YouSaid · the spoken record

Doug Conant

lines on the record: 61
first: 2021-08-24
most recent: 2021-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The courage of your convictions. It's hard to have the courage of your convictions if you don't know what your convictions are. And most people are flying by the seat of their pants, especially all the people that were listening to you on Wall Street. They're doing life by the seat of their pants. They're reacting to what comes at them, which I do too. 70% of the time. But when you're in these tight, tight situations, you got to know where to draw the line and where you stand on things. And I wasn't confident enough, so I needed to do some inside work to say, well, what do I want to stand for here? And how do I want to make this work so that I can not only contribute and perform, but I can do it in a way where I, you know, I can look at myself in the mirror every day. And nobody can do that work for you. And I'll tell you, you can't reading books about all these great leaders.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I realized I needed to get better anchored in what I believed in it so that I could have the courage of my convictions to deal with all of it in a way that where I would survive because it was challenging. So that's where I, and I was searching for help, not knowing I was searching for help, but I was searching for help and I discovered Stephen's book and I read it on a trip with my wife and totally neglected her. And I ultimately, she said, what are you reading? I said, this is an amazing book. And she said, why is it so amazing? Because he thinks just like I do, and it was the seven habits by Stephen Covey. And I wrote a whole book on it in the blueprint, but I believe you got to tend to your own foundation so that when you get put in the thick of thick things and having to make tough decisions about people and performance and every day where you're pushed to the edge, you have to be incredibly well anchored.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there were two guys that just say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I was ready for two people that really had a profound influence on me more than others. One was Stephen Covey and the other one was Jim Collins. And they both became very good friends. I was wrestling with my life. I had gone into Nabisco and it was at Nabisco that the magnitude of the challenge was overwhelming. And I was realizing without knowing it, that I needed to step up my game. Stuff was coming at me as part of the world's largest LBO and KKR the poster child for barbarians at the gate. You're young for this, but it was a huge deal at the time in the corporate world. We were being challenged to do things that just were more substantial than I'd ever been challenged before.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The companies that are doing well in today's challenging times are the ones that are building trust with their associates that's going to help them navigate the challenges of the day. We have challenges today. We had challenges yesterday. We'll have more challenges tomorrow.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All their names. When I was done, I would walk next door to the coffee shop and I would handwrite each one a note, and I would walk it back over to the receptionist before I left and ask them to deliver it that day to the people that I had just met. And I would make sure to thank them for something specific, maybe two or three sentences that they did for me as a way of being distinctive. I got to tell you, it was transformational. The key to making hard decisions at the top, you have to be in the black with your emotional bank account with the culture. As a leader, you have to build that bank account. You have to be making deposits every day into that account to build trust and to build credibility with the people that work there. Knowing that there are days where you're going to make some giant withdrawal because you're going to screw up, because you will.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was fired from my job and my outplacement and I was shy, my outplacement counselor said, you're never going to get a job. You're too shy. You only answer the questions that you're being asked. You're not selling yourself. You're not read your fifty pages of handwritten life story. You're committed. You're wildly committed to contributing and excelling, yet you show up in such a shy reserved way. And he said, you've got to figure out a way to make your job search distinctive. And as try as I could, I was just horrible at interviewing. At least I felt I was. So I said, I got to do something here. So what I did was when I would go, if I came to your building in Ottawa and I was interviewing for a job there and I'd meet six people and I'd meet the receptionist who opened the door for me at the building.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In today. I slept until five today, but I got a ton of work done. You sort of need to figure out what matters most in my life, and my work was part of it, my family was another part of it, and my own personal well-being. Those are three of my five cylinders. The other two were my community and my faith. So I have five cylinders that I work off of. And three of those cylinders with the practice of getting up early and reflecting, I was able to center myself and sort of help manage those three cylinders in a way that served me well, gosh now for almost thirty years.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember putting on my suits every day. And it was like I was putting on my armor and I was getting ready to go into battle. I found it to be a real important part of my life to give myself some space and quiet time to get anchored in what mattered most. The other thing I did was one of the things that mattered most was my kids and my family. And so I would be up with them for breakfast and then I would always try and find a way to take one of them to school before I would go to work. So I tried to be available in the early mornings knowing that the afternoons and nights were risky. I moved my wake up time up and it worked and to this day I mean I was up today. Actually I slept.