YouSaid · the spoken record

James Citrin

lines on the record: 93
first: 2019-02-04
most recent: 2019-02-04
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

“Well, I'm a LinkedIn influencer, and I've got 988,000 followers, so I need 12,000 listeners to just follow so I can crack that millionaire.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been in some form of the recruiting business for, I was a college admissions interviewer. I led analyst recruiting at Morgan Stanley. I've been always doing this and I absolutely love it. I would probably be, if the only thing I've been an adjunct professor at Harvard Business School at Stanford, at Duke and others. So I've written seven books. I love writing. I love teaching. I like communicating. So that's probably what I would do. But I still have at least hopefully another.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The two ingredients that are most important for leaders are twofold. Number one is to be the thought leader for the organization. And number two, to be the people leader. Sounds simple and simplistic and almost trite, but it's really below that to be the thought leader. What does that mean? You have to be really smart. You have to really know enough about the situation. You have to be a realist. You have to do your homework. And you have to develop a point of view, ideally with others to be the thought leader, to be the people leader, that means to have the right value set. That means to genuinely care as much about the people who work with you and for you as your own success. It means to really do right by others. And you can do that and be a real introvert, as I said. But if you're those two things, that's a really important lesson for hiring people or for listeners for their own careers, just developing those two instincts is what I would say.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boy, everything gets out. Everything you do have to assume that everything's out. And I think the third thing is the role at the CEO level, the real role is to be the thought leader of the company or the organization. Where are we going? Everyone wants to know where we're going. Even if you don't know, you can say, here's where I think we're going for these reasons. So if you are the thought leader, and that, by the way, goes to the, if I really summarize everything I've learned over these 25 years and 700 assignments and all this,”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Authentic. There is no separation between one's work life and their non-work life. So being authentic and not being a BS artist, not trying to be a salesperson, just to be real. Number two is communicative. And absolutely. So I mentioned I'm a graduate of Vasser College, our president at Vassar, Betsy Bradley. She writes on every Sunday night. She writes an email to the college community about what she did this week and she takes pictures of the sports events and the Vasser National Women's Rugby Champions, issues that she's worried about. And that becomes a way of her leadership style. I've seen company leaders do that as well. So communicative, authentic. And I genuinely think”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so last question, and because we've got to get going, but right now with power of employees, you see the Google employees demanding their management manage better, like very clearly making messages and saying you've fallen down on the job. And I think there'll be more and more of that at a lot of these companies. They're not quite as docile as they used to be in terms of things, and they have a voice and they use it. What is the best give me like three very brief, like what is the most important things for CEOs to be like today when you think about like what are the three best qualities for a CEO?”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If there are people who you trust, there are people who you respect. If there are people who you like and you align yourselves with them, then you have a great chance to be successful at the CEO level or even if you're coming out of college.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's to the point earlier I said about credibility. He was super credible and he's super capable and just knowing over many years that something like that could be the right thing. He ultimately could be attractable, but it's a real testament to the Nielsen board. They were really, really transparent with him. And now he's leading the strategic process very, very well. But the principle is that difficult situations, there are almost every I say this all the time. Nothing is easy. Nothing is perfect at all. And if it's perfect, then there's only downsides. So it's about diagnosing a situation and then I'm a big person of you go with the people.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, David, someone who I've known for 30 years? He was on the board of Yahoo, but we were at classmates at Harvard Business School together. And he was doing extraordinary things at IBM with Watson and their cloud business. But anyway, I just knew that he loves technology. He loves media. He's had experience in private equity. He's had turnarounds. He was the, here's an interesting thing. He would have been the logical person had one of the private equity firms made a presumptive bid to try and acquire Nielsen.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the activist has pressured the company and the company committed to doing a strategic review process. And so that was happening publicly. How do you recruit someone into that? Well, it requires a great board to be extremely honest, transparent with their candidates to say, here's the situation. We haven't come to any conclusion, but we'd like you to come in and help us sort out what is the best thing for our shareholders and our customers and all of that.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's hilarious. About where employees are. Look, here's the principle. Great people can go into really difficult situations if they know what they're getting themselves into. Transparency is really key. And I wasn't on the inside of the Uber board how they characterized it. And I know Travis had a lot of influence. But in any case, difficult situations can attract great people if people know what they're getting into. So here's one that I think I can mention. We just recruited the CEO of Nielsen, David Kenny came in to Nielsen. That's a case in a challenged company that is in the middle of an activist situation.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And then after Travis was stepped out, then it turned into a CEO search. And at least as was reported in Recode, they had Meg, they had Jeff Imolt, and they had a dark horse. And that dark horse turned out to be Dara. And that's a really interesting.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that process started by Travis having to recruit a COO being imposed on him by the board. And that was going to be a challenge, but still. Uber is Uber, and many great people around the world were drawn to that And so they had some candidates, as I understand what I've talked”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even alleged problems because I was the one that told Uber about problems with one of their Google records that at least it was never determined, but I was like, it happened. You need to be aware that this was a problem there, even if I don't know if it was proven or not, but boy, there was an issue. And they didn't know. And I was like, Where did that not happen? Where did that not happen? So, what do you do also, just a couple more things when you have, I'm sorry to focus on negative things, but when you do have like a toxic CEO, like an Uber CEO where you have a problem, where there's mounting problems within a company, do you get brought into those things or like recruiting Dara, for example?”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because of the work that we do, recruiting board directors, with our trusted relationships, we're able to have access and do really good 360s. And I will say, you know, knock on wood and anything can happen, but we take that very, very seriously to help our clients and help ourselves prevent real, even alleged problems.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the time. If you let Like, just so they know. We really try and operate, and Spencer Stewart, in a no surprises, if you read our candidate reports, they're balanced. They're really balanced. We really try not to sell. We really try and advise. And it's all in the context of helping hiring leaders and boards understand that no one's perfect. And that, in fact, the way I learned this years ago, the best way to get references is to ask have the confidence to say, look, we know all lots of the good. I really want to understand the downside. So if you don't come back to me, Spencer Stewart or whoever, with the real downside, then you won't have done your job. And we can handle it. We'll just make our judgments. And so that's kind of the spirit that we go into these. We always ask candidates for kind of their list of references and respect them. We also do our own.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you tell them the trade offs or the rumors? All the time. I'm often called by people and they're like, what do you think? I'm like, oh, here's the six things I've heard. Like, just so they know there.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We really try and be balanced. I say, I can't tell you how many times I say no one's perfect. It's all about trade-offs. It's all about understanding.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You spend a lot of time doing in that vein because I would think it's more important than ever. I don't want to say apo, but it's kind of how politics they do apo and you do apo on yourself. Like, what's the worst thing they can say about me? Do you tell boards the bad things you heard about the candidates when you like, or are you going, this is a shiney new candidate we'd like to show you?”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think there's kind of two levels there, companies have policies, and so there's, you know, that contend to be a sound, a little bureaucratic. But these are judgment cases. And I think there are clear cases where things need to be, decisions need to be taken, and that's very obvious. But there are gray matters where they're maybe alleged and you have to be careful in this environment that people are not guilty until they're proven innocent But as I say, it's really incumbent on boards and individuals to disclose and to do the work and to understand what they're doing.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do think that it's interesting. I just had a wonderful conversation with Facebook's worldwide head of diversity and inclusion. And she was a Rhodes scholar. Do you know Mexican? She's an incredible, inspiring. And the quality of the work that they're doing and the implications. It's not just HR practices. It's on every aspect of their business from the product. How do we users interacting and trying to get their leadership team and their user base, all that to be reflective of the global world? But you're absolutely right. Our requirement for checking beyond what's just in the public domain and even the routine background checks has gone greater than it has ever been before, particularly because if in board appointments or CEO appointments, that could bring down a board or a company or an individual.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you look at all the Me Too stuff, you look at the stuff at Google and sexual harassment, how much has that impacted? You could go on a lot of not just, it's diversity, Me Too, all those things. There's a lot more complexity to being a manager today in terms of things that were allowed to go on. And especially when you don't have a diverse culture and you have an almost all-male. White male culture. It creates a different kind of outcomes.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Capability to ask questions and learn and be open. And from what I believe and hope, it's the same impetus right now to get to the truth, to get to the essence based on good and to figure out what needs to happen. So that's anyway, that's what I believe. I do think that the boards, they're going to be really always focused on how can we help this organization do the right thing.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started the questions with in the first part was like, okay, well, who are you and what is Venture Stewart and what's recruiting and all this very high level stuff And then he just asked question and question and question after at the end of two hours based on his questions, he got to such a level of insight about how things work. And he said, okay, so one final question. So let me understand this. So if you're working on multiple CFO assignments at a time, how do you adjudicate, and use that word, how do you adjudicate between a candidate that you'll show us at Facebook and someone else? And that is an incredibly sophisticated question about how to work with executive search firm like Spencer Stewart. And what he did over the time of meeting all the candidates was really try and go to school on what a world-class CFO is like. And we ended up recruiting a wonderful guy named David Ebersman, who had been the CFO of Genentech, who then and then took them public. And he has gone on to great things as a CEO of Lyra Health. So that to me speaks volumes about his.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, companies and then boards can operate to the best of their ability within that context. I don't think this is controversial, and I'm not just saying this, but I actually genuinely believe that the impetus of Facebook is good. They are good people trying to do good things. Obviously, there's lots that needs to happen. I really believe that strongly. And I will tell you something about Mark that I haven't met him many times. I've done work, but there is something that I think is quite instructive back in 2007. I had the opportunity slash privilege to work with Mark and Cheryl to recruit chief financial officer for Facebook. And something that I think speaks volumes about their culture and to this day. So I met with Mark and we spent two hours and he didn't know Spencer Stewart. He didn't know Jim Citron. He didn't know any of this stuff.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, again, I don't want to speak beyond my area of insight or what is appropriate, but I actually believe that companies”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't. I mean, a lot of people do feel a lot of tech boards are toothless, like around Tesla and the SEC stuff and the, you know, obviously Elon's a great leader in many ways, but some of the stuff he did was really problematic around, especially around the comments relating to stock, which I think a lot of other CEOs would have gotten in a lot more trouble. It's really fascinating if the CEO of, I don't know, any company would have done that. I think there'd be a lot more hell to pay in an interesting way. And the boards would have acted differently. Same thing at Facebook. Most people feel like they have almost no power to do anything. And we don't know exactly what's happening, but most people feel they don't have any.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, whether or not there are supervoting shares or control or not, I actually think is not the central point. I think the central point, Kara, is the degree to which a board has or does not have confidence in their leader. And that you can have even be an advisory board. And if it's a group of people that the leader or the founder respects, they will have a big influence. The Facebook board has some amazing people on it. And again, not to speculate what's going on in that discussion, but I believe that boards as a body there, this is how they think. We support our CEO until we don't. And they're always asking. So within any situation, a board is always asking the question, how do we feel about what's going on? And then exercising influence to the best of their ability. And if they”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Inability of boards to actually do anything when these companies have way too much found or control or have complete founder control. Which's interesting is Amazon doesn't have it and Facebook does. Google did have it. And then what happens in these crises when there's calls for firing when Wall Street pressure? Talk a little bit. I know you don't want to talk specifically about whether they should be fired, but what happens”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, now than Yahoo, where is Yahoo? It's funny, it's unfortunately, I think Yahoo was on a downturn and almost nobody could have saved the situation. But one of the things, when you have crises like that, not just with Marissa, but lots of different CEOs like with Travis Kalanik at Uber or right now with Mark and Cheryl at Facebook, what happens inside a company when there's like recently there's been a million calls for Cheryl or Mark to, Mark can't be fired, obviously, or you have a founder that actually has that control, that can't move out. First, how do you feel about that?”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm still very proud of my role in recruiting Marissa, and I'm very proud of many of the things she did. And I think she did some great things. It didn't all work out, but I'm a child. Well, now Netanyahu.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guy. Oh no, not that guy It's not just the founders, the more senior you get in business, in government, and all that people. And it's human nature. It happened in monarchies back in the day. Yep, exactly. You know, because people's power gets derived from their proximity to others. Exactly. So it is a really big trap of the leader.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sandy Wild That guy. Oh, no, not that guy. But at the same time, I think when the success ones lose their motivation, it's almost always over money. They get licked up and down all day, and you know this and think they're right all the time. And we'll talk about that next because I do think the constant reinforcement cycle of these people that they get. Someone just asked me this today and I was like, they literally get licked up and down all day. And when you challenge them, I often am in meetings with them. I'm like, what are you talking about? They aren't even used to challenge anymore, which are extreme cohesiveness is like a toxicity.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very hard for many people and very hard for boards because very boards can, unless they're given the confidence, they can tend to be very risk averse.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, actually, the motivation is a really interesting question. And that's one of the topics I really want to study, which is where do people's fire come from and how does that fire change at different levels of success or failure? And one of the really interesting lessons learned over the years about hiring great people is looking at Sandy Weil. You remember Sandy Weil, Bill Travelers, merged with City. Sandy, and I interviewed him back in 1998 and I followed this. He had a real theory that he hired people on the rebound, that people who had had a failure, if he understood it and they learned from it, they would be that much more motivated to succeed the next time. And on that basis, Jamie Diamond really was created and has become the greatest leader in financial services. So I never forgot that. And so that idea of understanding failure, which is”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was there. You were there. So we were at the time looking at Amazon and someone on the board of Barnes Knoll made the comments like, well, Jeff Bezos wouldn't be qualified to run Barnes&oble.com. Sorry, I apologize. They're gone. But in any case, the point is that the ability to scale, the ability to learn, the ability to attract great people is really what a founder needs to do. And I've seen, again, it's not just in tech. And Howard Schultz is one of my business heroes, one of the friends, actually who I met back in 1997 when I interviewed him for lessons from the top. Rich Fairbank, I mentioned at Capital One, one of the longest serving founders in America today. And so I think their ability to scale is a function of not being arrogant.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The guy's amazing He's brilliant, you know. But I'm a huge fan. Do you think most founders eventually have to be replaced, or is there one founder who's done very well is Jeff Bezos, obviously, despite his personal troubles right now, but he has really led that almost perfectly. But there's very few that have survived. There'd be Gates, him, Jobs, but they're gone. And Larry and Sergei, I don't know what they're off. One's doing a hovercraft. They have not been as engaged as. As previously, is there a problem with having a founder? And we'll get to Mark Zuckerberg in the next section.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably not appropriate for it to say other than to say. The guy's amazing. He's a values-based leader. He's brilliant, who's created the world's most valuable company up until, you know, a couple of weeks ago or whatever. And obviously they've got challenges, but growing on that massive pace. But I'm a huge fan.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So Tim came in. He was a highly regarded logistics and logistics and ops expert back in Texas and came in to do tech and ops. And he obviously was Steve's successor. But it wasn't even obvious up until maybe six months before the appointment that he was going to be the one. And there were questions. And that's a big open question. I won't really speculate on Tim's successor whenever that happens, but it's a really interesting exercise to think, okay, how do you take something and go to the next level? Oftentimes people think, okay, we just need more of the same, but most great leadership transitions are quite different. And so that's a real important one.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lousy leader creates toxicity. I'll get into that. Okay, people are miserable, but a great leader really creates opportunities, makes people happy, and creates jobs. And what's shocking mostly about Microsoft is how fundamentally and how quickly”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that a great leader can actually help make people's lives better. And I don't just mean this to sound nicely. I really believe it.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was somewhat toxic had It's absolutely the Not to over index on Microsoft, but I would say that he didn't, I think he kind of reignited the best parts of the bill, founder culture. And I think being highly sensitive, the same way Kevin Johnson is doing at Starbucks right now. That's a really good point. So it's not changing it, but I think the smartest leaders really know what to tap into on that. But one of the real things that I've seen and I believe Karrot to the bottom of my heart is that leadership matters.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's created the founder culture there that was somewhat toxic had become very aggressive and internally aggressive and changed it really drastically. Microsoft today is not the MiShop I started covering. It's absolutely the change of founder culture really, which a lot of these companies, some people don't think you can escape the DNA of these tech founders especially.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Huge, huge, successful in PEG. I'd put such far superior to Bomber. I'd put Satya and Bob Eiger, if you were to ask me, who are the two best internal successors who have transformedally transformed their organizations? So far, I would say Satya and Bob. And I think it's a function of some things that, back to your earlier question about what leadership, what timelines, they both had an absolute clear vision for what they wanted their organizations to be. And then in the case of Satya, and again, you know him, and I know him really well. He's this wonderful person. He's a values-based leader. He's very humanistic, but he's intellectually rigorous. He's not, he makes tough decisions and makes big, big bets, but brings others along. And his bets have turned out to be really right. And he's kind of recreated the sense of purpose.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you're thinking of succession, one of the things that's hard is a lot of these in tech successors of founders, like in the case of Microsoft, it went to Bomber, who was kind of a founder. I consider him, he was there so early. He was sort of a semi-founder, I guess. They went with an internal person. That has been a very successful, huge, huge, successful and impact. Far superior to Bomber.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pushed out, and who was not being treated well by the board, and he really didn't like the direction of the company. He was working with private equity to make a hostile. You had Amazon basically putting them out of business, Circuit City had gone out of business, people using Best Buy to showroom and then buy on Amazon. There were real questions about its survival. And in that case, we found Hubert Jolie, who was outside of retail, but a brilliant guy inspiring. He had a vision that had a cost aspect of it to be able to be cost competitive with Amazon, to partner with vendors, to create these stores within stores, to focus on the training and culture of the employees so that you and I can go into a best buy store and not feel and just actually learn because we need to touch and feel. And that company has been a great turnaround.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I said, when there were only 10% of the appointments went to the outsiders, those 10% tended to be the most difficult assignments, whether there was an activist or maybe there was a Me Too issue or there was a real business model breakdown or a real turnaround. So here's a case like Best Buy in 2012 where many people started writing it off for dead and you had the founder who was”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I don't know if that's what they call them. That's what I call them when they're not the obvious, like the COO who is the step up. So that's where the boards are. They're really doing succession planning.”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Andrew was a 39 year old division guy three levels down who was running EA Sports, but we assessed him like we do the others and we saw this incredible leadership, this thought leadership, this learning potential and humility. And we played a key role in recommending to the board. Similarly, Chuck Robbins at Cisco was a skip level CEO appointment. Is that what they call him?”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either benchmark against the externals or have externals and have an internal and external track. And some of the actual CEO appointments that we're most proud of, it's Bencer Stewart and that I personally most proud of, are actually insiders. So for example, in tech, one of the great surprise appointments, and this is one I would call a skip level, is Andrew Wilson at Electronic Arts at EA. We were doing that process. There were external candidates. There were internal candidates. And at the time,”
2019-02-04 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Spencer Stuart executive recruiter James Citrin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT