Terry Leahy (Tesco) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Terry Leahy, the former C.E.O. of Tesco, the British supermarket chain. He asserts, “Stay focused, and your career will manage itself.”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times
* * *
Bryant: Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?
Leahy: I joined Tesco pretty much right out of college. And actually I turned down my first promotion because I didn’t think I was ready to lead.
Bryant: That’s surprising.
Leahy: It was a tiny marketing department in Tesco, with just a few people, and we were crunching data. A senior guy found me buried under all these reports and obviously saw something, and he eventually suggested that I lead the department. I turned it down. I’m by nature a shy person, and I’d never had any responsibility, and I was daunted by the thought of it. But the next time he asked me, about a year later, I said O.K. I figured I can’t keep saying no; it wasn’t really that I suddenly felt I was ready.
Bryant: So what was your approach once you started managing people?
Leahy: I suppose the contribution I made was energizing people by setting an objective and making a big personal contribution toward that objective. The other thing was probably that I always had an innate sense of justice and fairness, so I probably treated people O.K. Because I’m a little introverted, I’ve never had personal favorites, so people always felt that they’d be treated the same as anybody else.
* * *
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
Maria K. Mitchell (Amdec) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Maria K. Mitchell, president of Amdec, a partnership of New York medical research institutions. She says her nursing background lets her “get a sense of somebody pretty quickly.”
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
* * *
Bryant: Have you always been interested in leadership roles?
Mitchell: I think some of it is who I am. My mother told a story about me that’s sort of a predictor of how I would be very different from everybody else in my family. When I was in kindergarten, the bus stop was down the street past my house. So I asked the bus driver to stop at my house, because why should he go to the corner when my house was here? I talked them into changing the bus stop to my house because I thought it didn’t make sense. My mother said she just couldn’t believe that in kindergarten I was having this argument with the driver about where to go. So I think some of it is a little bit genetic.
I also discovered over the years that I’m good at taking complex problems and simplifying them and figuring out a path to a solution. I was always very goal-oriented. I would watch people in meetings sit and talk in a lot of disarray and never get anywhere, and I just found that I would naturally take charge and try to get to a place where there was a solution.
I also found I was pretty intolerant of people not quickly getting to where they needed to get to. I still don’t have a lot of tolerance for people not getting to the point, or not coming to a solution. I’m a doer.
Bryant: How has your leadership style evolved?
Mitchell: A colleague once told me that I was overprincipled. I remember saying to him: “That’s ridiculous. How can you be overprincipled?” I didn’t quite understand what that meant at first, but I think I was too black-and-white about people’s work ethic early on, without taking into consideration a lot of the gray. I now think it’s O.K. to manage within more of those gray areas. I’ve also learned to listen better to other people’s ideas and take them, not just listen to them. I’ve learned to be more flexible.
I also think you need to know who’s working for you and working with you. By virtue of being together all day, you learn about people’s lives. If there are things that need understanding, you make it clear that you do understand, and if there are things that people need, time or whatever, you give it to them. But clearly there are people who might take advantage of that and — this is another aspect of myself — I tell people when I hire them exactly who I am. I’m informal. I’m nice. Everything looks friendly, but don’t ever mistake that for not getting the job done.
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Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
Ken Rees (Think Finance) in “The Corner Office”
Ken Rees
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Ken Rees, president and chief executive of Think Finance, a developer of financial products. says he has learned to translate the skills of running a start-up operation into leading a much bigger company.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times
* * *
Bryant: How do you do that?
Rees: Some of it, frankly, is a bit corny. I have “Cookies With Ken” every couple of weeks, and we bring in about a dozen employees from across the company and talk about what’s going on. At the end, I always ask, “Tell me one thing you really like about the company and one thing that frustrates you about the company.” I always come out with at least one thing that is eye-opening.
We also have a quarterly town hall meeting where everybody in the company gets together. We walk through all the financials — the good, the bad and the ugly. Then, each quarter, we have five things that we’re focused on doing, and we get that widely communicated. At the end of the quarter, we discuss how we did, and we grade ourselves.
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Jacqueline Novogratz (Acumen Fund) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Jacqueline Novogratz is C.E.O. of the Acumen Fund, which invests in businesses aiding the world’s poor. She advocates initiatives when humility and audacity go hand in hand.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Bryant: Tell me about your approach to leadership.
Novogratz: I think we so often equate leadership with being experts — the leader is supposed to come in and fix things. But in this interconnected world we live in now, it’s almost impossible for just one person to do that.