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much, yeah. I'm a morning person. I actually cultivated that habit in an intentional way, interestingly, because as I was a company president and then a CEO and then a chairman, my evening life got crazy, but my morning life, I realized that if I wanted to sort of get centered for my day and everything, I just needed to get up earlier. And I was early morning anyway. But I started getting up an hour earlier and gathering myself, I'd sit in my garden in New Jersey at the time, where I lived for most of this time, 25 years of my work, and would have a cup of coffee as the sun came up and reflect on what was expected that day and gather myself a bit before all hell broke loose. And then I would go inside, shower, shave, and shine.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're saying, well, you know, you got to look at this on longer term time if you want corporate responsibility. We got to create room for people to create corporate enduring corporate enterprises that can serve society better and not live quarter to quarter. The same thing is true about young leaders. You don't live quarter to quarter. You've got to create room for yourself to grow over time and to have patience and to just focus on how can I help the enterprise do better today than we did yesterday. And how can I grow and be a little better today than I was yesterday and get into a continuous improvement mindset as opposed to a quick fix mindset? That's the tough piece. And I was just like them. I wanted more better faster too. And I kept track of when I was going to get my next promotion and was I going to get promotion?”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“or forty to fifty or fifty to sixty. And there's no substitute for it and there's no way to go faster with it. The demands of society are such that you've got to do more, better faster now. And the leaders today sort of hunger for the quick fix, just like the Wall Street hungered for the good quarter.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patience is one. We're conditioned now to want change faster and faster, and there's no substitute for cultivating wisdom Through experience I talk to it when I'm out on the west coast or I'm talking to folks in Silicon Valley. It's like my perspective is discounted, which is annoying but understandable. And because I'm almost seventy years old. And how could I possibly understand what this 30-year-old person is going through? And we get in this conversation and I say, well, how much wisdom have you accumulated in the last decade since from 20 to 30? A lot, you know, I've learned a lot. How much more do you think you'll accumulate from 30 to 40?”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His perspective was it's just beautiful because he studied the world and really invested time and energy and research and work in understanding it. And that adds a ton of value. But you got to walk a mile in their shoes too.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't walked in their shoes to the extent that they have. So what they miss is, I think, the visceral understanding of what it's like to be on that side of the table and walking in those shoes. That's what they miss, but they add so much more value because I've learned so much. Stephen Covey never ran anything. And when he did, he didn't do it particularly well. But his thinking enlarged my world. Jim Collins. I mean, he sees a lot of stuff, but he doesn't want to go run something of any scale.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I don't think it's more important to realize what they hit because they're able to step outside of it. They bring perspective and objectivity that I think enhances understanding big time. So, I think there's a lot more value addition than I think there is what they quote unquote miss. But you never know until you're trying to dealing with these people shoulder to shoulder day in, day out, grinding away, trying to make it all work amidst all of its complexity and ambiguity. And he said, she said, what are we doing? There's no substitute for living it, you know. It's just like my friends who are professors. I can't understand their life either.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then you have to walk in the world with others. So you've got to take that into account while you're being true to yourself. And that's the bridge we try and help people build when we work with them. One of the other just won't do. If you're just trying to meet the needs of others, you're hustling for your worthiness. And Brene Brown language, you're not walking inside your story. We want you to walk inside your story and be effective inside your enterprise. I have yet to find somebody that can't do both. If they are intentional about it and not just doing it by the seat of their pants.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nobody has time for it. So the process that I'm talking about was built so that it could fit in when you do it, it nests perfectly in your cockami life, and you can do it in a way that speaks to you and meets the needs of the enterprise. You can do all of that as long as you do it in small chunks with a continuous improvement mindset. That's the concept of a blueprint. Being true to yourself is at the heart of it.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blueprint for success is thinking about how you want to lead, figuring out what's expected of you, and then creating a reentry approach that says, okay, here's how I'm going to lead in a way that meets the needs of my organization. And we see just wild success with this as people are really tethered to what matters to them, and they're doing it in a practical way that matters to the enterprise. And you can do both. That's my belief. Lots of friends who study leadership and write about it, but arguably have never really done it. But they've studied people and done it. They add a lot of value. You've got to be able to do this. In the real world, and you've got to be able to work on lifting your leadership in the middle of your cockamy life. And who has time for this stuff?”