I recently went one-on-one with Greg Brown, CEO of Illumia. Greg was previously the CEO of Udemy.
Adam: What were the keys to rising in your career and becoming a CEO, and what can anyone do to rise in their career and make it to where they want to be?
Greg: That’s a really good question, and it’s broad in and of itself. For me, it was never a situation where I had this aspiration that I wanted to check the box and become a CEO. But I did know from a fairly early age that I wanted to develop a career in an area where, number one, I had the ability to compete, and number two, I could use some of the things that I developed through my sports career. I was fortunate enough to be a college quarterback and play at the Division I level. You develop the capability to be part of a team, but also to lead and lead from the front. I felt like that skill set would translate into the business world as I got my business degree and started building a career. Inevitably, it played out that way.
I got into sales because it was a proxy for me to keep those competitive juices flowing, similar to the type of feeling you had on Fridays or Saturdays playing football. I loved it. I had some success building my career in sales and had an opportunity to move into management. For me, that was the best of both worlds. Then I really got to expand my horizons as I started moving up in the management ranks into more general management. I had a really fortunate opportunity that was a catalyst for my growth into general management and eventually becoming a CEO. I was in my early 30s at Webex, and I was one of the first 50 members of the team at an early-stage startup. I had a chance to go to Europe and lead our European operation, really start investing in it, and take that organization to the next level.
That was a catalyst for a lot of the things that happened throughout the balance of my career, including having the courage and eventually the desire to give the CEO thing a shot. It’s worked out pretty well.
Adam: You started off as a college quarterback. You then started working in sales and were really good at it. You had the opportunity to transition into a management role. Excelling as an individual contributor is very different from excelling as a leader. How can you figure out which path is right for you? In both cases, you were successful, but you clearly decided that the leadership path was the path for you. What advice would you share?
Greg: I believe that to be an effective leader, to be a transformational leader, you’ve got to have a passion for making those around you better. For me, I always got more joy out of winning as a team and helping to facilitate the type of environment, whether it was on the football field or in my business career, where you bring the right folks together to do more than you ever thought you could do individually or even collectively. That really was the catalyst not just for my move into management, but for moving from sales management into thinking more broadly about what I could do to support organizational growth and organizational success.
To this day, I tell people what I said in my first all-hands after coming into Illumia: I get more joy and satisfaction out of enabling those around me to do the best work of their lives and for us to collectively win together than I ever did from any individual experience, competition, sales award, or what have you. I think you have to have a passion for it, and I’m not so sure that can be developed. I think it can be to some degree, but I think it just has to be innate in you. You have to truly get joy from making those around you better. That was a large catalyst for me. The rest of it, from a leadership standpoint, was just having a growth mindset and being very adaptable throughout my career. Those are characteristics and traits that have served me very well.
Adam: Going back to the sports analogy, if you get the most joy, the most satisfaction, and feel most rewarded and fulfilled by the numbers you put up, that’s the mindset of an individual contributor. If you’re a quarterback, how many yards did I throw for? How many touchdowns did I throw for? If you’re playing baseball, how many hits did I have? How many runs did I score? Did I hit a home run? If you care most about how your team performed, how did I influence the outcome of everyone around me? Did we win? Did we lose? That’s the mindset of a leader.
Greg: Spot on. To play that out from a quarterback’s perspective, you’ve got guys like Dan Marino. For those of us who grew up in the era watching Dan, he may be the best thrower of the football who ever put a uniform on, and he never won a Super Bowl. A lot of folks don’t view him as one of the most successful quarterbacks in NFL history because of that. It really is all about, especially as a quarterback but then as a leader, how we enable those around us to rise above maybe the level of talent they thought they had and to do more than they ever thought they could do.
But they have to do it together to reach a common goal, which in football is a Super Bowl. For us in business, it could be top-line growth, it could be bottom-line profitability, whatever those targets or goals are that your organization has. If we’re able to enable that through our people and through our teams, that really is the end game. That’s how I think about it. I’ve always gotten more joy out of seeing the score at the end of the game and us on top than I ever did in high school or college if I had 330 yards and threw three touchdowns. Yeah, okay, that’s great. But if we lost, I really didn’t care too much about it.
Adam: What do you believe are the key characteristics of the very best leaders, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?