So if we could only have more leaders who would start by just listening, just trying to understand what’s going wrong from the perspective of the people you’re supposed to serve — whether it’s your customers or people for whom you want the world to change.
Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they’re really not listening, or they’re listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they’re so right that they’re not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.
The kind of leaders we need — and certainly that I aspire to be — reject ideology, reject trite assumptions, reject the status quo, and are really open to listening to solutions from people who are most impacted by the problems.
I’ll often say at Acumen that you’ve got to learn to listen with your whole body. Lean in and pay attention not only to what someone is saying, but also to their body language and their level of comfort or discomfort. You have to learn to ask questions in a way that will elicit more nuanced answers, rather than the answers you would like to get.
Bryant: What kind of culture are you trying to foster at Acumen?
Novogratz: At Acumen we try to wear our values on our sleeves. We are building companies, and so we have to be really accountable. We’ve got to be tough, and yet we have to be very generous, since we’re working in communities where people make a dollar or two dollars a day. We talk about the power of listening and we juxtapose it with leadership, because sometimes you’ve listened enough, and now it’s time to make a decision.
We think about our values in pairs, and there is a tension or a balance between them. We talk about listening and leadership; accountability and generosity; humility and audacity. You’ve got to have the humility to see the world as it is — and in our world, working with poor communities, that’s not easy to do — but have the audacity to know why you are trying to make it be different, to imagine the way it could be. And then the immutable values are respect and integrity.
* * *
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
Mark B. Templeton (Citrix) in “The Corner Office”
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Mark B. Templeton, president and C.E.O. of Citrix, the Internet software company.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
Photo: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Bryant: Why didn’t you have the ambition for the top job?
Templeton: It was probably a combination of two things. Before Citrix, I had a number of start-up experiences. One of them was as C.E.O., and we ran out of money and I had to lay off about 30 people. I had a pretty deep scar from that experience, and I thought, “O.K., that’s not for me.” I decided that focusing on marketing and telling stories around products and understanding customers was really what I was best at.
The other reason was that we were a public company and I didn’t really feel I was qualified to be C.E.O. Again, there’s a lesson here. You try as a manager to never put people in situations where it’s too big a stretch for them, because it often doesn’t work out too well. Usually when people end up there, it’s because the person who really wants the job has overestimated their own capabilities, or management has overimagined someone’s capabilities and puts them there mistakenly. I didn’t feel I was qualified.
And there was a time, a small gap, when I lost the C.E.O job. In the June quarter of 2000, we really missed our expectations, and by then I’d been C.E.O. for six quarters and I was learning a lot, especially about working with the board. I had not kept the board informed about what was going on and some of the struggles we were having, and I was trying to carry all of it myself, which is what green leaders do. After we missed our expectations hugely, the board decided we would do a public search for a replacement, and I was demoted to president and senior executive officer. I deserved that because that’s part of the game, being held accountable.
So we did a public search for a replacement and we had a candidate, but the board decided they didn’t like him. That was about six months in. Then we had a second one, but the board decided that I was actually a viable candidate again. They asked me if I’d be interested in having my title back. It took me about a microsecond to say yes.
* * *
Jarrod Moses (United Entertainment Group) in “The Corner Office”
Photo: Christopher T. Gregory/The New York Times
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Jarrod Moses, founder of United Entertainment Group, a marketing agency, who says traveling with his colleagues by bus builds trust and candor, and stirs creativity.
* * *
Moses: My mother, Susan Moses, has been working in the Philadelphia community as a stage actress for 45 years. When I was 12, my father died, so I was somewhat of a latchkey kid. When I was hanging out with my mother, she’d eventually find things for me to do, so I became a ticket manager and a front-door manager at whatever theater she was working in at the time. She was constantly working. I loved the world of entertainment, and it was kind of a second family for me, and I felt very comfortable with a lot of the theater people. Growing up in my house, there were always these actors around, and I really got to understand people. It was a big life lesson.
Bryant: Tell me about your approach to leading people and managing people.
Moses: I take it personally when someone isn’t happy or excited in their job. If they’re not, I want to know why. I will pull somebody aside and talk to them about what’s going on in their life. People have to know I’m there to support them no matter what they need, personally or professionally. A lot of my time is devoted to those conversations. But what I hope they get out of it is that they feel that they want to go the extra mile. You have to be among the players all the time. The captain of the team doesn’t have to be the star. He can be the sixth man on the bench, but he has to be the one who excites people and gets them enthused about showing up every day.
Somebody also told me something about the conversations you have with your staff: sugar-coating only causes cavities. So let’s not have an hourlong conversation if only two minutes of it are important. A performance review should be a daily evaluation or a weekly evaluation. If you wait, people tend to be a little bit on edge. I like to be candid, and I want them to tell me what’s going on.
Bryant: Let’s talk about culture. What’s unusual about your company?
Moses: One of the first things we bought was a tour bus. We use it instead of flying. We take it at least 25 times a year to different meetings throughout the country. There’s an amazing culture that develops on the bus. You learn so much about one another, and you develop this candor and trust that you don’t get in the office. The creative juices just flow, and they flow 24 hours. They could come from a joke; they could come because someone is just overtired. You never know.
The point is that there’s no barrier to entry for the idea. People are wearing T-shirts and shorts. No one is the C.E.O. on the bus. It’s like a band. There’s a magic to it.
* * *
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
Ben Lerer (the Thrillist Media Group) in “The Corner Office”
Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Ben Lerer is a co-founder and the chief executive of the Thrillist Media Group, which oversees men’s lifestyle and shopping Web sites.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
* * *
Bryant: Tell me about the culture of your company.
Lerer: One thing that we preach at work all day long is “don’t hope.” What that means is don’t wait for somebody to do something for you. Don’t do something 90 percent well and hope that it’ll slide through. Don’t rely on luck. You have to make your own luck. The only thing you can do is try your absolute best to do the right thing. And then if it doesn’t work out, you know there’s nothing else you can do.
The only time when you can have real regret is when you didn’t do everything you could do. I want to never hope, even though I hope just like everybody else. It’s just important to know that you’re giving as close as you can to 100 percent, dedicated effort, and you’re being thoughtful about it.
Bryant: Where did that expression come from?
Lerer: It probably came up about five years ago when someone was asking me, what’s the best piece of advice you can give an entrepreneur? The first place that I used it was really early on in the business, when there’s no way to point fingers, when you’re just four or five people, and you have to will everything yourself.
Bryant: When you started the company, were you thinking about the culture you wanted to create?
Lerer: Not in any way aside from being affected by the way I felt very mistreated by a manager I had in a previous job. Part of the problem was that I was young and immature and I sort of walked in on Day 1 out of college and had this attitude of, “Give me the keys.” But I ultimately didn’t like going to work because of the way I was treated, my work suffered, and I didn’t have confidence in what I was doing. And ultimately that led me to decide to leave.
* * *
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
Tracy Streckenbach (Innovative Global Brands) in “The Corner Office”
Photo credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Tracy Streckenbach, president and chief operating officer of Innovative Global Brands. She said she might spend months to define the right goals for a company and set the benchmarks for performance.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
* * *
Bryant: What were some early jobs that had a big impact on you?
Streckenbach: My father owned a small printing company. I ended up working there one summer during college, and I just sort of reorganized all the processes. That’s what I love to do. Everybody has that one thing about the way they see the world, and for me that one thing is process. I see streamlined processes very clearly. And so becoming a consultant — I worked for Ernst & Young for many years — was just a great fit for me.
What I do now is turnarounds and start-ups. I typically spend two years with a company and help it get on a fast-track growth by putting in new processes, technologies and structures, and then I hand it over to somebody for the long term. Then I go on to do another one.
Bryant: Tell me about how you diagnose the problems at a company.
Streckenbach: I spend my initial two weeks talking with people, and often it’s not the senior executives. Sometimes it’s the middle managers who really know what’s going on, and you uncover the biggest problems by talking to them. I’ll ask them: “What makes it difficult to do your job? What is it that you struggle with? What is taking you more time than it should?”
If you ask people what makes it difficult to do their job, they know, particularly at the middle-manager level, and they want to tell you. But at the senior manager level, sometimes they don’t want to tell you because there’s a little bit of a job preservation going on. In the first phase, it’s tough stuff. I mean, I’ve been threatened.
Bryant: Really?
Streckenbach: I don’t know if you can print some of the things people have said. When you’re shutting down or de-emphasizing divisions, and making changes to senior leadership, it can be difficult.
* * *
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
Mario Batali in “The Corner Office”
Photo credit: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Mario Batali, the chef, cookbook author and television personality, has restaurants in the New York and Los Angeles areas, as well as in Las Vegas and Singapore, with his business partner Joe Bastianich. Yelling in the confines of a small kitchen, he says, simply isn’t necessary.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
* * *
Bryant: When you walk into a busy kitchen in one of your restaurants, what can strike you as off-key in terms of how people are interacting?
Batali: One of the big rules for our kitchens is that if you’re not close enough to be able to touch me, you can’t talk to me. A lot of people will yell across the kitchen because it’s just easier and faster. That doesn’t work with us, so our kitchens are smaller, and you need to talk in a conversational tone. If you can’t, you have to move toward me, because if you’re yelling at me, there can be problems understanding the nature of your message.
Bryant: The whole culture of yelling seems to be celebrated in some restaurants’ kitchens.
Batali: I worked with a lot of yellers over the years. My opinion is that yelling is the result of the dismay you feel when you realize you have not done your own job. Everyone in the restaurant business knows it’s not going to be busy at 5 p.m. It’s going to be really busy between 7:30 and 9:30 or 10, and then it’s going to taper off a little bit. And it is as inevitable as Christmas. So it’s the chef’s job to prepare the staff for what will inevitably come. And it comes every night, so it’s not like, “Oh my God, what happened today?” The reason the chef yells is because the chef is expressing dissatisfaction with himself or herself for not having prepared you properly. And then, of course, the obvious scapegoat is the person who’s the least prepared.
That said, if someone isn’t learning, my strategy for changing someone’s behavior has always been a stern, relatively direct conversation, sotto voce but within earshot of their peers — not mocking them, yelling at them or calling them names — and telling them exactly what I expect them to be able to do the next time we go through this. Their peers can hear it, so the message is clear to everyone.
Bryant: Other leadership lessons you’ve learned over the course of your life?
Batali: Well, one of the most important things is realizing you’re not the most important or the most intelligent person in the room at all times. And understanding that is a crucial component of the kind of self-deprecation that makes someone really good at understanding other people, especially when they’re faced with their own limitations and they come to you for help. It’s about being able to empathize and understand and communicate, even under stress, in a way that helps them solve a problem, as opposed to becoming part of the problem. The first day that a chef believes that he or she knows everything is the first day for the rest of their life that they will be a jerk, because you can’t know everything about our field.
* * *
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times’ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
Bill Flemming (Skanska USA Building Inc.) in “The Corner Office”
Photo Credit: Earl Wilson/The New York Times
Adam Bryant conducts interviews of senior-level executives that appear in his “Corner Office” column each week in the SundayBusiness section of The New York Times. Here are a few insights provided during an interview of Bill Flemming, president of Skanska USA Building Inc., who wants every meeting to end with a clear understanding of what was decided. “What are you going to commit to doing when you leave this room?” he asks.
To read the complete interview as well as Bryant’s interviews of other executives, please click here.
* * *
Bryant: Tell me about your approach to leadership.
Flemming: First, I work for the people below me. They don’t work for me; I work for them. Because if I don’t do a good job in leading and setting strategy and helping them do their job, they’ll probably fail. Second, teamwork is key in this business. This is not an individual sport. I see many leaders who are somewhat egoistic. To me, it’s more about the team. And in my early years in this job, I focused on organizing the senior leadership so that they’re moving more in the same direction.
Bryant: What did that involve?
Flemming: The first step was acknowledging that I wasn’t going to do it. I’m part of the team, not the guy who’s going to lead everybody in how to change it. I realized that we needed a facilitator to do that. So I brought somebody in just to teach us better interaction.
Bryant:What were the best questions put on the table by the facilitator?
Flemming: Why do you want to be part of this team? Why do you want to be in this company? Why do you show up at work? What’s in your box? And when I say, “What’s in your box?” it means “What drives you?” and I don’t want to hear the party line that you’re doing this for the company.
And what commitment do you have to your partners? We each had to come up with a personal commitment to our team and talk about our responsibility to others on the team. That drove people together fairly quickly. The interaction in the group has been different.
* * *
Adam Bryant, deputy national editor of The New York Times, oversees coverage of education issues, military affairs, law, and works with reporters in many of the Times‘ domestic bureaus. He also conducts interviews with CEOs and other leaders for Corner Office, a weekly feature in the SundayBusiness section and on nytimes.com that he started in March 2009. In his book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, (Times Books), he analyzes the broader lessons that emerge from his interviews with more than 70 leaders. To read an excerpt, please click here. To contact him, please click here.
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