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every enterprise I've been in, I've been in some crazy ones. There are some things they all want and that everybody wants in most of their leadership work, certainly in virtually every sector, but in corporate, I can say, look, there are two things performance and people that you're expected to perform. If you're a leader, you want to perform, and the enterprise wants you to perform. And they also want you to perform through people because they're having you manage people. Typically”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then over here, you have another circle that is the leadership approach that is expected of you in the world at large or in your organization. In the middle, hopefully is a crosshedge area. Where there is stuff that you value and how you want to show up, and there is stuff that the enterprise values on how they want you to show up. And the process we takes you through is it's putting those two things together so you can show up in a way that's effective for the enterprise and fulfilling for you”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then actually build what I call a leadership model. I believe models can be incredibly useful. You create a metal model for how you want to show up as a leader. And then as you do that, you build practices into your life that bring that metal to life in a very tangible way. So it's not just talk and leadership mumbo jumbo. It's here's how I show up. And then you commit to a continuous improvement process of doing a little better with that model regularly. So that's what a leadership model is, but that is not enough because then you've got to take that model, which is all about you, and how you want to walk in the world. And then you've got to actually go into the real world. And think about it in terms of the Venn diagrams you had in school. You have your leadership approach here.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think a blueprint has to be for your leadership has to be anchored in how do you want to lead. Has nothing to do with anybody else yet. All right, it's the process we take people through is envision the leader you want to be. Do some reflection of your life because I contend your life story is your leadership story and then study the world around you and see what other people are doing that might relate to what you the way you want to be, you know? And I've got lots of mentors like Stephen Covey, Jim Collins, but people I've worked for who I've learned from. So take that reflection and study.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the seat of my pants. You know, that's just life. We got a lot of crap coming at us every day, right? We're overwhelmed by data, by stuff coming at us. But I'm saying 25% of the time, you ought to know what matters most. And you ought to really be attentive to it every day. Most leaders haven't done that enough in that territory in terms of reflection and study to be world class. To be world class leaders.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think leadership works off a mastery model. I think the world works off a mastery model in terms all the way from Darwin and the species mastering their environment to leading. And I believe you apprentice at it, you learn from it, you study it, you study the craft, and then you get better at it. I can't imagine the first podcast you did was as good as the podcast you do now. You get better. You work at it. And these leaders, they just think by virtue of making decisions by the seat of their past today, they're going to be better at making decisions by the seed of their pants tomorrow. That may be true, but I just contend it's inadequate. So most leaders I see haven't been intentional enough and haven't really thought about it. That's where I challenge them to do better. And to be clear, 75% of my day when I'm leading is...”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you want them to be wildly engaged in what you're doing, and you're not thinking about it? Hello and what I find is most leaders do it by the seat of their pants. And some of them are better at it than others, but largely because That's not good enough. Leaders can be born, but they are most certainly all made better.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have no idea. And it's like, wait a minute, leading your people is the most important thing you do and you have no plan. Well, yeah, I just kind of work my way through it. That's bullshit from my point of view. You know, I tell people that leading your people, you're on sacred ground. You're having a profound influence on these people's lives. And you're doing it by the seat of your pants? Give me a break, you know, these people are working all day. Then they're having dinner with their kids and what are they doing after dinner? They're getting back on email, working at night, falling asleep thing about what they did do and what they didn't do and what they got to do tomorrow. They get up thinking about what they have to do that day, squeeze some time in with the kids or the dog, and then do it all over again.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes you got to do that. I mean, that's reality. Most of the leaders I encounter, they lead by the seat of their pants. They create great business plans and financial plans, and then you say, what's your leadership plan?”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All about the people, you know, what we tend to do, and I'm guilty of it. And you got all this list of stuff that has to get done and you get all caught up in the tasks and you forget about the people. Because I got to get this done now. It's due by the end of the month. And they're not getting it done. And all of a sudden you're compromising the relationships with the people that work for you and with you. I found that leaders get so caught up in the delivery of performance that they lose sight of taking care of the development of the people. That's the thing I have to constantly remind myself of because you still have to perform. You've got to perform and take care of the people. But typically where you end up compromising is you just say, well, I don't have time to deal with him or her right now. I'm just going to take over this project and get it done because it's got to be done by Friday.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Assess the situation every year and revisit our strategy for the next three years. We would then say what are the implications for the coming year? We would then do an annual plan. We would then break that annual plan down into quarterly expectations. And as we did that in a collaborative way with every leader, it was another example of where slow, you start slow, you can finish fast because everybody's on the same page and they all execute against it. Then you're just doing modified. The other thing, so there's a planning process you put in place, and then there's a process for interventions where you find out what's working, what's not, and what's needed in here and now. And between the planning process and a simple intervention process, what's working, what's not, what's needed, you can find your way through almost anything.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know that your enterprise is committing to winning in the workplace before you win in the marketplace. You create this framework. Everybody knows what's expected. You know, the Gallup survey, they ask 12 questions which get at the hygiene of an organization. It's called the Q-12 survey. And one of those 12 questions is, I know what is expected of me. And the more you know what is expected of you, the easier it is to do your job. So as a leader, the key is make sure the expectations are crystal clear and make sure that if a push comes to shove, that if you've got to pick performance over people, then you better get somebody else in the boat with you because that's something that's taken very seriously in my organizations. When it came to process, we would do a strategic process where we would”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know first of all, this conversation makes all this stuff sound simple. It's not. It's messy every day, and you're anguishing over every decision about a person, every decision about a board meeting. I'll just use a CEO life, but it could be any life. I spent more of my time not being a CEO than I did being a CEO. I was basically in that lane of work for 40 years. I was only a CEO for 10. The other 30, I was a entry-level marketing person to a manager, to a leader. So for me, the decision making got easy. If we created a framework for what mattered most, if people knew what mattered, it made it easy to decide. If you know all stakeholders matter and you know that you're expected to do better tomorrow than you did today,”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meetings, and so we were able to deal with it before we took it outside. A good board member constructively engages in the dialogue. I guess the other observation about a good board, in my opinion, a good board member is that they understand their role in the process, and it's one of oversight. It's not one of execution and management. Their job is to make sure the organization is properly governed and that the enterprise is living up to the standards that have been set for it, not to make sure you've done the right job with your marketing that quarter that year.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I found it to be a blessing. We also had members of the founding family on the board who were tethered to the long term interests of the company, which I also found enormously helpful. I think it's not one board member or another. I think the key is to create a culture where all points of view can be heard and where people are comfortable enough to share them. And that's what we had at Campbell when I was there. We had people that we would go toe-to-toe and we disagreed on some things. But you know, those points of view, it was better to have it in the boardroom than it was to have it out with Wall Street or the analyst or any activists lurking out there to critique what we were doing. So I loved having a very candid, a large candid, arguably unwieldy board. Everything that mattered came up in those boards.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not individual members, it's the culture of the board because, you know, we had fifteen directors, which is a large board. But they represent all kinds of points of view, so we could deliberate on anything and look at it in a 360 degree way that I thought was incredibly healthy.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't even report. Most people aren't reporting quarterly earnings. They're doing annual. They provide guidance, but they're looking more long-term in nature, which is appropriate. I was willing to not have my job if I had to do it the wrong way. This is where you have to be incredibly well anchored. We talked earlier about if you're not well anchored in the leader you want to be and how you want to lead, you're going to be whipsawed by analysts and Wall Street and boards and activists and we were going to build a better company brick by brick and we were going to make sure we served all of our stakeholders, not just our shareholders and we said that at the beginning and I basically said it at the end 10 years later and I think if you're clear about what you intend to do and then you do it and you put points on the board every year”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are a couple of things. First of all, you got to be know what you want to stand for. When I took this job, at Campbell, I had said, you know, this is a heavy lift. And we can't talk our way out of something we behaved our way into. We're going to have to build something that's an enduring proposition. It's going to take time. And we've got to be willing to live with the results. We have to have clear gates of performance and we have to constantly be getting better. There can be no question that we're getting better in the workplace and in the marketplace every year. No question. And then you have to perform and meet or exceed those expectations. Today it's easier because when I first started, it was what were your earnings this quarter?”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's how I see managing turnarounds, which I've done everywhere I've been. There are some people would say that's too slow for a turnaround I find if you go a little slow at first you can go fast later on because everybody's felt heard and been part of the process If you go real fast out of the gate it's your idea and nobody owns it and you're off leading the team only to turn around and see the team is back at the starting line So there's an art to this you've got to bring people along with you and I think the first 200 days are the most critical with that you declare yourself and then you then you create a plan to bring it to life”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the second hundred days, you've got a plan together, and I'll use Campbell as an example. I started January 1st. I declared myself, we started to set the organization up, made some early hires that started to set the tone that I was serious about it. And we committed to having a plan by July. The first 100 days was doing a situation assessment and listening. The next hundred days was building a plan in a collaborative fashion with the leadership. And by July, we had launched our revitalization plan for Campbell. And then we were off to the races implementing the plan. My experience, you've got 100 days to figure it out, 100 days to operationalize it and get going, knowing that it's not going to be perfect, you're going to have to, of course, correct along the way.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, as a leader at a senior level, at the outside, you've got three years First year, it's the other guy's fault. The second year, it's our fault, but we're learning. The third year you own it. So in that spirit, the first year I had to declare myself with the organization who I was and what I stood for. And I had to bring that to life with tangible actions. First hundred days you establish a principle centered framework for leading, and then you listen a lot. First hundred days you lead by listening to the point where everybody says, my God, you've listened enough. What are we going to do? They're exhausted. They don't want to talk anymore. Yeah, you understand. You clearly want to understand. Great.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This person in this situation at this time right now and do it in a way that acknowledges whatever has brought them here, what we have to do in the present, and also sets the table for a more prosperous future conversation. As a leader, you've got to live in three time zones simultaneously, the past, the present, and the future, everything you do has got to honor the past, deliver in the present, set the table for a more prosperous future. And as you think that way, that's why trust building becomes mission critical. And the companies that are doing well in today's challenging times, the ones that are doing well are the ones that are building trust with their associates that's going to help them navigate the challenges of the day. We have challenges today. We had challenges yesterday. We'll have more challenges tomorrow.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we cared about their work environment and we cared about how their supervisors treated them. The number one expectation of a leader at Campbell was that you had to inspire trust. If you couldn't inspire trust, how could you inspire performance? And if you weren't inspiring trust, you were at risk. You'd lose your job. So you declare that, you live it, you work it every day. And then if people aren't able to get with the program, you kindly and gently but firmly move them out. And you do it in a way wherever possible that honors the individual who's been affected. It's not that they're bad people, it's just that they're not in the right place at the right time. And they ought to be honored. Everything I do emanates from a commitment to honoring people. And that's where it all starts. And so all of the stuff we're talking about is really about, okay, how am I going to honor?”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that the key to making hard decisions at the top, you have to be in the black with your emotional bank account with the culture. As a leader, you have to build that bank account. You have to be making deposits every day into that account to build trust and to build credibility with the people that work there. Knowing that there are days where you're going to make some giant withdrawal because you're going to screw up. Because you will. It's just too complicated. But you know that when you have that big withdrawal, you're still going to be in the black. Then it makes it much easier to make those decisions at the top because you're not running on empty with the employees. But the key is, how do you build that bank account before you need it and before you have to make those tough calls? I had three years to demonstrate to all the employees that we cared about and that we were going to upgrade the facilities.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I won't be associated with it. So we try to be really compassionate with the people we turned over. They didn't all agree with it. But I know we did the best we could at the time. That's an example of where you declare you're going to commit to building this kind of culture. You damn well better do it. And if you're going to build a culture that's going to be tough-minded on standards and caring about people. Either, as Jim Collins would say, either you get on the bus or you don't. You got to get the right people on the bus.