Greg: As far as characteristics, I’ve always felt that calm conviction paired with curiosity, just relentless curiosity, was a really solid, lethal combination from a leadership standpoint. It’s the notion of strong opinions loosely held, or having certainty but not being close-minded, and being able to lead with that level of calm conviction. I tell my folks all the time that one of the most important characteristics or skill sets you can develop is that growth mindset, that relentless curiosity as you’re going throughout your career, regardless of where you’re at. I really try to embody that and lead from the front with respect to that curiosity.
If I were to add anything, it would be something I focus relentlessly on in our organization: the ability to create clarity up and down the organization with respect to where we’re trying to go, what we’re trying to accomplish, and how we’re going to get there. That’s a little bit of my formula in terms of how I think about effective leadership.
Adam: How, as a leader, can you create that clarity?
Greg: I discovered an operating model through curiosity, reading, and what have you that I became enamored with. It’s an organizational clarity model that was born out of Patrick Lencioni’s books. I’m sure you know who Patrick is. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage. The Advantage is about an organizational clarity model. When I took my first CEO job, I searched out the leading consultant in the Bay Area, where I live, who was practicing this model. I brought him in and had him help me roll out this organizational clarity model to the organization. It was so successful that I brought Glenn with me everywhere I’ve gone.
In fact, I was just with him last week with my leadership team for two and a half days at a leadership offsite that we do four times a year, every quarter. It’s all about ensuring that we, as a leadership team, are the first team across all functions, that we’re aligned, and that we’re effectively creating clarity down through the organization. There’s a model I’ve adopted, and it’s been wildly successful. I’m definitely a strong advocate for it and would recommend it to any leader.
Adam: One of the things you mentioned is that one of the most important skills any leader needs to have is a growth mindset. As you were describing the importance of having a growth mindset within that context, the implication is that a growth mindset is a skill. It’s something that can be developed. How can you develop a growth mindset?
Greg: It’s developing an understanding that, as a leader, especially in the world I compete in, high technology and high-tech companies, if you’re not curious about what’s happening around you, especially today with generative AI and agentic AI and everything that’s happening, there’s really no way you’re going to stay on the cutting edge of technology development or understand the type of talent you need to win the game you’re playing. If you’re not intensely reading and trying to discover what’s happening in the world as it evolves, not just around you but in your specific category and the vertical markets you play in if you’re a vertically oriented business, you’re going to fall behind.
It’s something that was impressed upon me early in my career. As a result, the skill for me was just reading and continually asking folks, “What are you reading?” Now it’s easy. You’ve got podcasts, and it’s so much easier to consume information with all the amazing podcasts. If I’m on the treadmill or riding the Peloton, that’s what I’m doing. I’m consuming information, learning, and developing. That’s one of the core capabilities or competencies that a leader has to have. Can it be developed? Sure. You have to have an awareness that if you want to be great as a manager or leader, you’re going to have to continue to evolve, adapt, and grow. That’s something you’re going to have to invest time in.
One of the keys, especially when you get into leadership at my level as a CEO, is that there are tremendous demands on your time. I have to be disciplined and consistent about carving out time and finding time to learn and allowing that curiosity to drive the consumption of knowledge in whatever form factor makes the most sense, whether it’s on the Peloton or when I’m traveling. If I don’t do that, time gets away from you. You have to be purposeful about it. You have to schedule time and intentionally carve out time to do it.
Adam: How do you manage your time? How do you manage your day? How do you ensure that you’re performing at an optimal level day in and day out?
Greg: My days are pretty scheduled because I start early. I’m really into balance in terms of taking care of myself, getting enough sleep, and working out. I get up at 5:30 pretty much every day, somewhere between 5:00 and 5:30 depending on where I’m at. I’m getting a workout in six days a week, and I do sauna and cold plunge. I do a lot of things from a health-span perspective to invest in enabling myself to be my best when I’m working. I make sure I’ve got enough sleep, I’m fit at 57, and I’m ready to tackle the day so that when I’m engaged, I can be present and get the most out of that day.
I also schedule time in my calendar to reflect. That’s something I learned from a prior CEO of LinkedIn. I was following him, and he talked about scheduling time to reflect and be strategic with your thought processes. Sometimes it gets scheduled over, but I try not to let that happen. I schedule time to give recognition to folks in our company. We have a recognition platform. I think it’s critical for organizations to make sure that folks feel rewarded and recognized for the amazing work they’re doing to support what we’re trying to accomplish as a business. All of this is scheduled. Otherwise, it doesn’t get done.
