Early Life and the Making of a Leader with Mr James W. Keyes

Early Life and the Making of a Leader with James W. Keyes

Today’s conversation features James W. Keyes an American business leader, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and philanthropist who has led two iconic Fortune 500 companies.

Born in Grafton, Massachusetts, Jim’s journey is one of resilience and determination. Raised in humble beginnings without indoor plumbing, he went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from College of the Holy Cross and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

He served as CEO of 7-Eleven, where he drove remarkable growth and global expansion, and later as Chairman and CEO of Blockbuster, leading the company through a pivotal time of digital transformation.

Beyond business, Jim is deeply committed to education and opportunity. He is the founder of the Education Is Freedom Foundation and author of Education Is Freedom, championing the power of learning to transform lives.

In this episode, we explore his early life, the experiences that shaped his leadership, and the values that continue to guide his journey.

Connect with Jim:
LinkedIn: James W. Keyes 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

My guest today is Jim Keys, global business leader and the former CEO of two iconic companies, 7-Eleven and Bloodbusters, and also the best-selling author of Education is Freedom. So I've got it right here. So Jim, I firstly just wanted to thank you for honoring my invitation to this podcast. And I'm going to start off by asking you to tell us a little bit about your childhood and the environment you grew up in.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Sure. I um I had uh the advantage of growing up poor. And I call that an advantage. I know it seems uh unusual because uh someone who grows up literally without running water or you know in a broken home, um with all kinds of uh adverse surrounded by all kinds of adversity, one would think that that's a travesty. That's a that's a sad situation. And it it is often at the time. But if I look back on the way I grew up, instead of being a victim, I said, there's nothing I can do about this. The universe let me be born into this situation. I didn't choose this family or this part of the world, it just happened. But what I can control is how I respond and what I do with what I have. And so I took responsibility and said, just because my family is poor, I don't have to be. Um, and so I think that applies to everyone. Now, in in hindsight, I look back and I say, what was the strength that let me achieve the things I achieved? That strength came from the very adversity that I faced. It built uh a resilience in me, it built a sense of determination in me that I don't think I would have had had I been born into privilege.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

So during that time when you in your earlier years, um what value did you model, or who were you looking up to at that time as a young person?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

I didn't really have any role models. Um I watched television uh like any other kid, and I saw people on TV that were doing some pretty amazing things. Uh I saw the astronauts land on the moon, and these were ordinary guys like me, they weren't rich people. And so I made a drew a link between education and knowledge because the people I would see on TV seemed to be intelligent.

unknown 2:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:59

And they they they seemed to get their knowledge from books, and so I gravitated toward books and knowledge and school and used education as my um personal uh leverage to be able to succeed.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

I see. So I um I guess you were pretty good student then.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

I was a pretty good student, but I I was I wasn't necessarily a smart student. Uh I just worked really hard. And you know, that same work ethic uh I I have today. Uh I wrote a book, some people write a book and they let everybody else do all the work. I wrote a book and I'm out hustling and I'm all over the world promoting my book. And it it's it's a it's a sense of determination that says, no one's going to do this for me. I'm going to have to roll up my sleeves and put in the time. And if I put in the time, it will pay off.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Amazing. So I also wanted to ask you when you were in school, how did you how did you know there was this pack in you, and how did you get your first opportunity?

SPEAKER_00 4:09

When it came to career? Career, yes. Ah I uh basically pursued as much education as I could. So I went through high school, college, uh, went on to graduate school, uh, took on a lot of debt, but I saw the debt as an investment in myself. I I saw it as a a business decision. Um and that paid off. That business decision paid off because coming out of graduate school, I was much more prepared to be able to compete in the marketplace. Um, I had a graduate degree in business from Columbia University, and now uh I found companies coming to me where previously I had to go out and look for a job uh versus companies coming to me and recruiting me for a job. So it came down to getting as much and as high quality an education as I possibly could, which differentiated me in the job market. One more thing, you know, we think of ourselves as employees. We're like a product on the shelf. We can't just sit on the shelf and expect that somebody's gonna come up and buy us. We have to differentiate ourselves from everybody else on the shelf. And that comes through what does my resume look like? What is my what do my credentials look like? Where did I go to school? How did I do in school? Those are things that differentiate me from everybody else trying to get the same job.

SPEAKER_01 5:40

So would you say that's um that still applies uh for today in terms of education? Because when you look at the internet, a lot of people um feel that you know you can do things without having an education or you can self self- No, it's a it's a trap.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

It's a trap. You you always could. And I I could have become an entrepreneur, I might have been wildly successful as an entrepreneur. But if you think school is hard, being an entrepreneur is ten times as hard. If you think you have to, you don't want to work so hard to get an A in class, be an entrepreneur, you have to work twice as hard just to be able to live in the early days of any entrepreneurial venture. So people think if this notion that I don't need school, well, frankly, I think most of us do, because I don't think most of us have the determination, the drive, the persistence, the whatever it takes attitude to truly be an entrepreneur. And if you think you do and fail, then where are you 10 years, 20 years from now when it's too late to go back to school? So my my recommendation to anyone, whether they want to be an entrepreneur, an Instagram influencer, whatever they want to be, get that education first. You've got a long life ahead, and then be whatever you want to be. Once you've got the degree, if you want to be an entrepreneur, go be an entrepreneur. But then you have the ability to pivot. Now, this is especially important in a world of AI where none of us sitting here today know which jobs will prevail and which jobs may go away because of the power of technology. None of us know that. So if you don't know that, you don't want to find yourself in one of those jobs or even businesses that goes away because of the power of technology. Then what? Now, if you've got the degree, it doesn't matter. You can pivot to do something else. And it's not the degree, it's learning how to learn. And that's the mistake that people make. They think college is about the degree. No, college is about learning how to learn and getting the breadth of learning experience that allows you to keep learning for the rest of your life.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

No, you're absolutely correct. Uh, one of the things I wanted to ask you, because I I listened to some of the podcasts you were on, and you mentioned about you working in McDonald's uh flipping burgers.

SPEAKER_00 8:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:20

Um so from some of the things I've read, you seem to be a hands-on leader, even when you're at 7-Eleven and blockbusters. Why do you think that's so important, even in today's environment, to be a hands-on leader?

SPEAKER_00 8:37

I think the uh what we often forget is the tone at the top matters that that people look to the leader. And it doesn't matter if it's a Boy Scout troop or patrol or uh or Congress or or the President of the United States. People look to the leader and emulate that behavior. Right or wrong. We're humans and we tend to emulate those who are leading. So if the leader demonstrates poor behavior, we shouldn't be surprised if people within the organization demonstrate that same poor behavior. And the same thing goes for work ethic. If the w if the leader is sitting down in the back watching everybody work and just saying, work harder, work harder, and they're sitting back there reading a magazine. What kind of motivation does that give the team? But if they're leaders in there, rolled up sleeves, side by side, I'm with you, I know how to do this, or show me how to do this, you teach me how to do this. Um, that demonstrates a kind of interest and success that the team needs to see.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

And do you think that contributed to you being such a success in your um when you manage 7-Eleven?

SPEAKER_00 9:59

I think it helped. I was uh out in the stores, I would put on a smock and get behind the sales counter and wait on customers. And I think the organization saw that. I think they realized that I was a whatever it takes, 24-7 kind of leader and willing to do whatever it takes to help the enterprise be successful. I think that attitude becomes infectious in an organization, and everybody says, yeah, I want us to be successful.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Yeah, and uh thank you for that. Um, one of the things I was actually going to ask you as well is that in you were you managed two iconic um companies. How did you manage them totally differently? Because I know they are they're two different um companies, but how did you transition from one to the other?

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Yeah, leadership is really about change and adaptation. And it and it's uh there are no two companies that are the same. There's no two circumstances that are the same. And so a leader has to be able to pivot. A leader has to be able to adapt to whatever the environmental conditions uh end up being. Uh, you can be running a wildly successful company and the and the financial markets collapse and you have to pivot. You have to change from growing your company to perhaps holding back a little bit and letting the financial markets calm down. Um, at 7-Eleven, I was able to lead through a number of those different kinds of environmental changes. Getting to Blockbuster, my plan was to transform the company to help it achieve uh the future of digital streaming. But then the financial markets collapsed all around me, and I found myself with virtually no choice but to pivot my leadership to helping the company survive rather than growing the company into the future. And a lot of people look at that and they say, Well, why didn't you just take Blockbuster to streaming? We were. In fact, we were ahead of Netflix in many ways, but we couldn't finish the job because we had to fix a balance sheet with a billion dollars of debt. And that's what leaders have to do. They have to pivot.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yeah. I also I've had you also say that CEO stands for change equals opportunity. What does that mean?

SPEAKER_00 12:24

Well, it means that that all commerce, if you think about it, begins and ends with something changing. Someone invented a wheel, and then someone figured out how to do something with the wheel and made money at it. And then someone else said, Well, I can do something better with that wheel. Hold my beer, watch this. And then they may have displaced the first person who made money off the wheel. And and that evolution continues. Uh, and change does equal opportunity. So you think about uh Sears. Sears started out, Sears Robuck, the old retail company, started out as a catalog uh in the United States where people out in the West didn't have stores, so they would order supplies out of a catalog and have them mailed, and then uh they decided they needed stores, so they built a whole chain of stores. Along comes Walmart, figures out how to source product from China, gets a better cost, beats Sears, along comes Amazon. Amazon then goes online with what? A catalog.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Yes, you're absolutely right.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

I look at the Amazon uh offerings online, and I think I'm scrolling through the old Sears catalog, right? So the question is, could Sears have adapted along the way and become what Amazon is today? Arguably they could have and should have. Yeah, but they have to be able to see that as an opportunity, that change that's coming as an opportunity rather than a threat to their existence.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

Yes, I was just going to ask you one question. It just came to my mind. I don't know if you're familiar with Tom Peters. He wrote management books, and I think there was a phrase that he said, if it's not broken, don't fix it. And then a few years later, he said, if it's not broken, break it anyway and fix it. So do you think he's referring to change?

SPEAKER_00 14:21

He is. Um, and and what happens is uh companies have a built-in complacency. Once we're successful, we then fear creeps in, fear of changing. So we stick to what made us successful. Well, the environment is dynamic, it's not static. And so things keep changing out there in the environment. And if we don't adapt, if we're not able to break it and rebuild it and keep changing, then our complacency will cause us to eventually fade away.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things um someone wanted me to ask you this. Being a CEO, do you also have mentors? Or how do you keep yourself um in the loop of everything happening?

SPEAKER_00 15:17

Sure. There are there are I've had many mentors, and this is the interesting thing, good and bad, because people think a mentor is someone that teaches you how to do things right, but you can learn just as much from people who are doing things wrong. You can, as long as I mean, we have all had a bad boss, right? Well, think of a bad boss as an opportunity to learn how not to be a boss, right? But very few of us do that. Very few of us just say, Oh, a bad boss, this is horrible. I hate my life, I hate my job.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Uh instead, you should thank that bad boss. And you know, thanks for teaching me what not to do, how to not be a leader, because you're clearly demonstrating those terrible tendencies that I don't want to do when I'm in your in your role. So, yeah, you can learn from everybody, um, good and bad.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

So it now brings me to your book, which is a um bestseller.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

So um I when I I haven't finished reading it, but there was something that was in there. Can you elaborate on what the three C's are?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Well, uh three C's, there are I put nine in the book actually, but the uh the what to learn before you get any farther in life uh is three C's that I characterize as change, confidence, and clarity. And we've just talked about change and how important it is to be able to embrace change, but the biggest obstacle to being able to do that is fear. It's like, oh, I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, or I'm afraid to take risk, or what if I fail? It's all noise in your head. Um preparation leads to confidence, knowledge leads to confidence. If you have the confidence to then embrace that change and see it as an opportunity, you have a far better chance of success. Then the third, yeah, then the third C is clarity. So if you are embracing change and you have the confidence to do something about it, then you have to be able to both have inbound clarity, listening, and outbound, being able to communicate. Because as humans, we tend to overcomplicate everything. But simplicity is critically important and being able to communicate what you're trying to accomplish and what is the plan going forward. If people can't understand it, they can't execute it.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

Yeah. I was just going to go back to confidence because um that is actually quite important. If somebody was listening to us now, what would you say the first step is to building one's confidence?

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Uh step one, I think, if is understanding our our own mind. Um, it's awareness of what we do. Because as humans, we have a natural tendency to react negatively to fear. We have the fight or flight thing that causes us to shut down uh or causes us to be ready to go to battle. And neither of those reactions are very productive, especially in the workplace, um, because we are blessed as humans with the ability to have critical thinking. So, as cave people, we had to react to save our life. We don't have natural predators anymore. There, there's very little out there that's going to kill us. So what we should be doing a better job of is using our critical thinking skills rather than reacting. So think about this next time you're on social media and you see something that really makes you mad, step back from it for a second. Realize that you've just had a perception caused by a meme on the internet, yeah, and it's triggering your natural reaction to get angry. But if you use your critical thinking skills and dig a little deeper, can you find the truth behind that meme? And what you might find is that that meme wasn't true at all. Your anger was misplaced. It's a great example because what you're doing by doing that, it's called neuroplasticity. You're reprogramming your brain so that instead of a straight-up reaction and triggering anger, you're instead using your critical thinking to find the truth. If we can take that same pattern and change and get the practice of changing our reactions to instead using our critical thinking skills and being more objective, using more perspective versus being influenced by perceptions, then we can truly be confident. That's the secret to being able to be confident. You're not born confident, you're born with a brain that makes you scared. You have to learn to be confident.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

In your view, why does education remain one of the most powerful tools for transformation and opportunity, especially on um in undeserved communities?

SPEAKER_00 21:04

It's very simple. The more you learn, the more you can do. And that leads to the question of formal education or informal education. Well, I'm just a proponent of learning. So however you learn, wherever you learn, be a sponge. Learn as much as you can. But I also think as humans, we need structure, we need a little discipline, we need um uh something to to measure ourselves by, and that's where a formal education helps us learn how to learn.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So um I was going to ask about decision making. What core values have guided you um when you make decisions, especially difficult ones?

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Yeah, I think uh the the this is what separates us from machines and what will help humanity prevail in a world. Of AI. We've all heard about IQ, right? Yes. AI is going to have an IQ that's off the charts because IQ is just raw intelligence, and artificial intelligence can amass so much data that it will have an IQ that's off the charts. Then there's EQ. Then there's that emotional intelligence.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Intelligence, yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

And computers can possibly emulate at one point emotion. And I call IQ raw intelligence, IQ plus EQ, I call that knowledge. But here's where humans have the advantage. There's something called wisdom. I don't know if we can program a computer for wisdom. And here's my definition of wisdom. It's IQ plus EQ plus CQ. I call CQ the character quotient. So as a human, you have values, you have character, you have integrity. You know when you're not telling the truth, when you are telling the truth. You have the ability to have compassion for other for other human beings. And all of these elements of character, I think, truly make wisdom that extra level of knowledge that helps separate us from pure machines. Because I don't know if pure machines, if artificial intelligence will ever crack the code on love, on true human emotion and human character that separates us from machines.

SPEAKER_01 24:03

So I guess your values haven't changed over time then, as have they stayed consistence over the years?

SPEAKER_00 24:12

I think I'm constantly learning. So I hoped I hope that my values have changed. Um I think I had a set of values when I was a kid, but I also did some stupid things as a child. We all do, right? And we learn from those stupid things that perhaps we shouldn't do those things. And I think that shapes our values going forward. And then we also meet other people. And candidly, even in the last year, I've been in 14 different countries. And I've been in places like Ghana for the first time in my life, uh, at an entrepreneurs' festival with people from all over Africa. And I'm learning constantly. Now, here are people from different cultures, different religions, different values, but I can learn from their values that may be different, but may actually help enhance my own personal values if I'm willing to embrace their culture and learn from it. I call it in the book, I call it cultural literacy.

SPEAKER_01 25:16

Yeah. Amazing. So if you were to narrow your life lessons down to three principles, what will they be?

SPEAKER_00 25:26

Uh it would be that, you know, embrace change, have confidence to do something about it, and then use simplicity or clarity uh to help pave the way. Those are the probably the most important of the things that I encourage people to do. But it all comes down to, I can leave you with two or three things that that um one thing is to remember education is freedom because it truly is. The more we learn, the more we can do. It's not about making money. People think, oh, I I can't afford a degree. It's it's not about making money after you get a college degree, it's about having the freedom to do what you want to do, to be able to keep learning, and it's teaching you how to learn. So education is freedom, is the first. The second, change equals opportunity. It is CEO. It is the role of a CEO, but you can be CEO of your own life. Same thing. And the third is that the uh takeaway that I'd like to have your audience take is that the biggest enemy to all of this and to humanity candidly is fear. It's it's our own personal insecurity. It's that little person of our shoulder that says we can't do something. And then if you multiply that, it's the fear, collective fear of a group, of society. And that fear is the biggest obstacle that humans have to succeeding, to having world peace. What are we afraid of? And so their good news is, and the takeaway for your audience, is there's an antidote to fear. It's two things. It's knowledge, because the more you know, the less you have to be afraid of. If your kid's scared of the dark, your mom turns on the light, you look around, you go, there's no monster in the room. That's knowledge. I've now have knowledge. I was afraid of what I couldn't see. But then there's another fear. There's a fear of what you don't know. What's in the closet? I can't know that. It's locked. That's where you have to rely on your belief system, on your faith. And George Lucas called it the force. May the force be with you. It can be, you could be Buddhist, you could be Hindu, you could be Christian, you could be Muslim. It doesn't matter. You could be an atheist, but you have a belief in yourself. And the point is, all of us have to have the ability to channel our knowledge, to not be afraid of those things that can be known. And then we have to believe in something in ourselves and have faith that we will make it through even those things that we don't know. Combination of those two things, it's like a double-edged sword that will allow you to overcome any obstacle, any circumstance that the universe should throw at you and come out of the other side a winner.

SPEAKER_01 28:29

Thank you. So what does success mean to you now compared to earlier on in your career?

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Uh success now means freedom. The words education is freedom are there for a purpose. Success is not how much money you can make. And yeah, making money is fun. Making money is uh provides a lot of freedom, but it's not freedom in itself. Look around and see how many very wealthy people are miserable and are not free, ironically. They're tied to whatever it is they're doing, and they can't get off the treadmill because they need more and more and more. It becomes an addiction in itself, as opposed to understanding what it is that makes us truly happy and having the freedom to pursue those wishes. So someone that likes to fish may find that all they need is a shack, some food and a good running river, and some fishing gear, and they are free, and they can be as happy as someone who's flying around in a Gulf Stream jet, busily running from meeting to meeting, trying to make more money. Um, it's not about money, it's about it's about what makes you happy and freedom to do it.

SPEAKER_01 29:48

So, what what's keeps you motivated today?

SPEAKER_00 29:52

Uh I get motivated, I've get been getting letters from all over the world. I had a uh just last night sitting watching the news and I saw a LinkedIn post from a young man who had read my book, and he was inspired by it, and he was inspired enough to call his mom and to tell his mom, thank you, because as a child, she had basically sold a piece of land to be able to have enough money to take him and his siblings to Europe and to give them exposure to other cultures, and then took them to another country uh when they were children. And he called her up and and and thanked her and said, I didn't know what this was, but I just read in Jim's book this concept of cultural literacy that you gave me as a child, and you invested in our future by teaching us the power and the beauty of other cultures that we wouldn't have seen in our in our small hometown where we grew up. So he he literally called her to thank her and then sent me this note uh to thank me for writing the book and making him aware, inspiring him to realize um this is what helped change his life as a child.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

Isn't that beautiful? Those are the things that inspire me. That's what keeps me going. I get letters like that, and it's just really makes you feel good. That's more valuable than any amount of money anybody could pay me for writing a book.

unknown 31:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:34

And my last question is what kind of legacy do you hope you'd leave behind beyond business?

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Yeah, I hope people will um I would love to have people see me as the guy who reminded humanity that education is freedom, that we are in control of our own destiny, and that that world peace is within reach if we get over ourselves and get over our silly fears by channeling our knowledge and our faith to be able to overcome fear. That's what I hope people remember me for.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Thank you. Thank you very much for the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 32:18

Thank you.