I recently interviewed Newell Brands CEO Chris Peterson on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:
Adam: Our guest today is a Fortune 500 CEO who leads the parent company of many household-name brands. Chris Peterson is the CEO of Newell Brands, a $7 billion-plus business that is home to Sharpie, Rubbermaid, Crockpot, and many, many more brands recognized and utilized by customers around the world. Chris, thank you for joining us.
Chris: Thanks, Adam. I’m very excited to be here with you.
Adam: You grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and you grew up excelling academically and excelling at golf. You went to Cornell, where you graduated in the top 5% of your class while playing on the varsity golf team for all four years. Can you take listeners back to your early days? What early experiences and lessons shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?
Chris: Yeah, I went to school for engineering at Cornell, and I chose Cornell because it was one of the top engineering schools, and I was pretty good at math and science. It was sort of the area that I excelled at in high school. And what I would say out of that is I had a fantastic experience at Cornell, where I really thought the engineering program there taught me how to think. I was always interested in business and finance, and at the end, I wound up not becoming an engineer and going into finance instead to start off with out of school. But I feel like that logical mindset that you get from an engineering degree is a great foundation that helps you later in life.
My dad was a big golfer. I grew up playing golf. I played in high school and college the whole time. And to me, it’s a good way to take a break and do something different that you have to focus on, in addition to whatever work you’re doing at the same time. So, still to this day, I try to play golf every Saturday morning when I get a chance, and it’s a good mental break for me from being fully engaged at work.
Adam: I love that, and it’s really important that no matter how focused you are at whatever it is that you are pushing toward, you have an outlet. You have something that allows you to take a break, take a breather, recharge, relax, and then come back and be able to go just as hard as right before.
Chris: Yeah, that’s right. And it’s interesting because sometimes I find when I’m trying to focus on something else, whether it be golf or exercise or something else, and I’m not as hard-charging as I am during the week in my schedule, sometimes that’s when the best thoughts come to me because it gives you a chance to pause, to mentally decompress, and to think more broadly than oftentimes what you are during the workweek when you’re in the middle of it and moving from meeting to meeting.
Adam: What does your schedule look like? What is the routine of a Fortune 500 CEO? How are you able to perform at your very best day in and day out?
Chris: One of the pieces of advice I got when I became the CEO of Newell was that time management was one of the most critical skills that separates successful CEOs from those that struggle a little bit. And when you become a CEO, the demands on your time go up dramatically from almost every other position in the company, and there are a lot of stakeholders that are important to keep in mind. Obviously, you have the employees that you’re serving. Obviously, you have consumers that we’re trying to serve with our leading brands. We also have important retail customers. We have important suppliers. We have government agencies that are interested, and we’ve got a board of directors that requires management and engagement in addition to our shareholder base.
And so, as you think about all of those constituents, one of the things that I spend a lot of time thinking about is, how do I create time so that I’m managing all of those constituents to the best of my ability and for the benefit of the overall company, so that all stakeholders feel like they have a conduit into the company, and the company can operate on all cylinders without being out of balance with any of those stakeholder communities?
And so, I set my schedule accordingly. I have an operating calendar that I publish for about a year in advance that has big meetings. I go to Europe once a year and meet with our teams on the ground in a number of the European countries. I go to Latin America once a year. I go to Asia once a year. I schedule important investor conferences. We obviously have our board meetings. I schedule in days to go and meet with shareholders, and I schedule in a lot of time to meet with our business leaders and our employees more at large in facility visits around the world. We’re operating a little over 40 manufacturing plants. I make trips to go to the manufacturing plants because I think it’s important to see firsthand what’s happening and to interact with employees at all levels in the company to make sure that you don’t get disconnected from what’s happening in the business.
Adam: Chris, you shared a lot there that I would love to unpack, and something that you shared, which is particularly interesting, you laid out all of your different constituencies, and many of them are competing stakeholders. And that leads to a question, which is, how, as a leader, are you able to manage all of these competing constituencies, competing stakeholders? And one way that you’re able to do it is through transparency, by laying out, this is what my schedule is, this is how much time I have, and I’m going to give time to each of these different groups. I’m not going to spend all of my time with this one group or with that one group, but I’m going to spend my time with customers, with employees, with investors. I’m going to be there, present with everyone.
Chris: That’s exactly right. And the thing that’s interesting about that is, I found by doing that, you get different inputs from the different stakeholders, and it makes you a better leader having that direct interaction and direct input because you understand what each stakeholder group is looking for. And that helps when you get into a decision that maybe is a tough decision that the company needs to make because you understand what each of the stakeholder groups directly, on a firsthand basis, is looking for. And it allows you to make the right trade-off decisions to drive the value of the company from an overall enterprise standpoint in a more deliberate and informed manner than if you didn’t have that firsthand sort of direct interaction and knowledge.
Adam: Chris, what were the keys to rising within your career, and what can anyone do to rise within their career?
Chris: There’s a couple of things that are important. Obviously, you have to do the job that you’re in well and perform at a high level in the responsibility set that you have, and be willing to take some risk. And I’ll give you a couple of examples.
So early in my career, I was assigned to a manufacturing plant as the plant accounting manager, actually at the CoverGirl Cosmetics plant when I was with Procter & Gamble in Baltimore, Maryland. And I showed up at the plant. I had never worked in a plant before, and I was there to do the accounting and some of that technical work. I got into the job, and I spent the first month or two understanding the technical work. And I decided, boy, I may never get back to actually showing up in a manufacturing plant again. I’d really like to learn what it’s like to work on the line.
So I went to the plant manager and said, “Hey, I’d like to take a couple days and work on the manufacturing line itself as a day laborer, just to get a sense of what the culture is and what are the people on the line going through.” It had nothing to do with my job, but it had everything to do with understanding how the manufacturing plant worked. He looked at me kind of funny and said, “You really want to do that?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “The line might not be very good because I may be a terrible day laborer, but at least I’m going to learn something from it.”
So he said, “Okay.” So I showed up and I went to work on the line. And first of all, the people on the line were super surprised that I was there. They were excited to have me join because nobody had ever asked to do this. And I was not a very good day laborer, by the way. So the line didn’t perform as well as probably what it should have because I was there. But it gave me a whole different appreciation for the factory workers, how talented they are, how much they have to contribute, the knowledge base that they have, and the ability to tap into that.
And so, about a year later, I got a call from somebody who was very high up in the company, and they said, “Hey, I’d like to come and take a factory visit.” And I said, “Okay, well, I’ll take that person and I’ll give them the factory visit.” I took the person around the factory, and I was giving them the tour personally. And they said, “Boy, what’s happening over here?” And I said, “Oh, that’s where we’re blending the formulas. There’ll be a formula card over there, and it’ll have probably eight ingredients, and the number one ingredient probably would be talc.”
He went over there, looked at the formula card. Sure enough, it was eight ingredients. The number one was talc. He said, “How do you know all this?” And so I told him the story of working on the line. And he said, “You’re the type of person that I want to have destined for higher things.”
And so the moral of the story is: take advantage of the opportunities to be curious, to engage more broadly than just the job that you’re given. And you may not see an immediate direct-line benefit, but it’ll make you a better manager as you move throughout your career. And I’ve tried to take that lesson to heart throughout my career, and I’ve always tried to do my current job, but also take advantage of the job to be curious and learn more. And I think that constant learning mentality is one of the things that really propels leaders through the organization if done well.
Adam: I love that story, and I love that lesson: prioritizing curiosity over calculation. If you spend all of your time measuring your next move, you’re never going to be able to get to where you want to go. But if, instead of worrying about your career path and worrying about how what you’re doing today is going to get you to where you want to be, you instead focus on learning, you instead focus on the opportunities around you that allow you to grow, that allow you to develop, that allow you to expand your perspective, expand your worldview, that will allow you to become exponentially more valuable and will turn you into the kind of person that people will recognize as worthy of promoting, worthy of bringing the next opportunity to.
Chris: 100%. And I talk to a lot of people across the organization, and I say for those early in their career, skill acquisition and skill development is so important, and it’s almost more important than anything else at early stages in your career. The other thing that’s a side benefit is it allows you to then be able to go out and, by understanding different constituents, because I’ve worked all over in a whole variety of different jobs – it allows you to have the ability to better interact with stakeholders and understand, from the stakeholder perspective, what’s on their mind. What’s driving their needs? And that allows you to have better insight and judgment into decisions and how it will affect different stakeholder groups.
Adam: You mentioned the importance of skill development. What are the most important skills that you developed that allowed you to become a Fortune 500 CEO, and what are the most important skills that you utilize today as a Fortune 500 CEO?
Chris: Probably, I would say maybe three things. I’ll highlight. The first one is, and these are not in particular order, but strategy development: the ability to understand how to develop a strategy, set a strategy, engage the organization in that strategy, and then energize the organization to execute the strategy. That is a critical skill set that, regardless of the mission that you’re taking on and the role you have, at some point as you move higher, and particularly as a CEO, you have to have that ability to do that.
The second thing I would say is the ability to communicate. You have to be able to communicate. We operate with an organization of over 21,000 employees, and when I communicate, I have to be able to communicate to that organization in a way that people can understand in all different facets, regardless of which geography they’re in, which function they’re in, which brand they’re working on, which part of the company. And so you’ve got to be able to take sometimes what are complicated concepts and boil them down to something that sounds straightforward and simple. Because if you can’t communicate it, it’s going to be very difficult for people to follow your lead. So that would be the second thing.
And then the third thing I would say is you’ve got to be able to develop a strong team because the power of the organization is much stronger than any individual, regardless of what level you’re operating at. And so, oftentimes, I think of myself a little bit as a servant leader, where although I’m the CEO and the leader of the enterprise, I’m really trying to think about, how do I empower my direct reports, the organization, so that everybody can contribute at their maximum capability, and that collective contribution of the organization is delivering the strongest possible output? And if you approach things with that mindset of having the right leaders in the right role, enabling the team to contribute at maximum effectiveness, that’s probably the third thing I would say in terms of critical skill sets to have.
Adam: I would love to dive into each of those three. Starting off with strategy development, what are the keys to developing a successful strategy?
Chris: Yeah, it’s interesting, and maybe I’ll take the example of the Newell turnaround. So when I became the CEO of the company in 2023, Newell was in a turnaround situation. And one of the first most important things in strategy development is to call things transparently as you see them. So the first day I became the CEO, I declared to Wall Street that we were in a turnaround situation, and then I went through a very deliberate process on the strategy development.
I started by understanding what are the capabilities required to win in our industry. Things like consumer understanding, brand building, brand communication, new product innovation, go-to-market, supply chain, etc. Things that are relatively straightforward that you would think would be required to win in a consumer products company. I then had our team spend about two months assessing where did we stand on those capabilities versus best-in-class competitors. And not surprisingly, we picked 11 capabilities, for what it’s worth, and on about half of those, I declared that we were in dead last place. We were the worst of any company in our industry. And then there were about the other half where we were average or maybe slightly above average. So the first step on that is understanding where’s the starting point and where do you start.
From there, we went through a process of deciding a strategy that was a classic where-to-play, how-to-win strategy that was focused on our leading brands. So, 25 brands make up 90% of our sales and profit. Our leading countries, although we’re in 42 countries, 10 countries make up 90% of our sales and profit. We chose to focus on middle and high price points within our categories because we knew those were the areas where you could actually innovate against and get paid for the work that you were doing on innovation. We knew that we needed to focus on millennial and Gen Z consumers who were increasingly becoming the purchasing powers, and we also knew that we needed to focus on winning in leading retailers and winning disproportionately there. Those were sort of our where-to-play choices.
On the how-to-win side, we picked what we thought were the biggest capability gaps that we needed to make meaningful progress on to get the company back to sustainable, profitable growth. And those were things like consumer understanding, brand building, brand communication, go-to-market capability, operational excellence, and having a high-performing organization. And so those wound up being our how-to-win choices.
From there, we went to the third step, which was to say we needed to change the company’s operating model to enable the company to deliver against that strategy framework. And so, as an example, we created a brand management function because we didn’t really have a brand management function. And so we created it. We created exceptional performance standards. We staffed it. We assigned brand management teams to all of the company’s top 25 brands. We consolidated our U.S. selling team from seven separate teams into a single team. We consolidated our supply chain from 23 independent supply chains into a common supply chain. And so that was a pretty big operating model change.
We then needed to move to the next step, which was to assess our talent and say, do we have the right talent to drive the journey? And the answer there was that we had a lot of opportunity to make improvements. So for the top 500 people in the company, we’ve turned over, since that time, about 75% of those roles. About half were people that were inside the company that we felt had capability, and we moved them into a different role, sometimes promoted. And about half were people we recruited from outside the company because we just didn’t have the capability inside the company today. I think our talent is dramatically better than where we were.
And then the final piece, to try to instill it broadly, was to change the culture. And so we picked, in terms of what we were looking for, three things that we wanted to drive. We wanted to be a high-performing culture, an innovative culture, and an inclusive culture. And so we put a whole framework around how we were going to try to drive that, including changing the value set of the company, proactively evaluating performance against those values and that culture, and creating positive recognition and reward systems to reward positive behavior that was in the service of those values and culture, because what we were looking for is not only what people delivered, but how they delivered it. And we wanted people who could both drive great results, but do it in a way that was consistent with the company’s values and culture.
Adam: And now that you’re in the middle of this turnaround, what have you learned? What are the most important lessons that you, as a leader, have taken away on how to lead a turnaround?
Chris: When you’re turning around a large organization, at the time we had 80 brands, we had a lot of disparate systems. There was a tremendous amount of change that needed to happen. The biggest thing that I learned was some of this takes time, even if you go fast. And so we went very fast at initiating all of this work, driving a tremendous number of projects across the company. But we also recognized that this was going to be a multi-year turnaround. It wasn’t going to be something that next quarter is going to be finished because many companies that had these capabilities have been built over tens and more years.
And so having a mindset of making short-term progress, reporting out transparently on your progress to know that you’re on track, but also recognizing that this is going to be a little bit more of a marathon than a sprint, and it’s going to be a multi-year effort, is probably the most challenging thing to get right because everybody, including myself, is very impatient for the results to start to show through. And we got off to a strong start, but it’s taken several years to really get the company back to where we are today, where we’re back to top-line growth, market share growth, margin improvement, delevering the balance sheet, and all of those things are now showing through in the financial results because of a lot of this capability set that we’ve built and put in place.
Adam: Chris, you brought up something really interesting and really important, which is that it’s very easy to set big goals that are achievable over time, but you want to achieve them right away. And success takes time, and when you don’t necessarily have all the time in the world, you grow impatient. And what’s important is being able to set short-term goals that ultimately serve as stepping stones toward that long-term goal. Establish short-term metrics that allow you to understand whether you’re moving toward the long-term success that you ultimately want to achieve. What are those short-term metrics that allow you to understand whether or not you’re moving in the right direction?
Chris: We did that two ways, and you’re right. That’s absolutely critical. The first thing we did was we said, from an external standpoint, we told the Street when we announced in 2023 the turnaround strategy. We said the first thing you’re going to see is you’re going to see us generate a lot more cash flow, and that you should start to see over the course of the first year of the new strategy. And that proved out to be true.
And we told the Street the second thing you’re going to see is you’re going to see our operating margins improve radically, and that turned out to be true over the first two years of the strategy. And then it took a little bit longer to get the top-line growth going, and that might have taken three years or three and a half. But we told the Street, “Hey, the top line is going to take the longest because that’s where the most capability work is required. But you’re going to see sequential improvement. But we’re not going to be to bright until later.” So we laid out clearly a path of when to expect what and how to measure us over the sort of the one-, the two-, the three-year time horizon externally. So that was kind of how we handled it externally, and I think that was relatively well received from an external community standpoint.
Internally, and with our board and with our employees, more importantly, we do something that we call leading indicators and lagging indicators. And so we have a very sophisticated measurement system that we put in place as part of this. And so, as an example, we knew that we needed to get going on new product innovation because new product innovation is the lifeblood of branded consumer products. If you don’t have new product innovation over time, your brand will atrophy and die. And we were at a point where we did not have an effective new product innovation engine that we concluded through that capability assessment that I talked about.
So we put in place a completely new way of developing new product innovation, and we put in place a tiering system where we measured large initiatives. We call a tier one or a tier two. In 2023, there was one initiative that we had that was a tier one or a tier two innovation, which is wholly insufficient. We said we wanted to get that number up, and through this new capability that we put in place, we went from one in 2023 to eight in 2024 to 19 in 2025, and in 2026 we’ll launch 25. So it’s a massive ramp-up.
You don’t see that so much in the lagging indicators because you have to launch the initiative, the consumer has to experience it, and then you get the top-line growth and the market share. But we know how many qualified ideas we’re working on well in advance. So at the beginning of the journey, we were measuring the health of our innovation pipeline that we could prove out with consumer measurement tools and quantification tools from the consumer insights function, and we were very focused on increasing the value of our pipeline. As we mature, we’re now measuring the in-market success from that innovation pipeline. And so it’s important to measure both the internal input as well as the external execution. And that’s an example of the leading versus a lagging indicator, and we do that across all of the key areas of the company now.
Adam: How, as a leader, are you able to drive innovation?
Chris: Some people think it’s me sitting there coming up with the light bulb idea. I can tell you that that’s not how it works. If we were going to rely on that, we would be in deep trouble. Instead, what we do is we’ve put in place a very deliberate innovation process, and what we try to do is prioritize what are the brands and the categories that we’re the most focused on.
So I’ll give you an example. One of our largest brands is Graco Car Seats. In the car seat market, we have a team that’s fully dedicated to the Graco brand. That team goes out and interacts with consumers in both a quantitative but also a qualitative manner to understand what are the pain points with car seats.
One of the pain points that we identified a couple of years ago, following this retool of the innovation process, was that when you put a child in the car seat in the back seat, you have to sort of bend over to put the child in and get them in, and you have to twist the child to get them into the car seat. And if you’re a new mother, that can be very straining. And if you’ve had a C-section, it’s really almost impossible because you don’t have the stomach muscles to be able to do that. And so we identified that as a pain point through our observational research.
And the team said, “Well, how would we solve that pain point?” And they said, “Well, what if we could have a turning car seat that swiveled, and not just swiveled, but swiveled and actually sort of came out of the back seat, so that you could just put the child in front ways directly, and then push the car seat back in and swivel it back and lock it in place?” And from that insight, we were able to develop a new Graco EasyTurn car seat that we launched last year, and that has been a home run in the market. It was the number one-performing new item in all of baby gear that was launched in 2025, and we are gaining significant market share as a result of that type of innovation that we’re driving across the portfolio.
Adam: As you were discussing the most important skills that have allowed you to not only become a CEO, but lead as a CEO, you mentioned strategy development. You mentioned communication. You mentioned the importance of developing a strong team. What do you look for in the people who you hire? What are your best tips on the topic of hiring?
Chris: Yeah, it’s a good question. We look for a couple of things. We look for experience. Does the person have the demonstrated experience or background for the job that we’re putting them in? The second thing is, do they have a proven track record of results that are positive? And then the third thing is a little bit more intangible, but are they somebody who we think is going to be a strong leader with strong potential, a good communicator, somebody who can bring energy to the role, those types of things? And so it’s a mix of skills, experience, performance, and drive is what we’re looking for in the interview process. And that’s true whether we’re looking to bring somebody from a job inside the company to a new job, maybe it’s a promotion for somebody, or we’re recruiting from the outside.
Adam: What do you believe are the key characteristics of the very best leaders, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Chris: Being curious, being engaged, being a good listener to understand. You know, I mentioned the car seat innovation example. The reason why we got that innovation is because we had somebody watching parents use the car seat and listening to what they said was the pain point. If somebody hadn’t been there watching and listening, they probably wouldn’t have had the idea to create the rotating car seat or the turning car seat. And so those are the things that I would say are important as we think about this.
The other thing I would say is a culture that we’ve adopted is that because we’re in a collaborative industry that is multifunctional by design, everything that we do requires typically somebody from consumer insights, a marketing or brand person, a salesperson, a supply chain person. It’s important for us to have people that work well together. And so we try to have collaboration skills as high on our list as well. We want people who generally will make a good teammate, will treat people with respect, that people enjoy working with, because that does make the work environment more conducive and leads to better results, I believe.
Adam: You mentioned the importance of listening, and earlier you mentioned the importance of communication. And right at the heart of effective communication is great listening. The best leaders are the best listeners. The best leaders don’t walk into a room intent on showing off how much they know. The best leaders walk into a room intent on learning. And how do you learn? By listening.
Chris: Absolutely right. And I can’t overstate that point. And it’s interesting because there’s two types of authority. You can have positional authority because you have the title to do something, or you can have authority because you’re the most knowledgeable on something. It’s usually better to use the second rather than the first if you’re going to try to make a decision. But in order to use the second, you’ve got to be well-versed on the topic, and the only way to do that is to be a good listener.
And oftentimes, decisions that come to the top of a company come to the top of a company because they’re complicated decisions. If it was an easy decision, somebody at a more junior level may have already made the decision. And when you get to a more complicated decision, oftentimes there’s different viewpoints. And if you only listen to one viewpoint and don’t actively search out all of the viewpoints, I think you’re going to be suboptimal as a decision maker in the role.
And so that’s part of the reason why I spend so much time, as we started, traveling, meeting with all of the stakeholders, whether they’re inside the company or outside the company, trying to learn what’s on their mind, what do they think, what do they think we can do better. And I really value all of that feedback because it makes us a better company and gives us better context to make decisions in.
Adam: You mentioned the challenge of difficult decisions. You mentioned that as a leader, you’re faced with having to make difficult decisions, and you’ve had to make a lot of difficult decisions as Newell Brands has struggled, facing a number of crises that have been outside of your control: tariffs, a weak macroeconomic environment, soft global demand. How have you, as a leader, been able to deal with these crises? What have you learned? What advice do you have?
Chris: Yeah, you’re exactly right. The external environment over the last couple of years has been very challenging, with a lot of existential threats for this company. The lesson I take out of it is, and we’ve had to pivot and make some challenging decisions, whether it’s pricing for tariffs, pulling back on our brand portfolio, how to navigate surging commodity prices, etc.
The thing that I take out of it is the first thing is you’re never going to have perfect information to know what decision to make. And if you wait for perfect information, you’re going to be too slow. And so I always try to come at things from a construct of, I want to make sure I’m listening, that I’m getting the relevant stakeholders’ input, but I also have to recognize that a decision needs to be made on a timely basis because making no decision is also a decision in and of itself. And so you don’t want to consciously forego things because you’re waiting too long for information.
So I try to think about a construct of, if I have 70 or 80% of the information that I think I need to make a call, it’s probably the right time to make the call that allows the organization to move forward.
The other thing I try to think about, and I talk to our teams often about this, is sort of a batting average concept, which is I’m trying to create a culture where we don’t make decisions 100% of the time correctly. And that might sound strange to start, but if you’re waiting for 100% perfect decision-making, you’re going to be way too slow, way too bureaucratic.
And so, the motto I tell people: if, for example, in our innovation portfolio, what I’m shooting for is that 70% of our innovations are successful, because if we can bat .700, I think we’re going to be successful. And on the ones that don’t work, we’ll learn something from them. We’ll course correct. We’ll come back to it. And the 70% that we get going faster on are probably going to overdeliver by enough to make up for the 30% that didn’t make it the way we thought. And that’s proven to be about right so far. And so, this notion of speed is also important in decision-making, particularly so that an organization doesn’t get stuck and forego decisions that ought to have been made or that should be made.
Adam: I love that advice, and it brings me back to an interview I did with Anne Beiler, who is the founder of Auntie Anne’s. And in our conversation, she brought up something really interesting, which is the distinction between perfection and excellence. And when you’re seeking perfection, that can be crippling. When you’re seeking excellence, that allows you to get to a place where you are ultimately at your very best.
Chris: Yeah, I love that. It’s funny. I have not heard that way of describing it, but I wholeheartedly support that. We talk about it as perfection is the enemy of the good, but I love that distinction, and I think that’s exactly right. That we’re striving for excellence, and by the way, sometimes the way that you get excellence is by trying something and failing at it.
So I tell our teams, I don’t mind anybody who tries something and fails as long as we don’t repeat and make the same mistake twice. Because if we try something and fail, we likely will be able to course correct and wind up in a better spot than if we didn’t do that. And you see that in so many examples around corporate America, where people learn something by doing something, and that learning is more valuable than whether you succeed or fail on the first attempt. Now, we’ve got to be careful that we don’t take that too far and fail at something that’s critical for the company. But there’s many things that we’re striving for, that excellence, and through trial and error, so to speak, we’re iterating and getting better on the journey to excellence.
Adam: Chris, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?
Chris: Recognize that intelligent risk-taking is also a critical skill. So, if you’re a good listener, you’ve understood the environment, you understand the context, and you’re curious, and you have an idea to do something, having the ability to have the courage to stand up and take an intelligent risk and say, “We’re going to try it, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll pivot and we’ll iterate and we’ll make it better.” That’s how you drive continuous improvement, and that’s how organizations succeed over time.
And in the current world, where you have massive technology disruption and potential geopolitical disruption, if you’re not iterating as a company and continually improving, you’re likely to be disrupted as a company. There is no standing still and just doing what you did five years ago today. That model doesn’t really work. And so being able to be a person who is comfortable with change, understands how to take it on, and sort of does it in the right way is the advice that I would give somebody to develop their skill set, their experience base. And if you can do that and then articulate it, I think you become a very valuable employee and a very sought-after employee over the course of your career.
Adam: Chris, thank you for all the great advice, and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.
Chris: Thank you. Yeah, this was great. I very much enjoyed the conversation, and thanks for your words of wisdom as well.