In terms of my day, I try to spend a fair portion of my time with customers. I grew up on the sales side, as we talked about. For me, the only way to truly stay in touch with what’s happening in the markets we’re serving and our ability to create continued value for our customers is to hear from them and engage with them. Whether it’s Zoom meetings or me traveling on-site, I do all of it. I spend a fairly large percentage of my time out in the market, and then the balance of the time is running the business, as most CEOs do.
Adam: Do you have any tips for anyone listening on what they can do to optimize their day most effectively, manage their time, and ensure that they’re reaching as close to peak performance as possible day in and day out?
Greg: I’ve got a couple. One, as basic as it sounds, is the Pareto principle. It’s been effective for me. I really do focus on trying to identify what the 20% of the actions, products, or whatever it happens to be are that are going to generate a disproportionate amount of revenue or growth for the business. I hold myself accountable and try to stay as disciplined as I can about spending my time in those areas. I’ll give you one. For me, it’s talent. I need to make sure I’m spending enough time recruiting and engaging with our talent. It’s recruiting talent into key roles in the business to ensure that we’ve got the right team on the field and we’ve got a bench, or bench strength, supporting the team we have on the field.
I do a retro on myself periodically. I’ll look back at my calendar and ask, “Did I spend my time where I said I needed to spend it? Was I disciplined enough? If not, where did I get out of whack? Where did I get disproportionate?” Then it’s about making sure we structure my time so that I’m spending it where it’s going to have the biggest impact on our ability to have success as a business. For me, businesses are all about people, so I’ve got to be spending enough time recruiting, developing, and engaging with our team in support of the value we’re trying to deliver to our customers. It’s about accountability and taking time to do a retrospective to make sure you’re on track.
Adam: What is your approach to recruiting? What advice do you have for anyone on the topic of recruiting?
Greg: Going back to the Patrick Lencioni model, there are some key principles. I liked everything about the organizational clarity model they developed that we’ve deployed. There’s a very basic concept around talent: we’re looking for people who are humble, hungry, and smart. We have that in our job descriptions. We talk about it internally, and we really try to stay disciplined around it.
What do those terms mean? Humble, hopefully, is straightforward. It’s all about we versus me. Team first. A team-first mindset. Hungry? You can’t teach passion. I’ve tried to and never figured out how to do it. Either folks are driven, hungry, and passionate about the work they’re doing, or they’re not. We’re looking for folks who are. Then smart is not IQ. It’s EQ. We’re looking for folks who are switched on and really have a good sense of self-awareness and situational awareness. They’re coming into whatever situation or environment it might be with the right frame of mind. We really do vet that in the interview process and try to hire for it and develop talent around these principles. That’s been a very basic but effective approach for us in terms of building, leading, and managing teams.
Adam: I love that framework: humble, hungry, and smart. What can you train? What can’t you train? There are certain qualities that are innate. There are certain qualities that can be developed. There are certain qualities that can be developed a lot more easily when you have other qualities that are innate. When you’re a person who’s humble, hungry, and smart, you’re going to be someone who’s eager to learn and eager to grow. We spoke about the importance of having a growth mindset. You’re going to be able to show up on day one, even if you don’t know all that much, and in most cases you probably won’t, and be able to learn a lot really quickly because of your mindset and your mentality. I love that framework. I love that approach.
Greg: Yeah, I do as well. To answer the question of what you can train, in the smart category, the principle of empathy is something I learned early in my career on the sales side. I needed to develop the skill or capability of looking at things through the customer’s eyes in every discussion and every situation. I would go into it with the mindset that if I’m on the other side of the table, how would I be receiving the information I’m about to deliver? It changes your perspective forever if you’re able to do that in the development of a sales presentation.
For me, we just had a leadership summit a couple of weeks ago. We brought our top 50 leaders together and had a fantastic two and a half days with them. I kicked it off, went through some principles, and framed the couple of days. But everything I delivered was with the mindset of, how would I be receiving this information if I were a new leader six months into the company sitting in the crowd, or somebody who had been there six years? In everything I do, I really try to look at things that way. I didn’t always do that.
Is that something you can train or develop? I believe it is. The notion of empathy, or looking at things through that lens instead of just looking at things directly from the seat you’re sitting in, is something I’ve gotten better at over time. The humble and the hungry pieces are debatable in terms of how much you can develop the skill of being hungry or humble. But on the empathy side, I’ve surely been able to get better at that over time.
Adam: Greg, you bring up something really interesting, which is whether or not these skills can be developed. I’m with you. I strongly believe that EQ can be developed, and I would argue that all of these can be developed. Humility can be developed. Hunger can be developed. But it’s a lot harder to develop those skills and traits than it is to learn how to do a lot of other things that organizations want you to do. There are plenty of things that, if you’re humble, hungry, and smart, you’ll be able to learn really easily compared to someone who isn’t humble, hungry, or smart trying to learn how to be humble, hungry, or smart. As an organization, you have to ask yourself, who do I want on my team? Where do I want to spend my time investing in and training people? What’s going to be most likely to yield the best results? Going back to the sports analogy, if you’re bringing in great raw athletes who have great tools, they have the opportunity to develop into great players. If you’re bringing in players who might not necessarily have those great tools, sure, they could potentially get to a place where they’re good contributors, but it’s going to require a lot more coaching, a lot more time, and a lot more work. The odds are going to be a lot less in your favor than if you start off with the right people in place.
Greg: I couldn’t agree more. We talk about this quite a bit in the company. The best-performing organizations and teams are made up of an amalgamation of A players with similar values, traits, and skills. There’s an old saying in college football, and I think it definitely translates: it’s not about the X’s and O’s, it’s about the Jimmys and the Joes when it comes to whether or not you’re going to win the championship. Meaning, it’s about the people, not the strategy. You can put the best strategy out there that you can develop. You can hire Bain to come in and do its thing. But if you don’t have the right people in the right seats to execute that strategy, you’re going to have a very difficult time being successful with it.
Conversely, if you get the right team on the field with all the traits we just talked about, A players or B players who aspire to be A players and work their tails off, nights, weekends, and everything else, to do whatever’s necessary to become that A player because they’re earlier in their career, you get a bunch of folks like that, and there’s very rarely a challenge you can’t overcome, an opportunity you can’t take advantage of, and ultimately a game you can’t win. For me, it’s all about getting the right team on the field and then developing a talent offense with that team to enable them to develop the skills and capabilities and work together with that organizational clarity model we talked about.
It’s about helping them truly be the best they can be and do the best work of their lives at the company I’m currently at. I feel like that’s my job: create that environment, enable it, remove obstacles, and allow them to go do the work they came here to do. Leaders who look at it from that perspective give the organization the best shot they can to win.
Adam: You brought up a really important word, which is environment, because when we’re talking about recruiting, there are two sides of the coin. One side we’ve talked pretty extensively about, which is what you want in the people you’re trying to bring in. When you have clarity around what those qualities are, what those characteristics are, and who the people are that you want on your team, you’re going to be a lot more successful. But then the other side is, how do you get them to join your team? There’s going to be a lot of competition for A players. There’s going to be a lot of competition for B players who have the potential to turn into A players. How do you get them onto your team?
Greg: One thing I do know is A players want to work with other A players, and it starts from the top. It really starts with me. As I mentioned earlier, I invest quite a bit of my time making sure that at all levels of leadership in the organization, we’ve got almost 1,000 employees, so I surely can’t be involved in every interview process that’s going on in and around the company. But there’s no question that I can be involved and engaged in the interview processes for our leadership team, especially our senior leadership team down to our VPs.
I am because I want to make sure that whoever is looking at us, if we believe they’re an A player, or a potential A player, because that’s why they’re in the interview process, they understand from an organizational clarity perspective where we’re going, why we’re going there, how we’re going to get there, and the investment we’re making in our people to enable them to develop and grow and truly develop a career here in pursuit of the mission and vision we’re after.
Again, it’s about investment. I’m a passionate guy, and it’s about bringing that passion and commitment to those folks who are considering joining the organization. If you come here and join us, we’re going to invest in you, and we’re going to make sure we give you every opportunity to be successful doing what you came here to do. That translates. It really does. It always did for me. I wanted to work for companies that wanted to win and wanted to invest in putting a winning team on the field. If I felt like that was the case, it was a mission I bought into, and I felt I could contribute meaningfully to that organization accomplishing its goal or mission, then that’s a place I wanted to be.
From an empathy standpoint, that’s how I try to act. I put myself in their shoes. If I’m an A player looking at us, what do I want to see out of the CEO and the senior leadership team that’s going to convince me this is the place for me? That’s how I look at it, and that’s how I engage.
Adam: Do you have any other advice for leaders on how to build winning teams and how to lead winning teams?
Greg: Maybe a couple of things. One is something that’s hard to do, especially if, like us, you serve multiple markets. We serve a couple of different vertical markets. It’s the concept of focus. It’s something we talked a lot about at this leadership offsite I just mentioned. We had our top 50 leaders there. Collectively, we all feel like we’re trying to do too much. So how do we put a process in place, and we did, to discipline ourselves to focus on fewer things, track them relentlessly, and have a high level of accountability starting from the top, starting with me?
That’s going to enable us to push aside a lot of the other priorities that maybe aren’t as high on the list, that aren’t going to have that 80/20 impact, and that aren’t going to have as big an impact on us achieving our goals. Then the discipline side of it is not allowing yourself to be distracted. That sounds great, but how do you do it? It’s putting that scoreboard in place. Whenever we get together as an organization, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about the other 20 things we could be doing. We’re talking about the three things we said are going to be the most impactful for us as an organization to achieve our goals.
That’s what we’re going to track. That’s what we’re going to measure. That’s what we’re going to hold ourselves accountable to. That’s what we’re going to invest in disproportionately. That’s a hard discipline for most companies. It surely has been for the companies I’ve led. But it’s something I think is really important. If you look at the best companies, the best-performing companies, I think they do that better than others. They identify the 20% of actions, activities, projects, initiatives, or whatever it happens to be that are going to generate the majority of the results. Then they get relentless about protecting those investments, and they don’t get distracted.
Adam: I love that. It starts with clarity, which we’ve talked about in the course of this conversation. It continues with focus, and the only way it works is if you have discipline.
Greg: That’s very well said.
Adam: You mentioned that in your industry there are specific challenges you face as a leader, and leading in the technology industry is a great example of the challenges many leaders in many industries are facing. Every day you wake up and ask yourself, how do I manage change? How do I manage transformation? Taking that a step further, how do I lead change? How do I lead transformation? What advice would you share for anyone on how to lead change and lead transformation?
Greg: That’s another good one. Arguably, we’re going through more change than we’ve ever gone through in our careers as a result of generative AI, the most transformative technology any of us has ever seen, being front and center now in pretty much everything we do, work, personal lives, and what have you. I’m in Claude not just daily, but for a good portion of my day. In terms of how we lead through change and adaptability, number one, you have to be intentional. I’ll speak specifically to generative AI because it’s a good example.
One of the mistakes I made at Udemy when I was CEO was when generative AI hit the big stage and we all realized the impact it was going to have. I brought in a consultant, and the intention was to help us as a leadership team manage the organization through the change process of adopting this technology. The mistake I made was putting it on all the individual functional leaders, the CRO, CFO, CHRO, and what have you, to figure out how to embed the technology into their functions and determine the best approach for them. The mistake was that it’s moving so fast and it’s so transformative, and everybody has day jobs as it is. They have the work they’re already responsible for doing. It just didn’t get done. It didn’t work.
The learning from that was that if something like generative AI is going to be as transformational and require as much attention and focus as something that we, as a company, feel we need to get done, we actually need to lead this transformation. I’ve got to put somebody in place whose sole responsibility is to do that. We did. We had a COO here, Laura McLaughlin. She’s fantastic. She was in a different role. I asked her to move into this role and laid out the job description and expectations very specifically. We need to transform every function in this company, deeply embedding generative AI into everything we do.
She, as a C-level executive, is responsible for leading that change. As a result, there are investments and a team underneath her. I think you have to be purposeful. If the change you’re going through is going to be critical to the success of your organization, you’ve got to demonstrate that level of purpose through resources and investment to make sure you’re able to execute against whatever that change is. In our case, it’s going to be dramatic.
That’s an example of how not to do it in terms of what I did at Udemy, and then what I believe the right approach is. It’s surely playing out that way right now in terms of the early successes we’re seeing as a result of Laura developing the right strategy, communicating to the organization what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it, resourcing it appropriately, hiring those folks, and now starting to see those programs unfold. We’re investing in developing those skills, leveraging generative AI, and teaching everybody how to do it and do it well. It’s not about replacing people. It’s about augmenting people today, augmenting their skills, and giving them a lot more capability to move faster and be more efficient with the work they’re doing. I’m proud of where we’re at and proud of how we’re going about it now. It did come through some learning about how not to do it.
Adam: The key lesson you’re sharing is the importance of ownership. If no one on your team owns something, that something is probably not going to get done, or not going to get done very well. But if you, as a leader, own it, then you’re going to get it done. Or if you, as a leader, assign it to someone and they’re owning it, and that person is accountable to you, there’s a pretty good chance it’s going to get done. It’s ultimately about clarity, focus, discipline, and by extension, ownership.
Greg: That’s exactly right. Change for human beings is hard, regardless of what it is. We are creatures of habit. We like consistency in our lives. We like to be able to get up, go through our days, and do the things that are comfortable for us and that we’re used to doing. Anything that requires the amount of change or adaptive behavior that generative AI is requiring of all of us, to your point, requires a level of ownership and then discipline around that. You have to be able to move folks through that change process, which is uncomfortable for them. That’s something we’re in, I would say, the second or third inning of right now.
Adam: What inning are we in when it comes to AI? You spoke about some early mistakes you made when it came to AI implementation, but where are we today? What should leaders understand about AI? What are your best tips on the topic?
Greg: I think we’re really early. It’s tough to call the progression, so to speak. There’s no way we’re past the third inning. I’d probably say the first or second. Let’s just call it the second inning. I think a couple of things about generative AI. I was on another podcast about a year ago talking about this when I was at Udemy. I was getting challenged about the negative impacts of generative AI, how it’s going to displace jobs, and what have you. What I said back then is something I still very much believe today. Look, it’s here, so we have a choice. We’re either going to embrace the technology as it is, the innovative aspect of it, and the positive impact it can have on our lives in every capacity, or we’re going to be scared, we’re not going to adopt it, and it’s going to happen to us. We’ll be pulled along at some point regardless.
You have a choice. My choice, and what I believe everybody’s choice should be, is to embrace this technology in a way that’s going to enable us to reinvent how we work and live as human beings. Forget Illumia right now. I’m talking about our lives. If we all look at it from a glass-half-full perspective, we give ourselves a better shot at finding ways to optimize the technology and use it for good, use it to enhance our lives, versus what a lot of folks are concerned about, which is that it could have more of a detrimental impact.
Well, yeah, sure. So can walking down the street if you get hit by a car. There are a lot of things that can happen negatively with pretty much everything we do in our lives. I’m a pilot. One of the things I did when I took time off between my job at Udemy and my job now was get my pilot’s license. A lot of people say, “Aren’t you scared? Flying up there by yourself or with another individual, you could die.” You can also die doing a lot of things in life, but you can’t live your life scared. You’ve got to take advantage of the opportunity and charge at life.
In this case, with generative AI, I just think it’s the most exciting time any of us has ever lived through in terms of what we can do with this technology and the impact it’s going to have on our ability to live our lives more productively in ways we can’t even fathom today. I’ll round out my comments with this: it’s one of the primary reasons why I came back and am operating again after I took time off at Udemy. I just felt I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to be part of the most transformational period in any of our lives and help an organization like Illumia reinvent how it provides value and impact to customers in the verticals we serve, which are higher education and healthcare. I believe that even more strongly today than I did eight months ago when I joined.
Adam: One of the things you spoke about is the importance of adaptability, being not only willing to adapt to change, but eager to adapt to change. There’s so much change going on. AI is the best example of it. Are you going to be left behind, or are you going to be at the forefront? As a leader, not only do you have to be adaptive, but you have to create a culture of adaptability, a culture of flexibility. How do you do that?
Greg: A lot of it is mindset. I do believe leading from the front is a big part of that. It’s the tone we set as leaders. It’s how we talk about, in this case, generative AI and the ways we’re going to embed it to arm our employees with tools, resources, and the ability to be more efficient and more effective at what they do, and how we’re going to invest in teaching them how to do it. Again, that’s Laura’s job as COO and what we’re going to be bringing to our employees.
One of the things we’ve really tried to over-rotate on, and we’re still working diligently on this, is recognizing that this technology has the perception among many people that it could have a detrimental impact. We’re really peeling the onion back in terms of how we’re going to go about the process of enabling them with this technology. We have a playbook. I’ll give a shout-out to Paul Cheek over at MIT. I was on-site with Paul at MIT a few months back, and he’s developed something as part of an incubator he’s involved in at MIT called the AI-Driven Enterprise. You can go check out the website.
It’s fantastic work that Paul has done and is doing right now to help organizations with a very clearly defined playbook on how to transform from within, leveraging generative AI in the best ways to assist your employees not just in adopting the technology, but really embedding it and embracing it for good and for all the positive capabilities it has. We’re almost verbatim rolling out Paul’s playbook based on how impressed we were with the thought that went into it and the impact it’s already had on many other organizations.
We’re providing all this insight to our employees. Paul’s going to come help us roll out and kick off this initiative. In fact, I’m going to see him in a couple of weeks at a CEO event I’m going to be at in Miami. All of this is going to be unveiled and communicated to our employees with the empathy we would want to receive it with, so that they’re not feeling like their jobs are at risk. They truly feel that this is an investment we’re making in them.
Adam: What you just shared ties right into one of the most important skills we talked about: having a growth mindset. We spent a good amount of time earlier in our conversation on that skill and the importance of cultivating that skill. What other skills do you believe are integral to succeeding in today’s workplace? What do you believe are the most important skills to succeed in tomorrow’s workplace?
Greg: I don’t know if it’s a skill, but it’s a principle that could be developed into a skill: very succinctly focus on what you can control and let the rest fly by. Why would that potentially be a skill? Largely for the reason we just got done talking about generative AI, how much people are going to have to adapt, and the risk and some of the fear around it.
From a mindset standpoint, if you can, at the most basic level, rationalize that you can’t control everything going on around you, then what you’re going to focus on and spend your mental calories on are the things in your life, whether it’s your work life or personal life, that you actually can control and influence. The rest of it, I’m just not going to worry about. I’m not going to be distracted by it.
It does simplify life in many ways. For me, it really dampens anxiety around things that are easy for your mind to start getting wrapped around the axle on. Bring yourself back down to earth. Be present. Be where your feet are. Focus on what you can control, and let the rest go. That’s been very helpful for me. I think it’s a principle that would be helpful for a lot of folks, especially in turbulent times.
Adam: It’s such great advice, and it’s a topic I love talking about. What can we control? What can’t we control? There’s such a large gap between the perception of what the most successful people, the most successful leaders, can control and what they actually can control. I’ve done interviews with hundreds and hundreds of the most successful leaders across just about every discipline imaginable, and I’ve had Fortune 500 CEO after Fortune 500 CEO share with me how little they control relative to what people think they control. One of my earliest interviews on Thirty Minute Mentors was with Penny Pennington, who’s the CEO of Edward Jones. I asked Penny how, as a CEO of a huge company with 50,000 employees, she’s able to control her organization’s culture. She said, “What are you talking about? I have no control over my organization’s culture. I can control how I show up. I can control the tone I set. I can control the people I surround myself with. There are specific things I can control, but the vast majority of what goes on within my organization is outside of my control.” As a leader at any level, regardless of whether you’re a CEO or whether you’re the CEO of your own life and are just starting out, your advice is right on the money. What can we control? What can’t we control? Start there. If you spend all of your time focused on the things you can’t control, then you’re going to be a lot less successful at the things you can control, and you’re going to be a lot less successful.
Greg: And you’re going to be a lot less happy at the end of the day.
Adam: Yeah, there’s definitely a correlation between happiness, success, and fulfillment. Do you have an example in your career or in your life where you were doing something you thought was right for you, but it didn’t bring you happiness or fulfillment, and you realized maybe you should do something different?
Greg: Yeah, I do. I was at a company called Achievers, which was an employee engagement and recognition company. We got acquired by a public company called Blackhawk Network, which was effectively a global gift card company. They did more than just gift cards, but in the most simplistic terms, that’s what they did. I got on well with the organization, and they asked me to step into a leadership position managing the entire business outside of North America. We had somebody running North America, and I was responsible for everything happening outside North America, which was largely Asia-Pacific and Latin America. We had some things going on in Europe and a lot of other regions.
I enjoyed the challenge, but what I came to realize is that, at the end of the day, I’ve got to find joy and believe that I’m actually having an impact on folks’ lives for it to really matter to me. I was surely supporting the people who worked for me in these various regions, and I was flying around and spending a lot of time supporting our teams. My kids were young, and I was spending more than 50% of my time on the road. But at the end of the day, I found it very difficult to get intrinsically excited and really motivated to go eke out another tenth of a tenth of a point on gift card transactions.
I did a lot of introspection. What I missed was the impact I had at Achievers, being in front of customers and many times having them literally in tears talking about the impact we’d had on the lives of their employees as a result of our platform. We enabled them to see all the goodness happening around the world through the engagement and recognition platform. It was about impact for me.
Then I made the decision. Number one, I was traveling too much and away from my kids at a point in their lives when I didn’t want to miss their lives. I’m dad first, always, so that was one aspect of it. The other was that I wasn’t fulfilled. I wasn’t doing something that was mission-driven in a way that I really bought into and felt like I was contributing to good in a way that went beyond just making the company money. I wanted to impact people’s lives in a positive way.
So I took my first CEO job. This was a big job, a big responsibility at a public company, and I stepped down and took my first CEO job at a $20 million venture-backed startup. Off I went, and I couldn’t have been happier. It was a performance management company focused on revolutionizing the notion of performance management from one annual review, which we all believed was broken, to a very different approach with frequent conversations and check-ins.
The way they were going about it and the impact it was having on the lives of employees, based on what the customers I talked to before I took the job told me, made me think, okay, this is where I need to be. I need to be in a company that’s having this type of impact because that’s what gets me excited to get out of bed every day and work my tail off on behalf of not just our employees, but the value and impact we can have on people’s lives.
I made that change. Many times in life, you make these decisions and you don’t know until after you make the decision whether it was the right decision for you. For me, taking that big job with the big title and responsibility at Blackhawk felt like a step up in my career. I was going to expand my responsibility and capability, monetarily and otherwise. But it was a really good decision for me because I learned what I truly valued. Then I could spend the rest of my career working in companies that had that sense of purpose and mission that I so needed.
Adam: The word you used over and over again in telling that story is impact. Your desire to make an impact, your desire to show up every day feeling like, I’m doing something that makes a difference, isn’t a unique feeling. That’s a feeling every single one of us craves. Every single one of us needs. When you have that feeling, what a difference it makes.
Greg: It makes all the difference.
Adam: As a leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure that you’re translating the work you’re giving to the people who work for you in a way where they understand what the impact is and what the mission is. If the work you’re giving is work that’s in service of collecting a paycheck, in service of checking a box to get to the end of the day or to get to the end of the week, that’s very different from work that’s in service of a mission people believe in.
Greg: Very well said. Authenticity for me is very important. If I can’t be authentic in how I show up every day and lead, I can’t do that job. I have to be able to bring my authentic self and allow the passion to just roll. I’m a passionate guy, and if I’m doing something I believe in, there’s that innate passion. It’s not work for me. I’m showing up and doing everything I’m doing because I believe in it, and I believe I’m going to have an impact.
When you get yourself in that position and you’re fortunate enough to have the ability to filter your career decisions and move in that direction, then quite frankly, life is pretty good. I believe everybody can do that. I really do. I think now more than ever, with the optionality we all have, especially kids coming out of college, and I’ve got a son who’s going to be coming out of college in a couple of years, you can start your own company and almost reinvent what work looks like with the tools we have at our disposal today.
I think it really is more possible than ever early in your career to find and follow your passion and focus on making sure that whatever you’re doing is something you truly believe in. The money will come. I tell everybody, don’t chase the dollars, because if you’re not passionate about it, it’s going to show eventually. You can only get up every day and go to work for so long without it truly feeling like work if you’re not passionate about what you’re doing. I believe that now, and quite frankly, as I’ve just talked about, I’ve experienced it on both sides of the coin myself, so I know it’s true.
Adam: Greg, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful, personally and professionally?
Greg: Personally and professionally, right now, it’s the growth mindset. Just get fired up every day and excited to learn something new. I tell my kids, 1% better every day. It’s how you eat an elephant. You eat it one bite at a time. I think it’s the discipline and consistency to focus on getting a little bit better every day. Before you know it, at the end of the year, at the end of five years, at the end of 10 years, you’re a different human being. You’re in a different place.
That growth mindset, discipline, and consistency, fueled by passion, is a pretty good combination. It’s something I’ve found throughout my life. If I couple those principles together, they serve me well. I talked a little bit about my daily routines and what have you. Look, I’m 57 years old. I’m still getting up at 5:30, and I’m getting after it. When I’m working out, I’m not punching the card. I’m going hard. Then I’m translating that right into my day at work.
When I’m done, I clock out, and I’m passionate about being present where my feet are with my kids. I still have one son at home, and my other son is in college, as I mentioned. It’s those fundamental principles. If you can stick to those principles and embed them in your life, I think you’ve got a better shot than most at being successful and being happy at the end of the day.
