Scale Like a CEO

Scaling Business and Health: Insightful Conversation with Michael Critelli

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 7

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In this episode of Scale Like a CEO, host Justin welcomes Michael Critelli, an influential leader with a diverse career spanning law, health, transportation, and more. Michael discusses the critical role of reducing stress for better health outcomes, shares his journey from attorney to CEO of Pitney Bowes, and his work with the Make Us Well Network. He emphasizes the importance of psychological safety, scalable processes, and the integration of AI in modern business. This episode offers valuable lessons on leadership, innovation, and organizational scaling.

00:00 Understanding the Impact of Stress on Health
00:29 Introduction to Scale Like a CEO Podcast
00:57 Meet Michael Critelli: Career Overview
02:22 Current Business Ventures and Health Initiatives
04:03 Creating a Low-Stress Work Environment
07:59 Lessons in Leadership and Accountability
13:30 AI in Business: Challenges and Opportunities
20:53 Scaling Organizations: Key Factors
26:24 Scaling Psychological Safety
28:54 Conclusion and Contact Information

Michael Critelli:

One of the problems we have as a society with 7x24 media political polarization, the anger factor in many of our communities is that we do not appreciate the role stress plays in worsening all health outcomes. So one of the things I also point out in the Make Us Well Network are ways for people to be empowered and reduce the stress in their lives.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO, the podcast that brings you insightful conversations with visionary leaders who are transforming the business landscape. Each episode, we sit down with innovative executives and entrepreneurs to explore their unique journeys, challenges and the strategies that help them scale their organizations to new heights. Whether executives and entrepreneurs, to explore their unique journeys, challenges and the strategies that help them scale their organizations to new heights, Whether you're a seasoned leader or an aspiring entrepreneur, you'll find valuable insights and practical wisdom in every conversation. Today. We welcome Michael Critelli.

Justin Reinert:

Michael, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Michael, thank you so much for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. If you wouldn't mind, just to get us started, just give a 90-second intro. You have an amazing career to talk about. If you could give us a brief intro.

Michael Critelli:

Thank you, justin. I'm honored to be on this program. I've been out of school for 51 years and I started out as an attorney, did that for 19 years and then migrated in stages to operating leadership. I ran divisions and eventually all of Pitney Bowes. For about 15 years since I retired from Pitney Bowes I've been a serial entrepreneur, an investor, a public company board member and a member of many not-for-profits. I got schooled in the mailing and shipping industry at Pitney Bowes for 30 years, so I know that area quite well. But along the way I got pulled into health, transportation and logistics, education and many other fields, and I even made a feature film which hit theaters in 2014, although I don't pretend that I would ever want to be doing that again.

Justin Reinert:

That's so great. Tell me a little bit about the business that you're running today.

Michael Critelli:

It really has two sides to it. The MuFlux business is using the latest and greatest AI tools to solve a variety of business problems, predominantly in the marketing area. On the other side, given my long background in health and health care, I have something called the Make Us Well Network. The goal of that is to give people a different sort of out-of-the-box perspective how to improve health. And, frankly, where I focus differently from many people who look at our crisis in the United States is I don't consider us to have a health care crisis as the primary problem. I think we have a health crisis which overwhelms a health care system and the solution is not to tinker with health care. The solution is to make people healthier. If you can do that, it's like any other insurance system you can't overload the insurance system with too many claims. So we're looking at the root causes of health issues and educating our members and eventually I want to reach a broader population with a browser-based product to look at the root causes of some of our nutrition and health issues.

Justin Reinert:

That's amazing and such important work. I agree with you. I think the biggest challenge that we do have is our health. We're an unhealthy society and if we could fix that, get to the root problems, then we'd be in a better place.

Michael Critelli:

One of the things I learned, quite by accident, is that I created a low stress environment in every business I ran. People were healthier because of that. One of the problems we have as a society with 7x24 media political polarization the anger factor in many of our communities is that we do not appreciate the role stress plays in worsening all health outcomes. So one of the things I also point out in the Make Us Well Network are ways for people to be empowered and reduce the stress in their lives.

Justin Reinert:

I'd love to hear a little bit more about this. You talked about you ran a low-stress company. Tell me more about that.

Michael Critelli:

Well, thank you A lot of. It is the basics of treating people with respect and dignity and not fear. I didn't try to make people afraid. We had a lot of transparency. I inherited great communication tools from my Pitney Bowes predecessors and I improved on them. We had annual town hall meetings with senior management and frontline employees in every one of our offices worldwide. I personally did every home office meeting. I did 20 to 30 field office meetings a year with senior management. The night before frontline management for breakfast, a three-hour session with all the employees in that field office, usually sales and service, and then three to four one-on-one sales or service calls. So I really and that was the first thing we did that was something that I inherited but just improved on After 9-11, I started doing weekly four-minute voicemails and emails and print messages.

Michael Critelli:

We responded to every inquiry by every employee in response to those messages and I did a lot of impromptu meetings. I did skip-level meetings about 150 a year so I met with people that didn't report directly to me. I also would go down to the cafeteria and just wander around and sit randomly with different groups of people. That, single-handedly, made a big deal of difference. The other thing we did was serve healthier food. We got people out of their cubicles or offices or rooms and made them walk around more and engage in more physical activity.

Michael Critelli:

My one regret was that I probably didn't crack down enough on the interminably long large meetings. We did make progress there. We tried to cut down on sitting, cut back on the amount of time people had to drive on their jobs, which meant that they were working with customers more rather than what we call windshield time, and we had several thousand people that we redesigned their territories and their accounts so they could be in front of customers more as opposed to being in their cars. There were a lot of different things we did, and I'm co-authoring a book with a physician to point out some of the things we did that were different from what everybody else did.

Justin Reinert:

That's really incredible, and it sounds like you were creating psychological safety, something that is talked about a lot these days. That wasn't talked about back then. I'm curious. It seems like that would have been against the norm in the way that you were leading the organization. Did you feel it was that way?

Michael Critelli:

Yeah, I'll give you a prime example of that. I was the general counsel and the head of HR in 1993, and our financial services business suffered the worst loss in its history. It was a $100 million credit loss in Germany. The guy who was running the business just didn't know what to do. He froze up. So I moved into his job and everybody expected I was going to fire everybody involved. I didn't. I actually said we're going to study what has happened here so it doesn't happen again. In fact, when we completed the work, I held a celebratory dinner and we had the team present the findings from what had gone wrong.

Michael Critelli:

We made a number of strategic changes, one of which caused us to exit several of our businesses where we had risk that we weren't paying attention to. I believe very strongly that you cannot punish people for mistakes if they own up to those mistakes, if it's a one-off kind of mistake. A few years later, when we had a problem with customer service and sales, I punished the people that pointed their fingers at others and I rewarded the people that owned up to the problem, which was counterintuitive, but that changed behaviors. I said you're not allowed to go and you have to talk about what you could have done to make the situation better, as opposed to pointing what other people didn't do. And if all you're doing is pointing fingers and trying to shift blame, we're going to make sure that you're very uncomfortable.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, you are absolutely doing the work of creating psychological safety. Have you ever talked to Amy Edmondson about some of your examples?

Michael Critelli:

Well, I've read her books and I did meet her when I was in a Harvard Advanced Leadership Seminar. I was a big disciple of hers. When I was on the board of Eaton Corporation, the CEO, craig Arnold, gave every board member a book called Extreme Accountability or Extreme Ownership, by a couple of Navy SEALs and same principle, which is you got to own up to what's within your control. And in fact one of the seminal changes in the life of the mailing industry was when I had a team go to the newly appointed deputy postmaster general in the late 90s, john Nolan. We said we keep trying to reform the postal service through legislation and it fails because we bump up against the labor unions and the politicians. Why don't we create an industry postal task force and focus on the things within our control? We created a joint mailing industry task force, public-private task force, which I co-chaired with John, and 25 years later John and I are co-chairing the Postal Museum Advisory Council. But we made a number of recommendations, one of which resulted in what's called the Intelligent Mail Barcode, which enables you to track letter mail from origin to destination if you put a barcode above the letter. It revolutionized the management of mail inside the postal system. It's called informed delivery. You can actually find out what's in the process of getting to your mailbox. We also recommended Sunday delivery of books and packages and 11 years later the Postal Service partnered with Amazon and I recommended partnerships with FedEx and UPS and got to know Fred Smith who passed away over the weekend who partnered with the Postal Service. They did the long haul transportation of postal packages and the Postal Service made FedEx drop boxes available outside and they were cooperating and competing.

Michael Critelli:

But we did a lot of things and we eventually got postal reform legislation passed. One of the things we did was a census how many of us are there versus postal union members? There were 9 million people outside the postal unions and the postal service and 700,000 people that were lobbyists against reform. I said we outnumber them 12 to 1. We should be pointing that out to politicians, that 9 million people want reform, and maybe we should talk to the other 700,000 about getting on board. And I actually won over three of the four postal unions through our reform efforts, including heads, and I actually spoke at the two letter carriers unions conferences and I got them to buy into the idea of the kind of healthcare program that Pitney Bowes had, and that was a partnership that, as the head of the letter carriers union said, was highly improbable, but it worked.

Justin Reinert:

So incredible and I like that focus on controlling the things that you can control. The book was Extreme Ownership.

Michael Critelli:

I think it was Extreme Ownership. I don't have it here, but I think it's Extreme Ownership. If you typed that in and said by two Navy SEALs, I'm sure you'd get to the right title, given AI today, which we are deeply immersed in in my current business.

Justin Reinert:

Tell me more about that and how you're using AI in your current business current business.

Michael Critelli:

Tell me more about that and how you're using AI in your current business. Well, it's very interesting. We do one engagement, two engagements at a time and, frankly, I think we're at the cutting edge of learning about what works and doesn't work. Ai is a wonderful tool for rapidly learning and improving. I always think of the AI large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini which I have on my phone, as thought partners. So if I'm having a problem or something I can't understand, I type in what does that mean? And I get answers. Or I say what do you think about this? It's like I'm talking to an expert.

Michael Critelli:

But I also find there are many people who say I want to adopt AI, I want you to come and help us, and then they can't give up control. They're afraid to take the next step, which is to let go a little bit. They are afraid to take the next step, which is to let go a little bit. So what I'm learning is I have to spend a lot more effort on change management. My business partner who lives in Silicon Valley. He mouths the words about change management, but I really have to be the guy on the front lines dealing with the client, saying if you want to, for example, review every marketing email the AI engine produces.

Michael Critelli:

That defeats the purpose of AI. What needs to happen is for us to take your input, take your brand guidelines input, put them into the AI, do quick learning, put them into the AI, do quick learning and send out 10 to 12 different versions of the email so we can get a lot better than you are, faster, but people are not ready to let go yet. So there are a few clients that are, and even within a big client organization, like an ad agency, the head of the ad agency was very bought in, but we had uneven buy-in below that. So I think we're at a stage where, like the book that came out in the 90s called Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Moore, and he talked about the different stages of acceptance of radical change, and you know, there are pioneers, there are early adopters, there are early mainstream, late mainstream and laggards, and I think in many cases we're dealing with pioneers and early adopters. We aren't yet, in most organizations, even the early mainstream.

Justin Reinert:

Most definitely, and I think one of the challenges that I'm hearing in what you're talking about is probably people holding on to what they see as their job. Right, if I let go of this email, even just the approving the copy of it, what's my relevance as an individual?

Michael Critelli:

Yeah, they have a role because, I'll tell you, my son is in the digital marketing analytics consulting business. He said the large language models in AI have tripled the speed with which I learn and can help clients. But you have to get people away from doing things they're comfortable with as opposed to things that can add a lot of value, even with internal clients. Between 2002 and 2004, we went through a lot of seismic change at Pitney Bowes and the IT people love the idea of writing legacy code to do patches on legacy systems as opposed to just junking what we had and building something that was scalable. But they like to be heroic and I used to say to meetings we need to get away from heroic people and we need people to be heroic and creating heroic processes.

Michael Critelli:

That was hard for the better educated and the higher credentialed people were, the harder it was for them to let go. Adam Grant, a psychologist at Penn, has actually commented on that in his book. Think Again that the Ivy League educated people tend to be a lot who have gotten to where they've gotten in big organizations and, you know, have pleased people and gotten credentialed and advanced degrees and years of experience. They have a harder time letting go because they have to start all over again. In fact, they're at the bottom rung of the ladder when they're using AI.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, it's challenging. You've worked so hard to gain all of those credentials and you feel you're at the top of the game. It's got to be hard to let go of that. I'm curious as you look at the different companies that you're operating in. One thing I was wondering about is the size of company determining how willing or averse they are to adopting an AI solution. Have you noticed any trends there?

Michael Critelli:

Yeah, the bigger they are and the more hierarchical they are, the more difficult it is. If you have a champion, you usually have multiple layers of management and the translation down to the people that have to basically implement AI is very challenging. Now, pitney Bowes was different because, as I said that two-way communications we were used to bottoms-up innovation and we even were used to customer-centered innovation where the customers came up with the best ideas. So we were different from most big organizations. I had my finger on the pulse of what was going on in the front lines, whereas if you have a CEO who operates by, you know I follow the chain of command and I quote empower other people below me to do things and I keep my hands off completely.

Michael Critelli:

That's a bad outcome. You've got to strike a right balance. You don't want to be a micromanager, because some of my predecessors were micromanagers too much, but you also don't want to be the hands-off chairman of the board type, because then too much stuff gets filtered out before it gets to you. What I used to do and I would say this to my direct reports I'm meeting with the people that report to you, not because I don't trust you, but because I may pick up something. I have a wider field of vision than you do. You may not see the same thing with the information you're getting that I would see. Anecdotes, anomalies and outliers are data points that I look at and I try to find. You know, when I'm talking to frontline people and I said and I encourage my direct reports to do the same thing, I don't want anybody in my organization to just operate, sitting in their office and having people come to them.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, that makes so much sense. I want to talk a little bit about scaling companies. That's the focus of the podcast.

Michael Critelli:

We've got a few different directions today, which has been great, but I want to talk about, in some of the businesses that you've worked in, have to give up customization that might benefit you for the greater good to get scalable, repeatable processes. Let me give you an example. Pitney Bowes had a very sales-driven organization. The CEO would literally sit there with the head of marketing, sometimes bypassing the group. Four group presidents in a row failed because he micromanaged sales programs. They did all these custom sales programs and that created all sorts of processing problems. The sales organization was never happy with the errors that happened in order processing and customer care.

Michael Critelli:

In 1994, I was the head of Pennybo's Financial Services. The head of the Philadelphia office called me and said there are too many of these marketing and sales programs. We need to change things. Can you come to Philadelphia and do a focus group with my top eight people? I took the train to Philadelphia and I started the meeting and I said you know what I'm going to do is go around the room around the table and ask each of you which program do you think we should get rid of? Each person, each people, each of the people spoke and they all said I want to get rid of program A and one of the other people in the room said, no, I like that program. At the end of two hours they couldn't agree on what to get rid of because everybody benefited from one of the eight, one of the programs that somebody wanted to get rid of. And I finally said to them I said you know if I, uh, you know. And eventually, when I became ceo, I went back to that office. I said what you have to understand is the pro. You may get marginal benefit from what we customized for you or a small number of you, but there are so many issues that we create and customers that cancel that we've got to strike a balance and maybe say the 80-20 rule and if we need all these custom programs, it also says that our products and services should sell themselves Over time. I got people to buy that.

Michael Critelli:

The second some of the lack of scaling, and particularly with what we called our HR access program, was we had a lot of hand-holding, something as simple as doing requisitions for new hires. Hr people used to do that for the branch offices and there was no standardization. So we worked with SAP and we came up with a standardized recruiting tool and the big problem was that we had to get HR out of the hand-holding business and get our people in management into self-service and just say and management into self-service and just say ultimately, you're the hiring manager, you should write the specs, you should be doing the interviewing, you should be putting the requisitions in and I should be there to support you but not to be your hand holder. And that was challenging. It took a couple of years but we got there. So that's the second thing you need to do for scaling.

Michael Critelli:

The third is what I described earlier with the IT people, with these legacy platforms, and we ended up eventually outsourcing it to Wipro. Our people just couldn't make the change. Wipro basically could get the. They had what's called scored very high in what's the Carnegie Mellon capability maturity model, which was the standardization, systematization of processes, and Wipro got a five out of five, which was the highest. Our internal IT people were at one and a half out of five.

Michael Critelli:

For example, they were holding on to the job of sending people passwords. We needed a more automated process for getting people to update their passwords. We had 40 people out of 600 that did nothing but that and that was not scalable. So we outsourced to Wipro, we ended up outsourcing finance, the more routine parts of finance. Today you're seeing fractional CFOs where AI is replacing what even the outsourced finance people in India used to do. Scalability is also just letting go of humans doing jobs, in-house employees doing jobs. So those are the three things Get rid of the. You know I want to do it and have something that I personally benefit from. Get rid of the handholding and replace people with AI.

Justin Reinert:

That's great. One other thing I want to ask you about. I want to go back to the beginning of our conversation around psych safety. I'm curious your thoughts on scaling psychological safety, because as you add more people to a team and as it changes, you're constantly protecting that psych safety. So how do you scale psych safety within an organization or a team?

Michael Critelli:

There's no one way to do that. Growing up in Pitney Bowes, I would ask frontline employees when you say that people are risk averse, what comes to mind? Come up with specific examples. Very often the examples would be a misstatement of what really was going on and I would have to clarify that.

Michael Critelli:

One example was when two guys who ran our small business mailing business said we should experiment with placing our postage meters and our supplies in Staples and Office Depot and the CEO's reaction was what a bad idea. They will end up competing with us and finding third parties to do our supplies business. And a few months later people went back to him and they did get the pilot started and we did put both the postage meters and supplies in both stores. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal where these two guys were profiled and thanked the CEO for giving them the chance to do this, but many people in the organization didn't know about what ultimately happened. They only knew about the original. They shot him down and I found a number of examples like that and what we had to counteract the urban legends, because very often the urban legends were the things that gave rise to the mix, to the risk averseness.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, it is definitely making sure that you're elevating the positive stories and not letting those negative stories stay floating around, for sure. Well, michael, thank you so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed the conversation and learning from your experience. If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do so?

Michael Critelli:

I would suggest that they contact me via my business email. It's mikeceoatmovefluxcom, that's M-O-V-E-F-L-U-X dot com, and my personal email is mjcritelli at gmailcom. So either one will work.

Justin Reinert:

Michael, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciated the conversation.