YouSaid · the spoken record

Doug Conant

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61
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2021-08-24
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2021-08-24
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  1. “Well, I had time in between. I had one other job before then. I had gone to Kraft and I got my sea legs again. And I worked for some pretty tough guys there. And I learned I could do it. I mean, it wasn't an incidental amount of time. It was seven years. But it was seven years I needed to sort of mature. And, you know, I talk about the importance of my language again of being tough-minded on standards of performance and tenderhearted with people. I was inclined to be tenderhearted with people.”

    2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “The broader world, I just became wildly committed to assembling a world-class team and then to give them all the tools they needed to fight the fight and to give them air cover when I could because nobody else agreed with me. And so we started doing that and I started paying attention to them. Ultimately, we performed well one year. We performed yet well the next year and the next year I was made president of Nibisco Foods and for five years we outperformed any other food company in the United States, which is how I ultimately ended up getting the Campbell job.”

    2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “For prosperity that was going to allow me to make the earnings a year from then when I had lap that quarter and deliver again, I was being challenged with all that I sort of landed on this philosophy that said, look, there are two things that matter here in all the corporate world. It's performance in people. It's not just performance. It's performance in people. In fact, you take care of the people and they'll take care of the performance. You know, I'm this guy from the Midwest who shows up on the East Coast Pollyannish kind of perspective that you take care of the people, they take care of the work. And the more I care about them, the more they'll care about our agenda and the better we'll do. I mean, logical to me, but it wasn't the language of the day, the heyday of the 1990s. And it was countercultural at the time, both within Nabisco and”

    2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “But I just sort of left that in the dust and moved on, although I carried their lessons with me below the surface. But as I wrote it all down, I realized, wow, this is really rich stuff. And I started to ruminate on it and manage it, and then shortly thereafter I met Stephen Covey. When I was at Nabisco to get directly to your question, I was doing this Covey stuff and these guys were talking about me doing all this lovey-dovey Covey stuff. And our mission for the LBO was E-Cubed, earnings, earnings earnings. And it had nothing to do with people. It had nothing to do with organization. You were just expected to manage all that, but I need my quarterly earnings. You got to hit our targets. I just felt that was short-sighted. But I knew I had to deliver the earnings. But I also knew we had to create a roadmap.”

    2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Did for me. He said, Look, I want you to sit down and write your entire life story for me. Handwrite it. And I want every detail in there. And I want it back in two weeks. But I handwrote fifty pages, front and back, a hundred pages, small handwriting. I wish I had that. I don't know where it ever happened to it. And as I got into my life story, it was like, wow, look at all this stuff. And I haven't really reflected on any of this. I've just been going from, you know, one step at a time here to there, boom, boom, boom. Yet I had this incredible story being exposed to people who had profound influences on me.”

    2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “To you know, there's a great Brenet Brown quote you can either walk inside your story and own it or you can stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness every day. And you know, as a shy, introverted, oldest child, I was going through and I was walking inside my parents' story for me, my teacher's story for me, my coach's story for me, my boss's story for me, my organization story. I was walking inside everybody else's story, and I sort of began to realize when I lost my job in my early 30s, like this isn't working. I need to figure out what my story is. And in fact, when I got let go from my job, the first thing my out placement counselor”

    2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “No, I had been fired earlier in my career, and it wasn't that I did anything particularly wrong. I just don't think I did enough right. Every time I do a Myers-Briggs test, I'm an introvert. And that's hard. If you're trying to be a leader and influence the direction and you're uncomfortable in the spotlight, I discovered that I needed to really get anchored in what I stood for it was even extra hard for me because I had to overcome my introversion and my shyness and my reserved nature. And so the only way I could do that was to get really firmly grounded in what mattered most to me. And when I was firmly grounded, I was able to step outside of myself and express it. And so I spent a lot of time working in this territory more than most because I felt like I needed.”

    2021-08-24 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #118 Doug Conant: Leadership With Integrity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “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've 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

  9. “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

  10. “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, you know, 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

  11. “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. And 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