind of shape the culture in the way they'd like to. And so maybe we can talk a little bit about the leadership training, because, you know, Cummins has a reputation, I'm thinking all the way back to when I was, eons ago, when I was in business school, Cummins has a reputation for being a place where you could really go to get to be trained to be a great leader, and that has persisted through today. So maybe you could help us understand some of the concrete practices, maybe ones that are different from what you've seen in past organizations you've led. And the thing I'm particularly interested in is how you develop not only the skill side of leadership, but the side of leadership that leads to those leaders throughout the organizations shaping the culture in a way that you'd want it to be shaped for an employee base of 75,000 people.
8. Marvin Boakye
   Yes. Yeah, it's a great question. And again, speaking as a person's had a chance to see this in multiple organizations, I continue to say to people, I believe the work that we are doing here is unique and a differentiator. And there's a few reasons why. One is, first of all, as you mentioned, it goes back quite a ways. You have to take yourself back into the sixties and others where there's very, very purposeful aspects toward the kind of culture that wanted to be set forward. Jay Irwin Miller, one of the early CEO's, longtime CEO of the organization, had done a tremendous amount of the work in setting a culture, setting a tone, setting deliberateness, setting a very clear perspective around how to address inequity, both within the company and around the United States and around the world. And that really shaped how the company continued to go. But I would also say that as successive leaders have come in they've all had different approaches to how they think about this work, of making it deliberate. And I give a lot of credit to some of the leaders of the organization. The past CEO had taken an approach where he had brought in, really wanted to rethink the role that he could play, what it meant to him in this work, and that played a tremendous role for us. Partnered with a group, Manfredo Curtis and Associates, on how to create leaders that were more authentic, transparent, and vulnerable. And, you know, we kind of call it creating a spectrum of having self aware, authentic leaders. You know, being able to speak to your teams from a level of vulnerability is a very difficult skill for leaders to do. Most leaders have been taught the methods of, you do not show vulnerability. Right. You do not show when you don't know. You do not show when you are scared. You do not show when there are challenges. Learning to speak and be self aware of that, learning to be authentic, learning that. To say that when I talk about how we take care of our employees, it's not just something we put on paper, but we actually demonstrate it through actions. A lot of our development efforts through that partnership have created various development paths that teams have gone through, and they kind of graduate to different levels, from learning how to become self aware to learning how to think about what that self awareness means to how they work with other, with team members throughout the organization. And there's a significant amount of time and input that is put into making that happen. You know, we talk as an organization, we have a high expectation that when you are a leader, a significant amount of your time is spent on the development of your teams, whether that is setting clear targets, clear performance expectation to what you do to create an environment that enables people to be successful. There is a significant effort of time. And I remember this because in my past lives, when business changes, yes, many people say that, but as business gets difficult or challenging, the first thing to go is that commitment, because we got to focus on the results. And there's been a commitment here, you know, with, with our current CEO, Jen Rumsey, that has said, this is. This is the work team. Let's make that very clear. And so if you don't have time to do this, then you're not doing the work that is important to being a successful and differentiated company. So I think, Don, what I would say is those aspects of, one, it's a clear philosophy. Second, it's a clear expectation that leaders spend time working on this. Third, it is not an add on, it is the work. And fourth, making sure that the clarity starts with, you need to be self aware, you need to be authentic, you need to be transparent, you need to learn how to be vulnerable as an effective way of leading in the organization. I think. I believe it's a clear differentiator.
9. Don Sull
   Well, that's great. I love that. One of the things that's so interesting is you're an industrial company. I just say this because I've worked with a lot of industrial companies. What I almost hear you describing is the white belt and yellow belt and brown belt. But instead of being applied to TQM and very engineering focused processes and operational processes, it's around having that same discipline in training for self awareness and authenticity and transparency, which is really. It's such a neat kind of application of the engineering mindset to the kind of traditionally viewed as hard skills, to these crucial of soft skills.
10. Marvin Boakye
    Can I just add to that for just a moment? It's such a great analogy that you just put on there, because in a way, I don't know, we purposely came to that, but that is exactly what we think about it. We are essentially a very analytical, very engineering based company. The majority of our employee population are engineers at various levels of the company. And so talking about these things is not normal, just to be clear. Right. That's. That's not what you go about in your. In your day to day, and you're having to re-teach a paradigm and an approach. What's been helpful for us is that we, like many organizations, we created the Cummins operating system. It was a six sigma focus that was tremendous rigor and work that was put in there. It gained a. Gained hold. And for people new to get to the next level, there were things you had to do to be successful. That very same mindset is something that is embedded within our organization. Starting first with, but in this case, started with the senior leadership team, and then it worked its way down through the organization because a strong belief was that if they could see it within them, how can you expect our people to do the same thing?
11. Don Sull
    Yeah, no, it's great. And I live at MIT, and so I know that these kinds of issues, centrally, though they are to leadership, are not the kinds of things that engineers typically view as part of their job. Even when they're managing other engineers, they view it as a technical task or things that we're doing as good of a job teaching as we could be. So kudos to Cummins for doing that. I'd like to just a couple of quick follow on questions on this, because I think this is so intriguing. One is, I wonder how you measure, because that's so central to the six sigma approach. So how are you measuring, especially as folks are going from start starting with themselves, which I also love that element. You have to have the self awareness personally before you can start to think about how your self awareness allows you to develop the team more effectively. So how do you measure one, and then how do you think about selection versus training? Because one of the things we often hear is you can't teach a donkey to fly. There are some people, a lot of people, you just can't. They don't have the right value. Try to select on values. We can't train people on these, you know, these attributes. So I'd love to hear how you, how you think about measurement and how you think about the trainability of people. How much is selection versus how much is helping them to grow.
    56. Marvin Boakye
    That's two very good questions. And so I'll try to answer them in the best way I can. You know, we, we as an organization do have survey based processes that we have put in place and implemented, like many other organizations do. We run that every two years within our time and pulse survey and are about to pulse survey in between one of them for this year. And those really focus on engagement. But there's also very clear questions around how employees view us and view our ability to demonstrate leadership and demonstrate these competencies, these values that are important to us. Like you've shown within your data as well, too, we tend to show very positively, we tend to show fairly high versus industry comparators in that space. So that's one thing, but at an individual level. It's funny when you think about measurement. Measurement can also come through how people receive feedback. We have a very strong preference toward the continual cycle of feedback that takes place. And that cycle of feedback, again, in partnership with Matt Fredle Curtis and Associates, I give them a lot of credit because, because even how we do it, how we have the conversation around the, around the, what we saw, how it made us feel, you know, what we'd like to see differently is highly encouraged in both constructive, positive, constructive, negative feedback. And I think that acceptance to know you're going to get it right and acceptance to know it's going to be consistently coming, I think creates a culture of openness. So that's one thing that I would put in place. The other thing I would say too, as well, too, is when you have a culture like this, you want to give people the ability to self select out. And I think that's an important thing too. This kind of culture is not for everyone. And I try to tell people that again, as a person coming to the organization, when I first experienced it, I had to step back in my own paradigms, and I believe I do the stuff pretty well, how to step back within my own paradigms around. I'm going to have to be successful here to gain credibility, go into my own understanding, which might bring up things that I'm not always wanting to talk about within myself. And so I had to get comfortable with how to learn to have those conversations about being authentic and being vulnerable in small groups and large groups when times are great and not going as well, to be able to share that. We do give people the ability to do it. So if someone is in one of our development sessions and says, you know what, this has really been helpful, I've realized, I don't know if this is for me, that is also a success for us here. Does that make sense?
    57. Don Sull
    Yeah, perfect sense. And it's so interesting. The last session we had was with Katie Burke, who's the chief, was at that time chief people officer of HubSpot. And it kind of eerily the similarities in the discussions. But one of the points that she made was also around the critical role of leaders, receiving feedback in terms of their development, their ability to lead, but also creating a broader culture of transparency and acceptance, that candid conversations and candid feedback is the norm. It's just so interesting to. And she talked about the deliberate nature of the culture and so forth. But, yeah, really interesting kind of link back to that session.
    58. Marvin Boakye
    Great. I think we are very aligned in that kind of thinking. And I think it goes into all different places as well too. Like a big part of our work is around the efforts we're doing to try to create a more diverse, equitable and inclusive organization. And again, I came in and inherited part of this work here, but it's something that I think the team has done a really strong job and continues to figure out how to do in our journey. And it's funny, when you look at our data, if you think about the industry, I don't know how many comparators we have to our industry. I believe it's about 42.8% of our, of our senior leadership team are women. About 40% of our officers and executives, or are women. About 30% of our US leadership team are black or Latino. And I've had a chance to do this in many organizations. Not everyone shows their data, but I'll tell you, I think that's unique. And we believe the reason why we made that happen is because we believe that there is a strategic, competitive differentiator for us in this space. And not only do we believe it, but our customers know that as well too. They see that within our space. I was having a chance to. We were joking about this. We were looking at some pictures from 20 years ago of what the leadership team looked like and the leadership team looks like today. And it's so interesting watching in the pictures that 120 years ago we remember everyone dressed exactly the same. I think navy blue was the way you had to go, right, with the. With the black tie and white shirt. It was kind of the thing you had to do. Everyone had similar haircuts. There was one woman on the leadership team and one non-white leader that was on the leadership team. And we looked at it from there to here and we noted that at that time we were $6 billion in revenue and we've grown that to 30 plus billion dollars in revenue. And we believe a big part of that is as we've continued to bring more diverse townto our space, we've brought more views, we brought more innovation, we brought alternatives that people haven't thought about, that have changed our business. It is also shouldn't be missed, the fact that you talked about our focus. Our focus has continued to expand from just the diesel engine to many other aspects. And a big part of that is who's at the table that is pushing these forces of business. So it has become a very clear that the case for why we do this is very clear. And when you see us in our organization, we are very clear in saying that if you look at where we are in the journey, we believe we're very early in that journey because as we continue to go forward, we continue to learn what we're missing, what else we need to be able to do better, how we need to be more and more inclusive within our area in our work to make sure we have equitable solutions for all.
    59. Don Sull
    Yeah, it's such an important issue in general. But again, coming back to the industry you find yourself in, because in many industries it financials services, engineering writ large, what we always hear is, look, we just can't make, we can't move the needle in our industry. The applicant pool isn't there. And one of the things that's so interesting about Cummins is that can't come. In that case, Cummins couldn't be doing what Cummins is doing. So one thing that's, I think, so helpful about people getting to know the Cummins story is just to recognize, hey, this is possible. And really the excuse that look in our industry, it's just too hard.
    60. Marvin Boakye
    I think it is both possible. But also, again, this is the thing that I get to do that I get so much passionate about here. But there are some that do it because it's the right thing to do, which is an important part of our work. And there's some that do it because there's a competitive advantage. We truly believe that this is a competitive differentiator for us. And so when you have that belief, it drives where you put your focus and your priorities on, and we've seen that translate within our results. And so I think you have to make a decision, is this a competitive differentiator? And if it is, then there's only one way to go with it. Right?
    61. Don Sull
    Yeah. And it does. And again, you mentioned J. Erwin Miller, but, you know, he, my sense of him was always, he was someone who believed it was the right thing to do. And he firmly believed that if you didn't bring diversity to the workforce and make sure that you harness that diversity, you were losing voices that were going to help you to win in the marketplace as you grew global, as, as you, you diversified your product portfolio.
    62. Marvin Boakye
    Yeah, yeah. And the other thing, the answer is exactly right. And it's helped us also to become a very strong attractor of great talent and diverse talent. It has been a very big piece. People know it. In fact, it's very clear of some of the people we talk to. We're about to put up our latest human capital report. We hear candidates tell us, I read your report and that's why I decided to come talk to you. Right. I mean, that's significant. That's really significant that people are making those decisions. We are not shy and saying we want our unfair share of the market, of diverse talent, of great, great talent. And so that's an important part of the story. We want to attract great talent, that want to be part of this type of culture. You know, like many midwest based companies, we are very humble about our bringing. We're very. About our upbringing. We're very humble about the work that I do. Again, I have a perspective. I'd love to share this with more people because I truly believe this is a wonderful and unique story that I think more people would love to hear about.
    63. Charlie Sull
    So, Marvin, maybe turning to another aspect of attracting the best talent, can we maybe talk about Cummins remote work story for a little bit? It seems like nearly half of jobs at Cummins are remote or hybrid. How did you manage some of the challenges other organizations have faced in shifting to remote and hybrid work? What challenges have you encountered in maintaining a strong culture with this kind of workforce? And what have you found works well for maintaining this strong culture in the hybrid world?
    64. Marvin Boakye
    Charlie? I think the thing that I would say is, I'll start by saying, I still don't know if we have that answer. I mean, like every peer that I talk to in this space here, we continue to evolve in how we look at this work. Here's some things that we've learned. We learned pre-COVID. If you had a strong culture, it definitely helped you manage through the cycles and the challenges with COVID versus if you did not have a strong, purposeful culture. But even with that, that took you so far right within, within the work you did. We still believe very strongly that our culture really benefits and thrives when people are spending time together. And we continue to see that because the work that happens both formally and informally, particularly informally, is incredibly strong, whether it is direct work or just people experiencing the culture the way we intend intended it to be in place. And so we've continued to find purposeful ways for people to come together, whether they are remote or hybrid, to be able to experience that culture. The remote and hybrid work has been a competitive opportunity in that it's allowed us to get access to more great talent in places, in many different places. Part of how we've been trying to address that is, even if they're in different places, we've tried to find hubs where we can keep locations where people can have proximity to each other. We recently opened in the United States a hub, an additional hub in Atlanta with that very purpose, to be able to attract talent. So even if they might be remote or hybrid, they still have a place to be able to come to from various backgrounds, and we're trying to expand that view across the globe, the concept of thinking about global hubs. So one of the biggest challenges that we face from our employees is that perception that if I want to continue to grow, I have to come to Indiana. And many companies are challenged with that and some of the roles, yes, that is the case. But we also have been trying to push a perspective that we can have hubs in places where you can be a global leader and still be based at. You can still influence our cultures successfully. And so that's something that we've been pushing more in our efforts. We have said, because our culture is so important to us, there are little things that we try to do to drive that inclusiveness with our remote and hybrid staff. So one of the examples is just even how we have meetings, and it was something that I found really interesting because I hadn't seen it with too many other groups. When we have global meetings, and let's say the majority of the group is one off and within one location in person, and let's say there's four other people in different parts of the world, even though the global group is in one location, we ask all the leaders to put up their laptops and put up their screens as well so that people can still interact with the screen and with the people on the other side, as well as interact with their peers and folks around them. And even at the end of a lot of these meetings, you know what? We will give feedback. How did that work? What was. Well, we asked our folks, was there anything that was missing that we could have done better within those spaces here and continually improving on that experience so that people feel included in their meetings when they're not in person with us. So that's just one example that we have found that has had some value.
    65. Don Sull
    Great. So I feel like we're hogging Marvin, which is unfair to our guests. So why don't we open it up and roundtable members, maybe you could raise your hand, and then we'll select you. You can ask Marvin whatever you'd like to ask Marvin. Charlie, are you able to see everybody? All right, Christina.
    66. Robin Shanahan
    Okay. That was fascinating. I have so many notes that I know I will read again and again and again. My question is specific to selection, but from the perspective of recruitment. So I understand diverse talent being drawn to you. I love the disclosure and the transparency. We have a very sticky and unique and intentional culture as well. So I'm really curious to hear, how do you root out? How do you look for candidates that you think will thrive in your culture? And thank you for the bonus of the self selection. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that, but I won't hog too much time. But how do you recruit for it?
    67. Marvin Boakye
    Yeah, I tell you, I wish I could tell you there was just one particular piece of this that takes place, but there's a few different pieces. Like many groups, we try to make sure that people meet with panels as well as with individuals. We have a preference that as we get to the final selections, people get a chance to come and experience our culture by coming in person. We had some challenges initially when we were not hiring in that perspective, and so they didn't while they knew it. They didn't get a chance to experience it. And as a result, it added impact on their tenure with us. As an organization, we do and are very open to talk about who we are and our culture initially in conversations. I was just on a call yesterday and I'll just tell you because again, I think it was very unusual for them. Started the meeting. Started the meeting. I said, let me start by telling you a bit about myself and you're going to hear this from all of us. Told them about my life story, a bit about my life story at the beginning of the conversation. And I could see the person saying, that's a lot of information to be able to share. But the very purposeful attempt in doing that is that all of us have been working on our purpose, have been working on our life stories, and have been learning how to speak with that, with vulnerability and with authenticity. And so we are doing that as a way to also signal what's important to us in our organization. And so people that see that initially get a sense of saying, hmm, is that something that resonates with me? Is that also consistent with the kind of purpose and values that are important to me? And if so, I'm willing to talk more. Right. And talk further about that. I have found that piece to be one of the biggest benefits I've seen in our organization. And again, having done this in a number of organizations here, talking and addressing who you are both as an individual and then as an organization at the beginning, has allowed people to decide whether they want, this is the kind of culture they want to be part of with us. So I know that's a, you know, a high level answer, but I, again, if I give one small differentiator, that has been the biggest opportunity.
    68. Robin Shanahan
    Love it. Thank you so much, Marvin.
    69. Marvin Boakye
    Thank you.
    70. Don Sull
    Sorry, other questions. Oh, great. Rob.
    71. Robert Carlyle (He/Him/His)
    Marvin, I was wondering when you talk about that leadership model of showing the vulnerability and tying that in with caring and how as a global company do you find the expression of that might be different in Europe or Asia where the culture, the larger social context you're operating in has very different views of interpersonal relations and how someone might show up. How do you, how does you blend that unique Cummins culture and leadership style into these different countries where you're operating?
    72. Marvin Boakye
    Yeah, you know, it's a, it's a great question and it's one where as we think about what it means to be inclusive as, as an organization, it's one that we're continuing to update our thinking and ideas around cultures have different ways of what they express, how they express it. The piece that I will tell you is the one value that has continued to be consistent. Well, first of all, a couple of them, but they continue to be consistent no matter where we're at. The concept of integrity tends to stand no matter where we are, from a culture perspective. And the concept of caring for yourself and for those around you, no matter what culture we have, tends to be consistent within there. Third is the value that we believe we win together through teamwork versus we win on our own. We made decisions and even within our own business practices, where we changed our reward structure, that instead of incentivizing each individual business, which was leading to results, where the businesses were competing against each other, and we were seeing funny math with how that was coming together, to changing that all, to as a company, we will win together and we will tie our incentives together. So it benefits you, no matter where you are. To make sure that you and your other business units and other functions are successful has proven to be a method that has resonated globally within the organization. So I'm very big on understanding what differentiates us, but there are common cores and getting consistent with those common cores. And when you have that common core, do not change it. So I'm going to add just one more piece to the puzzle here, because the other thing that I find, that I find and something that I'm working on is that even though you've heard me talk a lot about the strong culture we have, when we announced our goal towards destination zero, Rob, it was going to mean that some of the things in our culture may not help us get there. And that was a tough, tough reflection to go through, because as I've been mentioning, there's a number of pieces that we believe are core. And so we've been going through an exercise where we have been saying, okay, the things that are core that we know are consistent, like the ones I mentioned before, our goal there is to keep and enhance those things, right? So we're not changing, keep and enhance those. But there's probably one, two or three things within our culture that if we do not make a dramatic change to, we're not going to meet our strategic goals as an organization. And so just recently, we just announced that to our 70,000 plus employees. And when we told them those three things, the majority of people nodded and said, yeah, yeah, that's probably the ones we need to go and change. And we were very clear about the. Where we're at, what kind of artifacts, what kind of tools we're going to be using to make those changes where we want to be at and how we're going to measure it. And when you're able to talk with that level of clarity, it is consistent. So even though those changes mean we're going to have to think about our costs differently, we're going to have to think about our complexity differently. People understand that that is embedded within the change we're trying to make to achieve our goals. And we're saying it in a way that resonates across the globe because all of our people experience those same challenges and have been hoping we would make those changes to our culture. Does that help?
    73. Robert Carlyle (He/Him/His)
    Yeah, that's really great. We're actually undergoing a similar purposeful evolution of our culture, and probably difference in the details, but similar in the concept of we know what we want to preserve. That's strong and historical, and it's what's brought us to the success we've had. But going forward, there's things that get in the way as business speeds up. There's more international collaboration required and where do we purposely change? And so, you know, I'm sure the details are quite different, but a similar approach. And so really, really heartened to hear that we might be modeling something that someone really successful is doing well.
    74. Marvin Boakye
    The only thing I would just. One of the other learnings we're having in going through this experience because we announced it to the entire organization, right within its work. And one of the things we had to realize is when you do that, even some of the stuff that are core, you may have to challenge your assumptions on some of it. So one example that came to mind is we made the decision that one of the things in our culture is how we make decisions, how we make decisions, a critical part of our culture. And one of the things that was critical about that was that we were a very collaborative culture, very collaborative. A lot of people get involved with it there. And when you get really collaborative, people enjoy it. One of the downsides is everyone believes they have the ability to say no, and as a result, it stops the work. And what's led to is a really major challenge in speed to make decisions, okay? And when you've heard us talk about the transition that we are going within our industry with across the world, that's not something you can afford to do with the pace of change that you need to drive. And so we had to make a decision. Okay, how much of the collaborative culture are we willing to take some from in order to increase speed to decision making right within this work, and we have to be very purposeful about that. And then once we decided that, we actually put in a new model that we started testing and we didn't test it with everyone else. We tested it with the leadership team first. All right, we're going to. We're going to do this and actually try it with ourselves. And you know what we learned, we weren't that great at it, just at the leadership team. So we've been working, re-working to make that the behavior before we then take it to the rest of the organization. But it meant one of the key parts of our fundamental culture. We had to dial back a bit purposely to make the change.
    75. Don Sull
    And I just underscore one thing and then move onto Robin's question, which is one of the key findings out of the research stream that we have in terms of the transformation or evolution of culture is around how you maintain that continuity and adapt to change. And I think part of what I hear that's so neat about what you're describing here, Marvin, is you're maintaining the value of collaboration. That remains a value, but how it's manifested in social norms, in this case, particularly around consensus and decision making that can and should evolve. And so what's neat about that is you can point to folks and say, look, collaboration remains central, but how that's manifested as a social norm in shaping our decision making, that's going to evolve and has to evolve for competitive reasons. And so you can kind of balance that need for continuity of the culture with the adaptation as circumstances change. Robin, you're up next.
    76. Robin Shanahan
    Thank you so much. My question really centers around the evolution of your change and just the comment that you made about the self selection out. How much of your existing population did you see not come along on that journey as you were going through the cultural thing?
    77. Marvin Boakye
    Yeah, it's surprising. Not as much. I mean, we run historically low turnover numbers, and I've seen it in enough industries to say, yes, it's pretty significantly low. People like to know that someone cares about them. Right. It's interesting. Most people do. Most people benefit from working in teams and where teamwork is valued. And so we have had people self select out, and we've also selected people out when their behaviors, their how has not matched with what we believe is important. You know, when we've had situations where we had to say, this is not working, most of the time, it's not been based on their ability to achieve results. It's been based on how they go about doing it within the organization. And so we make that very clear. And in fact, one of the things that I continue to say sometimes we do it so much more that I say we have to also bring back some of it to also make sure we're also clear on, on there's an accountability perspective to also achieve results as well. So learning how to manage through that balance has been something we're continuing to improve on as an organization. And we've gone through different flows of that as a group. But surprisingly, we've had some. But it has been the minority of the organization that has self selected out. And when they have, again, it's okay. It's okay. We've given people the ability to do this.
    78. Don Sull
    And I think part of the background here too is that the top team is so committed to this, right that allows these hard tradeoffs that what we see in the absence of the top team commitment performance is always going to let you hit your numbers. You do it the wrong way, you hit your numbers. That's all we're really focused on.
    79. Marvin Boakye
    I'll add this piece to it because when you mention the top team commitment, again, as a person who goes through that experience as well too, I regularly receive coaching from my CEO on this work. My CEO regularly receives coaching on feedback from me. It is a constant process that we are continually working on and that's what we embed. And so it can feel very different when you are talking with emotion about how you felt during that experience, what you would like to see an experience there. We've been talking through how we continue to increase the frequency of that feedback. And so when we have had people self select out, it's because that experience has not been congruent with what they want to do. But surprisingly, I can tell you every year and each time I've been part of it, I continue to grow as a person and I've learned new things about how I lead and can lead better with my teams as a result of this work and this commitment. And so that's the thing that I think people have found resounding that has kept them to the organization. They find self improvement every year through this commitment of authenticity, self awareness, vulnerability and transparency.
    80. Don Sull
    Mabel, are you able to. I know you had trouble raising your hand, but are you able to pose your question?
    81. Mabel Rius
    Yeah. Yes. Thank you. I just don't have the functionality on the chat. So let me read my question because I wrote it. I say, so you were talking about remote workers being inclusive, making them feel part of the organization. So I have two questions related to that. We have found that there's almost like a glass ceiling for remote workers to continue progressing all the way up in the organization. And that usually diverse colleagues have a higher preference for remote working than non-diverse colleagues, which automatically, when I do projections, that creates a challenge on the senior levels of the organization. Have you experienced that? Do you have any kind of, like, words of wisdom on that front?
    82. Marvin Boakye
    Yeah, it's a great question. And, Mabel, I tell you, we have both. We've experienced some of those challenges, and we've talked to outside experts around this as well, too, to normalize what that experience can be. And this is the thing that we've continued to see, is when you have a, when culture is part of your strategic purpose, you have to understand certain things that you do, how you experience it. Then the nonverbals that you experience within them tend to have a better benefit when people spend time together. So even with those that are hybrid and remote, we have minimum expectations of time that they will spend together in the organization. And sometimes that's not even necessarily their team. So I'll tell you, you know, I get to go and be part in, I have three different offices that I'm part of right now, and in those I have, there are multiple different people that are there. But that experience of spending time with them, the casual collisions that take place, the, all of those we have just found to be a benefit. And so I value that. And we have an expectation that if you're in those other categories, hybrid or remote, that you have the ability to experience them. So being purposeful about that is just as important as what happens in these conversations that are here. I know it sounds small, but even small things, like, we encourage people when we're together, even in remote environments that we get to see you because not just the verbal, but also the visual. And being able to experience that is an important part of our work here. We have an expectation that people at parts of their time are making time to go and be with people, whether it's our, whether it's with our team members, employees, and others. So, Mabel, I guess the thing I would say to you is that while we continue to encourage it, we are also very clear and deliberate around. We see a benefit in the time that we spend together, and we will always preference that as a way that we would prefer to operate.
    83. Mabel Rius
    Yeah. Because what I've observed, at least in my firm, is that at the higher levels, you lose a little bit of the flexibility that you can enjoy in more contained or structured type of roles. And there's almost a correlation of diversity associated to that.
    84. Marvin Boakye
    Yeah.
    85. Mabel Rius
    And I don't know if it's a chicken and egg situation, but as you were discussing that, I wonder how you guys were tackling that. So thank you.
    86. Marvin Boakye
    Thank you.
    87. Don Sull
    Dan, you get to ask those questions.
    88. Dmanea
    So, Marvin, you've answered probably about 80% of my question, but I'm still just going to nudge a bit, see if there's any more wisdom to squeeze out of your experience. So Insulet is also growing. I mean, it's a company, as a small company, growing at pace. And we made the, you know, we're growing headcount, anything between 17 and 25% year on year for the last four or five years. So really high pace. We're starving for talent. So we made, again, the intentional choice to go distributed workforce. You know, go where the talent is. Don't just build around our small network of offices. So we went into that remote hybrid space and we're kind of doing something similar. What you've been doing with this hubs and kind of getting people together, building community, embedding the culture. So it was great to hear what you're doing there in order to create this sense of community and the interaction between people. I just want to build on that and ask an additional question and any other wisdom do's and don'ts as you manage an organization which is so distributed and you try to keep it connected and engaged and inspired.
    89. Marvin Boakye
    Yeah, it's a great question. I think a couple other just additions. One of the things that we found when you talked about this year, and again, we have a primarily hybrid, well, almost 50% hybrid and, and remote for our office and exempt workforce. That's not the same as we think about our plants and technicians and other things like that. But so much of the experience that people talk about was really based on the relationship they had with their leader and with their manager. And so we can track, and some of our groups, including our technical group, is doing a great job on this here. They look at little things like how many one-on-ones are you having with your team member? And you can use things like Vivainsights to be able to see that. And you can start to see trends around who's getting the time and who's not getting the time. You can then start to look at that and understand. And we actually turned some of that data into an algorithm that told us about the probability that that person would be high risk. And surprisingly little things like that show that person is more likely to leave the organization with that, plus a few other indicators. So you can understand and start looking at those indicators, starting with the relationship and the time that spent together. And in that time that spent together, you can then get even deeper. You can get deeper into what are they talking about when they're in that time together? Are they getting a chance to talk about their career? Are they getting a chance to talk about what's working well? Are they getting a chance to talk about what barriers are in place that they need help with? Are they getting feedback around how they can continue to improve, whether in their career or the work that they're doing? So you can continue to drive down just from those insights that you start off with. We find that if you can address that, that tends to be a significant benefit for our people, whether they are in person, hybrid or remote. Just that one thing is a huge differentiator for us.
    90. Dmanea
    Thank you so much, Marvin. I knew that I'm going to be able to squeeze something more out of your experience. Thank you.
    91. Don Sull
    Well squeezed, Dan. Okay, so one thing just to note. One of our next sessions is on July 16, and we're going to dive into remote and hybrid work. And so the structure of that session, by the way, just as a heads up to everybody, and we'll send out an email reminding folks, is we'll summarize the kind of latest and greatest academic research, of which there's some pretty interesting and useful stuff, large sample, and then we'll devote the rest of the time we'll kind of pair up and talk about in pairs what's working, not working. Then we'll debrief as a group so we'll have a chance to dig into this some more and learn from each other on that coming upon July 16. And we'll send the email reminding folks of that. And then it was worth the wait. We've been waiting for four years. We've been trying to figure out a way to learn more about Cummins. Four years is a long time that our expectations just kept ratcheting up. And Marvin, you delivered, so thank you so much. It was absolutely terrific. We may follow up, and if there are any publicly available documents that we have your employer report, we have the old one. When the new one comes up, we'll give everybody a link to that. If there are other documents around, like this leadership training approach you guys have is so cool. Like if there's anything that you're comfortable sharing that I think would, there'd be a lot of interest in that in the group. So for the roundtable members who attended as well as all the other roundtable members, when we have this, you know, the summary of the discussion in the video. We'll also have those links if we have anything. But, Marvin, thank you so much. It has really been worth the wait and super insightful and super terrific and just great to learn how a company like Cummins does it, because they really are a company. It's a really special company. So thank you so much.
    92. Marvin Boakye
    Well, thank you. Really appreciate the time. Great to meet all of you and get your questions and look forward to discussing more.
    93. Don Sull
    Perfect. All right, that ends the official bit. But Marvin, thanks. That was great. That was really terrific.