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were two to one. So basically, we had two people doing the job of three everywhere in the world. And we tracked every year for the decade. And while I was making all these changes, I wasn't quite sure how it was going to turn out. We'd made all the changes and then I didn't know how employee engagement was going to come out. But I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. So the chips were going to fall where they fell when we measured it. Turns out every year we made the changes, employee engagement went up because all the employees knew what needed to be done. They were just waiting to see if there was a leader who was going to be tough-minded enough to do it. And we weren't perfect, but we tried to be wildly supportive of everybody we'd moved out. I had been fired in a tough way that wasn't particularly caring, and I said, I don't ever want to do this to anybody else again.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blue chip, young Turks to come in and transform the company into a twenty first century fighting machine. That was probably the single toughest thing I ever had to do because some of these people were not poor performers. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time from their career perspective. But I had a greater good to look after. I had 20 to 24,000 people counting on me to get it right. A footnote to this conversation is we started tracking employee engagement every year with Gallup. And when we first did it, the year one, Gallup said, this is the worst we've ever seen in a Fortune 500 company. This is horrible. We had an engagement ratio, which is how many people are engaged compared to how many people are not, of two to one. The average for Fortune 500 was four people wildly engaged for everyone who wasn't.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I was very upfront, we're going to have to make some tough calls here, and we're either going to find a job that you can do as an individual contributor or reporting to something. We're going to try and make it work, or else we're going to help you find another job somewhere. But we got to be tough-minded on standards here. We've got to perform. And in terms of performance, we said there are two things. It's the what and the how. The what was we have these standards that we want to hit in terms of our business performance and the how, which was more important, quite frankly, is, and here's how we're going to comport ourselves as leaders. And if you can't sign up for the what and the how, you're probably in the wrong place. And I think people were saying, oh, yeah, yeah, we've heard this before. We'll see how long you last. We turned over 300 of the top 350. You talk about tough. That was tougher than anything we did at Nabisco. We promoted 150 from within, but we had to go outside and find 150 more.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By regulators, you name it. It was happening. So I got there and I said, you know, here we go. New day we're going to value you. We're going to trust you're going to value us. And it's going to take a while. It's going to take us three years to get to a place where we can really lift our heads up because we're not going to overpromise and under deliver. We are not going to be able to talk our way out of something we behaved our way into. It took us years to get into this mess. It's going to take us years to get out. And I'm convinced all the leaders were saying, yeah, we'll see how long this works. You know, here comes Mr. Lovey-Dovey Covey again. And he's not tough enough. We turned over 300 of the top 350 leaders in the company, six out of seven. We gave them a year and a half or so to get with the program, but if it wasn't working, they knew.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to trust that in the fullness of time, you're going to care about our agenda and help us lift this company up. And we were in bad shape. We started in the 19th century and we were still selling the same products, canned soup. The leading analyst in the sector was comparing us to a buggy whip. And we were headquartered in the poorest, most dangerous city in the United States, Camden, New Jersey, where we had a city of 75,000 people and 70 murders a year. And we had razor wire all around our facilities with guard towers. It looked like a minimum security prison. The razor wire in the guard towers were there to make sure people felt safe when they got inside. And they had been through several years of poor performance, a lot of layoffs, no trust, overpromising, under delivering, churn at the top, investigation.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. I got to Campbell. I thought I'd seen everything when I got to the wild west of the world's largest LBO, and I was there for a decade. I thought I'd seen everything after barbarians at the gate. And then I got to Campbell, and there was a whole new world. And it turned out to be a very, very toxic culture. And I was bringing my same philosophy. In fact, day one, when I talked to the employees at Campbell, I said, you know, we cannot expect you to value our agenda until we tangibly demonstrate that we value yours. To me, it just doesn't make any sense. So my commitment is you're going to see that we care about you.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I needed to kind of get more comfortable with being tough minded on performance. And I did that at Craft. And I learned you can do both. The culture I grew up in was either your Vince Lombardi tough or your lovey-dovey covey. And what I found is, in my opinion, the best leaders that create enduring value have tough standards and care about people. They're not mutually exclusive. And I learned that at Craft, I applied it at Nabisco. And then I really brought it to life when I got to Campbell. So that's where that came from.”
2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT